emacy?]

CHAPTER VIII.

ON BIGOTRY AND PROGRESS.

If any Christian reader has been patient enough to follow me thus far,
I now claim that he will judge my argument and me, as before the
bar of God, and not by the conventional standards of the Christian
churches.

Morality and Truth are principles in human nature both older and more
widespread than Christianity or the Bible: and neither Jesus nor James
nor John nor Paul could have addressed or did address men in any
other tone, than that of claiming to be themselves judged by some
pre-existing standard of moral truth, and by the inward powers of the
hearer. Does the reader deny this? or, admitting it, does he think it
impious to accept their challenge? Does he say that we are to love and
embrace Christianity, without trying to ascertain whether it be true
or false? If he say, Yes,--such a man has no love or care for Truth,
and is but by accident a Christian. He would have remained a faithful
heathen, had he been born in heathenism, though Moses, Elijah and
Christ preached a higher truth to him. Such a man is condemned by his
own confession, and I here address him no longer.

But if Faith is a spiritual and personal thing, if Belief given at
random to mere high pretensions is an immorality, if Truth is not
to be quite trampled down, nor Conscience to be wholly palsied in
us,--then what, I ask, was I to do, when I saw that the genealogy in
the first chapter of Matthew is an erroneous copy of that in the Old
Testament? and that the writer has not only copied wrong, but also
counted wrong, so, as to mistake eighteen for fourteen? Can any man,
who glories in the name of Christian, lay his hand on his heart, and
say, it was my duty to blind my eyes to the fact, and think of it no
further? Many, alas, I know, would have whispered this to me; but if
any one were to proclaim it, the universal conscience of mankind would
call him impudent.

If however this first step was right, was a second step wrong? When I
further discerned that the two genealogies in Matthew and Luke were
at variance, utterly irreconcilable,--and both moreover nugatory,
because they are genealogies of Joseph, who is denied to be the father
of Jesus,--on what ground of righteousness, which I could approve to
God and my conscience, could I shut my eyes to this second fact?

When forced, against all my prepossessions, to admit that the two
first chapters of Matthew and the two first chapters of