eal coldly and analytically with something
which, as it has worked out in religious life, has been neither cold nor
analytical. Underneath it all have been great necessities of the soul
and issuing out of it all have been aspirations and devoutnesses and
spiritual victories and new understandings of God and a wealth of love
and goodness which are a part of the imperishable treasures of humanity
for three centuries. This faith and experience have voiced themselves
in moving hymns, built themselves into rare and continuing fellowships,
gone abroad in missionary passion, spent themselves for a better world
and looked unafraid even into the face of death, sure of life and peace
beyond. But behind the great realities of our inherited religious life
one may discover assumptions and processes less sure.

_The Strength and Weakness of This Position_

Once more, this inherited faith in the Bible and the systems which have
grown out of it have been conditioned by scientific and philosophic
understandings. The Protestant doctrine of the infallibility of the
Bible assumed its authority not only in the region of religion but in
science and history as well. The inherited theologies really went out of
their way to give the incidental the same value as the essential. There
was no place in them for growth, correction, further revelation. This
statement may be challenged, it certainly needs to be qualified, for
when the time for adjustment and the need of adjustment really did come
the process of adjustment began to be carried through, but only at very
great cost and only really by slowly building new foundations under the
old. In fact the new is not in many ways the old at all, though this is
to anticipate.

It is directly to the point here that the whole scheme of religion as it
has come down to us on the Protestant side till within the last fifty
years was at once compactly interwrought, strongly supported and
unexpectedly vulnerable. The integrity of any one part of its line
depended upon the integrity of every other part; its gospel went back
to the Fall of Man and depended, therefore, upon the Biblical theory of
the Creation and subsequent human history. If anything should challenge
the scientific or historical accuracy of the book of Genesis, the
doctrine of original sin would have either to be discarded or recast. If
the doctrine of original sin were discarded or recast, the accepted
interpretations of the Atonement went with