114 The Fundamentals the past, gallantly conducted to the confines of His world and bowed out as He is no longer needed and His presence might be very troublesome to some people. Such a religion is the very negation of Christianity, is a distinct reversion to hea thenism. It may be a cultured and refined heathenism with a Christian veneer, but yet a genuine heathenism. I am far from saying that all adherents of this school go to such lengths, but why do they not? Most of them had an early training under the best conservative influences which inculcated a wholesome reverence for the Bible as an author ity in religion and morals. This training they can never fully outgrow. Many of them are of a good,' sturdy religious ances try, of rigid, conservative training and genuine religious expe rience. Under these influences they have acquired a strong hold upon Christianity and can never be removed from it. They hold a theoretical standpoint and a religious experience together, failing, as I believe, to see the fundamental contra diction between them. Slowly the Christian consciousness and Christian scholarship are asserting themselves. Men are begin ning to see how irreconcilable the two positions are and there will be the inevitable cleavage in the future. Churches are none too soon or too seriously alarmed. Christianity is begin ning to see that its very existence is at stake in this subtle attempt to do away with the supernatural. I have seen the Unitarian, the Jew, the free thinker, and the Christian who has imbibed critical views, in thorough agreement on the Old Testament and its teachings. They can readily hobnob to gether, for the religious element becomes a lost quantity; the Bible itself becomes a plaything for the intellect, a merry- go-round for the mind partially intoxicated with its theory. As has been already intimated, one of the results of the critical processes has been to rearrange the Bible according to its own point of view. This means that it has to a large extent set it aside as an authority. Such a result is serious enough, but a much more serious result follows. This is
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