GK. Chesterton has said rightly that Protestantism never emphasises a truth except by means of denying some other truth—which is, I suppose, the reason that it shows to-day a reaction against all its first positions. Faith alone has changed to works alone, no temporal punishment in the next world has changed into no eternal punishment, the Bible an entirely divine document has become the Bible an entirely human document. In all these instances the reformers asserted that they wanted to emphasise a truth which the Church was neglecting; in all these cases their successors are trying to affirm another truth forgotten or denied by them.

In some ways the most interesting instance of this see-saw is the case of the Bible, and we need not go back three hundred years to study in this matter the earlier attitude of Protestantism. We can study it in the remoter parts of America or the suburbs of London and Birmingham in the persons of Fundamentalists and Four Square Gospellers. At many a C.E.G. Platform do they heckle, and in the Protestant Alliance magazines they state also their simple creed : ‘the pure word of God without note or comment.’

Yet is it really so simple? Without entering into the question of why the hecklers contradict each other, and contradict Catholic teaching as well, we may ask one question that insistently suggests itself : If the word of God requires no note or comment, why do they write or preach? When a crowd of ‘Hot Gospellers’ gathered in the Albert Hall to listen to Aimée Semple Macpherson,