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 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
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 BR 121 .E37 1889 
 Eaton, Arthur Wentworth 
 
 Hamilton, 1849-1937. 
 The heart of the creeds 
 
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The Heart of the Creeds 
 
 HISTORICAL RELIGION IN THE LIGHT 
 OF MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 BY 
 
 / 
 
 ARTHUR WENTWORTH EATON 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 CI^E ^nitlurboclur ^res? 
 
 1889 
 
COPYRIGHT BY 
 
 ARTHUR WENTWORTH H. EATON 
 1888 
 
 Press of 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 
 New York 
 
TO THE 
 CHERISHED MEMORY OF TWO WHO HAVE GONE FROM EARTH 
 
 MY MOTHFR 
 
 ANNA AUGUSTA WILLOUGHBY HAMILTON 
 
 EATON 
 
 AND MY FRIEND 
 
 ELISHA MULFORD, LL.D. 
 
 % bcbicate this book 
 
 111 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 In my ministry I have continually felt the 
 need of some book which, in a clear and con- 
 cise way, should put before people the rational 
 theology of the early Church and of the best 
 thinkers of our own time, and in so doing set 
 forth the undisputed religious principles which 
 make the basis of the Creeds and Institutions 
 of historical Christianity. 
 
 This book, which I have dedicated to her 
 from whom I learned my first lessons of rever- 
 ence for divine truth, and to the master of 
 thought, whose friendship I was privileged to 
 share in later life, tries to make clear the univer- 
 sal meaning in the rites and symbols of the 
 historic Faith, since, before the Christian con- 
 science can be delivered from narrow doubts 
 and Christian society from strifes and divisions, 
 men must learn to discriminate fairly between 
 what is necessary and what is accidental in 
 religion. Writing it I have had in mind, chiefly 
 
 V 
 
vi Preface, 
 
 the large class of young thinkers among the 
 laity who, like myself, have often been sorely 
 puzzled by the contradictions, and misled by 
 the mistakes of popular theology, and to whom 
 early Christian thought is little known. 
 
 There are books like Caird's ** Philosophy of 
 Religion," Mulford's '' Republic of God," Mau- 
 rice's " Theological Essays " and other writings, 
 Hunger's '' Freedom of Faith," Prof. Allen's 
 *' Continuity of Christian Thought," Dean 
 Stanley's *' Christian Institutions," Hatch's 
 " Growth of Church Institutions," and R. E. 
 Bartlett's Bampton Lectures for 1888, which 
 are accessible to all. In these books the scien- 
 tific basis and broader aspects of religion are 
 ably and fully shown, and in their scholarly and 
 reverent teachings many thoughts here briefly 
 indicated will be found in more expanded form. 
 
 Boston, Easter Week, 1888. 
 
 " Below the surface stream, shallow and light, 
 Of what we say we feel ; below the stream, 
 As light, of what we think we feel, there flows, 
 With noiseless current, strong, obscure, and deep, 
 The central stream of what we feel indeed." 
 
 — Matthew Arnold. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. — God 
 
 I 
 
 II. — Man 
 
 21 
 
 III. — Christ .... 
 
 • 39 
 
 IV.— The Creeds . 
 
 . 6i 
 
 v.— The Bible 
 
 . . 83 
 
 VI.— The Church . 
 
 . 103 
 
 VII. — The Sacraments . 
 
 . 127 
 
 VIIL— The Liturgy . 
 
 . 153 
 
 IX. The Future Life . 
 
 . 177 
 
 vn 
 
" The supreme truths which speak to every believing heart, 
 the way of salvation which is the same in all ages, the clear 
 voice of God's love so tender and personal and simple that 
 a child can understand it — these are things which must 
 abide with us, and prove themselves mighty from age to age 
 apart from all scientific study." — Robertson Smith. 
 
 " The deepest truths are always becoming commonplaces till 
 they are revivified by thought. And they are true thinkers 
 and benefactors of their kind Avho, having thought them over 
 once more and passed them through the alembic of their own 
 hearts, bring them forth fresh-minded, and make them tell 
 anew on their generation," — Principal Shairp, " Culture and 
 Religion." 
 
 " Duty is to crush out fanaticisms and revere the Infinite, 
 to cultivate the human soul, to defend mystery against 
 miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd, 
 to purify faith and obliterate superstition from the garden 
 of God." — Victor Hugo. 
 
 " Nothing can be worse than stagnation of thought. It 
 was an unhealthy condition of things when all was taken for 
 granted ; when authority was invoked to stifle inquiry, and 
 those who thought at all, thought only as their fathers had 
 thought before them ; and when within the limits of the 
 Church, at least, every thing was supposed to have been set- 
 tled once for all at the Reformation, or at the last revision of 
 the Prayer Book. We can hardly imagine the case of a 
 thinking person who is not also at times a perplexed or even 
 a doubting person."— Rev. Stanley Leathes, " The Chris- 
 tian Creed." 
 
 " Thou shalt not heed the voice of man when it agrees not 
 with the voice of God in thine own soul. 
 
 "Nature shall be to thee as a symbol. The life of the 
 soul, in conscious union with the Infinite, shall be for thee 
 the only real existence. 
 
 " This pleasing show of an external world through which 
 thou art passing is given thee to interpret by the light which 
 is in thee." — Dr. O. W. Holmes, " Life of Emerson." 
 
 "It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing 
 originated ; the only question is : Is it true in and for it- 
 self? "—Hegel. 
 
GOD. 
 
" When the martyr Attalus, in the persecution of the Gal- 
 lican Christians under Marcus Aurelius, was asked by his 
 judges what was the name of God, he replied : * 'O Oeo'S ovojua 
 
 OVK EX£l 00^ aV^pOOTtO'i.' " EUSEBIUS, v., I. 
 
 " Our Father who art in heaven." — The Lord's Prayer. 
 
 " One God and Father of all, who is above all and through 
 all, and in you all." — St. Paul to the Ephesians. 
 
 " For in him we live, and move, and have our being." 
 — St. Paul to the Athenians. 
 
 " I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of 
 heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible." — 
 Nicene Creed. 
 
 " Thou, O God hast made us for thee, and our heart is 
 restless till it rests in thee." — St. Augustine. 
 
 " It is said of Frances Power Cobbe that ' one day, musing 
 on the great problems of existence, she said to herself that, 
 although she knew nothing of God or of any law beyond her 
 own soul, she would, at least, be true to that and merit the 
 approbation of her own conscience. This resolution brought 
 her almost immediately a renewed faith in God.'" — West- 
 tninster Review y December, 1845. 
 
 "The conscience of man presumes the being of God ; it 
 presumes a righteous being. There can be no adequate ap- 
 prehension of conscience, nor explanation of the fact of con- 
 science, that does not imply the being of God, and his rela- 
 tions to man. 
 
 " All that God is he imparts, he reveals. He is no more a 
 distant being, that man cannot approach him ; he is not an 
 inaccessible being, that man cannot find him ; he is not an 
 unknown being, but what he is he has made known." — 
 MuLFORD, " Republic of God." 
 
 " Father of all ! In every age, 
 In every clime adored, 
 By saint, by savage, and by sage, 
 Jehovah, Jove, or Lord." 
 
 — Pope's Universal Prayer. 
 
GOD. 
 
 Belief in God is the fundamental article of 
 every religious creed, the foundation stone of 
 every theology. Throughout Christendom the 
 people of all churches and sects are unanimous 
 in saying: " I believe in God." But, to many 
 persons, it perhaps does not occur that this 
 fundamental tenet of theology is held with very 
 great differences in the religious world. Within 
 the Christian Church itself, professing to base 
 its beliefs on the teachings of Jesus, and to 
 hold, at least in essentials, a united faith, there 
 have been great and important differences in 
 men's conceptions of what God is. The changes 
 in popular theology from age to age have, in 
 fact, resulted chiefly from a growing reason- 
 ableness or unreasonableness in this funda- 
 mental doctrine. 
 
 In the same community to-day are often 
 to be found churches from whose pulpits or 
 chancels the teaching about God differs so 
 
 3 
 
4 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 radically that we are compelled to define for 
 ourselves with great care, separating between 
 true and false in them, our own beliefs in Him. 
 Especially is this necessary when v/e further 
 see that sectarian strifes and controversies, 
 those dark shadows ever lurking in the back- 
 ground of church life, are directly traceable to 
 conflicting views of God. The sin most abhor- 
 rent to a devout Hebrew of ancient times was 
 that of idolatry, the root principle of which 
 was, as it ever is, a distorted image of God in 
 the mind. And our own Litany, praying that 
 men may be delivered from " heresy and schism,'* 
 asks in that familiar petition that people shall 
 be kept from false conceptions of God, since 
 true ideas concerning Him have been at the 
 bottom of all peace-bringing, elevating, spiritual 
 faiths, false opinions at the bottom of all fierce 
 and degrading theologies. 
 
 One of the truths concerning the Bible, that 
 careful study of its various parts has made 
 clear, is that the Hebrews did not, by any 
 means, all have similar conceptions of God ; 
 that the popular theism of the Pentateuch, for 
 example, is of a very much lower order than 
 that of the later prophets; that Jesus, in His 
 
God. 5 
 
 day, held very different views of God from those 
 of the chief theologians of Judea, among the 
 Scribes and Pharisees. 
 
 Jehovah, to the earlier Hebrews and the 
 popular theologians of our Saviour's time, was 
 only one of the great national or tribal gods, 
 greater and better than all others, but, like 
 them, the god of one people, having many of 
 the imperfections that the other Semitic tribes, 
 the Moabites and Ammonites and Philistines, 
 who lived near the Hebrews, ascribed to their 
 gods. In their thought they conceived of Him 
 as *' a great, non-natural, magnified man," who 
 created the heavens and the earth as an archi- 
 tect makes a house ; who got angry, and 
 changed His mind, and sent plagues on His ene- 
 mies, and fought the battles of His subjects, 
 performing stupendous feats in the sphere of 
 nature in order to frighten the one or help the. 
 other. The prophets and others, on the con- 
 trary, often rose to the most exalted planes of 
 thought about God. " Canst thou, by search- 
 ing, find out God?" they say. ** Canst thou 
 find out the Almighty unto perfection ? It is 
 high as heaven ; what canst thou do ? Deeper 
 than hell, what canst thou know ? " '' For thus 
 
6 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 saith the high and lofty One, that inhabiteth 
 eternity, whose name is Holy ; I dwell in the 
 high and holy place, with him, also, that is of a 
 contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit 
 of the humible, and to revive the heart of the 
 contrite ones." 
 
 Such passages as these, from the Books of 
 Job and Isaiah, show that their authors had 
 risen far above the popular conceptions, in 
 their thought of God, just as in their times 
 Kleanthes and Plato and other great Greek 
 writers rose far above the popular mythology 
 of their country. But the Hebrew idea of God 
 was most fully exalted and spiritualized by 
 Jesus, and after him St. Paul, who taught that 
 God was not a changeable deity, made in the 
 likeness of man, but the unchanging spiritual 
 life of the universe, and the Father of all man- 
 kind. "God is a Spirit," Christ said to the 
 woman of Samaria, when she spoke to Him 
 about the conflict between the Hebrew belief 
 that true worship could be performed only at 
 Jerusalem, and the Samaritan belief that Mt. 
 Gerizim was the proper place for it, — " God is a 
 Spirit, and they that worship Him must wor- 
 ship in spirit and in truth," thus refusing to 
 
God. 7 
 
 localize the Divine Presence, or limit the com- 
 munication of the Divine Spirit. 
 
 St. Paul, at Athens, a little more than thirty- 
 years afterward, uttered these eloquent words, 
 in exactly the same spirit and meaning: 
 " God who made the world and all things 
 therein, seeing that He is Lord of heaven and 
 earth, dwelleth not in temples made with 
 hands. Neither is He served by the hands of 
 men, as though he needed any thing ; for it is 
 He that giveth unto all life and breath and all 
 things. And He made of one blood all the 
 nations of mankind, to dwell upon the face of 
 the whole earth ; and ordained to each the ap- 
 pointed seasons of their existence, and the 
 bounds of their habitation. That they should 
 seek God, if haply they might feel after Him 
 and find Him, though He is not far from every 
 one of us ; for in Him we live and move and 
 have our being ; as certain also of your own 
 poets have said : ' For we are also His off- 
 spnng. 
 
 The views of God held and taught by Jesus 
 and St. Paul were indeed spiritual and pro- 
 
 ^ This quotation is from Aratus, a Greek poet, like St. 
 Paul himself a native of the province of Cilicia. 
 
8 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 found, but all their followers, the new converts 
 to Christianity, did not share in them. Side by 
 side in the Christian Church grew up two en- 
 tirely distinct sorts of theistic belief : one crude 
 and anthropomorphic, like the earlier Hebrew, 
 or Greek polytheistic belief ; the other profound 
 and philosophical, like the thought expressed 
 in the passages quoted from the Gospel of St. 
 John and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. 
 
 In the minds of one set of thinkers was firmly 
 rooted the Oriental idea of God as a great, man- 
 like being living far away from the world, con- 
 trolling it through intermediate agents, much as 
 the Czar of Russia controls that part of his 
 empire which lies across the Ural Mountains. 
 As theology became more of a science in the 
 Christian Church, this view of God as an abso- 
 lute monarch, made in the likeness of an earthly 
 despot, took on more definiteness, and from it, 
 by a natural process, in the Western world, 
 sprang the Augustinian or, as we know it bet- 
 ter, Calvinistic form of the leading Christian 
 doctrines — Divinity of Christ, Trinity, Atone- 
 ment, Heaven and hell. 
 
 In the Calvinistic thought, the world was a 
 lifeless machine moved by the will of a Super- 
 
God. 9 
 
 human Being, who never came near it. Man 
 also was His creation, but the relation between 
 him and God was no more than that between 
 the clay pitcher and the potter who moulds it. 
 Revelation was not to be sought in the better 
 instincts of humanity, and the process of his- 
 tory, in philosophy and poetry and art, but 
 merely in certain utterances of the few inspired 
 Hebrews and Christians who wrote the books 
 of the Bible. The proof of God's interest in 
 the world lay not in His continuous renewal of 
 its life, and in the increase of moral and intel- 
 lectual power among men, but rather in certain 
 interferences with the regular working of events, 
 called miracles. Christ was not the highest 
 expression of the great universal fact of incar- 
 nation, "■ God's idea of man completed," but an 
 incongruous being, neither God nor man, and 
 yet both. 
 
 The doctrine of Trinity was not the summing 
 up under the symbol of three-foldness of all the 
 great attributes of God which have their root in 
 His eternal personality, the brief expression of 
 all the highest philosophy concerning the rela- 
 tion between the divine and the human, God 
 and His creation, but rather a division of the 
 
lo Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 infinite God into three finite personalities in 
 some measure antagonistic to each other. The 
 Atonement was not the realization in humanity 
 once for all, in Christ, of perfect righteousness, 
 the one complete exhibition of sacrifice, but 
 rather, as Avith the heathen, the propitiation by 
 means of literal blood of a vengeful and deeply 
 outraged deity. Heaven and hell were not 
 progressive states of mind and feeling, condi- 
 tions of the inner Hfe consequent upon obedience 
 or disobedience to natural law, but rather 
 places of physical delight or torture, into 
 which, at death, for their good deeds or bad 
 deeds, men were arbitrarily put by their Crea- 
 tor. Law itself was not the eternal expression 
 of the life of the universe, so much as the fiat 
 of a despotic will. 
 
 That was one, and because it requires less 
 grasp of intellect, and through the middle ages 
 was most in harmony with the imperial temper 
 and aims of the Church, it became after the 
 fourth century the popular view of God, and 
 His relation to the world. But there was an^ 
 other and better theology prevalent during the 
 first four centuries of the Christian era, which 
 is commonly termed the conception of God as 
 
God, 1 1 
 
 ** immanent in the world." It is a conception 
 that has never been lost, even in the crudest 
 and darkest times of religious thought, and 
 now that the intellect of man, released from the 
 fetters that bound it when the mediaeval or 
 Calvinistic theologies held sway, is free to ap- 
 proach all the sources of divine knowledge, to 
 find in arguments unrecognized in other days 
 its strongest proofs of God, belief in God as 
 the indwelling Life and Power of the Universe, 
 Soul of all things, Omnipresent Spirit, Source 
 of strength and order, Fountain of beauty, 
 *' Light of Light," who dwelleth on high, and 
 humbleth himself to behold the things that 
 are in heaven and in the earth, is necessarily 
 coming to supplant the other view. In the bet- 
 ter conception God is not a person in the sense 
 in which we are persons; not as Michael Angelo 
 painted Him, a marvellous man " with the brow 
 of Jove and the lightning in his grasp" ; but the 
 Great Spiritual Life, who robes Himself in a 
 world-vesture, and faintly yet truly reveals His 
 noblest attributes. His divine character in the 
 personality of man. In the third chapter of 
 Exodus there is a profound passage in which 
 God is said to have told Moses, when he asked 
 
1 2 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 what name he should call Him by, that His 
 name was simply " I am/' meaning that God is 
 too great to be understood by men, or named 
 in human language. *' I am that I am ! " And 
 we shall probably never get much nearer an 
 adequate description of God, than our English 
 Churchman, Wordsworth got, in his "Lines 
 Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," 
 where he says so profoundly that God had re- 
 vealed Himself to him as, 
 
 " A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean, and the living air. 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
 A motion and a spirit that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 Tennyson, in his little fragment called '' The 
 Higher Pantheism," writes : 
 
 " Speak to Him thou for He hears. 
 And spirit with spirit can meet ; 
 Closer is He than breathing. 
 Nearer than hands and feet." 
 
 And his lines breathe much the same spirit as 
 those words in the thirtieth chapter of Deuter- 
 onomy, used also by St. Paul in the Epistle to 
 
God. 13 
 
 the Romans : " For this commandment which 
 I command thee this day, it is not hidden from 
 thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven 
 that thou shouldest say : Who shall go up for 
 us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we 
 may hear it, and do it ? Neither is it beyond 
 the sea, that thou shouldest say : Who shall go 
 over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that 
 we may hear it, and do it ? But the word is 
 very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy 
 heart, that thou mayest do it." Even Pope 
 writes : 
 
 " All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
 "Whose body nature is, but God the soul ; — 
 To Him no high, no low, no great, no small, 
 He fills, He bounds, connects, and equals all." 
 
 And Emerson says : 
 
 " Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line 
 Severing rightly His from thine ; 
 Which is human, which divine ? " 
 
 Thus the incarnation is a process having its 
 highest point in the Christ ; the Trinity is the 
 doctrine, first, of God as unrevealed and unre- 
 vealable, God in the great unfathomableness of 
 His being, God the Father ; second, God as 
 immanent in nature and in humanity, God as 
 
14 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 the reason or light of all men, the Son who 
 binds together all things, temporal and eternal, 
 human and divine ; third, God the Sustainer 
 and Living Spiritual Power of the visible uni- 
 verse and of man its noblest member, God the 
 Holy Spirit. Revelation, in its largest sense, is 
 to be sought in the long process of history and 
 the life of man. The Atonement, typically 
 wrought out in the historic Christ, is the recon- 
 ciliation of the spirit of man with the highest 
 truth, with God. Heaven and hell are ever ad- 
 vancing conditions of the soul in this world, and 
 all worlds where men may be. 
 
 The former view of God prevailed in the 
 Western Church during the Middle Ages, and 
 indeed has lasted to our own day, and this fact 
 is largely attributable to the influence, first, 
 of Tertullian, and then of the Latin father 
 Augustine, who was converted to Christianity 
 in the year 387, but whose mind never lost 
 the unhealthy tone it had received from the 
 Manichasan philosophy to which, for nineteen 
 years, between the ages of twelve and thirty, 
 he had given his allegiance. Certain parts of 
 our Prayer Book bear the impress of Augustine's 
 thought, the Litany perhaps showing it most of 
 
God, 1 5 
 
 all. But the oldest parts of the Prayer Book, 
 and especially the so-called Apostles' Creed, 
 which we say every Sunday, the universal 
 creed of Christendom, were made under the 
 influence of the larger and freer and more 
 rational theology of a time nearer to Christ 
 and the Apostles than the fourth and fifth 
 centuries when Augustine lived and wrote. 
 The chief representatives, in the early Church, 
 of this theology are the much more profound 
 and rational thinkers, Clement and Origen, 
 whose thought illustrates what is known 
 as the Alexandrian theology, and Athana- 
 sius, who has always in the history of doc- 
 trines borne the name of *' The Father of 
 Orthodoxy." 
 
 These, in brief outline, are the two forms of 
 belief about God that have prevailed in the 
 Christian world, and their histories. The Au- 
 gustinian theology has hitherto colored most 
 of the religious thought of this continent, but 
 with the increase of independent thought and 
 study, the older and better and more truly or- 
 thodox form of theology of the Alexandrian 
 fathers of the Church is returning, and in intel- 
 ligent and broadly thinking quarters, is fast sup- 
 
1 6 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 planting the cruder form of religious belief that 
 has prevailed. 
 
 This older, more rational view of God, as 
 everywhere present in the world, is sometimes 
 felt to be too vague and obscure for ordinary 
 minds to grasp, but the truth is, God is so great 
 that when we think most truly about Him, we 
 are least able to express our thought. It was 
 the exceeding poverty of the other view of God 
 that made it possible to think definitely of Him 
 as a great man sitting on a throne in the dis- 
 tant heavens, whence He issued laws to men. 
 All our language about Him is figurative. He 
 has no material form, no jewelled throne above 
 the sky, no literal judgment-book open before 
 him. He dwells everywhere ; His throne is 
 the eternal order of the universe ; His reign 
 the supremacy of law and love ; His judgment- 
 book the conscience of the race. We cannot 
 make adequate theologies ; our best thought 
 comes so far below the great reality, and our 
 richest language is so poor. We can speak of 
 God only in figures and poetically, and we must 
 always beware of mistaking this figurative lan- 
 guage for scientific or precise description. It is 
 this mistake that has led the Church, when the 
 
God. 1 7 
 
 Augustinian theology has prevailed, into per- 
 secutions and cruelties innumerable, while the 
 Alexandrian theology has generally fostered a 
 spirit of peace. 
 
 Yet, in conceiving of God as everywhere 
 present in the universe, creating, renewing, in- 
 spiring, life of our life, inspirer of our best 
 thoughts and deeds, we are not Pantheists. 
 Pantheism confounds God with His creation ; 
 Christianity has always maintained as carefully 
 the trayiscendence of God as His immanence. 
 He is in all things ; and yet the highest and 
 most essential truth concerning Him is that 
 He is a Personal God. But his Personality, 
 which is the root and source of our own, His 
 mind and affections, of which ours are but 
 "broken lights," are not limited like ours. All 
 that we know of reason and right emotion in 
 man we may think of as existing in unlimited 
 fulness in God. All that we can fathom of the 
 mystery of human souls we may regard as ex- 
 isting infinitely in Him from whom human 
 souls come forth. 
 
 One question more some minds will be glad 
 to have touched upon in this chapter, the very 
 important question as to the proof that God 
 
1 8 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 exists at all. In the old New England theology 
 this would have been the first thing to settle 
 in a chapter treating of belief in God ; but we 
 have entirely given up trying to prove God's 
 existence from the mere abstract propositions 
 of thought, or from the observed sequence of 
 nature, or fitness of means to ends, or from any 
 thing outside our own souls, and are simply 
 and confidently willing to assume His existence 
 in all we say or do. The highest proof of God's 
 existence is the fact that we are able to think 
 of Him at all, as the strongest and most con- 
 vincing argument for immortality is the fact 
 that we are able to conceive of immortality. 
 The human soul is both finite and infinite, both 
 human and divine, and we cannot by any exer- 
 cise of the mind ever help believing in God. 
 His personality is the source of our personality, 
 His thought the source of our deepest thought. 
 " In Him we live and move and have our be- 
 ing," and instead of going to books for argu- 
 ments for His existence, we must obey the in- 
 junction of an old seventeenth century divine 
 of our Church : *' Intra te quaere Deum : " Seek 
 for God within thine own soul. 
 
 The injunction to seek for God within one's 
 
God. 19 
 
 own soul, seems to some persons very vague 
 and unsatisfactory. They prefer to be told to 
 seek Him in something He has done or is de- 
 clared to have done outside of themselves. It 
 is true we should never forget to see God's 
 revelation of Himself without us, in the world 
 of nature, or in the record of the movements 
 of human life and thought we call history. 
 But the revelation of God in our own souls 
 through the instincts of love, justice, sincerity, 
 and reverence on which we act, and the voice 
 of reason which always speaks within us, pre- 
 cedes any, however important, revelation with- 
 out us. If men would habitually think not of 
 what God has done, but of what their own 
 souls, all the truth and reason within them, de- 
 clare that He is, they would find the process 
 of belief in Him strangely easy. 
 
 "The pure in heart may know God, but the 
 critical understanding can never comprehend 
 Him," says a modern English philosopher ; 
 and these forcible words were written near the 
 close of the second century, by Theophilus, a 
 bishop of Antioch : " If thou sayest. Show me 
 thy God, I answer, Show me first thy man, and 
 I will show thee my God. Show me first 
 
20 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 whether the eyes of thy soul see, and the ears 
 of thy heart hear. For as the eyes of the body 
 perceive earthly things, light and darkness, 
 white and black, beauty and deformity, so the 
 ears of the heart and the eyes of the soul can 
 see God." 
 
 Our own New England philosopher, Emer- 
 son, says, in his essay on the " Over Soul " : 
 " We know that all spiritual being is in man. 
 A wise old proverb says, ' God comes to see us 
 without bell ' — that is, as there is no screen or 
 ceihng between our heads and the infinite 
 heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul, 
 where man the effect ceases and God the cause 
 begins." 
 
 Thus he gave us, and thus we must explain 
 Jesus* great doctrine of the universal Father- 
 hood of God. There is an eternal relationship 
 between God and every created soul. The 
 true laws of life are the laws of His life in us. 
 Not only is belief in Him possible, but actual 
 unbelief is impossible. When men are most 
 questioning His existence, they are, often, 
 most profoundly believing in Him. It may 
 be truly said that scepticism never reaches the 
 soul. 
 
MAN. 
 
" So God created man in His own image ; in the image of 
 God created He him." — Genesis, i., 27. 
 
 " The Platonic view of the soul, as a spiritual substance, an 
 effluence from Godhood, which under certain conditions be- 
 comes incarnated in perishable forms of matter, is doubtless 
 the view most consonant with the present state of our knowl- 
 edge." — John Fiske, " Destiny of Man," p, 43. 
 
 "The divinity that stirs within us." — Addison. 
 
 " If a person could be persuaded of this principle as he 
 ought, that we are all originally descended from God, and 
 that He is the Father of men and gods, I conceive that he 
 would never think of himself meanly or ignobly. 
 
