It is indeed pitiable, something quite absurdly vain to hear a certain kind of people making out by lame violence, which they mistake for forcible reasoning, that the Bible is an old-world book, a rag out of fashion, not a garment fit for this day’s wearing.
Some knavish preachers are not ashamed to do this: They have lived on the dear old book, it has kept them and their families in food and lodging these last thirty years, and yet they have nothing good to say about it; they like better the last book which they do not understand, or the last novel which is as hemlock or strychnine to the soul.
Thieves they be, knaves with pulpit robes reluctantly thrown over their thievish breasts. Beware of them. They are clever liars, swindlers who look too innocent to be quite guiltless, hirelings who hunger for the pelf.
I could respect, in some grim way, the vulgar infidel who blasphemes openly and on purpose, and rejoices in his pitiful bellowing, mistaking the very blatency for courage; but the man in the pulpit who insults the Bible on which he lives, and wriggles out of the profession by which he climbed to the pulpit he dishonors, I charge with worse crimes than those which blackened Barrabus or damned Iscariot.—PARKER.
