Note 35 — Chapter VIII · CONCLUSION

The Rev. V. F. Storr, at the Liverpool Church Congress (1904), advocated telling the truth regarding established facts, and asked: “In how many pulpits are the opening chapters of Genesis frankly treated as legendary? How many teachers in schools, if called upon to give a lesson on the Fall, would make plain to the children that the framework of the story is imaginative? Are not the teachers creating for them the very difficulties which, when they come to mature years, will make shipwreck of their faith?” These remarks were received in dead silence by the audience, and the President was vociferously cheered when he asked: “Are we to tell the children that these narratives are mere fables, with a moral teaching, or, as Dr. Wace says, that they are true and historical, only clothed in an Eastern symbolism? I prefer to stand with Dr. Wace.” On the other hand, Dean Farrar advocated a diametrically opposite course. “We must,” he said,35 “vaccinate them [the children] with criticism to save them from the small-pox of scepticism.” His successor at Canterbury has, it would appear, a “conscientious objection” to this vaccination; and well he may, for it would be far more likely to promote the disease than to bestow immunity from it.