know, hundreds, if not thousands of clergymen in all the churches to-
day who are ready to concede that the story of Eden is poetry or legend
or tradition: they no longer treat it as serious history. And yet, as I
have said a good many times, they go on as though nothing had happened,
although the foundation of their house has been removed. Only theories
which stand in the air can thus defy the law of gravitation.

Nobody to-day who has a right to have an opinion believes that God ever
drowned the world. That is gone. As to the question as to whether we
have an infallible book to guide us in religious matters, there are
very few scholars in any church to-day, so far as my investigations
have led, who hold any such opinion. That is gone; and the Bible, the
Old Testament, at any rate is coming to be recognized, not as
infallible revelation, but as ancient literature, immensely
interesting, full of instruction, but not as an unquestioned guide in
any department of life.

There are many among the nominally old churches who are coming to hold
a very different theory concerning Jesus, his life, his death, and the
effect of his death on the salvation of man. More reasonable ideas are
prevailing here. In every direction also there are thousands on
thousands who are becoming freed from that horrible incubus of fear as
they look out towards the future.

As you note then, point after point of this old scheme of the universe
is disappearing, being superseded by something else; until I am
astonished, as I converse with friends in the other churches, to find
how little of it is really left, how little of it men are ready, out
and out, to defend. In conversation with an Episcopal clergyman a short
time ago on theological questions, we agreed so well that I laughingly