BIBLE TEACHING.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 467, 30 April 1890, Page 4

BIBLE TEACHING.

INSTRUCTION IN .RELIGION AND MORALS. Auckland, April 25. An interesting discussion took place at the quarterly meeting of the Church of England Sunday-school teachers, held at St. Matthew’s Sunday - school last evening, in connection with a paper read by the Rev. J. Bates on “ The Bible in Relation to Religious and Moral Instruction.” Mr Bates said that among the duties of the Sunday-school teacher there were two of primary importance, that of forming in the minds of the scholars a worthy idea of God, and that of maintaining and emphasizing the distinction between moral right and wrong. God had been presented to men as an arbitrary ruler an angry, vengeful being—whilst the atonemenb made by Christ had been so defined and described in schemes of theology and popular preaching as to appear immoral to many minds. He held that the Bible was the best and truest of books ; but, like most good things, ib could be used rightly or wrongly. Men had endeavoured to vindicate, with the aid of the Bible, all kinds of bad beliefs and practices. In the order given by Samuel to SauJ to proceed against the Amalekites, Mr Bates said that if the words were taken as they stood, they clearly ordered an indiscriminate slaughter of the Amalekites, and the difficulty was that this war of extermination was represented as commanded by Almighty God. They naturally asked, Can indiscriminate slaughter ever be right? Could the command of God make such a slaughter right? He considered the distinction between right and wrong to be anterior to all recorded commands of God. When they were told that God was merciful and gracious, 'slow to anger, and that His mercy was over all His works, they felt that this conception of God’s character agreed with their deepest convictions. Whatever there was in the Bible, or elsewhere, thab contradicted this idea of the Divine Being might be safely rejected. The Rev. Mr Coates, who followed the essayist, expressed the opinion that Mr Bates’s paper contained most dangerous teaching. It appeared to lay down that any part of the Bible teaching which did not accrod with the moral sense was to be rejected, and thab every individual teacher should be left to reject whatever he found in the Bible opposed to his moral sense. He held thab the proper view of the story of the Amalekites and other such dealings of God, was that for God to take away life wa3 merely to transplant the person who lost thab life from one place to the other. They could nob look upon the taking away of life by Him who gave it, as either a wrong or an injustice, or an act of very great severity; and if they knew all the strong reasons for such an act, they would find that nob only was it justified, but even calculated to produce in the end the highest happiness for those concerned and for the world at large. Mr Hammond expressed himself in a similar line of argument, while Rev. W. Calder urged that God punished men for wickedness. He did not say that it was immoral to exterminate a nation who would destroy the moral sense of the Israelites. The Rev. Mr Bates, in his reply, said he had no intention to have thrown a bomb into the meeting. The matter with which be dealt had been well considered. All that he maintained was that they should be true to their moral sense, and that the highest conception of God was that He was a God of love and mercy and graciousness, and that that conception should govern the interpretation of all that seemed contrary to it.