ing to reproduce the sequence of
conviction of sin, aspiration, repentance, and conversion by doctrinal
pressure from the outside. The foundations of it all are in the New
Testament and somewhat in the Old, but what has been built upon these
foundations has been either too extended or too one-sided. In order to
include in one general sense of condemnation strong enough to create an
adequate desire for salvation, all sorts and conditions of people,
theology has not only charged us up with our own sins which are always a
sad enough account, but it has charged us up with ancestral and imputed
sins.

This line of theology has been far too rigid, far too insistent upon
what one may call the facts of theology, and far too blind to the facts
of life. It has made much of sin in the abstract and sometimes far too
little of concrete sin; it has made more of human depravity than social
justice; it has failed to make allowance for varieties of temper and
condition; it is partly responsible for the widespread reaction of the
cults and movements of our own time.

Since so strongly an articulate system as this needed something to
sustain it, Protestantism has constantly supported itself in the
authority of the Old and New Testaments. It displaced one authority by
another, the authority of the Church by the authority of the Book, and
in order to secure for this authority an ultimate and unquestioned power
it affirmed as the beginning and the end of its use of the Scriptures
their infallibility. The growth of Protestant teaching about the Bible
has necessarily been complicated but we must recognize that Protestant
theology and Protestant tradition have given the Bible what one may call
read-in values.

At any rate after affirming the infallibility of the text Protestantism
has turned back to the text for the proof of its teaching and so built
up its really very great interrelated system in which, as has already
been said, the power of religion over the life of its followers and the
reality of religion in the experiences of its followers locked up on
just such things as these: First, the experiences of conversions;
second, conversion secured through the processes of Protestant
indoctrination, backed up by the fervent appeal of the Protestant
ministry and the pressure of Protestant Church life; and third, all this
supported by an appeal to the authority of the Bible with a proof-text
for every statement.

All this is, of course, to d