e. O! my pity
has been excited by seeing these ministers endeavor to warp and twist
the passages of scripture to fit some demonstration in science. These
pious evasions! These solemn pretenses! When they are caught in one
way they give a different meaning to the words and say the world was
not made in seven days. They say "good whiles"--epochs. And in this
same confession here of faith and creeds they believe the Lord's day is
holy--every seventh day. Suppose you lived near the north pole, where
the day is three months long. Then which day will you keep? Suppose
you could get to the north pole, you could prevent Sunday from ever
overtaking you. You could walk around the other way faster than the
world could revolve. How would you keep Sunday then? Suppose we ever
invent any thing that can go 1,000 miles an hour? We can just chase
Sunday clear around the globe. Is there anything that can be more
perfectly absurd than that a space of time can be holy! You might as
well talk about a pious vacuum. These pious evasions. I heard the
other night of an old man. He was not very well educated, you know,
and he got into the notion that he must have reading of the bible and
have family worship; and there was a bad boy in the family--a pretty
smart boy--and they were reading the bible by course, and in the
fifteenth chapter of Corinthians is this passage: "Behold, brethren, I
show you a mystery; we shall not all die, but we shall be changed."
And this boy rubbed out the "c" in the "changed." So next night the
old man got on his specs and got down his bible and said: "Behold,
brethren, I show you a mystery; we shall not all die, but we shall be
hanged." The old lady said, "Father, I don't think it reads that way."
He says, "Who is reading this?" "Yes, mother, it says be hanged, and,
more than that, I see the sense of it. Pride is the besetting sin of
the human heart, and if there is anything calculated to take the pride
out of a man it is hanging."

I keep going back to this book; I keep going back to the miracles, to
the prophecies, to the fables, and people ask me, if I take away the
bible, what are we going to do? How can we get along without the
revelation that no one understands? What are we going to do if we have
no bible to quarrel about? What are we to do without hell? What are
we going to do with our enemies? What are we going to do with the
people we love but don't like? They tell me that there never w