Abstract
THE author, a veteran naturalist of distinction, a great authority on Crustaceans, has here raised a protest against the continuance of superstition in modern theological doctrines and religious conceptions. The conventionally orthodox attitude to the Bible is an anachronism. But he tilts too often against windmills, and there is more than a hint of wooden literalism in the examples he gives of Biblical contradictions and of anthropomorphisms which have become grotesque. The science of literature and of folklore has surely changed the educated man's attitude to the Bible much more than Mr. Stebbing's mode of treatment would suggest. The Thirty-nine Articles do not fare-much better at his hands than do the Scriptures, for they are redolent with impossible anthropomorphisms. To take these literally may be superstitious, but it is surely possible to read them sympathetically as historical survivals. A theological or philosophical idea may be living and useful, though its particular form has grown musty.
Faith in Fetters.
By the Rev. T. R. R. Stebbing. Pp. 223. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., 1919.) Price 6s. net.
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Faith in Fetters . Nature 103, 224 (1919). https://doi.org/10.1038/103224a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/103224a0