PERFECTION OF THE BIBLE.
By Dr. Gausen
OPEN now the Bible; study its fifty sacred authors, from that wonderful Moses who held the pen in the wilderness, four hundred years before the war of Troy, down to the fisherman, son of Zebedee, who wrote fifteen hundred years afterwards, in Ephesus and in Patmos, under the reign of Domitian; open the Bible, and try, if you can, to find any thing of this sort there. No. None of those blunders which the science of every successive age discovers in the books of those that preceded it; none of those absurdities, above all, which modern astronomy points out, in such numbers, in the writings of the ancients, in their sacred codes, in their systems of philosophy, and in the finest pages even of the fathers of the church; no such errors can be found in any of our sacred books; nothing there will ever contradict what, after so many ages, the investigations of the learned world have been able to reveal to us of what is certain in regard to the state of our globe, or of that of the heavens. Carefully peruse our Scriptures from one end to the other, in search of such blemishes there; and while engaged in this research, remember that it is a book which speaks of every thing, which describes nature, which proclaims its grandeur, which tells the story of its creation, which informs us of the structure of the heavens, of the creation of light, of the waters, of the atmosphere, of the mountains, of animals, and of plants;—it is a book that tells us of the first revolutions of the world, and foretells us also the last; a book that relates them in circumstantial narratives, exults them in a sublime poesy, and chants them in strains of fervent psalmody; it is a book replete with the glow of oriental rapture, elevation, variety and boldness;—it is a book which speaks of the earth and of things visible, at the same time that it speaks of the celestial world and of things invisible;—it is a book to which nearly fifty writers of every degree of mental cultivation, of every rank, of every condition, and separated by fifteen hundred years from each other, have successively put their hand;—it is a book composed first in the center of Asia, among the sands of Arabia, or in the deserts of Judea, or in the fore-court of the temple of the Jews, or in the rustic schools of the prophets of Bethel and of Jericho, or in the sumptuous palaces of Babylon, or on the idolatrous banks of Cheber; and afterwards at the center of western civilization, amid the Jews with their manifold ignorance, amid polytheism and its ideas, as well as in the bosom of pantheism and its silly philosophy; it is a book the first writer of which had been for the space of forty years a pupil of the magicians of Egypt, who looked upon the sun, and stars, and the elements, as endowed with intelligence, as reacting upon the elements, and as governing the world by continual effluxes;—it is a book the first chapter of which preceded by more than NINE HUNDRED YEARS the most ancient philosophers of ancient Greece and of Asia, the Thaleses, the Pythagorases, the Zaleuces, the Xenophaneses, the Confuciuses;—it is a book which carries its narratives even into the field of the invisible world, even into the hierarchies of the angels, even into the remotest realms of futurity, and the glorious scenes of the last day;—well then, search through these 50 authors, search through these 66 books, search through these 1189 chapters, and these 31173 verses . . . search for one single error of those thousands with which ancient and modern books abound, when they speak either of the heaven or of the earth, or of their revolutions, or of their elements; search, but you will search in vain.—Dr. Gausen.