ons according to his
individual fancy.

For in a divine book everything must be true, and as two
contradictories cannot both be true, it must not contain any
contradiction. But the careful study of the Bible which I had
undertaken, while revealing to me many historical and esthetic
treasures, proved to me also that it was not more exempt than any
other ancient book from contradictions, inadvertencies, and errors.
It contains fables, legends, and other traces of purely human
composition. It is no longer possible for any one to assert that the
second part of the book of Isaiah was written by Isaiah. The book of
Daniel, which, according to all orthodox tenets, relates to the period
of the captivity, is an apocryphal work composed in the year 169
or 170 B.C. The book of Judith is an historical impossibility. The
attribution of the Pentateuch to Moses does not bear investigation,
and to deny that several parts of Genesis are mystical in their
meaning is equivalent to admitting as actual realities descriptions
such as that of the Garden of Eden, the apple, and Noah's Ark. He
is not a true Catholic who departs in the smallest iota from the
traditional theses. What becomes of the miracle which Bossuet so
admired: "Cyrus referred to two hundred years before his birth"? What
becomes of the seventy weeks of years, the basis of the calculations
of universal history, if that part of Isaiah in which Cyrus is
referred to was composed during the lifetime of that warrior, and if
the pseudo-Daniel is a contemporary of Antiochus Epiphanes?

Orthodoxy calls upon us to believe that the biblical books are the
work of those to whom their titles assign them. The mildest Catholic
doctrine as to inspiration will not allow one to admit that there is
any marked error in the sacred text, or any contradiction in matters
which do not relate either to faith or morality. Well, let us allow
that out of the thousand disputes between critique and orthodox
apologetics as to the details of the so-called sacred text there are
some in which by accident and contrary to appearances the latter
are in the right. It is impossible that it can be right in all the
thousand cases and it has only to be wrong once for all the theory
as to its inspiration to be reduced to nothing. This theory of
inspiration, implying a supernatural fact, becomes impossible to
uphold in the presence of the decided ideas of our modern common
sense. An inspired book is a miracle. It shou