When, in my third letter, I first echoed the question "Why should I
not?" the answers came crowding on my mind. I am well content,
however, to have merely suggested the main points, in proof of the
positive harm which, both historically and spiritually, our religion
sustains from this doctrine. Of minor importance, yet not to be
overlooked, are the forced and fantastic interpretations, the
arbitrary allegories and mystic expansions of proper names, to which
this indiscriminate Bibliolatry furnished fuel, spark, and wind. A
still greater evil, and less attributable to the visionary humour and
weak judgment of the individual expositors, is the literal rendering
of Scripture in passages, which the number and variety of images
employed in different places to express one and the same verity,
plainly mark out for figurative. And lastly, add to all these the
strange--in all other writings unexampled--practice of bringing
together into logical dependency detached sentences from books
composed at the distance of centuries, nay, sometimes a millennium
from each other, under different dispensations, and for different
objects. Accommodations of elder Scriptural phrases--that favourite
ornament and garnish of Jewish eloquence; incidental allusions to
popular notions, traditions, apologues (for example, the dispute
between the Devil and the archangel Michael about the body of Moses,
Jude 9); fancies and anachronisms imported from the synagogue of
Alexandria into Palestine, by or together with the Septuagint
version, and applied as mere argumenta ad homines (for example, the
delivery of the Law by the disposition of angels, Acts vii. 53, Gal.
iii. 19, Heb. ii. 2),--these, detached from their context, and,
contrary to the intention of the sacred writer, first raised into
independent theses, and then brought together to produce or sanction
some new credendum for which neither separately could have furnished
a pretence! By this strange mosaic, Scripture texts have been worked