Article January 28, 1911 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from George Batchelor, F. C. Aldinger, Joseph D. Wilson, K. C: Anderson, Woodrow Wilson

[Christian World.]

Religion is immortal, because it represents the world's highest life. But its immortality does not mean the immortality of its forms. Their successive decay and disappearance are simply the preparation for newer ones which shall more adequately express its ever-growing vitality. Observe, as one illustration of this, what has been happening to the Bible. No instructed person now believes in its infallibility, in its verbal inspiration. It offers itself to us now as a human product, and thereby has opened for itself a fresh career full of new interests. Taken so, it comes to us as more than ever divine, because it is the deepest product of that humanity in which God seeks ever to incarnate Himself.

And what is true of the Bible is true also of the church. We have here, going on before our eyes, a change vaster in its character and consequences than that of the Reformation, or than any that has taken place in its previous history ; changes of which it is impossible to forecast the issue. When we try to estimate what has happened in our own lifetime, the revolution in doctrine, in the general conception of life, we are staggered at the conception of what, in this sphere, is to happen within the next hundred years. Of this, however, we may be well assured. The movement will be not toward death but for a larger life. The church will be occupied with new applications of its central energy. In the loss of some of its old interests it will have gained new ones.

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