 " If what philosophers say of the kinship between God and 
 men be true, what has any one to do, but like Socrates, when 
 he is asked what countryman he is, never to say that he is a 
 citizen of Athens, or of Corinth, but of the Universe." — 
 Epictetus. 
 
 " Know thyself then the pride of His creation, the link 
 uniting divinity and matter ! Behold a part of God Himself 
 in thee ! Remember thine own dignity, nor dare descend to 
 evil or to meanness." — Ancient Brahminical Writing. 
 " Every inmost aspiration 
 Is God's angel, undefiled, 
 And in every ' O my Father,' 
 Slumbers deep a ' Here, my child.' " 
 
 " Man is the free, personal unity of spirit and nature. In 
 every human individual there exists something uncondi- 
 tioned. " — M artensen. 
 
 " Human thought cannot recognize itself as imperfect and 
 relative without conceiving God as perfect and absolute. We 
 see every thing in God." — Malebranche. 
 
 *' The aim of man should be to secure the highest and most 
 harmonious development of his powers to a complete and 
 consistent whole." — HuMBOLDT. 
 
 22 
 
MAN. 
 
 The central principle of Christianity, in op- 
 position to some of the older faiths of the East, 
 was the value of the individual. Christ taught 
 that not man alone but men were the objects 
 of the divine love and care. And in all His 
 teaching concerning the human soul, He as- 
 sumed in men not merely the capacity for 
 knowledge of the divine, but actual possession 
 of the divine nature, by which alone such 
 responsibility in divine things as he attributed 
 to man could be regarded as possible. 
 
 The Christian belief in mankind as divinely 
 related, is so spontaneous, so fundamental to 
 the best religious thought, that no theology 
 making a contrary declaration has ever been 
 able to shield itself from the charge of self- 
 contradiction. Theology, to be consistent, must 
 declare frankly, and take as its starting-point 
 the doctrine of Jesus, that the deepest truth 
 about men is that they are the sons of God. 
 
 23 
 
24 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 Confusion regarding this fundamental truth in- 
 evitably results in confusion as to the meaning 
 and the means of salvation, and the purpose of 
 God in the establishment of His Church. And 
 in this we have the explanation of much of the 
 vagueness and uncertainty in matters of belief, as 
 well as the conflict of opinions, that exists with- 
 in the churches of the modern Christian world. 
 
 Most people have received from their teach- 
 ers a double education in religious things. The 
 Bible and other religious books sometimes 
 speak so strongly of human unbelief and sin 
 as almost to warrant the teaching that there is 
 no natural relationship between the soul and 
 God, but rather a great wall of separation, 
 never to be removed ; no closer bond of sym- 
 pathy than among men exists between the 
 ruler and his subjects. And such teaching is 
 part of the teaching of popular religion. 
 
 But the view of these utterances which finds 
 in them the foundation stones of a theology 
 radically at variance with that in whose reasona- 
 ble teaching that man is truly God-related we 
 have all likewise been educated, is, of course, 
 superficial and false. 
 
 In days when the world knew far less than it 
 
Man. 2 5 
 
 does now of the value of charity, ''the bond of 
 peace/' when instead of mercy and the sense of 
 human brotherhood, despotic cruelty and dis- 
 regard of private rights prevailed, it is not 
 strange that a system of theology should have 
 grown up which, so far as it was able, ignored 
 the simple relationship of man to God, and on 
 the Gospel of Jesus imposed a grim and un- 
 lovely structure of logic, or an artificial ritual 
 method it called '' the way of life." Two sys- 
 tems continually waging warfare against each 
 other, the Sacerdotalism of Rome and the Cal- 
 vinism of many Protestant sects, thus share in 
 the radical error of a false view of man's funda- 
 mental relationship to the divine. Calvinism 
 declares that man is not God's child, but merely 
 the creation of His hands, in his nature com- 
 pletely at variance w^ith truth and goodness : 
 
 " To all that 's good, averse and blind, 
 But prone to all that 's ill ; 
 What dreadful darkness veils our mind ! 
 How obstinate our will ! ' 
 
 Conceived in sin, (O wretched state ! ) 
 Before we draw our breath, 
 The first young pulse begins to beat 
 Iniquity and death." ^ 
 
 ' Watts' Hymns. 
 
26 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 Whatever we do or think before conversion, 
 is necessarily wrong, since our whole nature is 
 corrupt and wicked. At God's hands we de- 
 serve, not the treatment which children have a 
 right to expect at the hands of their parents, but 
 only wrath and punishment for the sins we have 
 committed, or what is worse, the evil we in- 
 herit ; and whatever of good He gives us is of 
 His '' free grace and bounty." ^ 
 
 Romanism is built on the same perverted 
 view of man and his relationship to God. 
 
 Teaching that man is estranged from God in 
 every fibre of his soul it compels him to come un- 
 der a system, like that of many heathen religions, 
 in which a priesthood and sacrificial rites hold 
 a prominent place, before he can properly be 
 regarded as a child of God, an inheritor of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. So on the basis of its 
 mistaken belief regarding man Calvinism has 
 shaped its logic of regeneration, and justifica- 
 tion by faith, and future reward and punish- 
 ment ; and on the same basis Romanism has 
 
 ^ The Plymouth Brethren, who represent the extremest 
 form of Calvinism, refuse to allow " unconverted people " to 
 use the Lord's Prayer. They do not teach it to their children, 
 and they are at least logically consistent in not doing so. 
 
Man. 2 7 
 
 reared its doctrine of salvation by means of 
 the Church and the Sacraments, apart from 
 which man must be left to the ''uncovenanted 
 mercies" of God. 
 
 The view of man implicity and in his direct 
 teaching recognized by Christ, and afterward 
 for many years common in the Church, was the 
 simplest and most natural that can be held. 
 Jesus had no theories of total depravity, and 
 predestination, of substitutionary atonement, 
 and justification by faith, or deliverance from 
 God's wrath by means of the Church and the 
 Sacraments. He taught that in his deepest na- 
 ture man is always the child of God, yet always 
 needing light on his half-perceived relationship 
 to his Father, always needing to have the 
 springs of his soul purified, to have the way of 
 duty made plainer to him, his moral obligations 
 pointed out, his conscience touched and quick- 
 ened ; in short, needing an education no teacher 
 less perfectly at home with truth than Christ 
 himself can give him. His parable of the Prod- 
 igal Son is an epitome of His Gospel, and in 
 that the misguided and wandering sons of men 
 are represented as living in a far country in 
 moral filth and degradation, yet never for a 
 
28 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 moment less truly sons of God than if theywere 
 living in the Father's house of truth and purity. 
 
 It is true He gave the world the important 
 lesson of the new birth, but that meant the 
 awakening within men of the deepest instincts 
 and emotions, the opening of their eyes to see 
 the beauty of divine truth and life as it was 
 natural for them to see it. He sometimes 
 spoke to people as every moral reformer has 
 felt it necessary to speak, as if the world and 
 sin had taken entire possession of them ; and 
 yet He knew that if righteousness was not 
 deeper in them than sin, sense of God stronger 
 than atheism, it was impossible that they could 
 be moved by His exhortations. He assumed 
 in His hearers a true and proper sense of divine 
 things, a natural power to discriminate between 
 the things that were for the soul's health and 
 those which wrought in it decay and death. 
 
 When He called His first disciples from their 
 fishing-boats or places of business, he did not 
 tell them, in the Calvinistic way, that they 
 must be regenerated and consciously converted 
 before they could become His disciples, nor did 
 He ever teach them that Baptism created men 
 children of God. He treated them simply as 
 
Man. 29 
 
 any true elder brother would treat his needy 
 and dependent younger brothers, bade them go 
 with Him, and let Him teach them about His 
 Father, who was also just as truly theirs. 
 
 For a good while after Christ's death, the 
 Church, in a simple, undogmatic way, held that 
 simplest view of man's relation to God. Its 
 teachers believed in the ideal nature of man, as 
 well as the dark and sinful nature, the divine 
 element as well as the human within him. 
 They often quoted that passage in the first 
 chapter of Genesis, which declares that man 
 was created " in the image of God," and they 
 understood by that, and by that other passage, 
 in which God is said to *' have breathed into 
 man's nostrils the breath of life," that the soul 
 has God's own life in it. It was only very 
 slowly that the notion, that man by nature is 
 utterly separated from God and lost to right- 
 eousness, came to prevail, and we can trace the 
 steps by which, under the influence of the 
 great Augustine, it finally came to overshadow 
 the fresher and simpler teaching of Christ and 
 the early Apostles and the Greek fathers of the 
 Church. 
 
 Its origin is to be sought in an exaggerated 
 
30 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 feeling of human sinfulness, and in a growing 
 belief in the importance of the visible Catholic 
 Church in mediating between God and human- 
 ity. The earlier theology said : There is no 
 doubt that we are sinful, but the very fact that 
 we know and feel our sinfulness, shows that 
 there is a deeper and better self in us which 
 allies us to Him who is the Source of all good. 
 We are not utterly gone from righteousness 
 any more than we are perfectly true to God. 
 We inherit propensities to sin, and weaknesses 
 of will that keep us from always doing right, 
 but all our lives we never lose the conviction 
 that our actual welfare is not furthered by doing 
 wrong, nor that we are untrue to ourselves 
 when we disobey the least of God's commands. 
 And these commands of God embrace whatso- 
 ever conscience, instructed by reason, whispers 
 within us that we should or should not do. 
 
 For confirmation of the Augustinian doctrine 
 of total depravity, theologians of the Latin 
 Church repeatedly turned to the allegorical 
 story in Genesis of the temptation and fall, 
 and taking it for literal history, traced all hu- 
 man sin to Adam, and made many strange as- 
 sertions of the impHcation of all men in their 
 
Alan, 3 1 
 
 great forefather's guilt. Thus was shaped the 
 dogma that still haunts the Church, and pro- 
 duces confusion in many thoughtful minds who 
 see it lurking like a dark shadow behind the 
 devotional words of certain parts of the Prayer 
 Book, the dogma of original sin. " It was un- 
 known," says Dr. Allen, *' to Greek theology, 
 as well as an innovation also in Latin thought, 
 though it had been vaguely broached by Ter- 
 tullian and Cyprian, and intimations looking 
 toward it are to be found in the writings of 
 Ambrose." And it led, both in its formation 
 and after its irony had fully entered into west- 
 ern thought, 'to many bitter discussions and 
 strifes that seem all the sadder when we re- 
 member Christ's simple teaching concerning 
 man. With it is connected the view, once so 
 common, but now generally discarded, that by 
 the fall of Adam, death and all the sicknesses 
 and minor ills that necessarily belong to man's 
 lot were brought about. In it are involved 
 many dark and dreary thoughts of God and the 
 future, and by it the problem of evil, always 
 insoluble, yet not so strange, if we regard the 
 human race as slowly but steadily developing, 
 intellectually and morally, from the beginning, 
 
32 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 is unnecessarily complicated. To this doctrine, 
 and the men whose minds it most strongly in- 
 fluenced, rather than to any, however oriental 
 figurative language of the New testament, is 
 chiefly to be traced the mediseval, Miltonic 
 doctrine of everlasting punishment, a doctrine 
 that once at least in the Prayer Book seems to 
 find expression, where in the Litany we pray 
 to be delivered from everlasting damnation ; 
 the words, however, having for us a deep 
 spiritual truth and meaning. 
 
 How, then, in these modern days, when men 
 are trying to look at all questions as the Chris- 
 tian thinkers of Alexandria did — fairly and in 
 the light of reason, — shall we define for our- 
 selves the doctrine of man's spiritual nature? 
 
 An old seventeenth century divine of our 
 Church, Benjamin Whichcote, used to quote, 
 very often, as expressing what he regarded as 
 the true view of Biblical teaching and the view 
 of reason, concerning man, those Avords from 
 the Proverbs, " The spirit of man is the candle 
 of the Lord," thus affirming all that the best 
 thinkers of the Church before Augustine had be- 
 lieved and taught concerning the divine relation- 
 ship between the human soul and God. St. Paul 
 
Man. 33 
 
 speaks feelingly in the seventh chapter of Ro- 
 mans about the conflict between good and evil 
 desires that went on in him, and confesses, 
 as we all have to confess, that he had not al- 
 ways strength to do right. But you will notice 
 that he lays just as much stress on the good 
 nature that dwelt in him as the bad, that he 
 recognizes himself and all men as endowed with 
 the two natures that he elsewhere calls the 
 Adam and the Christ, the old man and the new. 
 That struggle of St. Paul's is the common 
 struggle of the race. The old man with his 
 deeds, that is the lower, less perfect nature is 
 daily in revolt against the new man, the higher 
 and holier in us, of which Christ is the type 
 and head. And so we, like him, are often made 
 conscious by our own experience of the great 
 double fact of our natures. 
 
 The divine nature of man is a frequent 
 theme of great writers. In spite of this 
 
 ** Muddy vesture of decay 
 
 That doth so grossly close us in," 
 
 St. Paul, as has been said, recognized in man 
 the movement of righteousness and freedom. 
 And it was that that made it possible for him to 
 
34 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 appeal earnestly, as he did, to the disunited and 
 sensual people who composed the Corinthian 
 Church, to regard their bodies as the temples of 
 the Holy Spirit. It was that he meant when he 
 said : '' But to us there is but one God, the 
 Father, of whom are all things, and we in Him^ 
 Emerson says: "We live in succession, in 
 division, in parts, in particles. Meantime, 
 within man is the soul of the whole ; the wise 
 silence ; the universal beauty, to which every 
 part and particle is equally related ; the eternal 
 One." *' In all conversation between two per- 
 sons," he says, " tacit reference is made, as to a 
 third party, to a common nature. That third 
 party or common nature is not social ; it is im- 
 personal ; it is God." Again he says : " I feel 
 the same truth how often in my trivial conver- 
 sation with my neighbors, that somewhat higher 
 in each overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods 
 to Jove from behind each of us." And in Ten- 
 nyson's fragment, *' Flower from the crannied 
 wall," where he says: 
 
 " If I could know what you are, little flower, 
 Root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is," 
 
 the same truth appears. 
 
Man. 35 
 
 Caird says, most significantly : " The very con- 
 sciousness of our finitude indicates that we have 
 already transcended it. If we were wholly finite, 
 we should never be conscious of our finitude. 
 We could have no sense of imperfection, but for 
 the presence in us of a standard of perfection." 
 
 The evil in man is testified to by every one, 
 and so near at hand, so dark and dreadful is its 
 presence, that it is not strange that it should 
 so often have obscured the lovelier truth con- 
 cerning man ; that sin rather than redemption 
 should have been the starting-point of the me- 
 diaeval theology, and the Devil the destroyer, 
 rather than Christ the redeemer, the hero of 
 Calvinistic thought. 
 
 The problem of evil is one that has never 
 been solved to the intellect, as evil itself can 
 never be reconciled with the better self of man ; 
 but the more truly we know ourselves, the more 
 sensible must we become of the imperfection 
 in even our best thoughts and works. On the 
 other hand, if we forget or refuse to reverence 
 the divine light of human reason, the eternal 
 rectitude, the infinite truth in man, we shall in- 
 evitably fall into false and querulous ways of 
 thought concerning him. 
 
36 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 The figurative account in Genesis of the fall 
 of man, as of the creation of the world, used to 
 be regarded as literal history. By that account 
 people judged that man was created at first not 
 only innocent, but complete in all his nature, 
 and that in one moment he fell from a state of 
 moral grandeur to one of moral degradation 
 and blindness. This fallen nature he then en- 
 tailed on his descendants, and so the evolution 
 of the race has been downward, not upward. 
 
 That was the doctrine of the mediaeval 
 Church ; but in the light of many truths that 
 history and science have revealed, it is no 
 longer generally believed. Whether man has 
 been evolved from lower forms of life or not, 
 there is every reason to think that he has risen 
 from a very low state of intelligence and 
 moral consciousness to his present condition ; 
 that in his whole history, as in the universe at 
 large, the law has been, '' first the blade, then 
 the ear, then the full corn in the ear." We do 
 not now take the account in Genesis as literal 
 history ; we regard it as an allegory of the in- 
 ward experience of every man. Men come into 
 the world innocent, as to actual guilt, but with 
 latent capacities for good and evil within them. 
 
Man. 2>7 
 
 As life goes on, they eat of many a forbidden 
 tree, and so fall into sin and sorrow, but, as in 
 the story of Genesis, such experiences make 
 them wise to discern good from evil, and per- 
 haps help them to a noble final self-conquest. 
 
 To sum up the doctrine of man : In the light 
 of the New Testament and the best subsequent 
 Christian thought, we believe that the soul of 
 man contains divine and human, infinite and fi- 
 nite elements. We do not hold sin to be a 
 light thing, but we believe that righteousness 
 lies deeper in us than sin ; that it is inwrought 
 with the fibre of our being, while sin, as some 
 one has said, is the dye, a very dark and dread- 
 ful dye, that stains the fabric of our life. And 
 consequently, that, as Epictetus declares, " If 
 a man could be persuaded of this principle as 
 he ought, he never would think of himself 
 meanly or ignobly." 
 
 Some may question whether this teaching is 
 in harmony with that of the Prayer Book, but 
 the teaching of the Prayer Book, like that of 
 the Bible, is to be discovered rather in its gen- 
 eral spirit than from isolated words or phrases. 
 We must remember how simply and confidently 
 the Prayer Book puts the Church's prayers into 
 
38 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 the mouths of all men and women who will use 
 them, assured that they express the deepest de- 
 sires, the purest emotions of all human souls. 
 
 The system of the historic Church is one 
 of rational religious education. She takes peo- 
 ple in childhood, because they are children of 
 God, baptizes them, teaches them to pray, con- 
 firms them, and makes them, if they will be, 
 participants in all her life and worship, the very 
 fundamental principle of her system being the 
 double nature of man. The whole aim and end 
 of her education is not to save men from the 
 wrath of an offended Deity remote from them, 
 but to bring into complete harmony within them 
 the two natures now so often in fierce and bit- 
 ter conflict. Looking beyond this world, she 
 prophesies of worlds where we may grow more 
 freely in light and knowledge, where seeing 
 truth no longer darkly, but with clear vision, we 
 shall love and follow it, and where, no longer 
 torn by conflicting desires, 
 
 *' Mind and soul according well, 
 
 May make one music as before, 
 But vaster ! " 
 
CHRIST. 
 
 39 
 
"The incarnation was Msiorica/Iy accom-plished in Jesus 
 Christ, who was born of the Virgin Mary, and suffered under 
 Pontius Pilate. 
 
 " The inward Christ of the heart (of the Church and of each 
 believer) presupposes the Christ manifested in history, and 
 without the latter soon fades away into a mystic cloud." — 
 Martensen. 
 
 " The Council of Nicsea, which declared the union of God 
 with man, is one of the most important assemblies that was 
 ever convened on this earth ; it dates a new era in the his- 
 tory of human thought. God in actual contact with man — 
 God in man and man in God — is the underlying idea of the 
 Athanasian dogma, which asserts that the Son is consubstan- 
 tial with the Father."— Dr. F. H. Hedge, "Ways of the 
 Spirit," p. 352. 
 
 " Passing from India to Persia, and thence to Greece, 
 where in the hands of Plato it was made much of, the doc- 
 trine of the Logos became the prominent feature of the 
 famous Neoplatonic school of Alexandria." — " Keys of the 
 Creeds." 
 
 "The difference between the prophets and Jesus was, that 
 he accomplished what they foresaw. His life full of faith in 
 God and man, became the new seed of a higher kingdom 
 than that of David. He was the Son of David, as inheriting 
 the loving trust of David in a heavenly Father ; he was also 
 the Lord of David, by fulfilling David's love to God with his 
 own love to man ; making piety and charity one, faith and 
 freedom one, reason and religion one, this life and the life to 
 come one. He died to accomplish this union and to make 
 this atoning sacrifice." — James Freeman Clarke. 
 
 " The revelation of and in the Christ is not a religion, and 
 it is not a philosophy. 
 
 " The Christ does not come into the world as the founder 
 of a religion, and this revelation is not set forth as an insti- 
 
 40 
 
tute, or a system, or a cultus of religion. — Mulford, " Re- 
 public of God." 
 
 " It is rather His assumption of our nature in all its fulness, 
 than his death alone, that the Fathers dwelt upon. He is the 
 representative man, the second Adam, the head of the body, 
 who recapitulates in Himself, as they are fond of expressing 
 it, the whole human race, and imparts to them — a new prin- 
 ciple of life, in whose death all die, in whose resurrection all 
 are made alive. This is the great argument of Athanasius." 
 — OXENHAM, " The Atonement." 
 
 "To believe in the name of Christ is to believe that no 
 other approach to God exists, except through the same quali- 
 ties of justice, truth, and love which make up the mind of 
 Christ. ' Ye believe in God, believe also in me,' is given as 
 His own farewell address. Ye believe in the Father, ye be- 
 lieve in Religion generally ; believe also in the Son, the 
 Christ. For this is the form in which the Divine Nature has 
 been made most palpably known to the world, in flesh and 
 blood, in facts and words, in life and death." — Dean Stan- 
 ley (" Christian Institutions "). 
 
 " The vital principle of the doctrine of the atonement is 
 self-surrender. Christ yielded himself perfectly to the Divine 
 Will, and so became the world's redeemer. 
 
 "All the Fathers agreed, as it were with one mind, that 
 to Christ belongs not merely the limited importance attached 
 to every historical personage, but that his person stands in an 
 essential relation to the whole Human Race ; on this account 
 alone could they make a Single Individual the object of an 
 article of faith, and ascribe to him a lasting and eternal sig- 
 nificancy in relation to our race." — Dorner, "Person of 
 Christ." 
 
 ' ' Christ saves us by pouring into us his own life, which is 
 love. When Christian love is formed within us, it has killed 
 the roots of sin in the soul and fitted us to be forgiven, and 
 to enter the presence of God." — James Freeman Clarke. 
 
 41 
 
CHRIST. 
 
 An old painter of the fifteenth century, Fra 
 Angelico, used to paint the head of Christ on 
 bended knee, and with corresponding rever- 
 ence of mind the Saviour's life should be 
 studied. 
 
 It may seem presumptuous, after nearly nine- 
 teen hundred years of conflicting opinion, to say 
 that it is not hard to arrive at true conclusions 
 about him ; and if the modern student were 
 obliged to seek for his true character and re- 
 lation to mankind amid the dense mists of 
 scholastic opinion, or the strifes of ecclesiasti- 
 cal councils, it would be impossible to say it. 
 The doctrine of Christ's divinity, if it be true, 
 is to be discovered in far simpler ways. 
 
 Theodore Parker once said : " Above all 
 men do I bow myself before that august 
 personage, Jesus of Nazareth, who seems to 
 have had the strength of man and the softness 
 of woman, — man's mighty, wide, grasping, rea- 
 
 43 
 
44 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 soning, calculating, and poetic mind ; and wo- 
 man's conscience, woman's heart, and woman's 
 faith in God. He is my best historic ideal of 
 human greatness." How much such a confes- 
 sion as that reminds us of the simple-hearted, 
 yet deep and ardent love for him, that inspired 
 Christ's first disciples ! There is a great gulf be- 
 tween their faith and admiration and that of the 
 men who composed the Council of Nicaea, which, 
 in the year 325, established on a dogmatic basis 
 the Church's belief in his divinity ; and this 
 modern utterance of one who loved the undog- 
 matic faith of St. John and St. Peter, but cared 
 little for the formulated opinions of the bishops 
 of the fourth century, carries us back to the 
 first flush of the world's new spiritual day. 
 
 Two questions in this chapter demand our 
 attention : first, the nature of Christ ; second, 
 his work. 
 
 The Catholic Church, ever since the Council 
 of Nicaea, has persistently declared her belief in 
 the double nature of Christ. It was the denial 
 of his divinity by the Arians that led to the 
 Nicene Council, whose stormy vote decided 
 that henceforth the Church should hold and 
 teach the doctrine of his double nature. After 
 
Christ. 45 
 
 that council other sects arose denying his com- 
 plete humanity, and although the echo of all 
 such strifes has long since died away, many 
 people are still in doubt whether Christ was 
 both God and man. Can that question be set- 
 tled rationally and beyond the sphere of mere 
 theological assertion ? Let us see. The Chris- 
 tian world to-day contains but two leading 
 forms of statement concerning Christ's nature: 
 that of the Catholic Church, to which we have 
 referred ; and that of the Unitarians, which is, 
 in general, an assertion simply of his human 
 nature. And in many minds there is an im- 
 pression that the separation between the beliefs 
 indicated by these two forms of statement, is 
 as wide and deep as that between the beliefs of 
 the Church and the Arians in the fourth cen- 
 tury. This is not always true. The early 
 Arians were people influenced by the current 
 teaching of the East concerning God. Arius 
 himself was bred, not in the Christian school of 
 Alexandria, but in that of Antioch, a school 
 tinctured with the Oriental view of God as re- 
 mote from His universe and acting upon it 
 only by means of intermediate agencies. In 
 the Oriental view there was no point of contact 
 
46 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 between God and the universe ; such a thought 
 as that He was the indwelHng life of nature and 
 the personahty of man, never for a moment 
 entered into it. They had discovered no 
 natural tie between the human and the divine, 
 and so the idea of the perfect incarnation of 
 God in Christ, to which the Alexandrian view 
 of God as incarnate in all men logically and 
 quickly led the Church, was impossible for the 
 Arian mind to grasp. Thus the early strife 
 concerning Christ's divinity was, in reality, a 
 strife about the more fundamental doctrine 
 of the nature of God. The Alexandrian theo- 
 logians regarded God as immediately present 
 in His universe, not in the uncommunicable- 
 ness and entire profoundness of His nature 
 and power, but as the logos or reason in which 
 every human being shared. He did not exist 
 in solitary greatness, but in complex and beau- 
 tiful relationships. Reason in the intellect and 
 goodness in the soul of man both testified to 
 His abiding presence in the race. And when 
 ** The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, 
 full of grace and truth," it was only in pursu- 
 ance of the regular manifestation or revelation 
 of Deity. God and man had never existed 
 
Christ. 47 
 
 apart, one " in heaven," the other " on the 
 earth," except in figurative language, used to 
 portray the respective greatness and Httleness 
 of divine and human attributes. Christ was 
 the perfect type or head of the visible incarna- 
 tion of God, the highest point in the divine 
 communication to the intellect and heart of 
 man. In him was that perfect union of divine 
 and human of which the constitution of the 
 world and man had always been prophesying. 
 " He was the light that lighteth every man that 
 Cometh into the world." He had not alone 
 the divine nature, else he would have been 
 like those mythical gods whom the Orientals 
 conceived of as sometimes walking the earth 
 in human guise, and so would have taken the 
 world back to heathen polytheism. He had 
 not alone the human nature, else his appear- 
 ance in the world would have destroyed the es- 
 sential principle on which all true philosophy 
 of the relations between God and humanity is 
 based. He calls himself both Son of God and 
 Son of man. He tells the Jews that no sign 
 shall be given them but the sign of the Son of 
 man; that is, that he had come to establish 
 truth, not by means of " portent and prodigy," 
 
48 Heart of the C^^eeds. 
 
 but by means of revelation in a person ; that 
 his mission was to declare the eternal, inde- 
 structible relationship between God and man. 
 
