Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n JUDGES Out of the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, seven have been selected for study in the familiar discourses which follow. To two classes of persons I trust that these discourses will be especially serviceable. The first class includes those who reject some or all of these books as worthless, finding them rather stumbling-blocks than helps to faith, and discovering in them reasons for the rejection of the entire Bible. I hope to show these skeptics that their judgment is hasty and superficial; that these books, though not, perhaps, what they have sometimes been represented to be, are, when you handle them intelligently, of great value, capable of giving us instruction and inspiration. The other class consists of those who regard the Bible as a book equally inspired in all its parts, every sentence of which wasdictated by the Holy Spirit, the whole of which is therefore equally inerrant and authoritative. I hope to make it plain to these persons that this view of the Bible is untenable. I shall be asked why I indulge this hope. I shall be told that I ought to leave them in peace with the traditional theory; that it is no kindness to them to disturb a belief which gives them comfort. My answer is, that it is far better for them to know the truth. The view which they are entertaining cannot be held in these days by any fairly well-informed man without constantly doing violence to his intelligence and his integrity. The errors, the contradictions, the moral imperfections which appear in some of these books, which thrust themselves before every wakeful reader, and to which the attention of the whole world has been sharply called by modern investigation, must be met and accounted for by the advocate of Biblical infallibility. His task is to explain them away....