The New Testament Problem.

In the selection of passages from the New Testament there was at least as much need for care and compromise as in the Old Testament lessons. Within the Church itself the voice of criticism has not spoken so freely in the one case as in the other. It is true that at the last Congress of the Church of England in the Old Country a paper was read urging that the synoptic gospels had not entirely escaped from legendary influences, and the writer's conclusions would apply to a good many of the lessons in the text-book. It is also true that a Canon of the same Church has recently edited a biblical dictionary in which some of the fundamental positions of traditional Christianity are rudely assailed. But these exceptions serve but to emphasise the rule that the critical spirit of the Church does not work with the same freedom upon the New Testament as upon the Old. On the other hand, the nearer one approaches to the inner mysteries of the Christian faith, the more clearly is the line drawn between those within and those without the pale, the more vital do differences become, the keener the feelings they arouse, and the greater the dinger to the public peace of anything which stimulates or extends their operation. Yet even from the New Testament it would have been easy to select lessons which would have provided the highest ethical and not far from the highest spiritual teaching without directly raising questions that are peremptorily and essentially controversial. The parables, for instance, and the Sermon on the Mount contain abundant material of this description, transcending neither the intelligence of childhood nor the limits of what is common to all ethical systems and all good men; and such material may be admissible into a secular curriculum when men have ceased to wrangle about the authority of the Book and the personality of the Teacher.