NO student of Scripture will be surprised at the state of things both in the Established Church of this country and the various Nonconformist bodies. All has been foretold. The views on Inspiration now current amongst the principal clergy, ministers, and professors of theology, are amongst the most serious signs of the times.
But everyone will surely be pained at the outspoken infidelity of the Bishop of Wakefield in his recent address to the members of the Leeds Branch of the Parents’ National Education Union.
Let every Christian parent well weigh the result, so far as their children are concerned, of handing over the religious education of their little ones to such men or their deputies.
We hold that it is the parents’ duty as well as privilege to bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and in nothing is their responsibility greater than in that which concerns the soul and the child’s eternal interests.
Yet we have met with cases of culpable carelessness, children being sent to convent schools where they are trained in sacramentalism and sacerdotalism, and allowed to go to denominational Sunday schools, where, alas! the teachers are becoming familiarized with such views of the Bible as the Bishop of Wakefield unblushingly gave utterance to.
Dr Eden insinuates that the children are the ones in whose minds the questions as to the Bible originate. This is not by any means the case; almost invariably infidelity comes secondhand, and doubts are suggested to the minds of the young by those who have grown older in unbelief — a crime if ever there was one, a crime of darkest dye, a devilish crime, for Satan was the first one to ask, “Hath God said?”
“For centuries,” we are told,” it was believed that every part of Scripture was equally inspired.
Even educated people had found it a great relief to be told such elementary truths as these: — The Bible is not infallible, the Bible is not necessarily literal and exact; it is not a scientific text-book — he was glad they had at last realized that; the books were not necessarily written by the authors whose names they bore; these names had absolutely no authority except old traditions of the Jewish race.... Once they realized these facts, and understood the great purpose of inspiration, they would lose the paralyzing and crippling fear of answering truthfully the direct questions of children. They would no longer be reduced to the pious impotence of harmonizing contradictions, or accounting for absolutely impossible phenomena by unnatural miraculous power.”
The “questions of children” above alluded to, whenever there are such, are the results of listening to the unholy speculations of such theologians as the Bishop himself.
The trouble is that an immense number of preachers to-day no longer believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God; this unbelief is found amongst the leading men of both Church and Dissent, who propagate their infidelity amongst the rising generation of preachers, so that the minds of the people are becoming saturated with religious doubts. Add to this the natural dislike to the plain truths of the Bible, and we can easily understand with what rapid strides Christendom is hurrying along to complete apostasy.
Is there a remedy? None. All this sorrowful state of things has been abundantly foretold in the Scriptures of truth. We are in the last days, and so far as Christendom is concerned there is no recovery, “Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Tim. 3:1313But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived. (2 Timothy 3:13)).
But at any rate Christian parents should awake to their responsibilities and withdraw both themselves and their children from all danger of contamination with these “damnable heresies”