, "The Bible is none other than the voice of
Him that sitteth upon the throne. Every book of it, every chapter of it,
every verse of it, every syllable of it, every letter of it, is the
direct utterance of the Most High. The Bible is none other than the Word
of God, not some part of it more, some part of it less, but all alike
the utterance of Him who sitteth upon the throne, faultless, unerring,
supreme." The Martian compared this statement with the words of the
scholar Loisy, "If God himself wrote the Bible, we must believe Him to
be either ignorant or untruthful."

As he delves further into the intricacies of the construction of the
Bible, our visitor perceives that the Old Testament gradually evolved
from the tenth century to the second century B.C., and in its present
form is mainly a fifth century compilation, so distorting the facts
that it has taken scholars one hundred and fifty years to get them
straight. "It may rightly be said that there is not a single book in the
Bible which is original in the sense of having been written by one man,
for all the books are made up of older documents or pre-existing sources
which were combined with later materials, undergoing, in this way,
several revisions and editions at the hands of different scribes or
compilers. Deep traces have therefore been left upon the text of the
Bible by these several stages of expansions, additions, modifications,
revisions, and incorporations--they appear to the scholar of biblical
literature much like the striations grooved in the rocks by large
glaciers to the student of Geology." (_Trattner, "Unravelling the Book
of Books._")

The Martian ascertains that to most thinking men it has become very
obvious that the Bible is the work of man, and not the inspiration of a
god; that an increasing number of liberal theologians are discarding the
theory of the divine inspiration of the Bible. He likewise clearly
perceives that there are as yet many men that have given this matter but
little thought; with the Divine inspiration looming up as a corner stone
in the Hebrew faith he realizes that it behooves him to carry his
investigations further.

The Christians, accepting the Old Testament as a book dictated by God,
had fixed the age of the earth as 4004 B.C. The harm done by the
Christian ecclesiastics in attempting to force science to conform to the
ridiculous concept of the construction of the universe as contained in
the Bible, and as interpreted