But can the Christian Church afford to lose either section? It is true there may be irreconcilable extremists on both sides; but even this I should be sorry to admit. Of course, there are some who have entered upon the critical study of the Bible from a sceptical standpoint: I am not referring to these. But there are many who are truly devout scholars and who are intensely loyal to our Lord Jesus Christ; and there are many younger men and women who long to be able to maintain the faith delivered to their fathers, but who feel that, in doing so, they dare not be untrue to their own God-given reason, and who are therefore compelled to face the questions which some would counsel them to leave alone. The cure for such is not to tell them that an unorthodox view with regard to the authority of a certain book puts them outside the Kingdom of God: unfortunately there are not a few whose counsels to the young would seem to point in this direction. Can we not find a _via media_ which will help us to work together in love in spite of the fact that we differ so greatly even on so important a question? If we cannot so work together I believe there must be weakness in our testimony to Christ. I think that the Society of Friends is in a position of unique strength in regard to this difficult problem. The early Friends realized—as their contemporaries did not—that the Holy Scriptures contained the word of God; but that it was not right to speak of them as being the word of God. They realized the danger, to which the Reformers were many of them blind, of a literalism in the interpretation of Scripture which would bind men as did the tradition of the Elders in the time of Christ. Nevertheless, they held with tremendous tenacity the view that the Scriptures were indeed inspired of God, and this none the less because the same Spirit who first inspired men of old to write was present and necessary to help the men of to-day in the interpretation of those writings. This view is thus expressed by Samuel Fisher: “And because we do not, with the misty ministers of the mere letter, own the bare text of Scripture entire in every tittle, but say it hath suffered much loss of more than vowels, single letters and single lines also, yea, even of whole epistles and prophecies of inspired men, the copies of which are not by the clergy canonized nor by the Bible sellers bound up, and especially because we own not the said alterable and much altered outward text, but the holy truth and inward light and spirit to be the Word of God, which is living [and] the true touchstone, therefore they cry out against us. Yet the Scriptures are owned by us in their due place and the letter is acknowledged by us full as much as it is by itself, to have been written by men moved of God’s Spirit.”[8] [Footnote 8: Quoted in “Beginnings of Quakerism,” p. 289.]