, and the two parties among the audience. Mr. Barker uniformly
bore himself as a gentleman, courteously and respectfully towards his
opponent, and with the dignity becoming his position, and the solemnity
and importance of the question. We regret that we cannot say the same of
Dr. Berg, who at times seemed to forget the obligations of the gentleman
in his zeal as a controversialist. He is an able and skillful debater,
though less logical than Mr. Barker, but he wasted his time and
strength too often on personalities and irrelevant matters. His personal
inuendoes and epithets, his coarse witticisms, and a bearing that seemed
to us more arrogant than Christian, may have suited the vulgar and
the intolerant among his party, but we believe these things won him no
respect from the calm and thinking portion of the audience, while we
know that they grieved and offended some intelligent and candid men who
thoroughly agreed with his views. It is surely time that all Christians
and clergymen had learned that men whom they regard as heretics and
Infidels have not forfeited their claims to the respect and courtesies
of social life, by their errors of opinion, and that insolence and
arrogance, contemptuous sneers and impeachment of motives and
character, toward such men, are not effective means of grace for their
enlightenment and conversion.

Among the audience, there was a large number of men, who also lost their
self-control in their dislike to Mr. Barker's views, and he was often
interrupted, and sometimes checked in his argument, by hisses, groans,
sneers, vulgar cries, and clamor, though through all these annoyances
and repeated provocations, he maintained his wonted composure of manner
and clearness of thought. On the other hand, Dr. Berg was heard with
general quiet by his opponents, and greeted with clamorous applause by
his friends, who seemed to constitute a large majority of the audience,
and to feel that the triumph of their cause, like the capture of Jericho
of old, depended upon the amount of noise made.

Mr. Barker, in giving an account of the origin of the discussion,
says:--

"In December, [1853] in compliance with a request from the Sunday
Institute, I began a course of lectures in Philadelphia, on the origin,
authority and influence of the Scriptures. The object of the lectures
was to show that the Bible is of _human_ origin, that its teachings are
not of divine authority, and that the doctrine that the Bible i