The lessons may still be true. But they are robbed of their certainty. Each man is thrown back upon his own resources; he is denied the support which all popular religion offers him, the conviction that outside himself there is a power on which he can and must lean for guidance. In the ancient faith a man said: “I believe this on the authority of an all-wise God.” In the new faith he is in effect compelled to say: “I have examined the alleged pronouncements of an all-knowing God; some of them are obviously untrue, some are rather repulsive, others, however, if they are properly restated, I find to be exceedingly good.” Something quite fundamental is left out of the modernist creeds. At least something which has hitherto been quite fundamental is left out. That something is the most abiding of all the experiences of religion, namely, the conviction that the religion comes from God. Suppose it were true, which it plainly is not, that Dr. Fosdick by his process of selection and decoding has retained “precisely the thing at which the Bible was driving.” Still he would be without the thing on which popular religion [p048] has been founded. For the Bible to our ancestors was not simply, as he implies, a book of wisdom. It was a book of wisdom backed by the power of God himself. That is not an inconsiderable difference. It is all the difference there is between a pious resolution and a moral law. The Bible, as men formerly accepted it, contained wisdom _certified_ by the powers that govern the universe. It did not merely contain many well-tested truths, similar in kind to those which are to be found in Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, and Bernard Shaw. It contained truths which could not be doubted because they had been spoken by God through his prophets and his Son. They could not be wrong. But once it is allowed that each man may select from the Bible as he sees fit, judging each passage by his own notions of what is “abiding,” you have stripped the Scriptures of their authority to command men’s confidence and to compel their obedience. The Scriptures may still inspire respect. But they are disarmed. 3. _What Modernism Leaves Out_