The most telling proofs in favor of the Rationalist position on the bible are the admissions which, from time to time, the defenders of the bible themselves make. The editors of the Oberlin College Magazine, which is a religious publication, in an article on "Bible Hero Classics," suggest that parts of the bible should be excluded from the mails:
Modern scholarship has so changed the point of view with which the bible is regarded, that one no longer has the confidence, in sending the "seeker after God" to the bible to believe that he will certainly find Him there. The Old Testament is a complete literature with units of varying value. Much of it is incomprehensible to the ordinary reader. Parts of it should be excluded from the mails.
Prof. Dr. Charles Henderson, the chaplain of the University of Chicago, expresses his utter contempt for certain parts of the bible: "John the Baptist's God was no better than our devil. The things which made Solomon and David saints in their own day would land them in the penitentiary in ours." *
* Reported in the Tribune, Chicago.
The bible quotes God as saying that David was a man after His own heart, but this divine tells us David was a criminal. Could a more damaging admission be made by a clergyman? And yet the book that can mistake a scoundrel for a saint is to be placed in the hands of our children at a very tender age, and foisted upon the whole nation as "the sublimest of books," to quote the words of another divine. * A book concerning which its own friends can hold such diametrically opposite opinions can not be, at least, a very honest book. Honest people speak or write to be understood. If what one reader of the bible calls God, another calls the devil; or if to one reader David is a great saint, while to another he is only a scamp, deserving a long term in jail, then, surely, either we can not understand the bible, in which case the book is worthless; or the bible was not meant to be understood, which leads to the same conclusion.
* Editor Sunday School Times.
The Rev. J. Biresley, writing in the Christian World, pays, unconsciously, a great tribute to the Rationalist: "More than thirty years ago I listened to a lecture by Charles Bradlaugh on 'Is the Bible True'? His assertions shocked the orthodox among his hearers, and yet there was scarcely one of them which the biblical students of to-day would not accept." What a compliment this is to the courage of the Rationalist. He dared to shock the orthodox at a time when they had the power to persecute him unto death. And what an admission this is, of the intellectual and moral superiority of the heretic to the believer! It takes "thirty years" of dilly-dallying before Christian scholars will admit that the persecuted heretic was in the right. Is it any wonder that the world is losing respect for priest and preacher and honoring the heretics as the pioneers of the golden day of truth?
To the churches we say: "If you would save the bible, separate the good from the bad, and the false from the true. Do not print them all in one volume as the 'Holy Bible.' If you have not the courage to call any part of the bible bad, or any of its statements false—we shall do it for you."