The Literalists a Minority?

All these four views—the literal, the figurative or allegorical, the lyrical, and the mythical—have still their adherents, and a man may hold any of them according to his lights without prejudice to his character or his Christianity. The literal school is now in a minority within the Church itself according to so high an authority as the Dean of Westminster "It is quite true," says Dr. Armitage Robinson, in his recent lectures on "The Inspiration of the Bible" (Times, Dec. 11, 1904), "that astronomy and geology and biology and anthropology have each in turn revealed to us facts which are plainly inconsistent with the literal interpretation of the earlier Chapters of Genesis, and that a recognition of this inconsistency has led the majority of intelligent Christians to fall back" on the allegorical interpretation which was so boldly proclaimed by Origen of Alexandria in the third century." And, addressing the Church of England Sunday School Institute, the same authority applied the same method to other parts of the same book. "The second chapter of Genesis no longer means to us that God moulded clay into a human figure and breathed upon it, or that He took a rib from Adam and made Eve. These and many other stories, like that of the talking serpent or the talking ass, we do not take, or, at any rate, most of us—I do not—as literal statements of historical facts, but as imagery which clothes certain spiritual truths." (Times, Oct 17, 1904.) The views thus boldly proclaimed by the Dean of Westminster may or may not be as general in his own church as he declares, but his expression of them has certainly caused much pain to many of its members.