The Unitarian president of America * defines Christianity as "The fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man." When Edward Everett Hale died, the Unitarians said that "Pater noster"--our Father--expressed the heart and soul of his Christianity. A short time ago, Doctor Eliot, president emeritus of Harvard University, undertook to reduce Christianity to the same simple terms. The idea common to these men is that the only essential thing is the God idea. Never mind about Balaam, or the virgin birth. "Our Father which art in heaven" is all that is necessary. But one moment: Is not God as much a miracle as Christ or Balaam? How do we know God is, or that he is a father, or that he is in heaven? By faith? Why then is not faith also enough to make all miracles true? The "Our Father" is a chip of the same old block of supernaturalism. There are against one little chip from the block all the objections that there are against the whole block. If God is our father by faith, then Christ was bom of a virgin by faith, and the whale swallowed Jonah by faith, and the pope is the vicar of God by faith, and so on to the end of the creed. Let us be consistent; which is another way of saying, let us be honest. * President Taft The Unbelievable in the Bible |THE bible taxes even _credulity_ beyond the point of endurance. No matter how willing one may be to believe everything in the bible, there is a limit even to one's willingness to believe. When Moses was upon the mountain talking with God, the people down in the plain were worshiping idols. Is it possible that with the quaking and thundering mountain before them, with the deity sitting on its summit, the Jews would have had the temerity to worship a golden calf? Yet this is precisely what the Jews are accused of doing. The parting of the Red Sea is easier to believe than that the Jews worshiped a calf in the immediate presence of "the one true God"! Let us glance at the story as it is told in the bible. _And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that there were thunders and lightning, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled. And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God. And they stood at the nether part of the mount. And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice_. * Is it believable that, under such circumstances, with the only God in sight of all the people, and his voice in their ears, the Jews could have turned to Aaron and said to him: _Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him._ **