FUNDAMENTALIST AND MODERNIST.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 89, 16 April 1927, Page 22

FUNDAMENTALIST AND MODERNIST.

Dr. Richard Roberts, of Montreal, writing in the Hibbert Journal on "Theology in America," says:— "What seems to be most needed at the moment, at least on this side of the Atlantic, is the removal of the whole discussion out of the sphere of polemics. The controversial spirit is the last enemy of the truth, and the toleration of differing opinions one of the earliest and most elemeirtary applications of the principle of Christian charity. "And to those who on either side are minded to uphold the truth at all costs, even at the cost of charity, one may commend the words of the late Dr. Alexander Whyte on the occasion of a Scottish controversy: 'For the restraint of controversy and for the reign of peace and for the life of love, for my part, I would willingly become almost all things to all men. But you will say to me in triumph that Truth is Truth. And so it is. But I say also— and I more and more deeply feel it— that Love is Love. And I* have the highest authority for it, that love is the fulfilling of every law, the law of truth and the law of duty and every other law.' "It is for the modernist not to allow himself even in the privacy of his own mind to suppose that the fundamentalist is concerned only with a dusty antiquity; for he is upholding a side of truth which is integral to a living religion; it is no less for the fundamentalist to be wise enough to allow that the modernist is not being fooled by a trumpery novelty. It is surely time for reasonable folk to reject altogether the sharp and doubtful dilemma 'either .... or,' which extremists love, and for the present, even though it be at the cost of some mental tension, to say lor the sake of a quiet intellectual conscience, "Give us 'both . . . . and.' excluding nothing but tfce falsehood of extremes at either end."