THE DEAN OF WESTMINSTER ON THE BIBLE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1715, 11 January 1905, Page 74 (Supplement)

THE DEAN OF WESTMINSTER ON THE BIBLE.

Dr Armitage Robinson, the Dean of Westminster, delivered a remarkable utterance on the teaching of the Bible in his advioe to Sunday-school teachers at the Church House recently. I)r Robinson said: —“The Rook which you hold in your hands as teachers has not changed. We have changed. Our whole conception of the method of its inspiration has been altered. A greatdeal which our forefathers took literally we cannot take literally to-day. Thu first chapter of Genesis no longer means to us that the world was made in six days. The second chapter of Genesis no longer means to us that God moulded clay into a human figure and breathed upon it, or that He took a rib from Adam and made Eve. These are allegories or parables to us. They still proclaim their original spiritual lessons. They teach that God is -the source of all creation: that God works in patient, slow development; that the lower comes before the higher; that the highest .and lowest is man ; that man is akin to the beasts that perish, but also akin to God, and that he is God’s image in the world. All this is taught by modern discovery. It is the underlying spiritual truth, taught in a form of what was at first literally believed, hut which, for us is a parable.

“And so again we believe that God made man out of dust, not by moulding clay, but through a long process of development which followed the course which He had marked out, and in every step of which He was working His will. So we believed that through holy matrimony man and woman become intimately one in a union which God has made and which man must not break. This is the underlying truth of the oldworld story which makes Adam say ‘Bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh.’ . “These and many other stories like that of the talking serpent and the talking ass, we do not take, or at any rate most of us —I do not —now as literal statements of historical facts, but as imagery which clothes certain spiritual lessons. “For ourselves this is not perhaps very difficult; but when we come to

teach it is not easy. For quite young children there is very little difficulty, for stories are the natural vehicles to them of moral lessons, and they do not venture to ask, Is it true? or, Did it really happen? But older children want to' know, and we must be prepared to give them an honest answer. “ These are the old-time stories which God allowed to he taught to teach certain great lessons which were easiest learned and easiest remembered. ' For us they are parables—earthly stories with a, heavenly meaning. I give these as illustrations of difficulties that are to bo met with. There are many more and many greater difficulties in connection with the Old Testament and the New Testament than those. I have spent most of my life in the study of these matters, and I feel that there is a mass of difficulty which has not yet been solved: but those other difficulties do not so directly concern the teaching of children, and even our learned theologians are not clear about many.”