“To allegorize is to juggle with Scripture,” said Luther. The Protestant Reformers could not tolerate that. For they lived in an age when faith was already disintegrating, and they had themselves destroyed the authority of an infallible source of religion. “We must,” wrote Calvin, “entirely reject the allegories of Origen, and of others like him, which Satan, with the deepest subtlety, has endeavored to introduce into the Church, for the [p040] purpose of rendering the doctrine of Scripture ambiguous and destitute of all certainty and firmness.” The insistence of the Reformers on a literal interpretation of the Bible had, as Dr. Fosdick points out, two unforeseen results. It led to the so-called Higher Criticism which in substance is nothing but a scientific attempt to find out what the Bible did mean literally to those who wrote it. And this in turn made it practically impossible for modern men to believe all that the Bible literally says. When they read the Bible as allegory they found in it unending confirmation of what they already believed. But when they read it literally, as history, as astronomy, and biology, and as a code of laws, it contradicted at many crucial points the practical working convictions of their daily lives. “The consequence is,” says Dr. Fosdick, “that we face the Biblical world made historically vivid over against the modern world presently experienced, and we cannot use the old method (_i.e._ allegory) of accommodating one to the other.” 2. _Modernism: Immortality as an Example_ This predicament forced modern churchmen to seek what Dr. Fosdick calls “a new solution.” They could not believe that the Bible was taken down, as John Donne put it, by “the Secretaries of the Holy Ghost.” Yet they believed, as every sane man does, that the Bible contains wisdom which bears deeply upon the conduct of human life. Their problem was to find a way of picking and choosing passages in the Scriptures, and then of interpreting those which were chosen in such a way as to make them credible to modern men. They had to find some [p041] way of setting aside the story that God made Eve out of Adam’s rib, that God commanded the massacre of whole populations, and that he enjoyed the slaughter of animals at the sacrifice; but they had at the same time to find a way of preserving for the use of modern men the lessons of the ministry of Jesus and the promise of life everlasting.