e truth has made us free. It possesses
still--the Bible--the truth and revelation and meaning for life it
always possessed. We are gradually realizing this and gaining in the
realization. But the Bible has been compelled to meet the challenge of
an immensely expanded scientific and historical knowledge. We have had
to test its supposed authority as to beginnings by Astronomy, Geology
and Biology; we have had to test its history by the methods and
conclusions of modern historical investigation. The element of the
supernatural running through both the Old and New Testaments has been
compelled to take into account that emphasis upon law and ordered
process which is, perhaps more than any other single thing, the
contribution of science to the discipline of contemporaneous thought.

_The Average Man Loses His Bearings_

The whole process has been difficult and unsettling. There was and is
still a want of finality in the conclusions of Biblical scholars. It
needed and needs still more study than the average man is able to give
to understand their conclusions; it needed and it needs still a deal of
patient, hard, clear-visioned thinking to win from the newer
interpretations of the Bible that understanding and acceptance of its
value which went with the inherited faith. The more liberal-minded
religious teachers doubtless very greatly overestimate the penetration
of popular thought already accomplished, by what seems to them a
familiar commonplace. The New Testament is still, even for the scholar,
a challenging problem. Conclusions are being bitterly contested and
where the specialist is himself in doubt the average man is naturally in
utter confusion. The more conservative communions neither accept nor
teach the results of the higher criticism, and so it reaches the body of
their communicants only as rumour and a half-understood menace to the
truth.

Religion is naturally the most conservative thing in the world and even
when we think ourselves to have utterly changed our point of view
something deeper than mere intellectual acceptance protests and will not
be dismissed. We pathetically cling to that to which we, at the same
time, say good-bye. The average man somewhat affected by the modern
scientific spirit is greatly perplexed by the miraculous elements in the
Bible and yet he still believes the Bible the word of God with an
authority nothing else possesses. In fact, by a contradiction easy
enough to understand, what p