clipping before me contains the following, uttered on March 28, 1905, by the Rev. B.A.  Green, pastor of the First Baptist Church, of Evanstown, Ill., before about a hundred of his fellow ministers:  “All the truth in the world is not contained in one book, nor in books of theology, God was too big for one temple and he is also too big for one book.  God is everywhere.  His truth is found in all good books.  The pastor of to-day should read the modern psychology and modern literature, especially the works of fiction which deal with religious or social phases of modern life.”  A large portion of the sectarian ministry reject entirely the Mosaic account of the creation, and accept instead the modern theory of evolution.

The following quotation is from the Rev. Minton J. Savage, pastor of the Church of the Messiah, New York, N.Y., who is an acknowledged leader in the “higher criticism.”  This was in answer to an attack made on the higher critics by a convention of the American Bible League.  “The men who are leading in the higher criticism of the Bible and who are now being assailed so bitterly by the American Bible League, are representative scholars of the world, scientific thinkers, leaders, teachers, who have given us a new universe, a new conception of God, a new idea concerning the origin and nature of man.  They are not seeking to support or to undermine anything.  They are seeking for the truth as the only sacred thing on earth.

“I would like to consider what this book is about over which all this controversy is raging.  It is really not one book, but sixty-six small volumes.  They were written during a period of nearly a thousand years, in different countries, by different people.  The first book was written about eight hundred years before Christ.  The first five books of the Bible were written between five and six hundred years before Christ.  The historical books tell us about the day of Judges, then of Kings, the wars of Israel, until the time of captivity.  Then the book of Job, purely anonymous, and no one knows who wrote it.  Then the book of the Psalms, the hymn-book of the people of Israel, and the books of the prophets.  It would be more proper to call them preachers, for they make no effort to foretell anything, but merely told the people that if they followed certain lines of conduct certain things would happen.

“No book was placed in the Bible by anything that claimed to be divine authority.  No law concerning the Biblical canon was ever issued by the church earlier than the sixteenth century and that changed nothing; it simply recognized what had come to be a fact.  These books drifted together and came to be bound as one, by force of gravity, by common consent, and there are one or two books in the New Testament which scholars could miss without feeling any the poorer.