Editorial April 16, 1904 Issue

The Signs of the Times

It is difficult to keep pace with the advance of a more consistent and liberal thought respecting the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, and heresy hunters must be in despair of ever being able to cope with what they are in the habit of naming "an alarming situation." As an interesting illustration of the emancipation of thought from the trammels of theological dogma, we quote the following from a recent work on "Christian Faith in an Age of Science" by a member of the faculty of a prominent denominational university. It is but one of many evidences of the change which is taking place in religious thought.

He says, "Let us fairly recognize that inspiration does not mean omniscience, and that errors in detail on the part of the Biblical writers, especially on subjects outside the sphere of morals and religion, do not invalidate the claims of Christianity as a revelation. . . . In a spirit of purely literary and historical criticism we can then consider what the original writer of the two narratives in Genesis and what the compiler who put them into the Pentateuch probably believed and probably intended to teach; . . . whether the order of events was intended to be an order of time, or only an order of thought; whether the second narrative was conscious allegory, or myth, erroneously believed by the writer or the compiler to be history."

Regarding prayer he writes,—

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