True, many of those worthless and
mischievous books are evermore disappearing, but others as bad, or but
little better, take their places. Look where you will you will meet with
them. What estimate can a man have of Christianity who receives his
first impressions of it from such books?
7. There are other religious books that are tolerable as to style, but
which display no power or prominence of thought, no living vigor of
expression; they are flat and dry as a plain of sand. They tease you
with the thousandth repetition of common-places, causing a feeling of
unspeakable weariness. Though the author is surrounded with rich
immeasurable fields of truth and beauty, he treads for ever the same
narrow track already trodden into dust.
8. There is a smaller class of religious writers that may be called
mock-eloquent writers. They try at a superior style, but forget that
true eloquence resides essentially in the thought, the feeling, the
character, and that no words can make genuine eloquence out of that
which is of no worth or interest. They mistake a gaudy verbosity for
eloquence.
9. The moral and theological _materials_ of many religious books are as
faulty as their style, and the injury they do the Gospel is
incalculable. Here is a systematic writer in whose hands all the riches
and magnificence of revelation shrink into a meagre list of doctrinal
points, and not a single verse in the Bible is allowed to tell its
meaning, or even allowed to have one, till it has been forced under
torture to maintain one of his points.
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