The editor of The Outlook, Dr. Lyman Abbott, has been studying the question, how to teach the Bible to children, since he has accepted "the results of criticism;" and being puzzled, no doubt, over the knotty question, he has called to his aid the venerable Dean Farrar. The latter responds in The Outlook for March 21 with an article which he introduces in the following words:

      The editor asks me to say a few words upon a subject of real and urgent importance--"the right way of presenting the [142] Bible to the young in the light of the higher criticism." I gladly accede to his request, because an unwise or unfaithful way of dealing with the facts forced upon us by the advance of knowledge may be prolific of deplorable results.

      When I read this introduction, and saw that the essay following fills more than five of the very broad columns of The Outlook, I expected to find an elaborate discussion of the urgent and important inquiry, and I was not a little curious to know what the answer could be. What was my surprise, then, on reading the five columns through, to find scarcely a dozen lines in which there is even an attempt to answer the question of the editor. All the rest is devoted to a defense of the conclusions of the advanced critics, and to denunciation of those who refuse to accept them. Nearly all the matter in the essay is such as any disciple of the school in this country might have furnished by copying from Briggs, Smith, Bacon, Harper & Co. I will call attention hereafter to some of the points which he presents, but now I must show how he answers the question in hand.

      First, he insists that "we should be profoundly and unswervingly truthful"--a statement to which all honest teachers of children can respond with a hearty Amen. Then he says: "We are not bound to teach children all we know, but we are most solemnly bound not to teach them anything which we feel to be doubtful as though it were certain, and still more are we bound not to teach them anything of which we ourselves begin to suspect the reality." Again can we respond, Amen; but we can see the author here leaves a big hole through which to creep out, and leaves the children entirely ignorant of those tremendous discoveries which have made the Bible so much more precious to him and his confreres than it ever was before. If they have had this effect on them, [143] why not tell all to the children, and make the Bible more precious to them, also? Ought not the children be taught to love the Bible?

      In the next paragraph he dodges the issue, by saying: "Into a vast part of our teaching, by far the largest and most important part of it, no question of the higher criticism enters at all." Well, if this be true, that is not the part to which the editor's inquiry refers. He wants to know, and we all want to know, how such men as Dean Farrar would teach the children in that other and smaller part. Why is there no explicit answer here? And then, it seems to me that the answer given is not only evasive, but rather disingenuous. What part of the Bible does the Dean suppose himself to be teaching when he speaks of the largest part of the teaching as not being connected with questions of criticism? There is scarcely a book in the Old Testament into which these questions do not enter, even to the very heart of them; there are few leading facts whose historicity is not challenged; and in the New Testament the reputed authorship of many documents is denied. How can he teach the children "truthfully" if he leaves them to the false ideas inherited from their fathers in regard to all these matters?

      But the Dean approaches the issue more closely in another passage, after which he leaves it finally. He says: "Does a child fail to grasp the meaning of the parables of Christ though he is told that these are not necessarily founded on real incidents, but are 'tales with a purpose'? Why, then, should it be different with the stories--say of Balaam and Jonah?" Here there is another evasion. The question is not whether the meaning of a story is lost when it is said to be a fictitious one, but whether it is wise to tell the child that the incidents [144] of the parables are not real, and that the facts related of Jonah and Balaam never transpired. And why stop with Balaam and Jonah? Rather, why begin with them? Why not begin at the beginning, and say the same of Adam and Eve; of the fall; of Cain and Abel; of Noah and the flood; of Abraham; of Moses and the plagues of Egypt, and on through the whole of the Old Testament? Why not tell, if not all you know, at least that which is so necessary to a right appreciation of these old "stories"? Is it because the Dean is fearful that this method would be "prolific of deplorable results"? How pitiful to see a great man tied down to a theory about the Book of God, which he dares not teach to his neighbor's children, or to his own grandchildren, for fear of "deplorable results." For my own part, I can not recall a single conception which I entertain about the Bible, any part of it, which I am in the least afraid to impart to the young. For this I thank God, and in it I take courage.

[SEBC 142-145]