The Unreal Bible.
"The Bible, and the reading of the Bible as an instrument of
instruction, may be said to have been begun on the sunrise of that day
when Ezra unrolled the parchment scroll of the Law. It was a new
thought that the Divine Will could be communicated by a dead literature
as well as by a living voice. In the impassioned welcome with which
this thought was received lay the germs of all the good and evil which
were afterwards to be developed out of it: on the one side, the
possibility of appeal in each successive age to the primitive, undying
document that should rectify the fluctuations of false tradition and
fleeting opinion; on the other hand, the temptation to pay to the
letter of the sacred book a worship as idolatrous and as profoundly
opposed to its spirit as once had been the veneration paid to the
sacred trees or the sacred stones of the consecrated groves or hills."
Dean Stanley: "History of the Jewish Church," iii. 158.