FROM Bible League Quarterly.
WE are no longer left to argue as to what is likely to result from a setting aside of the Bible as Divinely authoritative. Facts have come to light which may well appal even those who are most alive to the genesis and the nature of the destructive Higher Criticism which has so widely established itself among professing Christians.
Our attention has been directed by Watchword and Truth (Boston, U.S.A.), and by a trenchant booklet, written by Mr. S. H. Blake, Toronto, Canada, to some of the results of the rationalistic treatment of Holy Scripture, which have shown themselves in the teaching that is being given to over two hundred thousand students in so-called Christian Colleges in America.
The journal and the pamphlet referred to base their exposure of these results in articles contributed to the May, June, July, and August issues of The Cosmopolitan, by Mr. Harold Bolce. In introducing his articles, Mr. Bolce says: “To discover the scope and daring of college-teaching in the United States to day, I have undertaken an itinerary of class-rooms from Cambridge to California. Some of the institutions I have entered as a special student. In others I have attended lectures as a visitor, or interviewed members of the faculty, or consulted type-written or printed records of what they teach . . . and what I have come upon in the teachings . . . constitutes profound surprise—a series in fact of increasing surprises—absorbing and sensational.”
Mr. Bolce attended a college “presided over by one of the foremost leaders of a great evangelical denomination,” and, from his seat in the class-room, he addressed to one of the Professors this question: “Do you not believe, Professor, that Moses got the ten commandments in the way the Scriptures tell?” The Professor smiled. “I do not,” said he. “It is unscientific and absurd to imagine that God ever turned stone-mason and chiseled commandments on a rock.”
It is then stated that this Professor is “by no means a solitary pioneer among the modern college authorities in the scientific handling of the sacred story,” and later on we read: “The Bible, many of the Professors say, has outlived its usefulness as an infallible authority. The world to-day does not need, nor will it much longer tolerate, the belief that any book on earth was written by a God. The Creation, a Sinless Adam in Paradise, the Fall, the Confusion of Tongues, and the rest may remain passing good folklore, but they never happened in the course of history.”
The first of the series of articles to which we are referring has the title, “Blasting at the Rock of Ages”; and the Editor of The Cosmopolitan says: “It has been shown that our great Universities proclaim a new religion divested of Biblical creed. . . . Their whole attack is against what they define as dissipated mediæval myths embodied in Holy Writ.” And Mr. Bolce gives ample warrant for the startling heading to the first of his papers and for the Editorial Summary just quoted in such words as these: “The Christian world was shocked a few years ago when Ingersoll lectured on the mistakes of Moses. A far more startling fact is that a Professor of Philosophy in the University of Michigan has in his lectures referred to the mistakes of Jesus.”
The name of a Professor in Yale University is given concerning whom it is said: “He takes the view that the majority can make anything right. He has coined a new word, or rather resurrected an old one from its Latin grave, to take the place of the Bible as an authority. The word is “mores,” and by it he means popular usage and tradition exerting a dominant influence on individuals. The “mores” he teaches cover all the habits of society with “the mantle of current custom, and give them regulations and limits within which they become unquestionable.” He thus takes the daring ground that anything tolerated by the world in general is right.” And, Mr. Bolce adds: “Hundreds of Professors share his beliefs.” Now let our readers note the following. Mr. Bolce says: “From the college standpoint there are no God-established covenants. Contemporary college-teaching, as I find it, may be likened to an exploring expedition over a sea that has not been charted, or across unknown continents. The lectures take you along a course line with none of the immemorial land-marks. The Church does not count. They teach young men and young women plainly” (and this as they sit together in the class-room) that an immoral act is merely one contrary to the prevailing conceptions of society, and that those who defy the code do not offend a Deity but simply arouse the venom of the majority—the majority that has not yet grasped the new idea. Out of Harvard comes the teaching that there are no absolute evils, and that ‘the highest ethical life consists at all times in the breaking of rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case.’ “It was with no preconceptions of what the teachings of the colleges are that I started on my student’s pilgrimage. I realised, of course, that the volcanic transformations being wrought in current thought and conduct had not come through chance, and that back of the economic and moral upheavals of the time might be found the men giving first expression to the new ideas. But I did not expect to find academic warrant, as some have already construed it, for DEPARTURE FROM CONJUGAL RESTRAINT. Nor did I count on hearing THE HOME DECRIED as too archaic and narrow a channel for the transmission of progress to the race to come. It was, too, a shock to learn that college professors claim that CONSCIENCE IS A FALSE GUIDE and that there are NO ABIDING STANDARDS OF RIGHT AND WRONG; that moral precepts are merely passing shibboleths; that the conceptions of right and wrong are as unstable as the styles of dress, and no more significant; and that society, by its approval, can make any kind of conduct right. These teachers therefore claim that their doctrines, which may now shock the conservative, will probably be the Gospel of to-morrow.”
Again: “I discovered that the Professors defending or exalting as new ideals what the orthodox condemn, have been addressing young men and young women who have been receiving without outcry what the outside world, mature in its convictions and with inherited bias, denounces as unfit. A doctrine which universally applied might overturn religion, society, and the civil law is accepted as placidly as a demonstration in geometry or algebra. What the scholar in the chair of authority says is gospel.” Such teaching so received is bound to bear fruit in the life of the individual and of the nation, and as it does so, who will deny that it is the result, the direct, the inevitable result of that turning aside from the Bible as the Divinely Authoritative Word of God, which the Bible League exists to cry against. “Even as they did not like to retain GOD in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind to do those things which are not convenient.” (Romans i. 22). Whether things are yet as bad in the colleges in our own land as in those of America we cannot say, but with the condition of things there so startlingly exposed it is clear that to admit the right of man in any particular to dispute the truth and authority of the Holy Scriptures is to exalt sinful man above the Word of God and to throw open the flood-gates to ideas, influences, and events that are “earthly, sensual, devilish” (James iii. 15), and destructive therefore of all that makes for the present and eternal well-being of mankind.—Rev. R. WRIGHT HAYE.