 In tracing the doctrine of God we have al- 
 ready seen how, after Augustine's time, the 
 Oriental view of God as existing apart from the 
 world, an awful remoteness, came to be gen- 
 erally held in the Western Church ; and it 
 thus becomes most clear that the doctrine of 
 Christ's divinity would necessarily appear in 
 the later theology, under an entirely different 
 aspect. 
 
 As a matter of fact the doctrine of the in- 
 carnation, rich and beautiful in the Alexandrian 
 theology, did harden soon into a cold and re- 
 pulsive dogma closely allied to the older beliefs 
 of the heathen in the appearance of gods on 
 earth, the fruitful source of strife and division 
 and cruel persecution in the Church. In the 
 Western Church, Christ was not the perfect 
 type of creation, the complete embodiment 
 of the divine principle in man, the head- 
 stone in the temple of God's Incarnate Life, 
 into which all are builded, but rather a myste- 
 rious being, who came to earth to declare judg- 
 ment, and to ward off dreadful punishment from 
 
Christ, 49 
 
 a portion of the race by offering his body as a 
 Hteral sacrifice to offended Deity. 
 
 This, briefly stated, is the doctrine of Christ 
 that Calvinism has handed down to us, and who 
 can describe the painful struggles of mind it pro- 
 duced, age after age, among those who more or 
 less clearly perceived that it could not be har- 
 monized with reason or the better instincts of 
 the soul ? Turn whichever way they would, in 
 the direction of a natural and reasonable faith, 
 they were confronted with such passages as : 
 ^'Neither is there salvation in any other; for 
 there is none other name under heaven given 
 among men whereby we must be saved." 
 " He that believeth on the Son hath eternal 
 life, and he that believeth not the Son of God 
 shall not see life." And they said: "If in these 
 passages Christ, or the Son of God, means simply 
 the historic Christ, the divine man of Palestine, 
 how can salvation be justly limited to behef in 
 him, since millions of the inhabitants of the 
 earth, before he lived and since, never heard 
 nor could have known of him ? And what 
 does belief in him mean ? Can it mean merely 
 some particular belief about him formed in the 
 mind, or submission to the laws and institu- 
 
50 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 tions of the Christian Church?" These were 
 questions to which the Mediaeval and post- 
 Reformation churches of Europe could give no 
 answer satisfactory to thoughtful minds. It was 
 clear that salvation, whatever it meant, could not 
 reasonably have been made dependent on the 
 opinions people held about Christ, nor on the 
 administration of the external rite of baptism. 
 There was always a lurking conviction that God 
 could be just to man only by making well-being 
 or ill-being depend on something man could do 
 or refrain from doing, something that took far 
 deeper hold on the roots of life than mere 
 speculation concerning Christ, or an uncertain 
 state of the emotions connected with that, or 
 on baptism or the Lord's Supper. What, then, 
 was the true belief in Christ that was so neces- 
 sary to man ? The answer would have been 
 found, had people looked for it, in the writings 
 of some of the most orthodox of the Apos- 
 tolic and Church Fathers. 
 
 Justin Martyr's plain declaration was that 
 *' Christ is the Word of whom the whole human 
 race are partakers " ; that " those who lived 
 according to reason " were Christians, '' though 
 accounted atheists," even as those who " lived 
 
Christ, 5 1 
 
 without reason were enemies " to Christ ; and 
 that each man of the heathen writers '' spoke 
 well in proportion to the share he had " of the 
 Word of God in him. Clement of Alexandria 
 had said : " The Son of God is never displaced ; 
 not being divided, not severed, not passing 
 from place to place ; being ahvays everywhere, 
 and being contained nowhere ; complete mmd 
 the complete paternal light ; the teacher who 
 trains the Gnostic by mysteries, and the be- 
 liever by good hopes, and the hard of heart by 
 corrective discipline." " Christ is called Wis- 
 dom by the prophets. This is he who is 
 the teacher of all created beings the fellow- 
 counsellor of God, who foreknew all things." 
 *' There was always a natural manifestation of 
 the One Almighty God among all right-thinking 
 men." " He whom we call Saviour and Lord 
 gave philosophy to the Greeks. He has dis- 
 pensed his beneficence both to Greeks and 
 Barbarians." " For the image of God is His 
 Word, the genuine Son of Mind, the Divine 
 Word, the archetypal light of light." 
 
 Origen had said : " Christ has given light 
 and taught the way of piety to the whole 
 human race, so that no one can reproach 
 
52 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 him if he remain without a share of his mys- 
 teries." 
 
 This was the orthodox doctrine of Christ, in 
 the most enUghtened portion of the Christian 
 Church, before the time of Augustine ; and it 
 is this to which the Church in our day is re- 
 turning. In the largest sense Christ is the 
 divine Word or reason or wisdom of God, 
 manifest in the constitution of the universe, 
 and most perfectly in the nature of man. He 
 is that of God which we can comprehend, and 
 by means of which we stand forever related to 
 the unrevealed mystery of the Divine Nature. 
 He is indeed the Mediator between God and 
 man, not, however, as trying to win God over 
 to our side, but as in his nature " the eternal 
 logos of the world through whom the divine 
 light shines into creation " ; '' the ground and 
 source of all reason in creation, be it in men or 
 angels, in Greek or Jew." ' 
 
 From such statements as these we shall at 
 once see the necessity for the modern distinc- 
 tion between the essential 2.^6. the historic Christ. 
 The historic Christ, the God-man of Palestine, 
 who was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered 
 
 ^ Martensen. 
 
Christ, 5 3 
 
 under Pontius Pilate^ was crucified dead and 
 buried, and rose again from the dead, was the 
 perfect manifestation of the essential Christ 
 incarnate from the beginning of the world. 
 " Christ lives in the heart of the Church and of 
 each believer," says Martensen, '' but the in- 
 ward Christ of the heart presupposes the Christ 
 manifested in history, and without the latter 
 soon fades away into a mystic cloud." 
 
 It would hardly be profitable to discuss, at 
 length, the various theories that have been held 
 in explanation or definition of the work of 
 Christ. 
 
 Most of the theological treatises with which 
 people are familiar, and many of the pul- 
 pits, teach an erroneous doctrine of what is 
 called *' substitutionary atonement," and it is 
 this principle of substitution or quid pro quo, 
 that enters into most of the mediaeval and re- 
 formed theories of the work of Christ. 
 
 For man's sin, those theories declared, justice 
 demanded satisfaction ; outraged law must 
 be vindicated ; God's wrath must be appeased. 
 Yet Infinite Love could save the victims, if it 
 would yield itself to that which would, other- 
 wise, relentlessly fall upon them. So love and 
 
54 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 justice met in conference, and bargained that 
 love, in the person of Christ, should come to 
 earth and submit itself to the pains of physical 
 death, in order to pay man's ransom. 
 
 No form of this substitution doctrine could 
 possibly satisfy the minds of the best thinkers. 
 The human reason revolted at the grotesque 
 spectacle of a God at war with Himself, de- 
 manding man's utter ruin, yet willing to be 
 pacified if some victim could be found to take 
 the offender's place, and so bargaining with 
 Himself, or with the devil, for men's salvation. 
 And the question kept recurring how spiritual 
 wrong could be atoned by physical suffering or, 
 as in heathen sacrifices, by the mere shedding 
 of blood ? Or how the sufferings of Christ for 
 a few brief hours could, by any possibility, be 
 regarded as an equivalent for unending ages of 
 torture too dreadful to be imagined, for the 
 whole race, in the life to come ? Yet this, in 
 one form or another, was the doctrine that was 
 almost universally preached and professedly 
 believed in New England until about half a 
 century ago, when a large body of thinking 
 men, under the name of Unitarians, rose in re- 
 volt against it and the popular crude and un- 
 
Christ. 5 5 
 
 philosophical doctrines of Trinity, Divinity of 
 Christ, and Heaven and hell connected with it. 
 
 After what has been said concerning the be- 
 lief of the early Church about Christ's nature, 
 it will not be necessary to show how far re- 
 moved from early Christian thought this view 
 of the atonement was. The New Testament 
 writers, full of enthusiasm over their Lord and 
 his divine work, seized all the strongest figures 
 they were familiar with, in order to express 
 what they felt of the value of his life and 
 death, but they held no dogmatic theories of 
 the sacrifice of the Son of God, least of all 
 such theories as were imposed upon the Church 
 in later ages by the Augustinian theology. 
 
 Nor among the Fathers of the Church, in 
 the third and fourth centuries, can there be said 
 to have been any well-defined doctrine of 
 atonement, while, indeed, all believed pro- 
 foundly in the sacrifice of Christ, and spoke 
 rhetorically of his life and death as having 
 been for man's redemption. 
 
 We believe that Christ redeemed the world, 
 not by suffering a penalty that except for 
 him man must have borne, but first, by re- 
 vealing, in his own divine-human nature, the 
 
56 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 fact of God's enshrinement in the universe 
 and the soul of man ; and second, by realiz- 
 ing in history, once for all, the perfect union 
 of divine and human, and so the ideal, that 
 man had long been struggHng for and hop- 
 ing to see realized, of perfect life. The death 
 from which he saved man was the spiritual 
 blight of sordidness and sensuality and false 
 beliefs. The salvation he wrought was the 
 *' liberation of the God consciousness " in 
 men from the slavery to sense in which it is 
 so greatly held. The sacrifice of the cross 
 not only typifies, but is the great tide-mark of 
 that eternal sacrifice of the lower to the higher 
 through which the universe and the soul of 
 man struggle ever upward toward perfection. 
 
 The word salvation is as often on our lips to- 
 day as ever, but we mean now, by salvation, 
 not deliverance from fiery tortures in the life 
 to come, but the gradually increasing perfec- 
 tion of our natures in all worlds where we may 
 be. We speak of the atonement of Christ, 
 but we mean by that, not the satisfying of an 
 offended deity by a dreadful offering of human 
 blood, but the revelation of the light and free- 
 dom of the obedient soul, which came through 
 
CJirist, 5 7 
 
 Christ. The redemption of the worid, we be- 
 lieve, lies in the truth that '' in him was life, and 
 the life was the light of men." That "" the Word 
 became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we be- 
 held his glory, glory as of the only begotten 
 from the Father), full of grace and truth." 
 Thus we believe in Christ, not as man, but as 
 God-Ma7i, head and type of creation, eldest 
 brother of all the great family of mankind to 
 whom God has imparted Himself, liberator of 
 the human soul, redeemer of the race from sin. 
 We hold that in his divinity every one, how- 
 ever defective his philosophy may be, who, 
 loving reason and goodness and faith, seeks the 
 liberation of his own soul from sin, truly be- 
 lieves. 
 
 The obstacle to a frank avowal of belief in 
 the divinity, or deity, of Christ has always 
 been a mistaken conception of God. The best 
 thinkers have never personified God as a great 
 man and localized Him in the distant heavens. 
 To them God has been ever present in His 
 children and His v/orks, and they have had no 
 difficulty in thinking of Him as manifesting 
 Himself preeminently in Jesus. We love and 
 admire the flowers in our gardens, and feel that 
 
58 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 they all reveal somewhat of that wondrous per- 
 fection of beauty that exists in God. But when 
 one more rare and beautiful than the others 
 unfolds its petals and spreads its perfumes 
 lavishly abroad, we feel almost like worshipping 
 that as a complete revelation of Infinite Beauty. 
 When the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 calls Christ *' the brightness of God's glory, and 
 the express image of His person," or when St. 
 Paul says that " he is the image of the invisible 
 God," and that *' it pleased the Father that in 
 him should all fulness dwell," we have a similar 
 exhibition of feeling. It was not Christ in his 
 single personality that kindled the fervid apos- 
 tolic imagination to so a bright a glow, but 
 rather Christ as " unveiling God in the world 
 and in the consciousness of man," Christ in his 
 union with other men, of whom St. Paul had 
 elsewhere said (i Cor. xi., 7) that they were 
 " the image and glory of God." 
 
 On summer mornings as we watch the sun 
 rise out of gold and crimson seas and mount 
 proudly upward into the heavens '' trailing 
 clouds of glory as he comes," we understand 
 how Tennyson could write, " God made himself 
 an awful rose of dawn," for it seems to us that 
 
Christ, 59 
 
 He has wholly incarnated himself in that glorious 
 vision. Lost in contemplation of the divine 
 man who reveals to men not only their duty 
 and destiny, but, in his oneness with them, their 
 divine relationship, how natural to feel that he 
 is the image and glory of God. As we stand 
 face to face with him, how can we better express 
 our belief in the one perfect human char- 
 acter, the man who alone of all men could 
 truthfully say as he looked into his inner life, 
 There is no shadow of evil on my soul, than to 
 repeat his own words : " I and my Father are 
 one. 
 
 In confessing our belief in the sacrifice of 
 Christ, the Lamb slam from the foundation of the 
 worlds we are confessing belief in the subordi- 
 nation of the lower to the higher, the universal 
 sacrifice once historically, sublimely, and fully 
 witnessed in the life and death of Jesus in Pal- 
 estine. 
 
 Thus there are to-day many who piously 
 repeat the Nicene Creed who, judged by the 
 standard of the oldest and truest orthodoxy of 
 the Catholic Church, are farthest from belief in 
 the divinity of our Lord ; while there are many 
 who never say the Creeds who, at heart, are the 
 
6o Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 strongest believers in the fact. A clergyman of 
 the English Church once quaintly said : " Divine 
 truth is better understood, as it unfolds itself 
 in the purity of men's hearts and lives, than in 
 all those subtle niceties into which curious wits 
 may lay it forth " ; and there is the echo of the 
 Master's own spirit in Whittier's lines : 
 
 " Call him not heretic whose works attest 
 His faith in goodness by no creed confessed. 
 Whatever in love's name is truly done 
 To free the bound and lift the fallen one 
 Is done in Christ. Whoso, in deed and word, 
 Is not against him, labors for our Lord. 
 When he who, sad and weary, longing sore 
 For love's sweet service, sought the sisters' door, 
 One saw the heavenly, one the human guest. 
 But who shall say which loved the Master best ? " 
 
THE CREEDS. 
 
 6i 
 
" As the name of the Father represents to us God in nature, 
 as the name of the Son represents to us God in history ; so 
 the name of the Holy Ghost represents to us God in our own 
 hearts and spirits and consciences. This is the still, small 
 voice — stillest and smallest, yet loudest and strongest of all — 
 which, even more than the wonders of nature or the wonders 
 of history, brings us into the nearest harmony with Him who 
 is a Spirit, — who, when His closest communion with man is 
 described, can only be described as the Spirit pleading with, 
 and dwelling in, our spirit." — Dean Stanley, "Christian 
 Institutions." 
 
 "Christianity, though a monotheism, and a monotheism 
 which has destroyed forever both polytheism and idolatry 
 wherever it has gone, is not that of numerical unity. The 
 God of Christianity differs in this from the God of Judaism 
 and Mohammedanism. He is an infinite will ; but he is 
 more. Christianity cognizes God as not only above nature 
 and the soul, but also as in nature and in the soul. 
 
 "He is an omnipresent will as the Father, Creator, and 
 Ruler of all things. He is the Word, or manifested Truth in 
 the Son, manifested through all nature, manifested through 
 all human life. He is the Spirit or inspiration of each indi- 
 vidual soul. So he is Father, Son, and Spirit, above all, 
 through all, and in us all." — James Freeman Clarke. 
 
 " In the Apostolic Creed we breathe the atmosphere of 
 fact rather than of doctrine, and surely if its witness is accept- 
 ed in all its length and breadth and depth, it will be found to 
 be not only a rallying-point for all who love the Lord Jesus 
 Christ in sincerity, but also will supply the truest and most 
 
 62 
 
powerful corrective for the errors and follies of our times." — 
 Rev. Stanley Leathes, M.A. 
 
 "In early Trinitarian discussions, we cannot mistake the 
 presence of a yet higher aim, — that, viz., of bringing to dis- 
 tinct consciousness not only the unity of the divine nature, 
 but also the living longing of divine love to impart itself ; in 
 other words, the effort to maintain both the trajishicent 
 nature of God and his immanence in his works, — the former in 
 opposition to polytheism and pantheism, and the latter to an 
 abstract deism. So far such formulas have also their edifying 
 side, as giving witness to the struggle of the Christian mind 
 after a satisfactory expression of what has its full reality only 
 in the depths of the Christian heart. — Hagenbach, " History 
 of Doctrines," vol. i., p. 270. 
 
 " To exist in relationship is the essential idea of God." — 
 Prof, A. V. G. Allen, D.D., "Continuity of Christian 
 Thought." 
 
 " God the Father is the ground of creation, 
 God the Son is the law of creation, 
 God the Holy Ghost is the life of creation. 
 
 " God the Father originates, 
 God the Son regulates, 
 God the Holy Ghost actuates. 
 
 " God the Father is Deity invisible, 
 God the Son is Deity manifested, 
 God the Holy Ghost is Deity communicated." 
 
 —Rev. H. V. D. Johns, D.D. 
 (Recently reprinted in the New York Churchman.') 
 
 63 
 
THE CREEDS. 
 
 Close together in the Prayer Book stand two 
 venerable Creeds, or short Confessions of Faith, 
 which are used interchangeably in public wor- 
 ship, — the Apostles and the Nicene. These two 
 Creeds are always said to embody the substance 
 of Christian belief, and in the Protestant Epis- 
 copal Church there is no standard of doctrine 
 whatsoever beside them. The Church in England 
 at the time of the Reformation, following the 
 Reformed Churches of the Continent, adopted 
 a code of thirty-nine articles, which have no 
 doubt often hampered her progress and dis- 
 turbed the consciences of her clergy compelled 
 by law to subscribe them. The organizers of 
 our Church, knowing that however unnecessary 
 these articles might be, or however faulty in 
 expression, still, like the Catholic Creeds them- 
 selves, they contained the substance of all true 
 religious belief, decided to retain them in the 
 Prayer Book as an historical document, not to 
 
 65 
 
66 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 be formally subscribed by ministers or people, 
 but rather to indicate the close relationship 
 between the Church in England and America. 
 
 There seems no sufficient reason, as we re- 
 gard them, why the broadest thinker should 
 not feel able to subscribe them as a whole, but 
 in point of fact they stand in the back of our 
 Prayer Book as a witness to our spiritual descent 
 as Churchmen, a document serving to remind 
 us of the crisis the Church went through in the 
 sixteenth century, and of the debt of religious 
 freedom we owe the English Reformers. 
 
 The only doctrinal standards we have are 
 contained in the two Creeds, the shorter of 
 which, from a legend that each of the twelve 
 Apostles contributed a clause, is commonly 
 called the Apostles' Creed, the longer, made 
 in its original form by the Council of Nicea 
 in the year 325, and afterward added to, the 
 Nicene. The Apostles' Creed was probably 
 formed by combining the various simple Con- 
 fessions of Faith used in the Early Church by 
 those who were admitted to baptism, and it 
 came into general use in the Latin Church ; 
 while the Nicene, formed on the basis of an 
 earlier Creed in use in the Church in Palestine, 
 
The Creeds, 67 
 
 and, much more than the Apostles', the product 
 of speculative thought, became distinctively 
 the Creed of the Eastern Church.' " But there 
 is one point," says Dean Stanley, '' which the 
 two Creeds have in common. It is the frame- 
 work on which they are formed. The frame- 
 work is the simple expression of faith used in the 
 Baptism of the early Christians. It is taken from 
 the First Gospel, and it consists of * the name 
 of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.' " 
 At first it was common to use simply the 
 name of Christ in the profession of Christian- 
 ity, but that was soon superseded by the Trin- 
 itarian formulary found in the twenty-eighth 
 chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew, and in 
 the second century the latter became universal. 
 The use of this formulary in baptism antedates 
 all the discussions recorded in Church History 
 concerning the doctrine of the Trinity, which, 
 at last, in the latter part of the fourth century, 
 became fully settled as a symbol or mode of 
 expression of the belief of the Church. The 
 history of these discussions is instructive, as 
 
 ' The history of the origin of the Nicene Creed will be 
 found in detail in Dean Stanley's " History of the Eastern 
 Church." 
 
68 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 showing how impossible it often is for people of 
 mystical and speculative, and people of logical 
 and practical tendencies of thought to under- 
 stand each other. The heretics of that early- 
 time were often heretics simply because a dif- 
 ferent philosophical training had made it im- 
 possible for them to enter into all the subtle- 
 ties of the thought of their orthodox oppo- 
 nents, while many of their persecutions wxre 
 the result of the failure of the Church party to 
 see the difference between religion and their 
 peculiar thought about religion. 
 
 The doctrine of the Trinity is the framework 
 of the Creeds, but it is not a doctrine originat- 
 ing with or peculiar to Christianity. Triads 
 and Trinities belong to many of the religious 
 and philosophical systems of earlier and later 
 times, and the Trinitarian symbol of Christian- 
 ity we may with little hesitation trace imme- 
 diately to a Greek source. 
 
 The following paragraph from a little book 
 called " The Keys of the Creeds " is very sug- 
 gestive, as indicating some of the steps by which 
 the symbol reached the early Christian Church. 
 
 "The School of Alexandria added a new 
 Trinity to those already received in Egypt. 
 
The Creeds. 69 
 
 This new Trinity was based on an analysis of 
 the functions of the individual man. Every 
 living being consists of a trinity ; the individual 
 self ; the mind ; and the life . . . projecting 
 the individual man into the ideal, and di- 
 vesting him of limitations, the Neoplatonists 
 presented their Trinity as consisting of three 
 Persons, of whom the first was unity, infinite / 
 and perfect, but capable of generating exist- 
 ence. The second person was subordinate to 
 the first, but was the most perfect of all gen- 
 erated beings. It was called the Intelligence, 
 Wisdom, or Word, — Logos, a Greek term, by a 
 happy coincidence signifying both reason and 
 speech. The third person was the universal 
 Spirit, Soul, or Life. It was only through the 
 Word that God the Father could be known, as 
 a man's mind can only be known through his 
 speech. The Word was thus the interpreter or 
 Mediator between God and man. The leading 
 apostle of this philosophy was a Jew, named 
 Philo, who was born about B.C. 30.^ He was 
 
 ^ Philo lived in Alexandria, the most intellectual centre of 
 the Eastern world, at the time when Christian doctrines were 
 moulding, and there can be little doubt of the strong influence 
 he and his school exerted on the intellectual spirit and form 
 of early Catholic theology. 
 
JO Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 at once an enthusiastic disciple of Plato, and 
 an ardent Jew after the pattern of the later and 
 more spiritual type. His countrymen, grow- 
 ing in spiritual graces since the captivity, had 
 long been familiar with the idea of the Logos, 
 whom they personified under the name of Wis- 
 dom." — (" Keys of the Creeds," p Zj^ 
 
 However the number tJiree first came to be 
 used as a mystic or sacred number, its use as 
 such is very ancient, and is intended to convey 
 the idea of completeness. In Christianity it 
 denotes the completeness of the nature of God 
 and His relations with mankind, and so impos- 
 sible does the ordinary mind find it to symbol- 
 ize God under the figure of unity alone, and so 
 naturally does the idea of completeness take 
 shape as threefoldness, that there seems little 
 probability, no matter how far or fast scientific 
 thought may progress, that the Christian sym- 
 bol of the Trinity shall disappear. Not more 
 from regard for an ancient and venerable sym- 
 bol, than from a sense of its value in keeping 
 before the minds of men the largeness and rich- 
 ness of the divine nature and revelation, do 
 Christian thinkers hold and value it. 
 
 This deeper and profounder significance of 
 
The Creeds. yi 
 
 the doctrine of the Trinity was felt by the 
 Alexandrian theologians and by Athanasius, the 
 great champion of Catholic orthodoxy. But in 
 the Latin Church the doctrine soon hardened 
 into what seems very like belief in three gods, 
 and in the popular Calvinistic theology of 
 New England there can be no doubt that a be- 
 lief very nearly allied to heathen polytheism pre- 
 vailed. The popular mind conceived of a God 
 of justice, a God of love, and another God, subor- 
 dinate to these two, on whom they both relied to 
 carry out their plans. The Unitarian protest- 
 ants, keenly alive to the outrage Calvinistic the- 
 ology had done to the divine truths written in 
 man's intellect and heart, yet blind to the evolu- 
 tion of religion, and the intrinsic value of the 
 religious symbols Calvinism had either per- 
 verted or thrown away, and lacking the catholic 
 spirit of the older churches of Christendom, cast 
 this symbol aside as a sign of unenlightened 
 thought, and from that time to the present they 
 and their descendants have done without it. 
 
 So far from being a sign of narrow or mis- 
 taken thought, the Trinitarian symbol is un- 
 doubtedly a great help and stimulus to pro- 
 found and rational beliefs concerning God ; and 
 
72 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 even the Unitarian body, which in many places 
 has outlived much of the aggressive spirit with 
 which it naturally began, and has mellowed and 
 softened with time, has quite ceased to protest 
 against it. 
 
 The doctrine of the Trinity is the basis or 
 framework of the Creeds, although the symbol 
 is nowhere directly referred to in them. Saying 
 them we confess our belief in God as Father, 
 Son, and Holy Spirit, and this is the sum of our 
 statement of belief, for the latter clauses of 
 the Creeds, which relate to tJie Holy Catholic 
 C/mrch, the Connminion of Saints^ the Forgive- 
 ness of Sins, are still further declarations of 
 belief in the Holy Spirit, the third Person in the 
 Trinity. We believe in one God in three Per- 
 sons ; but what do we mean by the word person 
 as applied to God? We clearly do not mean 
 that God is a person as we are persons. A 
 Being whose nature has no limitations, to whose 
 attributes of thought and will there are no 
 bounds, must be very far removed from us, with 
 our imperfect thought and feeble power of will 
 and many limitations. The personality of God, 
 like our own, is based on conscious thought, 
 intelligence, and implies the power to will, but 
 
The Creeds. 73 
 
 in God thought and will are perfect and com- 
 plete. Yet God exists not in solitary infi- 
 niteness, lonely perfection of personality, but 
 in self-manifestation, in relations. There are 
 mysterious depths of being in Him that we 
 have received only faint suggestions of, but if 
 He existed in cold, abstract unity we could never 
 know Him at all. He would forever remain to 
 us the incomprehensible and unthinkable source 
 from which all things proceed, never to be 
 named nor known, — an Infinite Father, but an 
 Infinite Silence as well. God cannot exist in 
 absolute mystery. His nature requires self-rev- 
 elation, and He has revealed Himself. Speech 
 has come out of the Silence, and that speech, 
 God's thought, the Logos (both reason and 
 speech) — all of God that can be named and 
 known, — is the Revelation of the Son. In hu- 
 manity that revelation is most intelligible, most 
 complete, and in Jesus, the Christ of history, it 
 culminates, and at last is grandly summed up. 
 
