your face before it as the savage before his fetish? You would
consider it unreasonable to believe that everything a Greek, or a
Roman, or an Arab ever said was inspired. And yet, men have been
hounded to death for not believing that everything that a Jew ever
said in olden times was inspired.

I do not have to use arguments, I hope, to prove to an intelligent
public that an infallible book is as much a myth as the Garden of
Eden, or the Star of Bethlehem.

A mythical Savior, a mythical Bible, a mythical plan of salvation!

When we subject what are called religious truths to the same tests by
which we determine scientific or historical truths, we discover that
they are not truths at all; they are only opinions. Any statement
which snaps under the strain of reason is unworthy of credence. But it
is claimed that religious truth is discovered by intuition and not by
investigation. The believer, it is claimed, feels in his own soul--he
has the witness of the spirit, that the Bible is infallible, and that
Jesus is the Savior of man. The Christian does not have to look into
the arguments for or against his religion, it is said, before he makes
up his mind; he knows by an inward assurance; he has proved it to his
own deepermost being that Jesus is real and that he is the only
Savior. But what is that but another kind of argument? The argument is
quite inadequate to inspire assurance, as you will presently see, but
it is an argument nevertheless. To say that we must believe and not
reason is a kind of reasoning, This device of reasoning against
reasoning is resorted to by people who have been compelled by modern
thought to give up, one after another, the strongholds of their
position. They run under shelter of what they call faith, or the