In the case of theological ingenuity, where truth is the professed and sacred object, a graver judgment is called for.

When the Biblical interpreter struggles to reconcile contradictions, or to prove that wrong is right, merely because he is bound to maintain the perfection of the Bible; when to this end he condescends to sophistry and pettifogging evasions; it is difficult to avoid feeling disgust as well as grief.
Some good people are secretly conscious that the Bible is not an infallible book; but they dread the consequences of proclaiming this "to the vulgar." Alas! and have they measured the evils which the fostering of this lie is producing in the minds, not of the educated only, but emphatically of the ministers of religion?
Many who call themselves Christian preachers busily undermine moral sentiment, by telling their hearers, that if they do not believe the Bible (or the Church), they can have no firm religion or morality, and will have no reason to give against following brutal appetite.
This doctrine it is, that so often makes men atheists in Spain, and profligates in England, as soon as they unlearn the national creed: and the school which have done the mischief, moralize over the wickedness of human nature when it comes to pass instead of blaming the falsehood which they have themselves inculcated.
[Footnote 1: A critic presses me with the question, how I can doubt that doctrine so holy _comes from God_.

He professes to review my book on the Soul; yet, apparently became he himself _dis_believes the doctrine of the Holy Spirit taught alike in the Psalms and Prophets and in the New Testament,--he cannot help forgetting that I profess to believe it.

He is not singular in his dulness.

That the sentiment above is necessarily independent of Biblical _authority_, see p.