 Nor can God cease to create. From Him 
 continually comes forth creative and sustaining 
 power. He causes death, and out of death 
 brings nobler forms of life. He hath created 
 the heavens and stretched them out ; He hath 
 
74 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 spread forth the earth and that which comeih out 
 of it ; and still the creation drama ceases not, 
 for He givetJi breath unto the people tipon it, and 
 spirit to them that walk therein. Along with the 
 speecJi of God goes ever the manifestation of His 
 power J which is the revelation of the Spirit. 
 
 Thus we have God in three persons or char- 
 acters, back of and revealing itself through 
 each of which, is the Divine Personality, the 
 Infinite Intelligence. Back of the Silence is 
 God, back of the Speech is God, and back of 
 the Power is God. 
 
 Canon Liddon, " Bampton Lectures," p. 49, 
 says : '' That three such distinctions (having their 
 basis in the Essence of the Godhead) exist, is a 
 matter of Revelation. In the common language 
 of the Western Church, these distinct Forms 
 of Being are named Persons. Yet that term 
 cannot be employed to denote them without 
 considerable intellectual caution." The Latin 
 word persona, as is well known, originally meant 
 the mask or character the player on the stage 
 assumed, but in time it came to denote an indi- 
 vidual of a species. Thus, when it was finally 
 used in theology to represent the original Greek 
 word hypostasis, which meant not an individual 
 
The Creeds. 75 
 
 of a class, but a Distinction in the Essejtce of 
 God, it could not fail to mislead. *' The con- 
 ception of species," Canon Liddon says, " is 
 utterly inapplicable to that One Supreme 
 Essence which we name God." 
 
 There are many aspects under which this 
 threefoldness of God's nature, and so the doc- 
 trine of the Trinity which beautifully yet feebly 
 tries to express it, may be regarded. Dean 
 Stanley says that the whole faith of Natural 
 Religion, the faith of the Natural Conscience, is 
 indicated by the name of the Father; Histori- 
 cal Religion, or the Faith of the Christian 
 Church, God in history, in man, and above all in 
 Jesus Christ, by the name of the Son ; and 
 Spiritual Religion, or God in our own hearts 
 and spirits and consciences, by the name of the 
 Holy Spirit. 
 
 Wherever among men we find any sense of 
 awe or mystery, any aspiration of soul after 
 truth and goodness, any dissatisfaction with that 
 which is low, base, vile, any — however feeble — 
 groping after spiritual light, we have the rev- 
 elation of God the Father. Wherever we find 
 the human feeling of the brotherhood of man- 
 kind, wherever in men*s natures, we see re- 
 
76 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 fleeted the wisdom and strength and forbear- 
 ance and tenderness of God, or find the spirit 
 of loving, religious sympathy drawing people 
 together in organized societies for worship and 
 charitable works, we have a revelation of God 
 the Son. Wherever we find men conscious of 
 a power of righteousness within them, strug- 
 gling to free their natures from captivity to sin, 
 pleading with them to be true to duty, to fol- 
 low charity and faith and patience, honesty and 
 purity and love with all men ; wherever in the 
 Church we see a spirit of earnest faith that 
 triumphs over false and narrow prejudices and 
 keeps religious life in its true place, above form, 
 we have a revelation of God the Holy Spirit. 
 It would be hard to see how the world could do 
 without either view of God. Dean Stanley 
 says : *' To acknowledge this triple form of 
 revelation, to acknowledge this complex aspect 
 of Deity, as it runs through the multiform ex- 
 pressions of the Bible, saves, as it were, the 
 reverence due to the Almighty Ruler of the 
 universe, tends to preserve the balance of truth 
 from any partial or polemical bias, presents to 
 us not a meagre, fragmentary view of only one 
 part of the Divine mind, but a wide, Catholic 
 
The Ci^eeds. 77 
 
 summary of the whole, so far as nature, history, 
 and experience permit. If we cease to think 
 of the Universal Father, we become narrow and 
 exclusive. If we cease to think of the Founder 
 of Christianity ' and of the grandeur of Chris- 
 tendom, we lose our hold on the great historic 
 events which have swayed the hopes and affec- 
 tions of man in the highest moments of human 
 progress. If we cease to think of the Spirit, 
 we lose the inmost meaning of Creed and 
 Prayer, of Church and Bible, of human char- 
 acter and of vital religion." 
 
 In i860, Charles Kingsley, who, with Maurice 
 and others, was deeply distressed over the fail- 
 ure of the Tractarian leaders, such as Pusey and 
 Newman on the one side, and the Evangelical 
 leaders on the other, to point out the deeper 
 principles and make clear the rational basis of 
 religious thought, wrote his novel *' Yeast." 
 The book traces the intellectual and moral 
 development of Lancelot Smith, a young Eng- 
 lishman, educated under Evangelical influence, 
 
 ^ When we say of Jesus " Conceived of the Holy Ghost, 
 born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was 
 crucified, dead and buried, and went into the place of departed 
 spirits,''^ we simply mean to declare our belief in the facts 
 of his history whatever they are. 
 
yS Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 and now skeptical of his early mistaken opin- 
 ions. At one of the crises of his life he is found 
 in St. Paul's Cathedral talking with an Asiatic- 
 Christian philosopher. " Who is He to whom 
 you ask me to turn ? " Lancelot says. " You 
 talk to 7ne of Him as my Father; but you talk 
 of Him to men of your own Creed as the 
 Father. You have mysterious dogmas of three 
 in one. I know them — I have admired them in 
 all their forms, in the Vedas, in the Neo Pla- 
 tonists, in Jacob Boehmen, in your Catholic 
 Creeds, in Coleridge, and in the Germans, from 
 whom he borrowed them. I have looked at 
 them, and found in them beautiful phantasms 
 of philosophy — all but scientific necessities, — 
 
 but " " But what ? " answers the sage. 
 
 And Lancelot says : ** I do not want cold, ab- 
 stract necessities of logic ; I want living, practi- 
 cal facts. If those mysterious dogmas speak of 
 real and necessary properties of His being, they 
 must be necessarily interwoven in practice with 
 His revelation of Himself." Then the Chris- 
 tian philosopher says, in substance, for we do 
 not quote the words : Have you not felt the 
 necessity for an All-Father, the Father of Per- 
 sons, and so Himself the source of personality, 
 
The Creeds, 79 
 
 the fulfilment of our fitful and broken dreams 
 of power, wisdom, creative energy, love, justice, 
 pity? Have you not always been conscious of 
 the imperfections of your own, the common 
 manhood, and in your own consciousness al- 
 ways been holding, perhaps unconsciously, to a 
 perfect human ideal, a perfect sonhood, a per- 
 fect human expression of the God above and 
 the God in humanity? And have you not, in 
 all your failures to keep your life a perfectly 
 united life, in all your ignorance, passion, want 
 of will, in all the confusion and helplessness of 
 your soul, felt the need of a Divine Spirit to 
 unify and give order to that which was so con- 
 fused and helpless ? 
 
 The doctrine of the Trinity Kingsley means 
 to say is just what we would find any such doc- 
 trine, full of vitality, and richly suggestive of all 
 the deepest and tenderest in human thought 
 concerning God and the soul's life in God. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the threefold revelation 
 of God, having come to the world slowly and in 
 the fulness of time, not only can never be lost, 
 but belief in it is in no sense limited even now 
 to those Christians who retain the Trinitarian 
 symbol. Opposition to the symbol first arose 
 
So Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 because its rich and beautiful significance had 
 been obscured and hardened, but for this mistake 
 the Latin Church and the Calvinists should be 
 rather pitied than blamed, and it is clear that 
 Christians of to-day are in no wise responsible 
 for it. Therefore to keep up and apologize for 
 divisions in the Household of Faith on the plea 
 of an old-time abuse of the doctrine of the Trin- 
 ity, is not only foolish but wrong. The cause 
 of the breach between Unitarian and Trinitarian 
 is no longer,what it once was, a radical difference 
 of conception of divine things, for both have 
 grown wiser and more enlightened in half a 
 century, and both may now, if they will, wor- 
 ship with the same venerable forms and express 
 their faith by means of the same time-honored 
 symbols. 
 
 As to the doctrinal symbol of the Trinity, 
 since every truly religious man is of necessity a 
 Trinitarian, there is reason to believe that in 
 time even it shall be restored to its wonted place 
 in the regard of all Christian men. The fact that 
 we now need to make clear to ourselves is that 
 we all believe in God as Father, Son, and Spirit. 
 Sometimes as we think about Him He appeals 
 to us most in one aspect, sometimes most in 
 
The Creeds, 8i 
 
 another, but from no thought of ours about 
 Him is either aspect wholly absent. When we 
 pray, it is with the sense of either His Father- 
 hood, His Sonhood, or His Spirithood present 
 with us, and in our dark and sorrowful hours 
 one thought or the other about Him is sure to 
 give us peace. Sometimes we need to be awed 
 with the majesty and mystery of God; some- 
 times to be soothed and cheered with the ten- 
 derness and patience and pity of God ; some- 
 times to be quickened and strengthened with 
 His indwelling Power. Sometimes we need to 
 make clearer to ourselves not only that God is 
 great and perfect, but that He is the source of 
 all human greatness and goodness ; sometimes 
 to fix our minds less on theology and meta- 
 physics than on homely virtues and homely 
 tasks and the Christian courtesies and kindnesses 
 that make life sweet and pleasant ; sometimes 
 to feel not the stirring within us of great pow- 
 ers, but the quickening of weak faith and desire 
 for the right, and the enlightenment of dark- 
 ened conscience. 
 
 All these thoughts and many more are en- 
 folded in those richly suggestive, yet brief and 
 comprehensive symbols, the Creeds of the 
 
82 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 Church. When we use them, we must remem- 
 ber that they mean to express all the most true 
 and inspiring facts of divine and human life and 
 the relations between God and man. In the 
 various parts of the Prayer Book, sometimes the 
 prayers are addressed to the Father, sometimes, 
 as in most of the Litany, to the Son, sometimes 
 to the Holy Ghost ; and this richness and 
 variety in the devotional spirit of the Prayer 
 Book is one thing for which we should most 
 highly love and value it. The aim of the Trini- 
 tarian symbol itself is to keep religion from 
 becoming barren or perverted, and, as with all 
 religious symbols, its power to do this is the 
 true measure of its worth. 
 
THE BIBLE. 
 
 83 
 
*' The main thing for us is to ascertain the meaning to 
 which the words (of Scripture) are ministerial ; and we are 
 not to imagine that the sacred writers deceive us because they 
 do not give us the precise words of Him whose meaning they 
 desire to express. Otherwise we shall be like mere miserable 
 catchers at syllables, who imagine that the truth is tied to the 
 points of letters ; whereas, not in words only, but in all other 
 symbols of the mind, it is the mind itself which is to be 
 sought for." — Augustine. 
 
 " Devotion to the letter is the counterfeit of true and im- 
 plicit devotion to the sacred text." — Canon Westcott. 
 
 " Unto a Christian man there can be nothing more neces- 
 sary or profitable than the knowledge of Holy Scripture, 
 forasmuch as in it is contained God's true word, setting forth 
 His glory, and also man's duty." — " Book of Homilies." (See 
 also the sixth of the thirty-nine articles.) 
 
 "There is nothing in the Vedas, nothing in the Avesta, 
 nothing in the sacred books of Egypt, or the philosophy of 
 Greece and Rome, which so unites the grandeur of omnipo- 
 tence with the tenderness of a father toward his child (as the 
 Hebrew Psalms). 
 
 '* These Psalms express the highest and best moments of 
 Jewish life, and rise in certain points to the level of Chris- 
 tianity. They do not contain the Christian spirit of forgive- 
 ness, nor that of love to one's enemy. They are still narrowed 
 to the range of the Jewish land and nation, and do not em- 
 brace humanity. They are mountain summits of faith, rising 
 into the pure air and light of day from hidden depths, and 
 appearing as islands in the ocean. They reach, here and 
 there, the level of the vast continent, though not broad 
 
 84 
 
enoueh themselves to become the home of all races and na- 
 tions." — James Freeman Clarke. 
 
 " That the prophets and apostles taught under the influ- 
 ence of the Holy Spirit, was the universal belief of the ancient 
 church, founded on the testimony of Scripture itself. (See 
 II. Tim. iii. i6, II. Pet. i. 19-21.) But this living idea of 
 inspiration was by no means confined to the written letter. 
 . . . All, however, insisted on the practical importance 
 of Scripture, its richness of Divine wisdom clothed in una- 
 dorned simplicity, and its fitness to promote the edification of 
 believers." — IIagenbach, " History of Doctrines." 
 
 " Few heresies have done more to mislead than the state- 
 ment made by the assembly of divines at Westminster, that 
 the Word of God which is contained in the Scriptures of the 
 Old and New Testaments is the only rule to direct us how we 
 may glorify and enjoy Him." — Gail Hamilton in the Chris- 
 tian Union. 
 
 *' A book let down out of the skies, immaculate, infallible, 
 oracular — this is the traditional view of the Bible. 
 
 " In the name of religion let it die ! 
 
 " Then there will be a resurrection, and the Bible will live 
 again, clothed in a higher form for our most rational rev- 
 erence. All that ever made the Bible a Sacred Book lives on 
 to-day, and will live on while these books exist. Holy men 
 of old spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost. They 
 were most truly inspired. The Biblical writers recorded a real 
 revelation. These books hold for us the works of God. The 
 Word of God speaks to us in the person of Jesus Christ." — 
 R. Heber Newton. 
 
 •as 
 
" With reference to things in the Bible, the question 
 whether they are genuine or spurious is odd enough. What 
 is genuine but that which is truly excellent, which stands in 
 harmony with the purest nature atid reason, and which even 
 now ministers to our highest development ? What is spurious 
 but the absurd and the hollow, which brings no fruit — at 
 least, no good fruit ? " — Goethe. 
 
 " The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We 
 know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what 
 they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken 
 what they do not wish to hear, ' How do you know it is 
 truth, and not an error of your own ? ' We know truth when 
 we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that 
 we are awake. 
 
 ** We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its mani- 
 festation of its own nature by the term Revelation. These 
 are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this 
 communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. 
 It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges 
 of the sea of life. 
 
 "Revelation is the disclosure of the soul." — Emerson, 
 
 " The Over-Soul." 
 
 " The Gospel doth not so much consist in verbis as in vir- 
 tute." — Rev. John Smith. 
 
 "In the first Gospel we have narrative; in the second, 
 memoirs ; in the third, history ; in the fourth, dramatic por- 
 traiture. "—Bishop Ellicott. 
 
 86 
 
THE BIBLE. 
 
 The importance of right views of the Bible 
 can hardly be overstated when we remember 
 the part that Book has played in the history not 
 only of religious beliefs but of Christian civili- 
 zation. A careful discussion of any one of the 
 Sacred Writings that compose it would be im- 
 possible in this brief chapter ; we must rather 
 limit ourselves here to a general statement of 
 the Bible's worth, and of the reasons for the 
 pre-eminence it holds and must ever hold in 
 literature. 
 
 Every great Religion has produced its Bible 
 or collection of Sacred Books, most of which 
 are now to be found in our libraries, printed in 
 English. If we want to know whence the 
 Chinese religionists draw their inspiration, we 
 must turn to the Sacred Books edited by Con- 
 fucius in the sixth century before Christ and to 
 those compiled after his death by his disciples. 
 If we would find the source of the religious in- 
 
 87 
 
SS Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 splration of the people of India we must open 
 the Vedic writings, the Sacred Books of Brah- 
 manism, the oldest of them dating back perhaps 
 two thousand or more years before Christ ; or 
 to the Buddhist Scriptures, with their threefold 
 division, compiled in the sixth century B.C., 
 just after the Buddha's death. If we are study- 
 ing the history of Persia, we shall be charmed 
 with many a passage in the Avestas, the litur- 
 gical books of the Zoroastrian Religion. If we 
 desire light on the complicated religion of the 
 most deeply religious nation of antiquity, the 
 Egyptian, we shall have to turn to the five 
 classes of Egyptian Sacred Books, composed 
 several thousands of years before Christ. The 
 Greeks had their Orphic writings, the Teutonic 
 and Scandinavian Religion had its Eddas, the 
 Mohammedans have their Koran, and the Jews, 
 belonging to the Semitic race, had, and wher- 
 ever they are found still have, their Sacred 
 Books, which, grouped together, we call the 
 Old Testament. 
 
 In our English Bible there are thirty-nine of 
 these Hebrew books, but in the Hebrew com- 
 pilations certain books were united so that 
 there were but twenty-two or twenty-four, and 
 
The Bible, 89 
 
 these the Jews divided into three classes, which 
 they called the Law, the Prophets, and the 
 Sacred Writings, or the Psalms. 
 
 These three classes of Sacred Books differ 
 widely in the purpose of their composition, as 
 well as in authorship and date, and while some 
 of them bear unmistakable traces of the times 
 when they originated, the history of others is 
 not yet sufficiently determined to enable us to 
 say with certainty when they received their 
 final shape. In modern days these writings 
 have been viewed entirely without perspective — 
 history, prophecy, and poetry alike. Any state- 
 ment from the Bible has been treated just like 
 any other, people forgetting to ask when and 
 how the idea embodied in the statement arose, 
 or by what peculiar circumstances it was colored. 
 
 In reality, these Sacred Books comprised the 
 national literature of the Hebrews, some of 
 them embodying their history, or supposed his- 
 tory, some the best thoughts of their poets, and 
 some expressing the lofty moral sense and ele- 
 vated spiritual conceptions of that unique body 
 of men, their Prophets. Nor are the books 
 that have reached us the only ones the Hebrews 
 had. In certain portions of the Old Testament 
 
90 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 there are incidental references to such books as 
 the Book of the Wars of the Lord, the Book of 
 Jashar, and the Annals of the Kings of Israel 
 and Judah, all lost before our Saviour's time, 
 yet all, no doubt, of equal interest historically, 
 poetically, or spiritually, with those preserved. 
 The writing of this mixed collection of He- 
 brew books covers a period of somewhere about 
 sixteen hundred years, the earliest of them, ac- 
 cording to tradition, tracing to the time of 
 Moses, the latest to the time when Nehemiah 
 was governor of Judea in 420 B.C., and in them 
 we find reflected all the different phases of 
 Israel's life and culture and the vicissitudes and 
 changes that successive generations had to re- 
 cord. The early traditions of their origin, such 
 as every nation of antiquity had, are here to be 
 discovered. Their descent from Abraham is 
 recorded, their slavery in Egypt, the beginning 
 of their national life under Moses, their settle- 
 ment in Palestine, their history as a republic, 
 their history as a monarchy, their conquest by 
 a foreign power, and the subsequent restoration 
 to them of independence. Besides this, we have 
 here the lofty moral utterances of their prophets, 
 a body of men who, in successive generations. 
 
The Bible, 9 1 
 
 appeared as reformers of the popular religion, 
 which too often degenerated into a system of 
 merely external observances; and we have a 
 large collection of lyrical psalms, whose best 
 parts are so catholic that, although composed 
 "long before the foundation of Rome and 
 before the time of Homer," they are still in use 
 in Christian worship all over the world, and are 
 ** in every age a fresh spring of hope." 
 
 Extending over so long a period, we should 
 naturally expect to find reflected in these writ- 
 ings a great variety of religious views and states 
 of mind. The Hebrews, even with their marked 
 genius for religion, a genius similar to that dis- 
 played by the Greeks for art and by the Romans 
 for administration, never long remained station- 
 ary in matters of religion. From age to age 
 their religious conceptions changed, even as 
 their ritual took color successively from the ob- 
 servances of the national religions of Egypt and 
 Assyria. And in the same age, widely con- 
 trasting views and differences, as between the 
 spiritual theology of the prophets and the 
 grossly material theology of the priests, are 
 often to be found. 
 
 The theory of the Bible that has prevailed 
 
92 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 among us has not left room, even in the Old 
 Testament, for differences of religious opinion, 
 much less for inaccuracies or mistakes in histori- 
 cal or other matters. But the Old Testament 
 makes no such claim of infallibility for itself. 
 It simply claims to be the national literature of 
 a people, with the very texture of whose organ- 
 ized life a deep religious sense is interwoven. 
 It records their changing and sometimes con- 
 tradictory views concerning God and man. It 
 gives expression to a thousand lofty sentiments 
 that the Divine Spirit has enkindled within 
 them. It voices the universal hope and aspira- 
 tion of religious souls, and puts words of peni- 
 tence and trust into the lips of the sinning and 
 sorrowing. 
 
 " Out from the heart of nature rolled 
 The burdens of the Bible old ; 
 The litanies of nations came, 
 Like the volcano's tongue of flame, 
 Up from the burning core below, — 
 The canticles of love and woe." 
 
 Of the whole Bible Dr. Mulford says : '' It em- 
 braces the most varied forms of literature ; as 
 genealogies, laws, histories, records of legislative 
 and judicial procedure, methods of sanitary,civil, 
 and military administration. There is legend 
 
The Bible, 93 
 
 and myth ; there are various forms of poetry : 
 the ode, as in the antiphone of Moses and 
 Miriam; the drama, as in the Book of Job ; the 
 idyl, as in the Song of Solomon ; the lyric, as in 
 the Book of Psalms and the opening pages of 
 the Gospel of St. Luke ; and in the writings of 
 St. Paul citations from the Greek comedy, as 
 from Menander. 
 
 " There are traces in these writings of the 
 races, countries, and ages in which they ap- 
 peared, and of climatic conditions, with respect 
 to languages and customs and laws. There is 
 a popular element, as in the stories of Samson 
 and Ruth ; and there is also a priestly and a 
 kingly element, as in the books of the Chron- 
 icles and Kings. In some books there are 
 traces of reflective phases of thought, as in the 
 Book of Ecclesiastes ; and in some there are 
 traces of Asiatic forms and Asiatic institu- 
 tions." 
 
 In short, the Old Testament writings must 
 be studied with the same care as other books, 
 and the laws of literary and historic criticism 
 must be applied to them as searchingly as to 
 the literatures of other ancient peoples. Alle- 
 gory and legend must be carefully distinguished 
 
94 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 from straightforward narration ; prophetical 
 rhapsody and fervid poetry must not be forced 
 to yield what is technically known as doctrine. 
 And above all the meaning of inspiration must 
 be clearly defined. 
 
 When we come to the New Testament writ- 
 ings, of which there are, in all, thirty-seven, we 
 find that the conditions under which they have 
 been produced are somewhat different from 
 those under which the various books of the 
 Old Testament have come to be. They were 
 produced in Palestine amid the new religious 
 enthusiasm enkindled by the life and teachings 
 of the Messiah, whose advent indeed made the 
 dawning of a new day for men. 
 
 As Sakya Muni (the Buddha) arose in India, 
 in the seventh century before Christ, to reform 
 the popular religion, so Jesus came in Palestine 
 to reform not only the Hebrew, but all religious 
 faiths. Foretold by the prophets, who, what- 
 ever we may think of their other predictions, 
 certainly foresaw the Messianic times and the 
 more soiritual religion that the Christ should 
 bring, at last the Sun of Righteousness arose 
 " with healing in his wings," the Word became 
 flesh and dwelt among men, full of grace and 
 
The Bible. 95 
 
 truth, and they beheld his glory, and were in- 
 spired with love for the Hfe in God and for him 
 who taught the simple way of life. Out of this 
 inspiration were born the Gospels and St. Paul's 
 Epistles, and the few remaining books that 
 compose the New Testament.* There are inter- 
 esting questions connected with the writing of 
 each of them ; date and authorship are not 
 in every case fully known, nor can we tell the 
 changes that have come upon them in course 
 of transcription. But such matters are not 
 vital. We know from the New Testament that 
 Jesus lived, and that he preached faith in God 
 and man, and taught that self-renunciation, 
 striving after the ideal, is the true way of life, 
 and that at last he died for his principles, and so 
 dying, gave his life for the world ; all else in the 
 records being incidental, and of comparatively 
 little importance to faith. 
 
 ^ The twenty-seven books which compose the New Testa- 
 ment are not all the Sacred Writings known to the early 
 Church. The Gospel of Nicodemus, the Epistles of Barnabas 
 and Clement and the Shepherd of Hermas were read in many 
 churches and held in equal reverence with the books com- 
 prised in our Canon ; while for a long time the right of the 
 2d and 3d Epistles of St. John, the Epistles of St. James, St. 
 Jude, and the 2d of St. Peter, and the Book of Revelation to 
 be regarded as Scripture was greatly disputed. 
 
96 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 As in the case of the Old Testament writings, 
 the true significance of these Epistles and Gos- 
 pels was not at first obscured by superstitious 
 reverence of any sort. But, as happened in 
 later ages with the Hebrew writings, and as in- 
 deed has happened with the Bibles of all faiths, 
 there came a time in the history of Christianity 
 when what was written, as most books are writ- 
 ten, with simple integrity and true purpose, and 
 with common desire to impart to others truth 
 that men had received, came to be regarded as 
 given supernaturally by God. Inspiration is a 
 figurative term, which means divine inbreathing, 
 or movement of the spiritual forces of the soul, 
 but in later Christian times, and especially since 
 the Reformation, inspiration has commonly and 
 most unreasonably meant the dictation by God 
 to men of not only the sentiments but the 
 words of Scripture. There are many of us to 
 whom in early life that view of the Bible was 
 taught, and to whom, at one time, it seemed 
 sacrilegious to express a doubt of the literal 
 truth of even the stories of Samson or Jonah, 
 or the standing still of the sun and moon at 
 Joshua's command, or the speaking of Balaam's 
 ass. And that feeling arose from the belief we 
 
The Bible. 97 
 
 had that the Almighty, who never makes mis- 
 takes, had chosen certain men as His amanu- 
 enses, and had bidden them write all that we 
 found between the covers of the Bible. The 
 view was superstitious and, in the last analysis, 
 destructive of true reverence for the Bible. The 
 Bible with its history, poetry, prophecy, homi- 
 ly, apocalypse, legend, and myth, is a varied 
 record of God's ever progressing, ever widening 
 revelation of truth to men. It shows God not 
 speaking supernaturally ou.t of heaven to men's 
 ears, but speaking naturally, age after age, 
 through their hearts and consciences. It shows 
 the gradual advance of spiritual knowledge and 
 the preparation of at least one part of the world 
 for the Christ, and best of all, it brings us face 
 to face with Jesus himself and his divine work. 
 Let us confess frankly that we find in the 
 Bible mistaken opinions, inconsistencies, con- 
 tradictory statements, and inaccuracies of 
 various sorts. But that does not disturb our 
 enjoyment of the Bible, either in a literary 
 sense, as our noblest English classic, or in a 
 spiritual, as the tenderest and most sacred rec- 
 ord of religious thought and experience in the 
 world. We know that some of the Psalms con- 
 
gS Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 tain false and cruel sentiments common in the 
 times when they were written, but that fact 
 does not prevent our valuing the truly spiritual 
 parts of the Hebrew Psalter; that the mind 
 and words of Jesus were not fully apprehended 
 by his earliest disciples, yet surely such knowl- 
 edge does not forbid our basking in the sun- 
 shine of the Saviour's life and teachings which 
 they record. 
 
