L. A. S by L. A. S.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 9, 1901

L. A. S

By L. A. S.

The Sunday-schools which use the International lessons are to take up the study of Genesis, and, quite naturally, religious teachers and writers are querying how the Bible narrative in Genesis shall be taught, since they do not believe it to be historical truth. Shall they teach it to the Sunday-school pupils as being the truth? or shall they teach it as legend, or a set of fables, or an allegory? Why they should teach it at all if they do not believe it to be true, we cannot imagine.

The editor of the Independent (New York) has been considering the question, and as a “safe answer” he says that the teacher should teach what he believes to be the truth. The teacher who does “not believe the story of the destruction of Sodom, or of the deluge, to be sober history,” says the Independent, “can tell the story in such a way as to be interesting and useful, but without dwelling any more on its scientific or historical contradictions than you would in telling one of Esop’s fables, and yet without telling them that it is true.”

The Independent goes on at some length to tell how Genesis may be taught as a collection of “fables and fairy tales,” “legends and myths;” but the one thing that the Sunday-school teacher must not do, it says, is to teach it as being true; because “if he teaches them that their faith in Christianity depends on their acceptance of the Genesis stories as historic truth, he is bidding them become infidels; that is, he is unfit to teach in a Sunday-school in these days of diffused education.”

So then, the way to make infidels, we are now told, is to teach men that the Bible is true! and in order to lead men into Christianity, they must be taught that the Bible narrative of Adam and Eve in paradise, the fall, the deluge, etc., are myths!

This is the kind of doctrine that is being advocated by the religious teachers of this day. Can you see, reader, any necessity for a separation of your children, of Seventh-day Adventist children, of all children who would know the truth and be saved, from the schools where such teaching is given? Truly, to him who reads there is no mystery in the fact that God has called for a reform in the work of teaching the youth, and a return to the true gospel system of education.