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Love, could not have done in the treatment o f the nations what He is said in the Old Testament to have done, nor does He pun ish individuals or nations for disobedience to His will. Redemption from sin arid evil by the death of His Son, as related in the Gospels, does not satisfy their injured feeling, for why should sin and evil exist at all? We must choose, they say, between imperfect goodness arid imperfect power; and, whichever taken, the Bible ceases to be authoritative, But underlying all hostile criticism, and giving it a force which it could not other wise have over the popular mind, is the feeling which is in the air, that the Bible is a superannuated book. Transmitted to us, for the most part, from a rempte past, and embodying the religious conceptions o f an uncultured people, what authority has it over us? It reflects, as we are inces santly told, the crude beliefs o f a people living in the early- age o f humanity, when men’s conceptions o f the Supreme Being were necessarily narrow and very anthro pomorphic; a time when any scientific study o f nature was unknown, when legends were everywhere received as facts, and dead heroes were magnified into. gods. It is not possible for us o f this century to go back to such undeveloped form o f relig ious belief. We have outgrown them. Our religion must be conformed to the advanced philosophy and science o f our own time, to the modern ideas o f man and nature. The Bible is, indeed, valuable as a record o f what men have believed, but its concep tions o f God are the conceptions o f child hood, and must now be greatly enlarged, and our relations o f Him be determined by our wider knowledge o f nature and o f humanity. Many illustrations might be given o f the growing disposition to regard the Old Testament as superannuated, having little historical value, and no religious author- ity.. Thus it was said a half-century ago by Theodore Parker, who, in this matter, represents a multitude: “ The Old Testa ment contains the opinions o f from forty to fifty different men, the greater part of
some evolutionists that we must give up the Mosaic cosmogony, and the idea o f a cre ation. The uniform persistence o f Force in nature puts miracles and all Divine inter positions out o f the question; arid biology refutes the biblical account o f man’s for mation, and shows his development from the lower animals. As there is a natural law o f progress in humanity, the account of the fall cannot be accepted. ' Nor are we to accept the supernatural birth o f the Lord, since nothing can come into human ity from without: all is, developed■from within. And the future o f humanity must be in the same line as the past; no break o f dynamic continuity, no resurrection, no day o f judgment, no new creation. Foot note— (A very recent illustration of the disposition to adjust the teachings of the Bible to modern scientific theories is seen in “The Place o f Death in Evolu tion,” by Dr. Newman Smyth, 1897. W e are told by him that death had originally no moral significance, but gradually acquired one. JIn itself it is both useful and beneficent, and' necessary in evolution. It lifts man into a higher stage of life, and, therefore, will in the end be universally welcomed. O f course there can be no bodily resurrection, and the resurrection o f the Lord was an expression to His dis ciples o f “ His spiritual identity.” When a man dies, death is no more; and when all are dead, death will disappear forever. Dying- is “passage out of death into life.” When there is “complete detachment o f the soul from atomic matter, and it is brought into new and better connection with the ele mental forces, the natural is completed in the, spiritual.” This is the resurrection. Thus the earth is made a birthplace for souls, which, transported at death into some other world, have there their growth and development. Dr. Smyth thinjcs that “the coming defender o f the faith once given to the saints will be a trained arid accomp lished biologist” ). •UNDERLYING MOTIVES Others still reject the Bible on the ground that in many things it affronts their moral sense. An all-powerful God, being
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