2G8 AGNOSTICISM : A REJOINDER viil 



representatives are rending the Church over these 

 squabbles, had in his mind when, as we are told, 

 he uttered the scathing rebuke : 



Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, 

 This people honoureth me with their lips, 

 But their heart is far from me. 

 But in vain do they worship me, 

 Teaching as their doctrines the precepts of men. 



(Markvii. 6-7.) 



Men who can be absorbed in bickerings over 

 miserable disputes of this kind can have but little 

 sympathy with the old evangelical doctrine of the 

 " open Bible/' or anything but a grave misgiving 

 of the results of diligent reading of the Bible, 

 without the help of ecclesiastical spectacles, by 

 the mass of the people. Greatly to the surprise 

 of many of my friends, I have always advocated 

 the reading of the Bible, and the diffusion of the 

 study of that most remarkable collection of books 

 among the people. Its teachings are so infinitely 

 superior to those of the sects, who are just as busy 

 now as the Pharisees were eighteen hundred years 

 ago, in smothering them under " the precepts of 

 men " ; it is so certain, to my mind, that the Bible 

 contains within itself the refutation of nine-tenths 

 of the mixture of sophistical metaphysics and 

 old-world superstition which has been piled round 

 it by the so-called Christians of later times ; it is 

 BO clear that the only immediate and ready 

 antidote to the poison which has been mixed with 



