to it. The individual must judge the church before the church can judge the individual. Abstractly, a particular church may be a wholly divine institution; but till the individual has indorsed that divinity there is no divinity for him. No church can teach the individual till the individual himself has set it up as a teaching institution. This is true even if he is born into a church which he never questions, and from which he never swerves. His acceptance of its methods, however tacit, rests with his own judgment.

Furthermore, the individual cannot elude the fact that the world is full of authorities, each of which explains the Bible differently from every other, and is therefore always in a minority. As far as I can see, there is no "Catholic" standard in the sense commonly given to the word Catholic, of "what has been taught everywhere, by everyone, and at all times." There has never been any such teach

ing. Even among the apostles there were differences of opinion; in the earliest Christian churches there were varieties of procedure. Whether he will or no, the individual is driven to choose between many conflicting witnesses, selecting one, or rejecting all, or co-ordinating several. From the exercise of his private judgment there is no escape. Even when, as is perhaps most frequently the case, he merely flounders in ignorance and helplessness, he flounders of his own free will. The mother who cries, "I am at a loss as to what to teach my children about the Bible," is at that loss because she chooses so to be. It is a matter of the judgment.

For these and similar reasons, I have been obliged, like many others at the present day, to form my own opinions as to what the Bible means. This I have tried to do through what I may call a process of distillation. Accepting gratefully the varying testimonies of the

historic churches, I have done my best to fuse them, as far as they would blend. I have attempted this for my personal guidance only, keeping close to the dictates of what to me

seems common sense.

When I proposed the title "The Bible and Common Sense" as a caption for the series of articles out of which this book has grown, the editor of Harper's Magazine objected that he was afraid of it. "I should not like orthodox Christians to think that we were attacking their beliefs." The fear lest orthodox Christians should feel that between common sense and their views of the Scriptures there is some discrepancy, may seem a curious one but it can be justified. To no small degree we have removed the Bible beyond the pale of common sense. We have placed it where it can be read only in a specialized frame of mind. From this frame of mind our every

day powers of reasoning must be excluded to begin with.

It is only fair to say that this springs from unauthorized teachers rather than from any official utterance of the churches. The American Christian's conception of the Bible hardly ever goes outside the tradition of the nursery. There he is told the stories of Adam and Eve, of Jacob and Esau, of David and Goliath, with the more idyllic incidents of the New Testament. Except for those who, for professional reasons perhaps, mean to make a deeper study of the Scriptures, Christian education in the United States is confined, as a rule, within this range. Some perfunctory reading may be added, some learning of disjointed passages by rote, a little desultory explanation from a Sunday-school teacher of immature qualifications, if any at all, and the average Christian's biblical instruction is complete. For all the rest of his life he is

considered sufficiently introduced to the volume which contains the secret of eternal life.

It is not strange that as he grows older he should come to one of two conclusions-either that the Bible is preposterous, or that it must be judged by some process foreign to the human mind in any other of its functions. He may even halt between these opinions. Not venturing to reject it wholly, he may live and die as the victim of an infantile tradition, never handed on by any church, or taught by competent authority.

The trail of the nursery and the Sunday school may be said to lie over all Englishspeaking Christendom. The Bible as learned "at mother's knee," rarely rising above the level of Jack the Giant-killer, is probably the source of most of the spiritual bewilderments of later life. The so-called "Bible Stories" invariably raise in a child's mind, quick and logical as it generally is, questions