If it were at all needful, we might go on to show that there are people in the world, who have decent clothing and comfortable houses, who work well-tilled farms and sub-soil plows, and reaping machinery, who yoke powerful streams to the mill wheel, and harness the iron horse to the market wagon, who career their floating palaces up the opposing floods, line their coasts with flocks of white-winged schooners, and show their flags on every coast of earth, who invent and make everything that man will buy, from the brass button, dear to the barbarian, to the folio of the philosopher, erect churches in all their towns, and schools in every village, who make their blacksmiths more learned than the priests of Egypt, their Sabbath scholars wiser than the philosophers of Greece, and even the criminals in their jails more decent characters than the sages, heroes, and gods of the lands without the Bible; and that these people are the people who possess a Book, which they think contains a revelation from God, teaching them how to live well; which Book they call the Bible.

This is the book about which we make our present inquiry, Who wrote it?
The fact being utterly undeniable, that these blessings are found among the people who possess the Bible, and only among them, we at once, and summarily, dismiss the arrogant falsehood presented to prevent any inquiry about the Book, namely, that "Christianity is just like any other superstition, and its sacred books like the impositions of Chinese, Indian, or Mohammedan impostors.

They, too, are religious, and have their sacred books, which they believe to be divine." A profound generalization indeed! Is a peach-tree just like a horse-chestnut, or a scrub-oak, or a honey-locust?
They are all trees, and have leaves on them.

The Bible is just as like the Yi King, or the Vedas, or the Koran, as a Christian American is like a Chinaman, a Turk, or a Hindoo.

But it is too absurd to begin any discussion with these learned Thebans of the relative merits of the Bible as compared with the Vedas, and the Chinese Classics, of which they have never read a single page.