 The Bible was written much as other books 
 are written : the historical narratives compiled 
 from all available sources of information, and 
 sometimes perpetuating as history what was 
 clearly mythical or legendary ; the poetical 
 parts shaping themselves in the fervid imagina- 
 tions of poets ; the prophetical having their 
 origin in an unusually high degree of spiritual 
 illumination. 
 
 Its value consists, first, in its appeal to the 
 ethical and spiritual side of man's nature, the 
 divine in him ; and, second, to what is often al- 
 most entirely overlooked, its literary greatness. 
 
 It is related that Sir Walter Scott, in his last 
 illness, when asked what book he would like to 
 have read to him, said : '' There is no book but 
 the Bible," and we can all understand what he 
 
The Bible, 99 
 
 meant by such words. There .s no book like 
 the Bible to quicken the conscience and arouse 
 faith in God. There is no book that can so 
 satisfy man's spiritual hunger, and in life's 
 darkest hours so bring peace. There is no 
 book that so shames the sordid and sensual 
 spirit of the world, and whose utterances are 
 so pronounced against oppression and wrong. 
 The Bible is not a storehouse of proof-texts 
 with which to build systems of theology, but 
 rather the witness to God's life in nature, in 
 history, and in man. It contains the truth of 
 God ; its record is part of the great revelation 
 that is in progress in the world by means of 
 literature, art, government, scientific discovery, 
 and the various movements of individual and 
 social life. 
 
 People sometimes say: "If I must read the 
 Bible just as I read other books, separating be- 
 tween true and false, in its narrative and other 
 parts, how am I ever to be sure that I have the 
 truth ? " The answer to that is : the Bible was 
 given to teach the old truths that save the soul 
 — that is, that make men brave and manly, de- 
 vout and tender, honest and pure ; given to 
 help us keep in mind that we are all children of 
 
lOO Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 God, and that sin against Him and His divine 
 laws means sin against our own natures ; that 
 the Bible teaches no truth as necessary to salva- 
 tion but the old truths that in every age have 
 found response in the hearts and consciences of 
 wise and reverent men. 
 
 If we are ever in doubt about the truth of 
 the moral or religious sentiments expressed in 
 any part of the Bible, we may safely test them 
 by the highest standards we know, especially 
 the standard of Christ's perfect life and teach- 
 ings. If they agree with that they are right, if 
 not they are wrong. Lord Falkland wisely 
 says: ''To those that follow their reason in 
 the interpretation of the Scriptures, God will 
 either give His grace for assistance to find the 
 truth, or His pardon if they miss it." 
 
 The literary value of the Bible has been but 
 little regarded in places where people cared 
 about the Book principally for the proof texts 
 it yielded for their favorite dogmas. But the 
 Bible is a collection of venerable and noble 
 writings, that together make a book without a 
 parallel in the world. It is a varied literature, 
 containing lofty imagination, eloquence and 
 poetry unsurpassed, wonderfully-written narra- 
 
The Bible, loi 
 
 tive, delightful biography, interesting tradition 
 and legend, profound spiritual utterances, and 
 fresh, clear, crisp suggestions for practical life. 
 There have been few, if any, great literary 
 men who have not been lovers of the Bible, 
 whether they cared for the popular theology 
 that was forced from its pages or not. Emer- 
 son, whose great mission was to show that rev- 
 elation is not confined to a book, but is broad 
 and deep as human history and human life, nay, 
 universal as creation itself, says, among other 
 noble things, of the Bible: "The most original 
 book in the world is the Bible. This old col- 
 lection of the ejaculations of love and dread, of 
 the supreme desires and contritions of men, 
 proceeding out of the region of the grand and 
 eternal, seems . . . the alphabet of the nations. 
 . . . The elevation of this book may be meas- 
 ured by observing how certainly all observa- 
 tion of thought clothes itself in its words and 
 forms of speech. . . . Whatever is majestically 
 thought in a great moral element, instantly 
 approaches this old Sanscrit. . . . Shakespeare, 
 the first literary genius of the world, the highest 
 in whom the moral is not the predominating 
 element, leans on the Bible ; his poetry pre- 
 
I02 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 supposes it. . . . People imagine that the place 
 which the Bible holds in literature it owes to 
 miracles. It owes it simply to the fact that it 
 came out of a profounder depth of thought 
 than any other book." 
 
 To the ordinary teaching of the Bible by re- 
 ligious people and in the Churches, is distinctly 
 due much of the neglect the Bible now suffers 
 among us. It is the record of faith and so the 
 inspirer of faith ; and it is our noblest classic, 
 to be studied before Homer or Shakespeare, or 
 any of the great authors of ancient or modern 
 times. It should be read rationally. It should 
 be read daily. Its sacred words should be com- 
 mitted to memory in early life and treasured to 
 old age. Its biographies should be studied, its 
 poetry enjoyed, its righteous principles taken 
 into the soul, and its uplifting, spiritual truths 
 suffered to steal into our lives like the perfume 
 of flowers, or soft strains of music at the even- 
 tide. 
 
THE CHURCH. 
 
 I03 
 
" Every idea must have a visible unfolding ; a habitation 
 is necessary to any principle ; a church is God between four 
 walls; every dogma must have a temple." — Victor Hugo. 
 
 " In the very earliest period, the Christian society presents 
 itself as a simple association of a common creed and common 
 sentiments ; the first Christians united to enjoy together the 
 same emotions and the same religious convictions. We find 
 among them no system of determinate doctrines, no rules, no 
 discipline, no body of magistrates, 
 
 " At the end of the fourth and at the beginning of the fifth 
 century, Christianity was no longer merely an individual 
 belief ; it was an institution ; it was constituted. It was not 
 only a religion, it was also a church." — Guizox's " History of 
 Civilization." 
 
 " The various grades of the Christian clergy have sprung up 
 in Christian society in the same ways, and by the same divine, 
 because the same natural, necessity as the various grades of 
 government, law, and science." — Dean Stanley. 
 
 "In its earliest usage, therefore, catholic means univer- 
 sal as opposed to individual, particular. The Church through- 
 out the world is called catholic, just as the resurrection of all 
 mankind is called catholic. In its later sense, as a fixed at- 
 tribute, it implies orthodoxy as opposed to heresy, conformity 
 as opposed to dissent. Thus, to the primary idea of extension 
 are superadded also the ideas of doctrine and unity. But 
 this later sense grows out of the earlier. The truth was 
 the same everywhere, quod semper, quod ubique, quod at 
 Oiunibus. The heresies were partial, scattered, localized, 
 isolated." — Bishop Ligiitfoot. 
 
 " The life of the spirit has its witness to the world in the 
 Church. 
 
 *' The Church has an organic unity and life. 
 
 " The Church is the company of all faithful people. 
 
 " The Church is the witness to the life of the spirit in 
 humanity. It is not the source of the life of the spirit, but 
 the witness of it. The spirit is not the gift of the Church, 
 
 104 
 
but the Church of the spirit. The words of faith which can- 
 not be transposed are : * I believe in the Holy Ghost ; in the 
 holy Catholic Church,' " — Mulford, " Republic of God." 
 
 "Our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in 
 heaven and earth is named." — St. Paul. 
 
 " The Gospel first placed these two great principles as the 
 main pillars of the new moral structure : God the universal 
 Father ; mankind one brotherhood ; God made known 
 through the mediation of His Son, the image and humanized 
 type and exemplar of His goodness ; mankind of one kin- 
 dred, and therefore of equal rank in the sight of the 
 Creator, and to be united in one spiritual commonwealth." — 
 Dean Milman, "History of Christianity," vol. I., p. 204. 
 
 " To you and me and men like ourselves is committed, in 
 these anxious days, that which is at once an awful responsi- 
 bility and a splendid destiny— to transform this modern world 
 into a Christian society. ... to gather together the 
 scattered forces of a divided Christendom into a confederation, 
 in which organization will be of less account than fellowship 
 with one spirit and faith in one Lord — into a communion 
 wide as human life and deep as human need — into a Church 
 which shall outshine even the golden glory of its dawn by the 
 splendor of its eternal noon." — Edwin Hatch, M.A., 
 Bampton Lectures, 1880. 
 
 " I am truly thankful to hear that I have helped to make 
 a Churchman of you. The longer I live the more I find the 
 Church of England the most rational, liberal, practical form 
 which Christianity has yet assumed. . . . Strange to 
 say, Thomas Carlyle now says that the Church of England is 
 the most rational thing he sees now going." — " Life of 
 Charles Kingsley," vol. IL, p. 136 (extract from a private 
 letter). 
 
 " The Church must welcome to its bosom all who are will- 
 ing to be taught of Jesus, and to bear His cross ; all who have 
 come to Him and acknowledged Him as the Master." — Bishop 
 Vail. 
 
 105 
 
THE CHURCH. 
 
 Churches or societies for the promotion of 
 religious life and thought have always existed 
 in the world, and it is difficult to see how the 
 growth of mankind in knowledge and culture 
 has made them any less necessary to-day than 
 they have ever been. Our conception of the 
 function of religion may be different from that 
 our fathers held. The Church may no longer 
 regard it as her mission to try to frighten 
 people into the kingdom of heaven with un- 
 natural teachings concerning God and the life 
 to come, but surely man needs as much as ever 
 for the development of his spiritual faculties, 
 the quickening of his conscience, the nurture of 
 his true instincts and perceptions, the pure 
 and gentle ministrations of the unseen spirit, 
 who in all ages has influenced the soul through 
 churches and sacraments and prayers, and whose 
 perpetual mission it is to redeem the world 
 
 from sordidness and sin by showing it the essen- 
 
 107 
 
io8 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 tial truth its life contains. The Church is the 
 great witness to the truth within man as well 
 as without, and ail questions concerning it, 
 historical or otherwise, must therefore be full of 
 interest. 
 
 There are two ways of thought regard- 
 ing the origin of institutions or customs with 
 which we are familiar, and which age or long 
 use has made sacred. One of these ways is 
 to imagine the institution or custom as hav- 
 ing come full-fledged into existence in some 
 remote time, under the sanction of some high 
 authority ; the other to regard it as having 
 been slowly evolved out of preexistent con- 
 ditions or modes. The latter way of thought 
 is that now universally followed in scientific 
 investigation of all sorts, and by the most 
 trustworthy students in every department of 
 research. Just as we trace our own present 
 judgments in matters of thought and practical 
 life back to their crude beginnings in our child- 
 ish conceptions of things about and things 
 above us, so the modern student has learned 
 that if he would understand them he must 
 trace familiar institutions and rites back to 
 their earliest beginnings. 
 
The Church. 109 
 
 The introduction of this method into the 
 sphere of religion has wrought great changes in 
 modern theological conceptions, and through- 
 out enlightened Protestantism has released 
 men from slavery to irrational views concern- 
 ing the visible Church and its symbols or sacra- 
 ments. 
 
 There are few subjects on which so much 
 has been written as the proper organization of 
 the Christian Church. Romanists have written 
 in defence of the Papacy, English and Ameri- 
 can Churchmen have written in defence of 
 Episcopacy, Presbyterians, Independents, and 
 Methodists have successively argued for their 
 peculiar form of church order. And almost all, 
 in turn, have claimed for themselves an exclu- 
 sive divine right to exist. Among this medley 
 of opinions, unfortunately, all claiming support 
 from the same passages in the New Testament, 
 and all appealing with equal confidence to 
 apostolic usage, it is no wonder that many a 
 man has given up trying to decide what seemed 
 so perplexing a question, and at last has grown 
 indifferent to all forms of organized Christi- 
 anity. 
 
 Indifference to the Church as an institution 
 
1 1 o Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 is not, however, philosophical or right, any 
 more than indifference to the state and its con- 
 stitution, for, as there are important philosophi- 
 cal principles involved in all existing theories 
 of government, so there are in all theories of 
 church order and administration. 
 
 When a number of men are inspired with 
 common sentiments, the first thing that sug- 
 gests itself is the idea of organization. Com- 
 munity of feeling quickly draws them together, 
 and besides, united they will be better able to 
 extend their principles among others. The 
 christian Churches of the Apostolic age were 
 formed in obedience to this law of organization, 
 and there is no more reason to suppose that in 
 the beginning God gave express commands con- 
 cerning them, than that He gave express com- 
 mands concerning the government of the em- 
 pire into which Christianity was born. He is 
 the inspirer of true religion and good order 
 everywhere, and He loves ** whatsoever is lovely 
 and of good report." Thus we have the right 
 to claim the most divine sanction for whatever 
 Church organization, in the better judgment of 
 mankind, seems to embody most faithfully the 
 true principles of religion and order. Hooker, 
 
The Church. I Ij 
 
 in his "Ecclesiastical Polity," says: "Church 
 government is a thing which the Church itself 
 constitutes under a Divine authorization to do 
 so," " We must note that he that affirmeth 
 speech to be necessary among all men through- 
 out the world doth not thereby import that all 
 men must necessarily speak one kind of lan- 
 guage. Even so the necessity of polity and 
 regimen in all churches may be held, without 
 holding any one certain form to be necessary 
 for them all." 
 
 The theory of the church, however, that in 
 the third century, under the influence of Cyp- 
 rian, Bishop of Carthage, shaped itself for West- 
 ern Christendom, regarded the episcopal order 
 alone as having a right to exist, and sought to 
 limit the working of God's grace to that, ap- 
 pealing to Scripture no less than tradition for 
 its authority. The Presbyterian and Indepen- 
 dent Churches of the sixteenth century, disput- 
 ing the exclusive claims of the mediaeval cath- 
 olic church, in the same spirit, likewise appealed 
 to Scripture, and so there have come down to 
 our time, besides the Roman Catholic, two dis- 
 tinct and indeed mutually exclusive theories of 
 the church, each building itself on Scripture, 
 
1 1 2 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 and seeking to prove itself the true Apostolic 
 Church. These two views are thus described 
 by Bishop Kip in his '' Double Witness of the 
 Church " : " We contend, then, that in accord- 
 ance with the directions given by our Lord, 
 His Apostles, acting under the direct influence 
 of the Holy Spirit, established a Church having 
 a ministry of three orders, and which has been 
 continued by their successors down to the pres- 
 ent time. These three orders were: 1st, the 
 Apostles, called in the following age the Bish- 
 ops ; 2d, the Presbyters or Elders; and 3d, the 
 Deacons. 
 
 " We contend, also, that there is no instance 
 of ordination recorded in Scripture, as being per- 
 formed by any except the Apostles, or others, 
 as Timothy, or Titus, who had been invested 
 by them with the authority of Bishops ; in 
 other words, that there is no instance anywhere 
 of mere Presbyters ordaining. And we believe 
 that this remained an established rule of the 
 Church, never violated for more than 1500 
 years, until at the Reformation in the sixteenth 
 century, when some bodies of Christians, who 
 had separated from the Church, proceeded to 
 ordain ministers by the hands of mere priests 
 
The Church. 1 1 3 
 
 or Presbyters. We therefore require in those 
 who officiate at our altars that they should be 
 Episcopally ordained — that is, that they should 
 be ordained by some Bishop, who has derived 
 his authority from those Bishops who went be- 
 fore him in the Church in uninterrupted succes- 
 sion since the Apostles' days. This is the doc- 
 trine of the Apostolical succession. On the 
 other hand, those who deny the necessity of 
 Episcopal government, assert that the Apostles 
 of the Early Church left no successors — that is, 
 that it is not necessary for ordination to be per- 
 formed by a Bishop — that there is but one or- 
 der of ministers in the Church, that of Presby- 
 ters — and that these have a right, by their own 
 authority, to ordain and admit to the ministry. 
 Such, then, is the dividing line between us, and 
 to decide which view is right and most in ac- 
 cordance with the government of the Primitive 
 Church, we must refer to intimations given in 
 Scripture, and the testimony of History in the 
 earliest ages of our faith." 
 
 From this point Bishop Kip, to support his 
 view of the sole divine authority of an episcopal 
 organization of the church, goes on to build, by 
 analogy, an argument from the Jewish Church 
 
1 1 4 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 and its complicated organization, from certain 
 incidental passages in the New Testament, and 
 from early Christian history. 
 
 His argument is elaborated with great care, 
 but one feels, as he follows it, that it is hardly 
 more binding on reason than the equally in- 
 genious argument for the sole authority of the 
 papal organization, since it takes almost as 
 much for granted. The chief assumption which 
 underlies all claims, Avhether of Episcopalians, 
 Presbyterians, or Independents, for the sole di- 
 vine right of a particular form of church order, 
 is that Jesus intended to establish such an or- 
 der to the exclusion of any other. But it seems 
 strange that any one can read the simple story 
 of his life and teachings, and not feel how sig- 
 nificant is his silence with regard to the exter- 
 nals of religion ; can find any thing like hier- 
 archical pretensions or aims in those earnest 
 missionary teachers — his first disciples. When 
 Jesus was asked about the external signs of his 
 kingdom, he invariably tried to show men that 
 his kingdom meant the advance of spirituality 
 and faith. When his earliest disciples formed 
 new Christian congregations, they seemed desir- 
 ous of giving them the simplest and fewest laws 
 
The Church, 115 
 
 necessary for their corporate existence ; when 
 St. Paul spoke sorrowfully about schism, he did 
 it not as the advocate of a theory of the church 
 such as Cyprian and Augustine long afterward 
 held — a theory which limited God's kingdom 
 to a certain external order, and made it a fear- 
 ful sin to violate that, — but rather as a Christian 
 minister, who saw a community wickedly quar- 
 relling over the most peaceable and sacred truths 
 of religion, and instead of living as brethren in 
 one household of faith, setting up rival house- 
 holds, and so practically denying the most vital 
 principles of the Gospel. 
 
 We have no evidence that Jesus or the 
 Apostles held or sought to promulgate any ex- 
 clusive theory of church order or legislation. 
 All over Judea congregations of Jews existed, 
 each with its separate corps of elders, part of 
 whom were appointed to conduct its worship, 
 part to manage its affairs, and whenever one of 
 these synagogue congregations became con- 
 vinced that Jesus was the Messiah it seems to 
 have taken on a Christian form, without, in 
 any essential particular, changing its constitu- 
 tion. The Apostles or persons appointed by 
 them naturally assumed the general oversight 
 
1 1 6 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 of these new congregations and their elder- 
 ships, especially where they were formed in 
 non-Jewish communities, and thus, so far as can 
 be ascertained, for in the New Testament there 
 is a marked absence of direct statement con- 
 cerning it, the polity of the early church grew 
 up, — a polity that would seem to have been for 
 the most part accidental rather than delib- 
 erately planned, and to have combined some of 
 the features of both Presbyterianism and Inde- 
 pendency, but to have contained, at least in 
 germ, the moderate Episcopacy of a later time. 
 We have little accurate knowledge of the 
 growth of the episcopal order during the first 
 three centuries. Certain passages from a letter 
 called the Epistle to the CorintJtians^ written by 
 Clement of Rome, a fellow-laborer of St. Paul, 
 in the second century, and from the letters of 
 Ignatius, who was martyred about the year 
 115, and from the writings of Irenseus, who 
 died at the beginning of the third century, are 
 confidently appealed to by those who desire to 
 trace the episcopal order of the church to 
 Jesus and the Apostles. On the other hand, 
 those who believe in episcopacy as a growth or 
 development, think that the supremacy of the 
 
The Chm^c/i. 117 
 
 bishop, which is clearly enough to be seen in 
 the Latin Church in the third century, the time 
 of TertuUian and Cyprian, had its origin in 
 simple respect for seniority, and the preemi- 
 nence naturally accorded chief presbyters or 
 elders in the more important churches. On 
 this disputed point, Dean Milman, in his " His- 
 tory of Christianity " (vol. I., p. 19), has spoken 
 wisely and fairly, and as he has left the ques- 
 tion, so we think all fair-minded people should 
 leave it. " The whole of Christendom," he 
 says, " when it emerges out of the obscurity of 
 the first century, appears uniformly governed 
 by certain superiors of each community called 
 ' bishops,' but the origin and extent of this 
 superiority, and the manner in which the 
 Bishop assumed a distinct authority from the 
 inferior presbyters, is one of those difficult 
 questions of Christian history, which, since the 
 Reformation, has been more and more dark- 
 ened by those fatal enemies to candid and dis- 
 passionate enquiry, prejudice and interest." 
 
 And again (vol. II., p. 30) : '' The manner and 
 the period of the separation of a distinct class, 
 a hierarchy, from the general body of the com- 
 munity, and the progress of the great division 
 
1 1 8 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 between the clergy and the laity, are equally 
 obscure with the primitive constitution of the 
 church. Like the Judaism of the provinces, 
 Christianity (at first) had no sacerdotal order." 
 
 Tradition assigns the establishment of epis- 
 copacy, at least in Asia Minor, to St. John, and 
 the Latin father Jerome, as quoted by Hooker 
 (" Ecclesiastical Polity," vol. IIL, book 7, p. 
 130), says: ** Till through instinct of the devil, 
 there grew in the Church factions, and among 
 the people it began to be professed, I am of 
 Paul, I of ApoUos, I of Cephas, churches were 
 governed by the common voice of presbyters ; 
 but when every one began to reckon those 
 whom he had baptized, his own, and not Christ's, 
 it was decreed in the whole world that one 
 chosen out of the presbyters should be placed 
 above the rest, to whom all the care of the 
 Church should belong, and so all seeds of schism 
 be removed." It is not improbable that in 
 some quarters episcopacy may thus have origi- 
 nated, and that St. John, as tradition says, may 
 have had much to do with the appointment of 
 successors to the Apostles. 
 
 But it is clearly impossible to establish the 
 extreme view of Cyprian or Augustine, that 
 
The Church. 1 1 9 
 
 there is*' no Church without a bishop " ; and, 
 at least, the difficulties of New Testament inter- 
 pretation, and the uncertainties of early church 
 history, are far too great to warrant us in tell- 
 ing an inquirer that if he will read for himself 
 he Avill find the proofs. 
 
 What reasons, then, have Episcopalians for 
 their adherence to the Episcopal Church, and 
 on what grounds can they ask people bred 
 under other systems to give it their allegiance ? 
 No Episcopalian can properly tell people that 
 his is the only Church, for we have no suffi- 
 cient grounds for the belief that either Jesus 
 or his Apostles contemplated a particular 
 form of church organization, never to be 
 abrogated nor changed. Much of the best 
 Christian life for centuries has not been included 
 in the Churches that hold to the Catholic order 
 — that is, that acknowledge bishops ; and the 
 church's only apology for being is the mission 
 she has to make men realize their sonship of 
 God. 
 
 The Episcopal or Anglican Church is one of 
 the great Churches of Christendom, her history 
 tracing back to the earliest period of the estab- 
 lishment of Christianity in Britain, her consti- 
 
1 20 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 tution essentially the same as that of the Greek 
 and Roman Churches. But Christianity would 
 have a very hopeless outlook if we were obliged 
 to limit it to either the Greek, the Roman, or 
 the English Church, or to all of them combined, 
 for in both East and West a large part of the 
 Christian population belongs to other churches 
 than these, many of which have no idea of 
 adopting the episcopal order. 
 
 In the United States a large proportion of 
 the clergy of the Episcopal Church have been 
 bred wholly, or in part, in other communions, 
 and to her laity there are accessions continually, 
 from the surrounding churches. It was recently 
 stated that, in the last twenty years, the number 
 of communicants in the Episcopal Church in 
 the United States had grown from 161,224 to 
 398,098, and the number of dioceses and juris- 
 dictions from 34 to 65, and much of this growth, 
 at least in the number of communicants, has 
 been in the older States, and in places where 
 Calvinism once prevailed. But it is clearly not 
 true that changes from Calvinism*, or Unitarian- 
 ism, are commonly the result of a conviction 
 that the Episcopal Church is the only true 
 church. There are other sufficient reasons for 
 
The Church. 121 
 
 such changes without supposing the adoption 
 of so groundless a theory as this. The Episco- 
 pal Church has advantages which some others 
 do not possess; she has a history that goes 
 back continuously to the establishment of reli- 
 gion in Britain in the second century. She has 
 a liturgy that, in the so-called Protestant world, 
 for dignity and spirituality, has no parallel. 
 She is catholic, not only, according to the ear- 
 liest usage of that word, in that she recognizes 
 herself as part of the great Christian family, 
 and feels in herself the thrills of all true life, 
 but also in the later meaning of the word, where- 
 by it stood for that part of the Christian world 
 which recognized the episcopal order, and to 
 whose keeping, through the Middle Ages, were 
 entrusted the rich treasures of tradition that 
 have come down to us. She has a doctrine of 
 apostolic succession which keeps her from de- 
 generating into mere voluntaryism. But this 
 doctrine of apostolic succession does not mean 
 that, in some magical way, special grace is con- 
 veyed by the touch of a bishop's hands, but 
 rather that the Church recognizes herself as a 
 continuous body, whose threefold order has 
 never been broken as far back as church history 
 
12 2 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 can be traced/ An Independent Church can 
 make itself at any time, without reference to 
 what has gone before. The Episcopal Church 
 has a permanent external order and authority, 
 which she transmits from age to age. Thus she 
 is able to bring into modern civilization, with its 
 unsettled conditions, its comparative newness 
 and crudeness, an element of stability and per- 
 manence that such a civilization greatly needs. 
 A pastor of one of the leading Unitarian 
 Churches of the Eastern States said lately, on 
 
 ' We are perfectly familiar with the disputes regarding the 
 age of the Episcopal Church — whether she may properly 
 claim to be the English Church of the Middle Ages reformed, 
 or whether her origin is to be sought in Reformation times. 
 Can any church perpetuating the main principle of organiza- 
 tion, the chief traditions belonging to historic Christianity, 
 never having broken with these, be ranked, in point of age, 
 with the churches that newly arose during the Reformation ? 
 
 It may be further alleged that a few hundred years, more 
 or less, does not increase the value of such an organization. 
 But there are few in cultured communities who are insensible 
 to the claims of antiquity, or the notes of catholicity. 
 
