WESLEYAN HERESY HUNT.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVI, Issue 67, 24 July 1913, Page 7

WESLEYAN HERESY HUNT.

THE OLD SCHOOL OF THOUGHT

[Lv Electric Telegrapu—C /i-Yiuom] [United Press Association.] London, July 22.

Something in the nature of a heresy hunt occupied the Wesleyan Conference over the Rev. George Jackson’s appointment as tutor of Pastoral Theology at Didsbury College. Mr Jackson, in 1906, as head of the Methodist College at Toronto, became embroiled in a controversy' with an older school of thought. His appointment to Didsbury is questioned on the ground that his views on the Old Testament are contrary to the Methodists’ teaching. Mr Jackson enunciated his views in lectures in 1909, in which he expressed his disbelief that Moses wrote tho Pentateuch, that Genesis was a trustworthy account of the beginning of human life and civilisation, or that the Book of Jonah was a sober record of plain fact.

Dr. Coley moved that in view ot the unrest caused, the lecturer’s appointment to Didsbury be reconsidered. While Mr Jackson was no believer in what is called tho New Theology, he appeared to hold that a minister should go as far as R. J. Campbell or further, without being amenable to an ecclesiastical tribunal.

Mr Jackson, in his defence, said that however it might be with some older men of the ministry, nine-tenths of the younger ones found little that was new and nothing disturbing in his lectures.

The conference, with seven dissentients, carried an amendment that it saw no reason to interfere with the appointment.