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“One Spring morning we had got up early and sauntered out together. I remember perfectly what our talk was about. Charley had started the question: ‘How could it be just to harden Pharaoh’s heart and then punish him for what came of it?’ I who had been brought up without any superstitious reverence for the Bible, suggested that the narrator of the story might be accountable for the contradiction, and simply that it was not true that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Strange to say, Charley was rather shocked at this. He had as yet received the dogma of the infallibility of the Bible without thinking enough about it to question it. Nor did it now occur to him what a small affair it was to find a book fallible, compared with finding the God of whom the book spoke fallible upon its testimony—for such was surely the dilemma. Men have been able to exist without a Bible: if there be a God it must be in and through Him that all men live; only if he be not true, then in Him, and not in the first Adam, all men die.”
– George MacDonald. From Wilfrid Cumbermede.
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