he never desires any good,
and never loves anything which is sweet and fine; a being totally
depraved, a being who, as one passage in the Old Testament tells us, is
so corrupt his very prayer is a sin; conceived, born, in evil, and all
his thoughts tainted, and drifting towards that which is wicked. Not
this kind of a man. A man who has been on the planet hundreds of
thousands of years, who has been learning by experience, who has been
animal, who has been cruel, but who at every step has been trying to
find the light, has been becoming a little truer and better; a being
who has evolved all that is sweetest and finest in the history of the
world; who has made no end of mistakes, who has committed no end of
crimes, but who has learned through these processes, and at last has
given us some specimens of what is possible by way of development in
Abraham and Moses and Elijah and David and Isaiah, and a long line of
prophets and seers of the Old Testament time; not perfect, but
magnificent types of actual men; who has developed in other nations
such men as Gautama, the heroes and teachers of China, like Confucius;
then Aristotle, Plato, Socrates; the noble men of Rome; who has given
us in the modern world the great poets, the great discoverers, the
great philanthropists; those devoted to the highest, sweetest things;
musicians and artists; who has given us Shakspere, who has given us,
crowning them all, as I believe, by the moral beauty and grandeur of
his love, the Nazarene, Jesus, our elder brother, Son of God, and
helper of his fellow-man; this humanity that has never fallen; that has
been climbing up from the beginning, and not sinking down. Is there any
loss here?

Then let us see what kind of a Bible modern science and modern
discovery and modern scholarship and modern life have given us.

Our Bible is the sifted truth of the ages. There is not a passage in it
or a line for which we need apologize. There is nothing incredible in
it, except as it is incredibly sweet and good and true. It is the truth
that has come to men in all ages, no matter spoken by whose lips, no
matter written by what pen, no matter wrought out under what conditions
or in whatever civilization or under whatever sky.

All that is true and sweet and fine is a part of God's revelation of
himself to his children, and makes up our Bible, which is not all
written yet. Every new truth that shall be discovered in the future
will make a new line or a new