19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost;

20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and lo, I am with you always; even unto the end of the world.

Accepting this record as true Christians carry to the world a gospel intended for every human being, a code of morals that is to endure for all time, and a Saviour, with all power behind Him, who will be present always. What kind of gospel can those preach whose Christ was born a man like themselves, performed no miracles, brought no salvation, and who, after preaching to a group of deluded followers, was laid away in a new made grave and became the perpetual prisoner of man's great enemy, death?

The fifth proposition asserts that belief in the miracles performed by Christ is an essential doctrine of the Word of God. This proposition might well have come second because the veracity of the Word of God must be denied before the miracles can be disputed and the miracles must be discarded before objection can be made to the second, third, and fourth propositions. The natural order with those who depart from the Faith of our Fathers is first to deny the infallibility of the Bible, then to deny the authenticity of the miracles, then to deny the virgin birth, the atonement, and the resurrection because they are miracles. When all the miracles and all the supernatural are eliminated from the Bible it becomes a "scrap of paper." When its truths are diluted by the language of men they cease to stir the heart. "Weasel words," to use a phrase employed, if not coined, by President Roosevelt, such as "poetical," "allegorical," and "symbolical" suck the meaning out of the majestic utterances of those who were the spokesmen of Jehovah.

D. FOR THE LIBERALS

QUOTATIONS

By identifying the new learning with heresy, you make orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance.-Erasmus.1

He that speaks against his own reason, speaks against his own conscience: and therefore it is certain, no man serves God with a good conscience, who serves him against his reason.-Jeremy Taylor.3

He who begins by loving Christianity better than the truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.-Coleridge.

He who helps to disencumber Christianity from dubious or false accretions is rendering to it a service which may be more urgently necessary than if he composed a book of evidences.-Dean Farrar.*

But at the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.-Matthew Arnold.

TRUE CHRISTIANITY IS PROGRESSIVE ®

6

sees that

If wherever one takes seeing eyes one growth is the law of life and movement is its innermost

1 Heading of title page, The Modern Churchman, Oxford.

2 Quoted in Coleridge. Aids to Reflection. p. 303.

8 Aids to Reflection. p. 132.

5

Quoted in Drake, Problems of Religion, p. 5.

O Quoted in Drake, Problems of Religion. p. 5.

From a sermon, Progressive Christianity, by Harry Emerson Fosdick, preached in the First Presbyterian Church, New York, May 8, 1921.

necessity, how can one suppose that religion can escape the urgency of this principle? All views of Christianity tend to group themselves under two heads. The first is this: that Christianity is a static system, finally formulated in creed and ritual and practice at some time in the past; a deposit to be accepted in toto if at all; not to be added to, not to be subtracted from, not to be changed, its i's all dotted and its t's all crossed. Take it or leave it, but there it is, a finished article. And the second head under which you can group all other conceptions of Christianity is this: that Christianity is not a finished article, a static system; it is a growing movement. It is like a tree whose roots are deep in the spirit of Jesus. Sometimes it puts forth misshapen branches that must be pruned. Sometimes old branches die and must be lopped away. Because it is a growing, living, vital thing, it never has been quite the same thing in any two generations. We do not see it as our fathers did; our children will not see it as we do: but so long as its roots are in the spirit of Jesus let it grow, for its leaves shall be for the healing of the nations.

As between these two ways of conceiving Christianity, how can any man hesitate to choose, if he really knows Jesus and believes that Jesus still is the master of the movement that bears His name? A static religion was the last thing He ever dreamed of or wanted. Was He not reverent toward His people's past? No one more so! His thought, His speech, His spirit was saturated with the beauty of His race's heritage. Yet listen to Him: "It was said unto you of old time . . but I say unto you." Again and again that utterance fell from His lips. His truth was rooted in the past but it was not imprisoned in the past; it grew up out of the past, not destroying but fulfilling it, as He said. He had the spirit of the prophets in Him, the prophets who once had spoken to His people in words of fire; but old forms that He thought had been outgrown He brushed aside.

He would not have His gospel a patch on an old garment, He said, nor would He put it like new wine into old wine skins. Even when He bade farewell to His disciples He did not talk to them as if what He himself had said were a finished system: "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He shall guide you into all the truth."

PROTESTANTISM AT THE CROSSROADS1

One cannot have served for a generation in the active ministry of the Protestant Church without thinking a good deal about it all, and coming to some conclusions. The times call for much plain speaking about religionthe more the better. Here are one man's convictions -uttered freely, subject to revision, certainly open to criticism and challenge; but the honest outcome of cumulative service and thinking.

Protestantism is today in a critical position. It may have had its day, and henceforth exist as a declining, weakening cause. It may burst into new vigor, and go on into the splendor of a new day and a new life. Whether this or that shall be its destiny depends on the Protestants themselves, on no one else, on nothing else; on their courage, on their insight, on their obedience to the leadership of the Spirit of Christ, on whether they let their churches remain partly Catholic, or make them wholly Protestant.

The danger does not lie in any "Roman peril," in any "Catholic encroachments," which Protestantism must stoutly resist, or be driven from the field. The remedy does not lie in the use of propaganda, or any other outward means of defense or offense, whether the coarse indefensible methods of the Ku Klux Klan, or more

1 By William Pierson Merrill, D.D., pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church, New York. World's Work. 47: 418-24. February, 1924.