Article July 11, 1903 Issue

Religious Items

with contributions from Eliot, F. D. Storey, Phillips Brooks, Ichabod Spencer, H. A. Blake, Bushnell

James H. Ecob, D.D., in an article on "Church Federation" The Christian Register, says:—

"I hope that some day a scholar will arise, large enough in learning, broad enough in vision, to give the world the true story of that most destructive of all heresies, the verbal inspiration of Scriptures. It has mothered more of the sins and abominations of history than all other heresies combined. When Protestantism arrived with its doctrine of the inalienable right of private judgment, a new and terrible weapon was placed in the hand of this arch heresy. At least a degree of safety lay in numbers when synods and councils turned to the record for a God-given word. But when every man, whatever his equipment in learning, or insight, could turn to an infallible book and get his "Thus saith the Lord' at first hand, it was like the letting out of waters. Private interpretation, personal idiosyncracies, vagaries, conceits, ambitions, cruelties, avariceries, slavery, intemperance, war, each with its proof-texts, set out to the conquest of the world. Each must do thus, and no otherwise; for did it not carry, as a banner, its divinely inspired word? It was philosophically inevitable, therefore, that, after the first great unifying impulse had somewhat abated. Protestantism must begin to divide. Nothing can arrest that process of division so long as that cause is operative; namely, the right of private judgment to exploit a verbally inspired Scripture. There lies the logic, and there is the tremendous underscoring of history. Protestantism has gone on dividing and subdividing till to-day we have the 'scandal of Christendom,'—hundreds of sects, sects of sects. . . . The Bible to-day is a unifier, not a divider, because intelligent men and women the world over are more and more demanding its ethical contents.

"The original cause of division, a verbally inspired book in the hands of private judgment, being historically vacated of meaning, its corollaries, as represented in the various sects, having gone to seed on the parent stem, what do we find to-day as the product of the evolutionary process? We find a group of denominations looking one another in the face and asking earnestly, even solemnly: What next? No adequate reason of being exists within ourselves. What has survived of our historic sect-life is chiefly 'corporate ambition.' We can accredit ourself to ourself as a body of religious men and women, but not as a body of denominationalists. Evolution has cut that ground from under our feet. We are too small-minded for our God. When we call Him Our Father, we are ashamed to look our historical selves in the face. Either we must become larger, or get some narrower name for Him. . . .

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