 That the Episcopal Church, as she now is, is not free from 
 serious limitations, is, however, apparent to all who desire for 
 Christianity the largest and most rational expression ; and 
 there are many within her fold who, while strongly attached 
 to her, yet look to see her and other churches merged into a 
 great American Catholic Church. It would, however, seem 
 that this Church of the future must in some form perpetuate 
 the main features of historic Christianity. 
 
The Church. 123 
 
 his return from a trip through some of the 
 newer parts of the West, that he had never felt 
 so strongly the value of the Episcopal Church 
 as when he had found it, with its orderly and 
 beautiful service, in rude and rough places on 
 the frontier. It was, he said, the only bit of 
 refined civilization they had. This is not true 
 of other parts of the country, yet there can 
 be little doubt that it is from a conviction that 
 she, of all churches, is best equipped for the 
 work of advancing a higher type of Christian 
 civilization, that so many men turn from other 
 churches to her doors. 
 
 A few years ago, when the Calvinistic 
 churches were more hide-bound than now, 
 people used to look with wonder on the differ- 
 ences of opinion that existed within the Episco- 
 pal Church, and some gave her, a little in deri- 
 sion, the epithet of the '* Roomy Church." But, 
 of late, the sneer has died away, and there are 
 few who do not now feel that her breadth 
 is one thing that shows her fitness to be the 
 spiritual home of the human brotherhood. 
 She is not a school of philosophy, but the 
 nursery of the instincts of worship, and of pure 
 and earnest life. 
 
124 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 Her terms of admission are not found in 
 articles of faith, but rather in the recognition of 
 the native obhgations of the soul to truth and 
 virtue. She gathers the tempted to her altars 
 and gives them strength, the doubting and 
 gives them faith, the sorrowing and gives them 
 consolation, and none are too weak, too doubt- 
 ing, or too sad to find a welcome in her fold. 
 So in the future as in the past it would seem 
 that her progress must keep pace with the 
 growth of thought and culture. 
 
 To sum up what we have said : churches 
 were first established in obedience to the in- 
 stinct that bids men of like sentiments unite. 
 They were established for the promotion of 
 the moral and spiritual — that is, the whole wel- 
 fare of mankind. They were meant to help 
 men realize the divine sonhood, the universal 
 brotherhood, and amid the fleeting conditions 
 of this human life to give the soul a firmer 
 grasp on that which never changes. The laws of 
 their polity were the divine principles that are 
 given for the establishment of good govern- 
 ment everywhere, the principles of catholicity 
 and permanence. These conditions the Episco- 
 pal Church, in her constitution, fully realizes, 
 
The Chtirch. 125 
 
 and it is the continual aim of all large-minded 
 men within her fold to keep her true to her 
 divine mission — to teach men morality and 
 faith, and to unite them in a large and rational 
 way for the promotion of the truths that save 
 society and lift mankind nearer to God. 
 
 In opposition to the sectarian principle that 
 men have a right to make churches on the basis 
 of individual opinions, she declares that no 
 church can properly be made except on the 
 basis of fundamental moral and spiritual truth, 
 and that in such a church many individual 
 opinions must necessarily exist. 
 
 In the modern Christian world she stands for 
 unity and permanence. 
 
 Into her thought of unity come past, present, 
 and future. Her fellowship is with true souls 
 of all times : 
 
 " The saints above and those below 
 But one communion make." 
 
 Her permanence is the witness to the un- 
 changing life of God, and the eternal supremacy 
 in the universe of His kingdom of law and 
 love. 
 
THE SACRAMENTS. 
 
 127 
 
" Earth 's crammed with heaven, 
 And every common bush afire with God ; 
 But only he who sees takes off his shoes." 
 
 — Mrs. Browning. 
 
 " The sacraments become the evidence of the common life of 
 humanity. They take up the types of nature in its own hfe. 
 This water is the symbol of purity ; this bread and wine are 
 the symbols of the strength and joy of man. They are the 
 common elements of life. They are the witness of the pres- 
 ence of Him in the life of humanity, in whom the worship of 
 the visible is overcome and destroyed. This baptism is given 
 to children of every tribe and race ; as the sign of their com- 
 mon relation with Him, who hath broken down the wall of 
 partition, to make in Himself of twain one new man." — 
 MuLFORD, " Republic of God." 
 
 " Observe, then, baptism does not create a child of God. It 
 authoritatively declares him. It does not make the fact ; it 
 only reveals it. If baptism made it a fact, then and there for 
 the first time baptism would be magic. Nay, faith does not 
 create a child of God any more than baptism, nor does it 
 make a fact. It only appropriates that which is a fact already. 
 
 " The Catechism, however, says : ' In baptism I was made 
 a child of God.' Yes ; coronation makes a sovereign ; but, 
 paradoxical as it may seem, it can only make a sovereign one 
 who is a sovereign already. Crown a pretender, that corona- 
 tion will not create the king. 
 
 128 
 
"This doctrine protests against the notion of our being 
 separate units in the Divine life. The church of Calvinism 
 is merely a collection of atoms, — a sand-heap piled together, 
 with no cohesion among themselves ; or a mass of steel filings 
 cleaving separately to a magnet, but not to each other. Bap- 
 tism proclaims a church — humanity joined in Christ to God. 
 
 " The things of earth are pledges of things in heaven. It 
 is not for nothing that God has selected for His sacrament 
 the commonest of all acts — a meal, — and the most abundant 
 of all materials — w^ater. Think you that He means to say 
 that only through two channels His Spirit streams into the 
 soul ? Or is it not much more in unison with His dealings to 
 say that these two are set apart to signify to us the sacra- 
 mental character of all nature ? "—Rev. F. W. Robertson. 
 
 " In the early Church, the careful distinction which later 
 times have made between Baptism, Regeneration, Conversion, 
 and Repentance did not exist. They all meant the same 
 thing. 
 
 "As in other parts of the Bible the hand, the heart, the 
 face of God are used for God Himself, so the body, the 
 flesh of Christ, are used for Christ Himself, for His whole 
 personality and character." — Dean Stanley, "Christian 
 Institutions." 
 
 " The real presence of Christ's body and blood is not to be 
 sought for in the Sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the 
 Sacrament. " — Hooker. 
 
 129 
 
THE SACRAMENTS. 
 
 Religion has always formed for its outward 
 expression rites or symbols to serve as rallying 
 points for faith and worship. Some simple ob- 
 ject or act of common life has generally been 
 pressed into this sacred use, and thus has been 
 so charged with special significance, so freight- 
 ed with new meaning, that in time its true 
 origin, as a religious rite, has come to be for- 
 gotten. 
 
 Baptism and the Lord's Supper are the two 
 symbolical and representative sacramental rites 
 of the Christian Religion. 
 
 They are the two simple acts of washing and 
 eating exalted above life's other common 
 acts for the purposes of organized Christianity; 
 and their history has been much the same as 
 that of other representative religious rites not 
 only of Christianity but of the older Religions. 
 Beginning simply and naturally, in time they 
 have come to be regarded with superstitious 
 
 131 
 
132 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 reverence, and to be adored, not for the truth 
 they were set apart to represent, but for them- 
 selves. We are all perfectly familiar with the 
 two opposite ways of regarding them that pre- 
 vail among us. The Roman Catholic Church 
 holds them as sacred mysteries to be rever- 
 enced beyond all other religious acts, because 
 of some supposed vital relation in which they 
 stand to the soul of man, while the extreme 
 wing of so-called rational or non-churchly 
 Christianity regards them as archaic and out- 
 worn rites, no more claiming the allegiance of 
 people to-day than the grand and impressive 
 ceremonial of the Egyptian Religion or the 
 sacrificial rites of old-time Judaism. The truth 
 about them, as usual, lies between these two 
 extremes. There is nothing in the accounts of 
 their early institution or in the nature of the 
 case, to warrant us in giving them the rever- 
 ence of the Roman Catholic, and there is much 
 to make us value them far beyond those who 
 treat them as the mere playthings of supersti- 
 tion. Any rite or symbol that has been loved 
 and venerated by large numbers of earnest peo- 
 ple, and that has ministered to spirituality and 
 peace, however opinions may differ as to its 
 
The Saa^ame fits. 133 
 
 permanent usefulness, demands respectful treat- 
 ment from all. 
 
 There are two questions to be considered in 
 this chapter on the Christian Sacraments, their 
 history, and their perpetual significance and 
 value. 
 
 BAPTISM. 
 
 Baptism is the first of them, and it takes us 
 far away from our present surroundings to the 
 remote East, among peoples whose modes of 
 thought and expression differ widely from our 
 own, and whose habits of life, owing to climatic 
 conditions wholly dissimilar to ours, are often 
 such as we can hardly understand. 
 
 In Oriental countries, owing to the dust and 
 heat, both cleanliness and comfort demand 
 very frequent bathing of the whole body ; and 
 the out-door life and comparatively small 
 amount of clothing worn make the bath a sim- 
 pler matter than with us. We cannot there- 
 fore be surprised when in all the great Reli- 
 gions of the East we find the act of washing 
 the body, either completely or in part, used to 
 symbolize internal purification, or transforma- 
 tion of character. 
 
134 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 There has been much fruitless discussion, 
 among people who felt it necessary to perpet- 
 uate the exact form of administration of Bap- 
 tism known to the early converts of Christian- 
 ity, concerning the use and prevalence of this 
 rite among the Hebrews before Christ's time, 
 but it is much more to the purpose to discover 
 that the rite was connected with the religion 
 not only of the Hebrews but of all other 
 Eastern peoples ; that the Egyptians, Persians, 
 and Hindoos, as well as the Hebrews, baptized 
 those whom they wished to initiate into the 
 full privileges of faith, or for whom they desired 
 greater holiness of life. 
 
 Thus, when John, the herald of the Messiah 
 arose in the wilderness of Judea, no priest, but 
 an intensely devout and earnest layman who, 
 in common with many of the Jewish sect of 
 the Essenes and with some of the older 
 prophets, had retired to the wilderness to gain 
 spiritual power by contemplation, prayer, and 
 fasting, he naturally coupled with his preach- 
 ing the simple, healthful act of bathing the 
 body. 
 
 The Essenes were even more scrupulous 
 bathers than the Pharisees, for the sake of 
 
The Sacra7nents, ' 135 
 
 their ablutions always choosing their solitary 
 abodes on the banks of rivers or in the vicinity 
 of clear mountain springs. Indeed, ceremonial 
 bathing took up a great part of their time, and 
 so there is no reason why the baptism of John 
 should have awakened more surprise among 
 the people of Palestine than it did. The bath 
 in water was so much a part of the outward 
 religious life of the Hebrews that no one could 
 think it strange or other than appropriate that 
 when he found their hearts stirred by his 
 preaching the prophet not only spoke ear- 
 nestly to them about their lives, but gave them 
 a bath in the river Jordan, whose soft, re- 
 freshing waters flowed near by, so sending them 
 back into the world freshly consecrated to God 
 and His service. 
 
 From this natural beginning grew the Chris- 
 tian rite of Baptism, for although John's active 
 mission was soon ended, the early Christian 
 teachers, some of whom, as indeed Jesus him- 
 self, had received baptism in the Jordan, con- 
 tinued the practice of baptizing those who 
 came under the deeper influences of the re- 
 ligious life. 
 
 At first the rite seems to have been limited 
 
136 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 to those who in adult life embraced the spirit- 
 ual truths Jesus taught, but little by little, as 
 in the older religions, it came to be performed 
 on infants and little children, the ceremony in 
 these cases differing somewhat from that used 
 in the baptism of adults. It is impossible to 
 trace the steps by which this change came 
 about. The sources of church history in the 
 first and second centuries are exceedingly 
 meagre, and we have no means of knowing 
 whether infants were baptized in Apostolic 
 times or not. It is certain, however, that the 
 practice of Infant Baptism was not universal, 
 in some quarters perhaps not common, even so 
 late as the middle of the fourth century, for 
 the Fathers, Chrysostom, Gregory Nazianzen, 
 Ephrem of Edessa, Ambrose, Basil, and Au- 
 gustine, all born of Christian parents and all 
 save one during the first half of this century, 
 were not baptized until they reached adult life. 
 Nor can we be certain which influence was 
 stronger in bringing about its general accept- 
 ance — the natural and proper feeling that the 
 Christian Church was a school for the education 
 of young and old in faith and worship, or 
 that dark superstition fostered by Augustine, 
 
The Sacraments. 137 
 
 that even infants dying without the bath of 
 Baptism were consigned to everlasting fire. 
 It is, however, largely to the influence of this 
 Father that we must trace the materialistic be- 
 lief concerning Baptism as necessary to save the 
 soul from future torment, which in all its hide- 
 ous untruth, like a dark shadow, haunted the 
 Western Church during the Middle Ages. The 
 Church of Rome, in a form so mild, however, 
 that Augustine would have censured it as un- 
 orthodox, still holds to the doctrine, and thus 
 virtually declares that the infinite grace of God, 
 the infinite possibilities of the human soul, are 
 made dependent by our Heavenly Father on 
 the sprinkling of a few drops of water during 
 life on the head of a man or child. Our own 
 baptismal service, which was framed before the 
 Church had fully emancipated itself from the 
 unspiritual philosophy of the Middle Ages, is 
 not wholly free from traces of the Augustinian 
 belief, and many persons, especially of the 
 Evangelical wing of the Episcopal Church, have 
 been sorely tried by certain clauses in it.^ It 
 
 ' It would be strange, if in a Church so comprehensive as 
 ours, no traces still remained of this mediaeval belief regard- 
 ing the power of baptism to produce an entire change in the 
 
1 2f^ Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 has been repeatedly declared, however, both in 
 England and America, that the Church im- 
 poses no irrational or superstitious view of 
 Baptism on her clergy or laity ; that her bap- 
 tismal service is not to be interpreted against 
 the rational convictions of this or any age. 
 
 As the early simplicity of the doctrine of Bap- 
 tism disappeared, there grew up about the rite 
 many curious and interesting customs, such as 
 exorcism, or setting free from the power of the 
 devil, a rite which had hitherto been used only 
 in cases where people were supposed to be 
 
 nature, and to deliver the individual from the wrath of God. 
 Accordingly we find in use in Episcopal Churches manuals of 
 instruction containing questions and answers like the follow- 
 
 ing 
 
 Q. What are we made by Holy Baptism ? 
 
 A. Members of Christ's Body, the Church. 
 
 Q. What is the result of this ? 
 
 A. We become God's adopted children, and heirs of 
 Heaven. 
 
 Q. And what else ? 
 
 A, We are cleansed from sin, and our bodies are made 
 temples of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 Q. Of what, then is the Grace of Baptism the seed ? 
 
 A. It is the seed of the spiritual life in the soul of man. 
 
 Q. How do we become members of the Church ? 
 
 A. By being baptized with water in the name of the 
 Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 Q. Is there any sure way to salvation out of the Church? 
 
 A. There is not. — Trinity Church Catechism. 
 
The Sacraments. 139 
 
 possessed with demons. Anointing with the 
 sacred oil, or chrism, was also one of the con- 
 nected rites ; and the laying on of hands, which 
 later came to be separated by an interval of 
 time from Baptism, and grew into the rite of 
 confirmation, which we must always regard as 
 the proper completion, with the candidate's own 
 free consent, of the baptismal rite which he re- 
 ceived in infancy. 
 
 But perhaps the most striking thing in the 
 history of the outward part of the rite is the 
 change which, in the West, gradually came 
 about, from the complete immersion of the 
 body in water to the sprinkling of a few drops 
 on the candidate's head. " For the first thir- 
 teen centuries," says Dean Stanley, " the almost 
 universal practice of Baptism was that of which 
 we read in the New Testament, and which is 
 the very meaning of the word ' baptize,' — that 
 those who were baptized were plunged, sub- 
 merged, immersed into the water"; and in this 
 judgment fully coincide such eminent scholars 
 in the English Church as Conybeare and How- 
 son,' and Bishop Ellicott and Professor 
 
 » See " Life and Epistle of St. Paul," vol. i, p. 439 I Cony- 
 beare and Howson. 
 
140 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 Plumptre,' and Church historians like Kurtz 
 and Mosheim. 
 
 In the Greek Church trine immersion is the 
 rule, and unless it be, as in the early ages, in 
 the case of persons too sick or feeble to 
 undergo immersion, sprinkling, or even pour- 
 ing, is not recognized as baptism. In the 
 Western Church, however, gradually, as most 
 religious ideas and customs have grown up, im- 
 mersion changed to sprinkling, the Cathedral 
 of Milan and the large and influential Baptist 
 body now alone observing the rite in its primi- 
 tive form. The reason for this almost universal 
 change in Western Christendom is sufificiently 
 clear, and shows how infallibly time discerns 
 the essential spirit and meaning of any form of 
 truth committed to it. Baptism was simply 
 the common act of washing taken to symbolize 
 the purification of the soul, the continuous pro- 
 cess of new birth that goes on in every truly 
 advancing life; and while in the warm East it 
 would be more natural to perform it by dip- 
 ping the whole body in water, in colder climates, 
 and especially in churches established in cities 
 
 * Commentary on Matt, iii., i, Mark vii., 4, Luke xi., 38, 
 Acts viii., 38 ; Bishop EUicott and Professor Plumptre. 
 
The Sacraments, 141 
 
 and towns, or where intelligence and culture 
 prevailed, release from the mere letter of obedi- 
 ence to Scripture, or of conformity to early- 
 custom, would necessarily be attended not only 
 with indifference to the amount of water used, 
 but with a certain repugnance to the public 
 bath. There is no question that were the con- 
 ditions favorable, a plunge in a lake or river, 
 under the blue sky of heaven, in some calm, 
 secluded place, would be far more impressive 
 than the sprinkling of the forehead with water 
 from a stone font or a bowl in a church. 
 
 But, with us, immersion is so manifestly in- 
 expedient, so opposed to modern ideas, and 
 the spirit that requires it is so unlike the spirit 
 of liberty in ritual things inculcated by the 
 teaching of Christ, that one cannot help won- 
 dering that a large body of religious people 
 should still be found clinging to it, and indeed 
 making the observance of it their raison d'etre. 
 
 There is no ground on which the change from 
 immersion to sprinkling can be justified except 
 the ground of enlightened common-sense, but 
 there it is safe to rest — unsafe not to rest — all 
 our beliefs and opinions. There, likewise, is 
 our justification for baptizing infants. Baptism 
 
142 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 is intended to symbolize and so keep before 
 the world the great truth of regeneration, the 
 new birth, or resurrection from the death of 
 ignorance, selfishness, lust, and sin, which is a 
 continual process in true lives. And being the 
 natural door to the Church, which we regard 
 as a school for the nurture of Christian life, and 
 not an exclusive body of perfectly righteous 
 men and women, it is inevitable that we 
 should bestow it upon children. We baptize 
 them in token of the fact that they are God's 
 children ; and as members of a regenerated 
 and regenerating society, of which the Church 
 is the perpetual type and witness, early incor- 
 porate their innocent lives into the Church's 
 life. Infant Baptism, and our view of the 
 Church as a mixed school for the nurture of 
 faith and worship and holy life, are so closely 
 bound together that we can hardly think of 
 them apart. Under Calvinism, which does not 
 recognize God in the soul of every being, and 
 under the Independent theory of the Church as 
 a company of mature persons voluntarily asso- 
 ciating themselves for religious purposes. In- 
 fant Baptism has no true place and must inev- 
 itably fall into disuse. The Baptists, Charles 
 
The Sacraments, 143 
 
 Kingsley once said, are the true and logical 
 Calvinists, for they do not believe that people 
 are God's children until they have passed 
 through certain changes of feeling which may 
 or may not come, and so they refuse to baptize 
 them as if they were such. To us who believe 
 that humanity is '' God-related," that the hu- 
 man is grounded in the divine, the finite in the 
 infinite, Infant Baptism is not only richly sig- 
 nificant, but, if Baptism is to be maintained 
 at all, almost a necessity. 
 
 Thus we may bring our children to Baptism, 
 "■ nothing doubting but that God alloweth this 
 charitable work of ours," and giving Him 
 thanks that it '' hath pleased Him to regen- 
 erate them with His Holy Spirit" — that is, to 
 give them naturally the privileges of children 
 of the Most High, and in order to make them 
 sharers in the regenerating influences of Chris- 
 tian society, to "incorporate them into His 
 holy Church." 
 
 THE lord's supper. 
 
 The Lord's Supper originated as naturally 
 and simply as Baptism, but under circum- 
 stances far more touching. The Master, about 
 
144 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 to suffer a painful and humiliating death, sat 
 with his twelve disciples at night in an upper 
 room somewhere in Jerusalem. It was Pass- 
 over time, and they, like all faithful Hebrews, 
 had come up to the city to celebrate together 
 this most significant of all their festivals, and 
 now the meal was almost done. We can never 
 know all that was passing in Jesus* mind, — how 
 much regard he felt for the venerable Passover 
 ritual he was so scrupulously observing, nor 
 how clearly he foresaw the establishment of a 
 religion, looking to him as its founder, which 
 should supersede the Hebrew Faith. We can 
 never be certain how widely he hoped or ex- 
 pected his parting request should be observed, 
 but we are told that as he reclined with them 
 he took up some of the bread that lay on the 
 table, and instead of using the regular words, 
 ** This is the body of the Passover," or " This 
 is the bread of affliction," he said, in view of 
 his approaching martyrdom for the principles 
 of true religion which he had persistently 
 taught, ** This is my body which is given for 
 you : this do in remembrance of me." Then 
 he took up the cup of red wine and water, 
 the drinking of which was one of the last acts 
 
The Sacraments, 145 
 
 of the Festival, and instead of the words com- 
 monly uttered, said : This cup is the seal of the 
 covenant presently to be made in my blood which 
 is to be shed for you. Then after chanting to- 
 gether the anthem beginning, '' Not unto us, 
 not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory for 
 Thy mercy and for Thy truth's sake," the group 
 arose and passed silently out in the light of the 
 great yellow moon into the narrow street, 
 through a gate of the city, down into the valley, 
 of the Kedron, and so on to the Garden of 
 Gethsemane. This is the simple beginning of 
 that most venerated and cherished rite of the 
 Church, the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, 
 about which cluster not only some of the 
 sacredest and sweetest, but some of the sad- 
 dest and most corrupt traditions of the Chris- 
 tian world ; now a bond of the holiest brother- 
 hood, now a mark of unchristian strife and 
 superstition. 
 
 At first it was celebrated at evening, the 
 time when Christ had instituted it, and always 
 at the close of a common meal called the 
 ayaTTTj, or love feast, and with prayer and 
 praise, whence from evxoi.pi(yria, the Greek 
 word for thanksgiving, it came to be called the 
 
146 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 eucharist. As early as the third century the 
 simple devotional forms with which it was at 
 first observed expanded into an " elaborate 
 sacramental liturgy," which is the basis of our 
 own and of all the Catholic eucharistic liturgies. 
 Then it came to be regarded as a holy mys- 
 tery, participation in which was necessary to 
 insure everlasting life ; and when, as has hap- 
 pened in all great Religions, the ideas of a 
 priesthood and material sacrifice were devel- 
 oped in the Church, the Lord's Supper in the 
 hands of the officiating priest became a verita- 
 ble sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ, 
 into which, by a miracle, as the prayer of con- 
 secration was offered, the bread and wine were 
 changed. This belief, which to-day finds its 
 support in the Roman Catholic Church, and 
 which declares that Christ's death is repeated 
 every time a priest standing before the altar 
 consecrates the bread and wine, was of course a 
 late development, and in the theology of the 
 enli£rhtened Christian teachers of Alexandria 
 had no place. With them, as with us, the 
 bread and wine on the altar were simply, as our 
 Prayer Book calls them, God's ''gifts and 
 creatures of bread and wine," which they re- 
 
The Sacraments. 147 
 
 ceived, according to the Saviour's '' holy institu- 
 tion, in remembrance of his death and passion." 
 The sacrifice they offered to God was '' the 
 sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving," and of 
 their own " souls and bodies," and the body 
 and blood of Christ of which they partook was 
 " spiritual," not material food. The body of 
 Christ was moral truth as displayed in his 
 character, and the blood of Christ was love or 
 charity. 
 
 The superstitious view of the Lord's Supper 
 held by the Latin Church in the Middle Ages 
 has, however, its own antiquity. The ancient 
 religions of Persia, Egypt, India, and Greece 
 all had rites very similar to our Lord's Supper, 
 and there were many persons under all these 
 Faiths who supposed that in partaking of conse- 
 crated bread and wine they were actually eating 
 the flesh and drinking the blood of their gods. 
 *' How can a man be so stupid," says Cicero, 
 writing of the heathen eucharist, ''as to imagine 
 that which he eats to be a god ? " But an- 
 tiquity in religious opinions should have little 
 weight when it conflicts with intelligence and 
 common-sense. We sometimes hear heated 
 discussions concerning the propriety of using 
 
148 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 lighted candles and special vestments and of 
 bowing often in the celebration of the Lord's 
 Supper. But the only thing that can make 
 these wrong, provided a congregation is pleased 
 to have them, is the fact of their testifying to 
 a material and unenlightened, and, indeed, 
 ancient heathen view of the Sacrament. If the 
 introduction of these accessories, harmless in 
 themselves, into Christian worship expresses 
 simply the desire for a more earnest and beauti- 
 ful ceremonial, then no one can say aught 
 against them, provided they do not violate 
 well-established canons of good taste, but if 
 they are meant to symbolize and teach a mate- 
 rialistic and magical view of the sweet and 
 simple Christian memorial feast, then they are 
 harmful and wrong. 
 
