The enemies of the Bible often speak evil of it ignorantly, from the
mere force of bad example, as parrots curse: and the friends of the
Bible often speak well of it ignorantly, as parrots pray. They know,
they feel, they are sure, that the Bible is good,--that it does them
good,--that it purifies their souls,--that it improves their
characters,--that it makes them cheerful, joyful, useful, happy. Yet all
the time they fancy, because they have been erroneously taught, that the
blessed volume owes its comforting, transforming, and glorious power to
some metaphysical nicety, or to some unreal or impossible kind of
perfection.
When Christians attribute the sanctifying, elevating, comforting power
of the Bible to the fact that it is divinely inspired, they are right.
But many do not stop there. They suppose that divine inspiration has
given the Book certain grammatical, rhetorical, logical, historical,
scientific and metaphysical qualities which it has _not_ given it, and
they even attribute its superior worth and saving power to those
imaginary qualities.
It was against the mistakes and mis-statements of my opponents that I
first wrote, and it was their ignorance, or their want of honesty and
candor, that gave me at times the advantage over them in our debates on
the subject.
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