The Birmingham age-herald., 1903-10-18
From the New York Sun.


 N R. PATTON, in his address at his
 DU installation as president of the A> Princeton Theological Seminary, on Wednesday, again went to the root of the matter of the Christian religion. Elim- mate the Incarnation, he said and you have left only an emotional morality, associated with the name of Jesus In it's last analysis, 1t is not religion, but "a moral philosophy in competition with other moral phlosophies,. and defended by atheistic metaphysic that has to cope with another metaphysic which denies God.'
 The question of education, with or with out religion, is under discussion by many of our correspondents. and in England. in France, and very generally throughout Christendom, it is receiving foremost con- sideration from many of the best minds of this time. The religious theory, as expressed by Roman Catholics, more par ticularly, is that the contemporary ten dency to infidelty is due to the divorce of religion from education, and especially from the elementary education of chill dren. Our public schools, according to their argument, are spreading an infdeli- ty of which the consequences to society in the destruction of the religious ineen- tives to morality and obedience to law will be terrible.
 The forces which are working most ef- ficiently for the stimulation of religious unbelief however, are not in the school system. Neither are they in any aNowed infidel propaganda. They come rather from the camp of professed and com mssioned defenders of religious faith. In a very large part of our theological seminaries there is diffused a spirit of criticism which undermines and destroys religious faith. It is also active in the pulpits of the new theology" and gem erally they are the most eloquent or, at least, the most successful in attracting listeners. To that theology the Bible is only a Literature" in which is expressed the profoundly religious sentiment of the Jewish nation of the Old Dispensaton. The prophets were merely wise and far seeing men, men of genius, who discerned the consequences which must come from tendencies of their time, without other illumination than their natural percep- ton. The miracles of the Bible, of the Old Testament and the New Testament, are mythical, not actual happenings, but visions, figurative and symbolic To the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, is given a metaphysical explanation purely which denies it as an historical fact and rele- gates it to the domain ofemythology. as poetic imagining which, with the license of poetry, defies possibility and outrages natural and irreversible scientific law.
 Such is the 'new theology" so popular at the time in both pulpit and pew. It takes away from religion all supernatural bass, and. as Dr. Patton says, tn resi- dunn is only a moral philosophy. Of course. that is all infdelity has ever con tended for.
 The incarnation passes from fact into the realm of the poetic imagination, and Christianity becomes moral philosophy of merely human origination. and there fore debatable on it's merits. Criticism replaces faith. With all dogmatic au- thority discarded as an exploded super stition, there succeeds an analytic and comparative examination from which Christianity emerges with flaws in its philosophic system exposed by many critics. Unquestionably it is open to such criticism if it is measurable as sim ply construction of the human intellect and moral sense. Perfection can be pred icated of no work of mortal man. If Christianity Is not of God, if the incar- nation was not . fact but only a poetic picture, it cannot properly be approached sin spirit of deyout faith., but must be