 Throughout this chapter we have spoken of 
 Baptism and the Lord's Supper in the custom- 
 ary way of the Church and the Prayer Book as 
 Sacraments, and in the beginning of the chap- 
 ter we called them representative Sacraments. 
 The word sacrament originally meant an oath 
 or pledge, as that taken by Roman soldiers on 
 entering the army. The Christian Sacrament, 
 then, was the pledge of the Christian's obliga- 
 
The Sacraments. 149 
 
 tion to be true to the laws of God, and since 
 obedience necessarily brings good to man, it 
 was likewise regarded as a pledge on God's part, 
 as indeed Jesus had declared the Lord's Supper 
 to be when he said, " This is the new covenant," 
 or this is the pledge of the new covenant, " in 
 my blood." ^ 
 
 Baptism and the Lord's Supper are outward 
 signs or certificates of the relationship between 
 God and man. When we baptize a grown man 
 or a new-born baby we thereby certify the old 
 truth the world needs to be continually re- 
 minded of, that we are all children of the 
 Heavenly Father, and so under the most sacred 
 obligations to be true to duty and to Him. 
 We repeat by our act the old truth so easily 
 and so often sadly forgotten, that only through 
 obedience to God's laws, which are likewise the 
 laws of the soul, can the human race find sal- 
 vation. This our Baptismal Service makes 
 clear when it says to the Sponsors that '' Bap- 
 tism doth represent unto us our profession; 
 which is, to follow the example of our Saviour 
 
 » The Catechism brings out the original meaning of the 
 word in its definition of Sacrament as not only "an outward 
 and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto 
 us," but as " a pledge to assure us thereof'' 
 
150 Heai^t of the Creeds. 
 
 Christ, and to be made like unto him." When 
 we come to the Lord's table, we likewise de- 
 clare, as the priest who administers the Sacra- 
 ment declares, both the good-will of our Heav- 
 enly Father toward us, and the obligation we 
 are under to love and serve Him and our breth- 
 ren. But the question comes, Is not every good 
 act, especially every religious act in which we 
 engage, likewise a sacrament or pledge on 
 God's part and ours? To that question we 
 have to answer '* Yes." Baptism and the 
 Lord's Supper, the bath and the meal, have 
 been set apart from life's many sacramental 
 acts simply as representative sacraments or 
 pledges of the close alliance between God and 
 man and the necessity of obedience to all that 
 God has anywhere declared as His will con- 
 cerning us. Observing one day in seven as, in 
 a peculiar sense the Lord's Day, we thereby 
 declare that all days are to be regarded as holy 
 days. Assembling as churches or congrega- 
 tions for Christian worship and other religious 
 acts, we thereby testify to the divine life and 
 destiny of mankind and the holy brotherhood 
 of the race. And in Baptism and the Eucha- 
 rist we likewise set forth the sacredness of all 
 
The Sacraments. 151 
 
 life's common acts and experiences. In the 
 spirit of George Herbert's often quoted lines, 
 we declare that even the commonest and most 
 unhonored tasks are in truth divine. 
 
 How full of instruction and value, then, are 
 these ancient rites of the Church to us. How 
 sacred should we hold them as we remember 
 not only their divine origin, but the faith and 
 zeal, the love and reverence and holy life to 
 which in all the Christian ages they have wit- 
 nessed and ministered. Every Baptism we see 
 not only recalls the great truths of the Father- 
 hood of God and the brotherhood of man, but 
 seems to connect the present with the past of 
 Christianity, and to proclaim the perpetual 
 youth of those holy sentiments that inspired 
 the multitudes who came to John in the wil- 
 derness of Judea ; that stirred the self-sacri- 
 ficing first disciples of our Lord ; that made 
 the early Christians in the reigns of Nero and 
 Trajan martyrs for Christ ; that have inflamed 
 the zeal of all noble missionaries and true min- 
 isters of religion ; and that have softened and 
 sweetened and made saintly the lives of hosts 
 of unknown men and women in all lands and 
 times. As we kneel at the Lord's Table, and 
 
152 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 with bowed heads eat the bread which symbol- 
 izes the blessed character of Jesus, and drink 
 the wine which represents his love, we are car- 
 ried back to Calvary ; and then, as we remem- 
 ber that the sacrifice there finished meant the 
 perpetual sacrifice, the divine submission of all 
 true souls in all ages, how broad and deep and 
 tender grows the Christianity we profess ; and 
 how many sacred memories are there awak- 
 ened, memories of our blessed Lord, and of all 
 the prophets and saints of true Religion among 
 all nations ; memories of the early Christians 
 forced to hide in the catacombs, and there 
 among the silent dead to celebrate their eucha- 
 ristic joy ; memories of our own dear friends 
 who once knelt with us at the feast, but who 
 have now passed on into the unseen, where 
 face to face with truth, they need no longer 
 earth's poor symbols. 
 
 These are some of the lessons enfolded in 
 those holy rites of Religion, the Christian Sac- 
 raments. They are lessons the world can never 
 afford to miss, lessons in which no soul can be 
 too well instructed, since in them are involved 
 all our true well-being here and hereafter. 
 
THE LITURGY. 
 
 153 
 
" How cold and dead does a prayer appear that is composed 
 
 in the most elegant forms of speech, when it is not heightened 
 
 by solemnity of phrase from the sacred writngs ! " — Addison. 
 
 ' ' Different tastes find gratification in various forms — some in 
 
 what is fixed, others in what is free and flowing. 
 
 * ' The time will come when all outward Churches, with their 
 varying laws, will cease and vanish away, but when the true 
 and essential Church of Christ will reign forever. Then will 
 all members of His body give hearty thanks for whatsoever 
 means has, through the gracious providence of God, been 
 given whereby they have been brought to the knowledge and 
 love of their Lord. 
 
 " But there is no fear of the most excellent minister who 
 ever preached, making me desert the Church of England. 
 Every time I go, I feel more strongly how beautiful our 
 service is. 
 
 " It is one of the advantages of our good Church that we are 
 only very partially dependent on the qualifications of the min- 
 ister. If he can read, and most clergymen can do that much, 
 he must read the liturgy ; all his stupidity, if he be stupid, all 
 his carelessness, if he be careless, cannot unmake that into 
 anything unscriptural or undevotional." — " Memorials of a 
 Quiet Life." 
 
 154 
 
'* The Protestant cast aside the heresies of Rome, and with 
 them her arts, by which last rejection he injured his own 
 character, cramped his intellect in refusing to it one of its 
 noblest exercises, and materially diminished his influence. 
 
 " One thing I note in comparing old prayers with modern 
 ones, that however quaint, or however erring, they are always 
 tenfold more condensed, comprehensive, and to their pur- 
 pose, whatever that may be. There is no dilution in them, 
 no vain or monotonous phraseology. They ask for what is 
 desired, plainly and earnestly, and never could be shortened 
 by a syllable."— RusKiN (" Stones of Venice "). 
 
 "I enjoyed the fine selection of collects read from the 
 Liturgy. What an age of earnest faith, grasping a noble con- 
 ception of life and determined to bring all things into har- 
 mony with it, has recorded itself in the simple, pregnant, 
 rhythmical English of those collects and the Bible."— George 
 Eliot (extract from a letter). 
 
 "An admirable book, in which the full spirit of the Refor- 
 mation breathes out, where, beside the moving tenderness of 
 the Gospel, and the manly accents of the Bible, throb the 
 profound emotion, the grave eloquence, the noble-mindedness, 
 the restrained enthusiasm of the heroic and poetic souls who 
 had rediscovered Christianity, and had passed near the fire of 
 martyrdom." — Taine, " History of English Literature." 
 
 155 
 
THE LITURGY. 
 
 If we could have gone with Jesus and his 
 disciples into any of the synagogues of Pales- 
 tine at the time of Morning or Evening Prayer, 
 we should have found the people worshipping 
 with a liturgy. With phylacteries bound on 
 their foreheads and left arms, and the fringed 
 and tasselled TaHth falling over their shoulders, 
 we should have seen them on their entrance 
 bowing in silent prayer, heard them responding 
 with an Amen to the Reader's ** prayer of adora- 
 tion," listened with them to various Scripture 
 readings, joined in another short prayer, heard 
 the reading of the Song of Moses at the Red 
 Sea, and taken part in a short responsive utter- 
 ance of praise known as the Kadish, beginning 
 '* Praise the Lord who is worthy to be praised ! " 
 the response to which by the people bowing 
 was, " Praised be the Lord who is ever and 
 eternally worthy of praise ! " 
 
 After that we should have heard more prayer 
 
 157 
 
158 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 and a sublime chant : '' Rock of Israel! up! to 
 the help of Israel ! save, for Thy promise sake, 
 Judah and Israel! Save us, eternal God, eter- 
 nal God of Hosts, whose name is the Holy 
 One of Israel ! Blessed be Thou, O Eternal, 
 who of old didst redeem Israel ! " And then 
 we should have said softly with the entire con- 
 gregation the " eighteen Benedictions," or 
 ** The Prayer," joined in some solemn responses, 
 and on Mondays, Thursdays, and Sabbaths 
 listened to the reading of the regular lessons 
 from the Pentateuch or the Law. The sermon 
 would have followed, perhaps preached by 
 some one invited from the congregation, after 
 which, as with us, with prayers and the bene- 
 diction, the service would have closed. 
 
 Wheatley, in his treatise on the Book of 
 Common Prayer, like many other writers on 
 liturgical worship, has felt it necessary to argue 
 for the validity of such worship from the loyalty 
 of Jesus and the Apostles to the synagogue 
 services ; but we are fortunately not obliged to 
 content ourselves with single or exceptional 
 testimonies to the propriety of set forms of 
 prayer, since every great Religion has developed 
 its own peculiar ritual, and has expressed its 
 
The Liturgy, 159 
 
 reverence in traditional symbols and modes of 
 worship. 
 
 So universal, indeed, is the liturgical spirit, 
 that the modern Christian sects which have 
 discarded ritual, may well be regarded as, in 
 this respect at least, out of sympathy with the 
 Religion of the ages. It is not true, of course, 
 that any religious body is entirely without a 
 ritual, but we speak now of the difference be- 
 tween an historic and compulsory ritual, and 
 one virtually made by each church for itself, 
 and subject to the desires or tastes of a partic- 
 ular minister or congregation. The early Chris- 
 tians, as Christianity gradually separated from 
 the older Hebrew Faith, soon made their own 
 forms of worship, which at first were compara- 
 tively brief and simple, the only form of prayer 
 that Jesus had bequeathed to the church being 
 the ever-memorable form known as The Lord's 
 Prayer. Little by little, however, as the 
 churches grew in numbers and influence, both 
 parts of Christian worship, the service of com- 
 mon prayer and instruction, which took shape 
 largely from the synagogue service, and the 
 sacramental portion of worship, which neces- 
 sarily embodied much of the spirit of the serv- 
 
1 60 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 ice of the temple, became more elaborate. 
 The psalms and brief doxologies of the one, 
 and the prayers and thanksgivings of the other, 
 broadened into the various liturgical systems of 
 the East and the West. These primitive litur- 
 gies Mr. Palmer, in his "■ Origines Liturgicae," 
 reduces to four : the great Oriental Liturgy, in 
 use from the Euphrates and from the Helles- 
 pont to the southern extremity of Greece ; the 
 Alexandrian, used in Egypt, Abyssinia, and the 
 country from the Mediterranean Sea to the 
 west ; the Roman, in use in Italy, Sicily, and 
 the civil diocese of Africa ; and the Galilean, 
 used in Gaul, Spain, and probably Ephesus, 
 until the fourth century. A book called "■ The 
 Apostolical Constitutions," which originated in 
 Syria in the latter part of the third and the 
 beginning of the fourth centuries, gives the 
 common type to which the many later liturgies 
 all conform, and after the fourth century we 
 find these liturgies bearing the names of Apos- 
 tles ; thus the liturgy in use at Jerusalem is 
 ascribed to St. James, that of Alexandria to St. 
 Mark, that of Rome to St. Peter, and that of 
 Milan to St. Barnabas. 
 
 From this it will be seen that there was no 
 
The Liturgy, i6i 
 
 law binding the churches of the early centuries 
 to one universal form of worship, but rather 
 that each church claimed the right to make its 
 own ; nevertheless, as any one who studies 
 these primitive liturgies will see, they are per- 
 vaded by a common spirit, and alike manifest 
 the instinct common to all nations and races to 
 make public worship dignified and reverent, and 
 to express their sense of religion by means of 
 fitting words and symbols. 
 
 The liturgy of the ancient British Church, be- 
 fore the Anglo-Saxon invasion, belongs, accord- 
 ing to one classification of the early liturgies, 
 to a group named after St. John, and, at any 
 rate, differs considerably from that in use at 
 Rome. In the seventh century, however, sixty- 
 eighty years after the beginning of Augustine's 
 mission in Britain, although absolute uniformity 
 in public worship was not secured, the Roman 
 came generally into use, and thus originated 
 the various Service Books afterwards used in 
 Britain : the Breviary, containing the order for 
 Daily Service, the Missal, containing the Com- 
 munion Service, compiled about the middle of 
 the fifth century, the Antiphonary, the Ben- 
 edictional, the Collectorium, the Epistolarium, 
 
1 62 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 the Pontifical, the Manual or Ritual, and the 
 Book of the Hours. 
 
 After the Norman Conquest in 1078-99, Os- 
 mund, Bishop of Salisbury, undertook the re- 
 vision of these Service Books, and henceforth 
 the Breviary and Missal of Sarum, or accord- 
 ing to the use of Sarum, became practically the 
 liturgy of the Anglo-Norman Church. ' But in 
 the 1 6th century the deeply rooted and steadily 
 growing discontent with the prevailing reli- 
 gious order showed itself, among other ways, in 
 a petition of Convocation to the king for the 
 appointment of a committee to reform the 
 Ritual and Of^ces of the Church. Accord- 
 ingly, in 1545, an English Service Book called 
 the King's Primer appeared, which contained 
 the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Com- 
 mandments, the Venite, the Te Deum, and 
 other hymns and collects, " several of them,** 
 Wheatley says, '' in the same version in which 
 we now use them." 
 
 In Edward VI. 's reign, late in 1547, an Eng- 
 lish Communion Service was prepared, and 
 
 ^ There were still other Uses, however, in the dioceses of 
 Lincoln, Hereford, York, and Bangor. All these Uses, or 
 Service Books, were, of course, in Latin. 
 
The Liturgy. 163 
 
 during the next year the complete Prayer Book 
 of Edward VI. was compiled by thirteen emi- 
 nent divines, among whom were Cranmer and 
 Ridley, the latter burned at Oxford in Queen 
 Mary's reign, October 16, 1555, the former 
 March 21, 1556. This book, to which most 
 of the above-mentioned Latin Service Books 
 contributed, after being duly approved by 
 Parliament, came into general use on Whitsun- 
 day, June 9, 1549; and by comparing it with 
 the earlier Books of Worship, we shall find 
 that Morning and Evening Prayer were sim- 
 plified from the Breviary, that the Communion 
 Office with Collects, Epistles, and Gospels was 
 a translation and adaptation of the Missal, and 
 that the occasional Offices represented the 
 Manual or Ritual, while those of Ordination 
 and Confirmation were taken with modifica- 
 tions from the Pontifical. We shall find, like- 
 wise, how many objectionable things in the 
 earlier liturgy, such as Litanies to Mary, and 
 fictitious matter relating to Saints, were wisely 
 thrown aside by the Reformers. 
 
 The feeling of hostility toward Rome had 
 grown so rapidly that this Book did not long 
 satisfy the popular demand for a liturgy more 
 
1 64 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 in harmony with the spirit of primitive Chris- 
 tianity. Accordingly, Archbishop Cranmer, 
 with the aid of Martin Bucer, a German, and 
 Peter Martyr, an ItaHan Protestant, both 
 learned men, reviewed it, adding the Sentences, 
 Exhortation, Confession, and Absolution ; and 
 omitting some things such as Prayers for the 
 Dead,^ and a few Rubrics. This Book was 
 confirmed by Parliament in 155 1, and an Act of 
 Uniformity passed in April, 1552, directed its 
 general use. But it is not known that Convo- 
 cation sanctioned it, and it was probably never 
 generally adopted. 
 
 King Edward died July 6, 1553, and Queen 
 Mary restored the Latin Missal ; but after her 
 death in November, 1558, her sister Elizabeth, 
 desiring to restore the English Service and ''to 
 unite the nation in one faith," ordered a re- 
 view of the two Prayer Books of Edward's 
 reign. Two of the ten divines chosen to carry 
 out this revision were Matthew Parker after- 
 ward, and Edmund Grindall then. Archbishop 
 
 ^ These Prayers for the Dead, which many persons in the 
 Church now desire to have restored, were contained in the 
 Communion Service and in the Burial Office. One of the 
 omitted Rubrics was that directing the mixing of water with 
 wine at the time of the celebration of Holy Communion. 
 
The Liturgy, 165 
 
 of Canterbury, and the result of the reviewers* 
 work was the restoration of substantially the 
 second Book of Edward VI. 's reign, for this 
 Book, rather than the firsts was taken as the 
 basis of their work, and the changes made in it 
 were very few. It came into use the 24th of 
 June, 1559, and from this time onward the 
 English Prayer Book received few alterations. 
 In 1663, the first year of the reign of James 
 I., a few slight changes were made, and later, in 
 the reign of Charles II., a few more, and so, 
 with the generally desirable, yet as regards the 
 substance of the liturgy, unimportant changes 
 made by the American Church in 1789, the 
 Book of Common Prayer has come to us. 
 
 This, in brief outline, is the history of the 
 Prayer Book as a whole, and when we come to 
 a consideration of its details, we shall see at 
 how many points it touches the history of Re- 
 ligion. We read the Psalter and are carried 
 back to the Hebrew Temple service centuries 
 before Christ, when the same psalms were 
 chanted responsively by the Hebrew congrega- 
 tions. The Venite of our Morning Prayer (the 
 95th Psalm) takes us back not only to the primi- 
 tive liturgies of the East and West, but to the 
 
1 66 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, for which it was 
 perhaps originally composed. The Te Deum, 
 which is, at least, 1500 years old, brings us face 
 to face with Ambrose and the baptism of Au- 
 gustine. The Benedicite, *' O all ye works of 
 the Lord, bless ye the Lord," was an ancient 
 hymn in the Jewish Church, and was sung by 
 the early Christians. The Apostles' Creed, the 
 Creed in its Western form, introduces us to the 
 simple, uncontroversial faith of primitive Chris- 
 tianity. The Nicene Creed, the Creed in its 
 Eastern form, recalls the most dignified and 
 most important General Council of the Church. 
 The Lord's Prayer and the Gospels bring us 
 face to face with our Lord himself. The Collect 
 for Peace in the Morning and Evening Prayer 
 comes from the Sacramentary of Gregory the 
 Great, an early and eminent Bishop of Rome, 
 and is also associated with Augustine's mission 
 to Britain. The Collect for the Clergy and 
 People comes likewise from Gregory's ancient 
 Prayer Book, and has been used in the Church 
 of England for more than 1200 years. The 
 prayer of St. Chrysostom brings before us that 
 ancient Greek pulpit orator in his church at 
 Constantinople, since it is from the liturgy that 
 
The Likirgy. 167 
 
 bears his name. Part of the Gloria in Excelsis 
 is ascribed to Telesphorus, who is supposed to 
 have composed it about the year 137. The 
 Litany marks one of the most important epochs 
 in general history, the time when in the Roman 
 Empire, tottering to its fall, the terror inspired 
 by the invasions of hordes of Barbarians was 
 increased by droughts, pestilences, and earth- 
 quakes, and the Church itself was rent by fierce 
 internal strifes. In the open streets and fields 
 of France, the centre of these disorders, it is 
 said the first Litany was sung or shouted by 
 terror-stricken multitudes, who hoped thus to 
 avert the judgments of God. In the light of 
 its origin we can understand those strong ex- 
 pressions : the offences of our forefathers ; 
 Iight7ii7ig and tempest ; plague, pestilence, and 
 famine ; battle and murder and sudden death ; 
 desolate and oppressed; troubles and adversities. 
 Most of the Collects are very ancient, having 
 been framed probably by St. Jerome (who se- 
 lected also the Epistles and Gospels as they 
 now stand), and then put in order and in- 
 creased by Gelasius, a Bishop of Rome in the 
 fifth, century, and later revised by Pope Gre- 
 gory the Great in the year 600; while some 
 
1 68 Heart of the C7^eeds, 
 
 alterations in them date, with the Sentences, 
 Exhortation, Confession, and Absolution, to 
 the time of the Reformation. To the Great 
 Bible of Tyndale, Coverdale, and Cranmer, of 
 1535-1540, rather than to the Version of King 
 James, of 161 1, or the Bishop's Bible, of 1571, 
 we may trace our Prayer Book Psalter. The Of- 
 fertory Sentences are not from any recognized 
 version, but were probably translated by Cran- 
 mer, as also the Benedictus, Magnificat, and 
 Nunc Dimittis. The Epistles and Gospels are 
 from King James' Version, while the Psalms 
 sung regularly in Morning and Evening Prayer 
 agree in the main with the Great Bible. Dean 
 Stanley eloquently says : '' The Prayer Book, as 
 it stands, is a long gallery of ecclesiastical his- 
 tory, which, to be understood and enjoyed 
 thoroughly, absolutely compels a knowledge of 
 the greatest events and names of all periods of 
 the Christian Church. To Ambrose we owe 
 the present form of our Te Deum ; Charlemagne 
 breaks the silence of our ordination prayers by 
 the Veni Creator Spiritus. The persecutions 
 have given us one Creed, and the Empire an- 
 other. The name of the first great Patriarch 
 of the Byzantine Church (Chrysostom) closes 
 
The Liturgy, 169 
 
 our daily service ; the Litany is the bequest of 
 the first great Patriarch of the Latin Church 
 (Gregory) amidst the terrors of the Roman 
 pestilence. Our Collects are the joint produc- 
 tion of the Fathers, the Popes, and the Reform- 
 ers. Our Communion Service bears the traces 
 of every fluctuation of the Reformation through 
 the two extremes of the reign of Edward to the 
 conciliating policy of Elizabeth, and the reac- 
 tionary zeal of the Restoration. The more 
 comprehensive, the more free, the more impar- 
 tial is our study of ecclesiastical history, the 
 more it will be in accordance with the spirit 
 and letter of the Church of England." ' 
 
 This, then, is the Prayer Book used in every 
 church of the Anglican faith and order through- 
 out Christendom. It is inevitable that a book 
 with such a history should reflect phases of 
 thought and feeling that the world for the 
 time, and perhaps forever, has outgrown, and 
 should contain words and phrases now become 
 obsolete. And it is quite as impossible that 
 it should conform solely to the experience of 
 any one age or phase of thought. In studying 
 it we must not allow our minds to be diverted 
 
 * Eastern Church, chap, ii., p. 60. 
 
1 70 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 from its essential principles and its leading 
 purpose, to any mere technicality of expres- 
 sion or phrase that may seem ambiguous. 
 Spiritual birth and death and resurrection, 
 humiliation and triumph, self-sacrifice and rec- 
 onciliation with God, the true relation of tem- 
 poral and eternal, human and divine, — these are 
 the essential truths of the Book of Common 
 Prayer. And all these vital truths expressed 
 in the seasons of the Church Year group them- 
 selves around the great doctrine of all true 
 rehgious thought, the doctrine of the Incarna- 
 tion. In that doctrine of God in humanity, lie 
 the germs that have expanded into the various 
 forms of common prayer and praise, the Sacra- 
 mental liturgy, and the occasional Offices. From 
 it, as the central doctrine of all devotional 
 thought and life, come the observances of Ad- 
 vent and Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, 
 Whitsuntide, and Trinity,— all commemorative 
 of that life that forever stands as the type of 
 the life of humanity, the Christ in his headship 
 of the body of which we are members. 
 
 For us who believe in prayer as the instinct- 
 ive utterance of the heart, who are content to 
 pray without necessarily framing a doctrine of 
 
The Liturgy. 171 
 
 prayer, what words can be found more simple, 
 more comprehensive, more tender, than the 
 words of our Collects. How direct and natural 
 are the prayers for light and guidance, for the 
 increase of faith, hope, and charity, for defence 
 against dangers temporal and spiritual, for right 
 judgment in all the affairs of life, and for stead- 
 fastness in the way of truth. And how broad 
 and rational is the underlying spirit of the 
 Prayer Book. In the familiar Collect for Peace 
 it recognizes most fully that " all holy desires, 
 all good counsels, all just works " proceed from 
 the inspiration of God. Following the teach- 
 ing of Jesus and Paul, it declares that "all our 
 doings without charity are nothing worth." 
 Where it has one expression that would seem 
 to make salvation in anywise dependent upon 
 metaphysical or doctrinal rectitude, like Christ's 
 own teachings, it has a hundred testifying to 
 the supreme importance of righteous life. Its 
 Creeds are catholic as truth itself, its doctrine of 
 the Church is not limited by the accidents or 
 expedients of a single age or intellectual con- 
 dition.' It not only embodies the divine rich- 
 
 '" The mystical body of Thy Son, which is the blessed com- 
 pany of all faithful people."' — Service for Holy Communion. 
 
172 Heart of the Ci^eeds. 
 
 ness of the words of Christ, but it reflects the 
 inspired zeal of St. Paul, the love of St. John, 
 the fervor of St. Peter, the catholicity of 
 Athanasius, the vast learning of the most gifted 
 of the Fathers — Origen, the eloquence of the 
 golden-mouthed Chrysostom, the logic of Au- 
 gustine, the wisdom of Cranmer and his fellow- 
 workers ; and among its sacred associations are 
 enshrined the devotion and faith, the prayers 
 and tears and sufferings of Apostles and Mar- 
 tyrs, holy women and Christ-like men, that 
 whole vast company " who, having finished 
 their course in faith, do now rest from their 
 labors." 
 
 And when we remember, as we all should, 
 that long ago, our own forefathers in England, 
 in their times of joy or sorrow, of peace or 
 penitence, as they knelt together in the 
 churches of the motherland, used the same Col- 
 lects, sang the same Te Deum, offered the peti- 
 tions of the same Litany, and thus expressed 
 emotions of religious joy or sorrow, identical 
 with those that we their children feel, how in- 
 comparably sacred must the English Prayer 
 Book seem. Our ritual, in grandeur and im- 
 pressiveness, is far below that of ancient Faiths 
 
The Litttrgy, i "j^i 
 
 like those of Assyria or Egypt ; and indeed in 
 perfection of religious art, no Reformed Z\\\xxz\i 
 can compare with the Church of Rome, but 
 taken all in all, what service speaks so directly 
 to the heart, or so simply and fittingly ex- 
 presses the Religion of mankind, the primitive 
 Faith of the Church, founded by our Divine 
 Master, as the service of the English Book of 
 Common Prayer. The failure to appreciate its 
 merits among people of Puritan descent, a mis- 
 take that is necessarily fast curing itself, is due, 
 not, as many have supposed, to the possession 
 of more vital piety or more rational beliefs by 
 people who use no Book of Prayer, but to that 
 spirit of excessive protest, which led the Puri- 
 tans in England and America into fanatical in- 
 tolerance of much that the wisest minds in all 
 ages have loved and upheld.' 
 
 The liturgy of the Prayer Book is not per- 
 
 ^ No movement to me is more interesting than that of the 
 return in our day of so many of the children of the Puritan 
 Separatists to the ancient Church and her liturgy. For ten 
 centuries and more our ancestors sang the same hymns, 
 prayed the same prayers, knelt at the same altars, and when- 
 ever the religious horizon widens, and the narrowness of 
 present sect limitations appears, we seem to turn as if by 
 natural instinct to the familiar ways which through mistaken 
 conviction those ancestors left only a few generations ago. 
 
