It would seem to have been the Bible-reading that wrought the change.  The prayer and the blessing were to him sincere and gracious; but as the readings continued he realized that he had never before considered the Bible from a doctrinal point of view, as a guide to spiritual salvation.  To his logical reasoning mind, a large portion of it seemed absurd:  a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.  From such material humanity had built its mightiest edifice of hope, the doctrines of its faith.  After a little while he could stand it no longer.

“Livy,” he said one day, “you may keep this up if you want to, but I must ask you to excuse me from it.  It is making me a hypocrite.  I don’t believe in this Bible.  It contradicts my reason.  I can’t sit here and listen to it, letting you believe that I regard it, as you do, in the light of gospel, the word of God.”

He was moved to write an article on the human idea of God, ancient and modern.  It contained these paragraphs: 

The difference in importance, between the God of the Bible and the God of the present day, cannot be described, it can only be vaguely and inadequately figured to the mind . . . .  If you make figures to represent the earth and moon, and allow a space of one inch between them, to represent the four hundred thousand miles of distance which lies between the two bodies, the map will have to be eleven miles long in order to bring in the nearest fixed star. —­[His figures were far too small.  A map drawn on the scale of 400,000 miles to the inch would need to be 1,100 miles long to take in both the earth and the nearest fixed star.  On such a map the earth would be one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter—­the size of a small grain of sand.]—­So one cannot put the modern heavens on a map, nor the modern God; but the Bible God and the Bible heavens can be set down on a slate and yet not be discommoded . . . .

The difference between that universe and the modern one revealed by science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in the skies.  Its God was strictly proportioned to its dimensions.  His sole solicitude was about a handful of truculent nomads.  He worried and fretted over them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way.  One day he coaxed and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed them beyond their deserts.  He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances, but all to no purpose; his efforts were all vain, he could not govern them.  When the fury was on him he was blind to all reason—­he not only slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and dumb cattle....

To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the true God is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering