It has been well said that almost any preacher can make himself suddenly famous by announcing something heretical. Any utterance from a preacher in opposition to established religious belief is like a freshly found worm in the barnyard to the newspaper reporters. They cackle over it, and scurry about to see who will get hold of it first. It goes all over the country on the wires, and the Rev. (?) author of it is known at breakfast the next [313] morning from sea to sea. The profoundest and most convincing sermon may be preached in a metropolitan pulpit on any Sunday to prove the inerrancy of the Bible, without causing a ripple of excitement; but let any commonplace preacher proclaim some old and oft-refuted calumny about the Bible, and all the telegraph wires tingle with the news. All this is illustrated by Mr. Parker Cadman's essay recently read in the weekly meeting of the Methodist preachers of New York City. Who, in the country at large, ever heard before of Mr. Cadman? He may be a very great man, who has hitherto hid his light under a bushel, or it may be through the rural ignorance of many of us that we have not heard of him before; but one thing is very certain, that, if the newspapers make any approach to a correct report of his essay, it contained nothing but a rehash of what Professor Briggs and others have been telling us for a score of years about errors in the Bible. The only thing fresh about it is that the old song has now been caught up by a Methodist preacher, and that at the close of his reading his brethren applauded him. How many of the four hundred present united in the applause is not made definite. Some of the papers would lead us to suppose that all of them did, while one or two that I have seen speak of gray-haired men in the assembly who kept silent and said nothing. We shall have to await the reports of the soberer journals, if they shall think the incident worthy of a report, before we can feel that we have correct information on this point. In the meantime, we can rest well assured that the great American Methodist Church is not yet ready to commit suicide by discrediting the Book on the belief of the inerrancy of which it has built itself up into a mighty power. [314]

[SEBC 313-314]