1 74 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 feet, but its spirit is in harmony with the lead- 
 ing idea of our Church, which is that of religious 
 education^ and to him who uses it, it becomes 
 ever, insensibly, more and more sacred and 
 dear. There are times when extemporaneous 
 prayers may be necessary or at least desirable, 
 but there can be little doubt that the liturg-Ical 
 instinct which has expressed itself in all great 
 Faiths, demands for the permanent and abiding 
 use of worship a well ordered and uniform 
 ritual, and one which shall bear the impress, 
 not of a single mind, but of many minds in 
 many successive ages of religious thought and 
 culture. As we have already said, modern ex- 
 temporaneous worship receives no sanction 
 from any of the great Faiths of the world, nor 
 could it have been desired even by those ultra 
 Protestants who have given the tone to much 
 of modern Christianity, Calvin and John Knox, 
 for both these men compiled for use in their 
 day liturgies or Books of Common Prayer. 
 Nor does it satisfy the better educated people 
 of any denomination to-day. Whenever the 
 spirit of religion has been broad and catholic, 
 the value of historic liturgies has been felt, and 
 now that the more enlightened people of mod- 
 
The Littirgy. i 75 
 
 ern sects have come into some comprehension 
 of the largeness of Christianity, they feel the 
 lack of catholicity, lack of dignity of their non- 
 liturgical worship. 
 
 Little by little, especially among the chil- 
 dren of the Puritans, worship, seeking forms 
 that are adequate for its true expression, is 
 turning itself into the well worn channels that 
 the Catholic faith has made, is re-adopting the 
 forms rendered sacred by nearly two thousand 
 years of constant Christian use. The Prayer 
 Book, both as a literary treasure and as the 
 noblest manual of devotion in the English- 
 speaking world, is one of the most valuable parts 
 of our inheritance as children of the ancient 
 Mother Church. 
 
 To its refining and spiritualizing influence 
 the modern world now owes more than it can 
 possibly understand, and as Christianity again 
 returns to the spirit of the Christ and his Apos- 
 tles, the ancient liturgy shall exert a still wider 
 influence and secure the love of many hearts 
 that have not yet entered into sympathy with 
 its divine richness. 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 > 
 
 / 177 
 
" Death, if I am right, is, in the first place, the separation 
 of two things, soul and body, nothing else. And after they 
 are separated, they retain their several characteristics which 
 are much the same as in life." — Plato, " Georgias." 
 
 " This wonderfully woven life of ours shall not be broken 
 by death in a single strand of it ; it shall run on and on, an 
 unbroken life, upheld by the will of the Eternal." — New- 
 man Smyth. 
 
 " The desire of knowledge God has planted naturally in us, 
 as hunger is natural in our bodies, or the want of light in our 
 eyes. And the eye is not a more certain indication that light 
 is to be given than our desire to know divine things is that we 
 shall be permitted to know them." — Horace Bushnell. 
 
 " My mind can take no hold of the present world, nor rest 
 in it for a moment, but my whole nature rushes on with irre- 
 sistible force towards a future and better state of being." — 
 Fichte. 
 
 " My own dim life should teach me this : 
 That life shall live forevermore ; 
 Else earth is darkness at the core, 
 And dust and ashes all that is. 
 
 " Thou wilt not leave us in the dust : 
 
 Thou madest man, he knows not why ; 
 He thinks he was not made to die ; 
 And thou hast made him : thou art just." 
 
 — Tennyson. 
 
 "It is in Heaven only that I find any basis for our poor 
 pilgrimage on this earth." — Carlyle. 
 
 " When I consider the wonderful activity of the mind, so 
 great a memory of what is past, and such a capacity of pene- 
 
 178 
 
trating into the future ; when I behold such a number of arts 
 and sciences, and such a multitude of discoveries thence aris- 
 ing, I believe and am firmly convinced that a nature which 
 contains so many things within itself cannot be mortal." — 
 Cicero. 
 
 " The seed dies into a new life, and so does man." — 
 George MacDonald. 
 
 "We are immortal. Death, as we call it, may touch our 
 sensible vesture, but it is only a vesture which decays. Our 
 being goes on in another life ; for we live in His life, and our 
 true world is not this world. ' We look for a city which hath 
 foundations.' We abide in Him, and He in us, and He abides 
 forever. 
 
 " Does there seem to be a Spirit who leads us through life, 
 conquering the years in us, redeeming us from all evil, bring- 
 ing us calm out of sorrow, faith out of doubt, strength out of 
 trial ? And when He has made us great of spirit like Himself, 
 does He bury all that wealth of heart in nothingness ? 
 
 " What incredible thing is this? Only credible if there be 
 no God." — Stopford Brooke. 
 
 " I do not know whether I shall live again on earth or else- 
 where ; whether I shall be a being of three dimensions or four, 
 or of no dimensions at all ; whether I shall be in space or out 
 of space. It is far better to give up speculations about acci- 
 dental trifles, such as these ; for accidents they are, as com- 
 pared with the essence of the second life, which consists in 
 Love." — Edwin A. Abbott. 
 
 " Then climb and climb forever toward the day. 
 And fear not thou shalt miss the one true way." 
 
 — Samuel Greg. 
 
 179 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 The question of a future life, in its religious 
 
 or its speculative aspect, is of the greatest 
 
 interest to every intelligent mind. We have 
 
 so insatiable a craving for immortality, and are 
 
 so frequently reminded of the brevity of this 
 
 life, that we cannot get thoughts of the future 
 
 far away from us if we would. And in most 
 
 minds, could we know them well, there are, no 
 
 doubt, the same questionings and balancings 
 
 of probabilities regarding the condition of the 
 
 future life, if there be any, that we are so 
 
 familiar with in ourselves. Shall we continue 
 
 to exist when we have closed our eyes upon 
 
 this world, and, if so, how closely shall the 
 
 life beyond resemble, or how far differ from, 
 
 that we are living now? To the first of these 
 
 questions, many of the most enlightened minds 
 
 have felt obliged, from all they knew of God 
 
 and man, to answer, Yes. To the second, the 
 
 wisest men have never tried to give a very 
 
 i8i 
 
1 82 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 definite answer, and the two Creeds of Catho- 
 lic Christendom which distinctly affirm belief in 
 the fact of future existence are utterly silent as 
 to its precise conditions. 
 
 We are, however, perfectly familiar with the 
 ideas of the future that were common in the 
 Calvinistic churches a little while ago, but of 
 late have almost disappeared throughout New 
 England, — ideas which, based on the most lit- 
 eral views of the Bible, shaped themselves into 
 crude and sensuous doctrines of heaven and 
 hell. The sermons of Jonathan Edwards, 
 preached in Northampton 150 years ago, pre- 
 sent these doctrines in their naked deformity, 
 and shall stand perhaps to all time as the finest 
 testimony in Calvinistic literature to the want 
 of imagination and failure to comprehend the 
 Bible's true character of the Calvinistic mind. 
 
 But we must not blame the Calvinists as if 
 they alone were responsible for the crude popu- 
 lar theories of the future held in past times. 
 Dante's *' Inferno," as well as Milton's *' Para- 
 dise Lost," portrayed for the world a " mapped 
 and measured " heaven and hell; Chrj^sostom, 
 as well as Jonathan Edwards, depicted the tor- 
 ments of the lost and the joys of the saved in 
 
The Future Life. 183 
 
 language full of gross, material figures. In- 
 deed the Calvinists inherited much that was 
 worst in all their theology from the Mediaeval 
 Church. 
 
 In his recent book, "■ The Destiny of Man," 
 Mr. John Fiske has shown that the Doctrine 
 of Development, as expounded by Mr. Darwin 
 and Mr. Herbert Spencer, in its relation to 
 man, almost necessarily implies higher ranges 
 of existence, in which his being shall have 
 room to perfect itself. From the nature of 
 the case, he argues, scientific demonstration 
 of future existence is out of the question, 
 since we cannot test the matter except by 
 dying, but equally impossible is scientific dem- 
 onstration of 710 future Hfe, and ** he who re- 
 gards Man as the consummate fruition of cre- 
 ative energy, and the chief object of Divine 
 care, is almost irresistibly driven to the belief 
 that the soul^s career is not completed with the 
 present life upon earth. . . . From the first 
 dawning of life we see all things working to- 
 gether toward one mighty goal, the evolution 
 of the most exalted spiritual qualities which 
 characterize humanity. . . . Are Man's high- 
 est spiritual qualities, into the production of 
 
184 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 which all this creative energy has gone, to dis- 
 appear with the rest ? Has all this work been 
 done for nothing? Is it all ephemeral, all a 
 bubble that bursts, a vision that fades? Are 
 we to regard the Creator s work as like that of 
 a child, who builds houses out of blocks, just 
 for the pleasure of knocking them down? For 
 aught that science can tell us. it may be so, but 
 I can see no good reason for believing any 
 such thing. On such a view the riddle of the 
 universe becomes a riddle without a meaning. 
 Why, then, are we any more called upon to 
 throw away our belief in the permanence of 
 the spiritual element in Man than we are called 
 upon to throw away our belief in the constancy 
 of Nature?" 
 
 It is most certainly true that, whatever 
 doubts may arise in individual minds concern- 
 ing personal immortality, science has nothing 
 to say against it, and when we consider the 
 almost universal longing for it, the tendency of 
 the race to believe in it, the affirmations of 
 master minds like Plato's, Plutarch's, Montes- 
 quieu's, Emerson's — minds necessarily free 
 from narrow religious bias of any sort : when 
 we think of the latent capacities and powers of 
 
The FtUure Life. 185 
 
 man, of some of which we have as yet received 
 only the feeblest intimations, of the marvellous 
 spiritual grasp of his nature and the hunger of 
 his soul for truth and perfect life ; when we re- 
 member how he can love and hate and pity 
 and forgive ; how he can hope and enjoy and 
 suffer, we cannot escape the conviction that a 
 larger sphere must somewhere be appointed 
 him, in which to work out a grander destiny 
 than he ever approaches in his brief and limited 
 career upon this earth. We might possibly 
 think that the great dramatic purpose of God 
 needed for its fulfilment that the temporary 
 flame that burns in human souls should forever 
 die and disappear, and that it was our duty to 
 be willing to yield up our lives, and sink into 
 nothingness, if so, God might be better glorified, 
 were it not for all we have learned to believe, 
 not only of His love and sympathy for us, but 
 of the divine relationship between His intelli- 
 gence and ours. When we examine our own 
 thought, which we believe to be His thought 
 in us, and find what it has to say concerning 
 justice and righteousness and the enduring 
 power of love, we are sure He has not raised 
 us up to love and hate and hunger and grope 
 
1 86 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 for light denied us, and in the height of the 
 struggle to go down mocked and disappointed 
 into everlasting unconsciousness. The soul, 
 which is an effluence from Him, might at death, 
 as many have believed, be swept back once more 
 into Deity, if it were not that in projecting our 
 souls into existence. He has chosen to give us 
 each an identity as real as His own, and to 
 make even the thought of non-existence as im- 
 possible to us as to Himself. We cannot think 
 of ourselves as ceasing to exist. The effort to 
 imagine ourselves dead, is always accompanied 
 by the wider thought of ourselves as con- 
 sciously alive to know that we are dead. We 
 cannot get away from the belief in personal im- 
 mortality, however we may try, or however 
 loudly the voices of doubt and despondency 
 within us may call to us to j'ield up our faith. 
 And when to the revelation of eternal life given 
 us by our own souls we add the calm and un- 
 wavering belief of Christ in the continuance of 
 existence, we may well feel that but one answer 
 can be given to the question so often and eager- 
 ly asked, " Does death end all ? " The immor- 
 tality we desire and have a right to expect is 
 more than the resumption of our souls back into 
 
The FtUure Life. 187 
 
 Deity, more than the simple persistence of the 
 life principle we possess through other forms of 
 being, more than the mere immortality of our 
 influence in the race, it is the continuance of 
 conscious, personal existence for ever and ever. 
 The aged Victor Hugo expressed the confi- 
 dent belief of many of the maturest minds of 
 the ages when he wrote : 
 
 " I feel in myself the future life. I am like a for- 
 est which has been more than once cut down. The 
 new shoots are stronger and livelier than ever. I 
 am rising, I know, toward the sky. The sunshine 
 is on my head. The earth gives me its generous 
 sap, but heaven lights me with the reflection of un^ 
 known worlds. 
 
 " You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of 
 bodily powers. Why then is my soul the more lu- 
 minous when my bodily powers begin to fail ? Win- 
 ter is on my head and eternal spring is in my hearts 
 Then I breathe, at this hour, the fragrance of the 
 lilacs, the violets, and the roses as at twenty years, 
 
 '' The nearer I approach the end the plainer I hear 
 around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds 
 which invite me. It is marvellous yet simple. It is 
 a fairy tale, and it is history. For half a century I 
 have been writing my thoughts in prose, verse, his- 
 tory, philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, 
 ode, song — I have tried all. But I feel that I have 
 not said the thousandth part of what is in me. 
 
1 88 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 "When I go down to the grave I can say, like so 
 many others : * I have finished my day's work' ; 
 but I cannot say : * I have finished my life.' My 
 day's work will begin again the next morning. The 
 tomb is not a blind alley ; it is a thoroughfare. It 
 closes in the twilight to open with the dawn. 
 
 " I improve every hour because I love this world 
 as my fatherland. My work is only a beginning. 
 My monument is hardly above its foundation. I 
 would be glad to see it mounting and mounting for- 
 ever. The thirst for the infinite proves infinity." 
 
 The common belief of Calvinism, based on a 
 literal view of certain passages of Scripture, was 
 not only that at death people went on living, 
 but that they went on living under certain fixed 
 and unalterable conditions ; conditions of ma- 
 terial bliss or woe that should be the same mil- 
 lions of ages hence as they were the next mo- 
 ment after death. The two chief elements this 
 doctrine contained, were the ideas of absolute 
 stagnation of life in the world to come, and of 
 endless duration. It is almost unnecessary to 
 say that in whatever the New Testament says 
 about the future life, the first of these ideas 
 is not to be found at all, and the second, which 
 Calvinism always made most prominent, is really 
 incidental. Without discussing passages sepa- 
 
The Future Life. 189 
 
 rately, It may be stated that Christ in all his 
 discourses used the familiar language of Jewish 
 theology to impress on people's minds the pro- 
 found truths he desired to make them feel. 
 When he spoke of heaven and hell, of Abra- 
 ham's bosom and paradise, it was not to map 
 out and localize the future for the Jews to 
 whom he spoke, but to make them feel the 
 supreme importance of the principles of right- 
 eousness. The Jews in his time had a certain 
 sensuous imagery under which no doubt the 
 most enlightened of them concealed their true 
 thought, but which to the mass of the people 
 was exactly descriptive of the reality of the 
 future life. The primitive Hebrew belief seems 
 to have been that the spirits of those who died ^ 
 went indiscriminately into sheol, a vast subter- 
 ranean tomb — the underworld, — with barred and 
 bolted gates, where they lay silent like corpses. 
 If there were distinctions there, they were not 
 moral, but national or social, and to that under- 
 world Jehovah's reign was believed not to ex- 
 tend. Thus the Psalmist says with true devo- 
 tional feeling, and in protest against excluding 
 God from any part of His universe : *' If I as- 
 cend up into heaven, thou art there ; if I make 
 
190 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 ffty bed ill hell, {sheol) behold thou art there.'' Later 
 the belief seems to have grown up that from the 
 dominion of death, the king of sheol, faithful 
 Israelites should eventually be released, while the 
 wicked and Gentiles should still be kept in the 
 underworld. It was not until after the Exile, 
 which terminated in the fifth century before 
 Christ, that the belief grew up which seems to 
 have become fully settled before Christ's time, 
 that the unseen world comprised two distinct 
 localities — a Paradise, and an Inferno, the ge- 
 henna of St. Matt, v., 22, 29, 30 ; x., 28 ; St. Mark 
 ix., 43, 45, 47 ; St. Luke xii., 5 ; and a few other 
 passages. In many places in the New Testament 
 the word translated hell in the authorized ver- 
 sion is the Greek word hades, which, like the 
 Hebrew word sheol, means simply the under- 
 world, and has no necessary connection with 
 the thought of retribution. 
 
 The Book of Enoch, which originated in 
 Palestine in the second century before Christ, 
 and the second Book of Esdras (chap, ii., 19), 
 describe Paradise as a restored Eden, where all 
 is peace and prosperity, where there are moun- 
 tains covered with lilies and roses, where milk 
 and honey are plentiful, and as in the Revela- 
 
The Future Life. 191 
 
 tio7t, trees perpetually bear delicious fruits. 
 Another figure under which the Hebrews de- 
 scribed Paradise was that of a banquet with 
 the Patriarchs and Prophets/ where reclining 
 on couches some might even lean their heads 
 on Abraham's bosom, than which, to a faithful 
 Jew, no honor could be greater, no bliss more 
 perfect. Correspondingly dreadful was their 
 language concerning the abode of woe. They 
 named it gehenna, or the valley of the sons of 
 Hinnom, because in that valley, just outside 
 the city walls, the offal from the Temple sacri- 
 fices and all sorts of rubbish were made to feed 
 a fire that rarely, if ever, was suffered to go 
 out. It was the perpetual abode of corruption 
 and fire, and its ghastly associations supplied 
 terrible images by which to describe the condi- 
 tion and the place of lost spirits. Indeed, in 
 the lapse of time, it came to be regarded as one 
 of the mouths of the pit of destruction itself. 
 This will throw light on some of the strongly 
 figurative language of the New Testament con- 
 cerning the future life : Jesus, as we have seen, 
 spoke to his people in their own language ; 
 their familiar religious rites and doctrines he 
 
 ^ See St. Luke xiii., 29 ; xvi., 22. 
 
192 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 did not assail, nor in enforcing truth upon 
 them did he ignore their own metaphors. But 
 it will be noticed that he uses Jewish figures 
 only when talking to the Sanhedrin, or the 
 High Priest, or Nathaniel, not when talking to 
 the Roman governor, to whom Jewish figures 
 would have had little meaning. 
 
 Thus we see the origin of certain opinions 
 concerning the future life that have prevailed 
 in the Christian Church. It is not necessary 
 here to trace these in detail. According to the 
 temper of theologians in the Early Church, 
 and through the Middle Ages, belief in the 
 future assumed a milder or more vindictive 
 tone. Some believed in endless tortures for 
 the wicked and endless bliss for the good ; with 
 some the hottest fires of perdition were re- 
 served for morally wicked men, and with some, 
 those whose thought deviated from established 
 lines were to suffer the worst punishments. 
 Some, like Origen, with a finer ethical sense 
 and a truer belief in God, in the spirit of St. 
 Paul ^ looked forward and prophesied the final 
 
 ' See I Cor, xv., 22, 24-28 ; Romans viii., 21, 23 ; also 
 Hebrews ii., 14. In the New Testament there are as many 
 texts for the doctrine of the Restitution of all things as for any 
 other doctrine of the future. 
 
The Future Life, 193 
 
 triumph of righteousness and peace. In the 
 Early Church, the doctrine of an Intermediate 
 State between this world and the final heaven 
 and hell was commonly taught, a doctrine 
 which afterward in the Middle Ages held its 
 place as a belief in Purgatory, whose cleansing 
 fires should make it possible for some of the 
 many millions who had died impenitent or un- 
 baptized to be purified and so at last reach 
 heaven. In the later Calvinistic belief there 
 was no such merciful provision, the soul at 
 death being received at once into unending 
 bhss, or driven into unending woe. Taine says 
 of the Puritans : " The feeling of the difference 
 there is between good and evil had filled for 
 them all time and space, and had become in- 
 carnate and expressed for them by such words 
 as Heaven and Hell," and as one can see from 
 the writings of such men as Jonathan Edwards, 
 no palliation of the sufferings themselves, nor 
 shortening of their duration, was felt to be pos- 
 sible for "sinners in the hands of an angry 
 
 God." 
 
 Under all these gross, mistaken conceptions 
 of the future we may discern, however, the 
 true principles Christ taught ; of which our 
 
1 94 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 Church, rational and moderate, by her refusal in 
 all her history to adopt the Calvinistic lan- 
 guage, and her little interest in current disputes 
 concerning the state of the departed, teaches 
 us chiefly to think. 
 
 Heaven and hell are states of the soul, not 
 places of arbitrary reward and punishment. 
 Jesus taught nothing concerning the objective 
 conditions of the life beyond ; he did teach that 
 obedience to God's laws brings life and immor- 
 tality, that disobedience brings death, which is 
 the loss of light and power. In this world 
 and all worlds, it was the mission of his 
 life to teach, righteousness redeems the soul, 
 lifting it to heights of knowledge and peace 
 it has not known before, while sin narrows the 
 life and works therein confusion and dismay. 
 No word has been more common in Christian 
 speech than the word salvation, and no word 
 has been more mistakenly or at least unintelli- 
 gently used. To be saved, means to be under- 
 going that process of growth in knowledge and 
 goodness, that leads gradually onward toward 
 the state — for man never attainable — of abso- 
 lute perfection ; to be lost, means to be slowly 
 falling away from light and truth, to be going 
 
The Future Life, 195 
 
 downward not upward in the scale of being. 
 When Jesus wept over Jerusalem and her unbe- 
 lief, and bade the weary world before him drop 
 its burdens and replace them with his easy yoke, 
 or flee from wrath to come, he was not contem- 
 plating a lake of burning sulphur on the one 
 hand and a paradise of sensual delight on the 
 other, but rather the ruin of the moral nature, 
 or the perfection of the life of man. With a 
 power of spiritual vision that no other possessed, 
 he looked into the soul of man and was filled 
 with enthusiasm over its divine possibilities, or 
 else with unutterable grief over its prophecies 
 of ruin and decay ; and like all the greatest re- 
 ligious teachers, he sought to reveal to men the 
 great unacknowledged fact of their sonhood of 
 God, and so to make them conscious of the di- 
 vine power within them by means of which they 
 might rise superior to the limitations of sin and 
 sense. His figurative language, which to later 
 theologians seemed to imply that throughout 
 unending ages men should remain just as this 
 life left them, really implied endless expansion 
 and growth. The word which in our author- 
 ized version is sometimes translated eternal^ 
 sometimes everlasting, contained, as Christ used 
 
196 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 it, far more and other than the mere notion of 
 endlessness of time. Eternal Hfe was the free- 
 dom from all limitations that the soul gains by- 
 increased consciousness of God ; eternal death 
 was the loss of light and liberty, the narrowness 
 and slavery of soul that comes when God is 
 forgotten and His laws disobeyed. The essen- 
 tial idea in the word life is that of change : no 
 living soul can stand still here or hereafter ; nor 
 in view of the instinctive belief in the trium- 
 phant power of goodness which has expressed 
 itself in those passages of Scripture that speak 
 of future redemption for the race, and the 
 final conquest of the kingdoms of this world 
 by God, and that every day finds expression in 
 the devout hopefulness and cheerful prophecy 
 of reverent minds, can we believe that sin 
 and suffering are to go on in the universe 
 forever. 
 
 Emerson quotes George Fox as saying : 
 " There is an ocean of darkness and death, but 
 withal an infinite ocean of light and love which 
 flows over that of darkness," and this is the be- 
 lief of healthy souls. 
 
 The problem of evil has always been regarded 
 as insoluble on the theory of a perfect God, and 
 
The Future Life, 197 
 
 yet may we not be approaching an explanation 
 of it when we think of " imperfection as in 
 some sort essential to all that we know of life. 
 Sign of life in a mortal body, sign of a state of 
 progress, of change " ? ^ Cardinal Newman says 
 very significantly : *' The laws of the universe, 
 the principles of truth, the relation of one thing 
 to another, their qualities and virtues, the order 
 and harmony of the whole, all that exists is 
 from God ; and if evil is not from Him, as as- 
 suredly it is not, this is because evil has no sub- 
 stance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, 
 perversion, or corruption of that which has." "^ 
 If, then, evil is the excess, negation, or wrong 
 use of the good, its true corrective will be 
 found, as in the universe, so in the individual 
 life, in keeping all the factors of life in proper 
 balance. To do less or more than law requires, 
 to warp things from their proper uses, to give 
 the lower the place of the higher, to make aims 
 that are not the best life's chief aims, will assur- 
 edly result in evil. To observe the laws that 
 God has affixed to the nature of things will 
 
 ' John Ruskin. 
 
 ^ " Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Edu- 
 cation," pp. 91-97. 
 
198 Heart of the Creeds. 
 
 redeem the world and all its conscious life from 
 death and despair. 
 
 " O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself," says 
 the Prophet Hosea, speaking for God, *' but in 
 Me is thy help," and every soul in all the world 
 that has learned that living for self means 
 death, and living for God means life, has un- 
 derstood the double note of despondency and 
 hope that sounds in the Prophet's words : 
 ** God has not appointed us to wrath, but to 
 obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ." 
 Righteousness is more deeply rooted in our 
 natures than sin ; righteousness is our true life, 
 sin is life's contradiction ; and it may be over- 
 come. The Calvinistic view of man as natural- 
 ly lost to God, may sometimes seem to be true, 
 but it is not true. God's erring children may 
 be lost to themselves, but they can never be 
 lost to Him. 
 
 We have dwelt thus, at length, on the nature 
 of salvation, because right views of eternal life 
 and death, fulfilment and destruction, are at the 
 bottom of all true conceptions of the future. 
 We do not know what the conditions of the 
 future will be, what new bodies we shall wear, 
 what new homes we shall live in, what new em- 
 
The Future Life, 199 
 
 ployments we shall have ; we only know that life 
 means growth and development, and that eter- 
 nity means freedom from the limitations of time 
 and sense. " Where will you be then ? " said 
 some one once to Luther. ** Under Heaven," 
 he answered, and the words implied all that 
 we mean when we talk about the impossibility 
 of ever getting away from the divine presence, 
 the divine love. 
 
 " Our joys are shaded. The perfect smile be- 
 longs to God alone." ^ Yet if, in other spheres, 
 enlargement of spiritual life shall mean, as it 
 must mean, the ever more and more perfect re- 
 flection in us of the perfect ** smile" of God, all 
 our vague dreams of Heaven shall be more than 
 realized. 
 
 Hell is no longer to the enlightened Christian 
 mind the gehenna of the Hebrews or the sul- 
 phureous lake of the Calvinistic creeds ; it is 
 something far more terrible, — the corruption 
 and narrowness and emptiness and loss of vital 
 power of the retrograding soul. 
 
 Heaven is not pearls and flowers, and fruits 
 and banquets, but something infinitely better 
 and more to be desired, — enlargement of soul, 
 
 ^ Victor Hugo. 
 
200 Heart of the Creeds, 
 
 light, and liberty, and love ; "■ That perfect pres- 
 ence of God's face which we for want of words 
 call Heaven." 
 
 How shall we escape hell and gain Heaven? 
 By following conscience and true self-love, 
 which, as Bishop Butler says, " always lead 
 the same way." 
 
 " Be docile to thine unseen Guide ; 
 Love Him as He loves thee : 
 Time and obedience are enough, 
 And thou a saint shalt be." ^ 
 
 ^ Faber. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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