One of the stock objections which infidelity urges against the Bible is its alleged "obscenity." By this is meant the plain and unornamented representations of some sins. Now, indeed, as some one pointed out, "the Bible was not intended for a book of good little moral stories." Its purpose is far deeper. Besides setting forth God, it represents man as he is, and with his good and evil possibilities. Ask the objector if his own life, if it were recorded in every detail of deed and word and thought, would make good moral reading. And if he must acknowledge it would not, why does he blame God's word for bringing man's wickedness to the light? Is it not strange, too, if the Bible is such an obscene book, that the kind of people who delight in obscenities have no use whatever for the Bible, and that the people who love the Bible are of the cleanest that can be found? These things show how slanderous the charge. Even if it were considered as a human book, in view of the age out of which it arose and its chosen themes, what could exceed the delicacy of these writings? But take the literature of the world--the fiction of the day, and the most part of the world's poetry, also, with its innuendo and "double entendre" and outright filthiness; take the "immortal Shakespeare," who without shame tells and insinuates the most immoral doings of his characters, and gives you, as it were, a knowing wink and a smirk to boot, as if to say: "You and I, we know about these things, don't we?"--how it contrasts with the word of God, which draws the [182] vice of men in awful colors against the dark and fearful background of God's disapproval and wrath!

[TAG 182-183]