UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN BOOK , ACKS The person charging this material is re¬ sponsible for its return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. To renew call Telephone Center, 333-8400 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2020 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign https://archive.org/details/significanceofwe00warf_0 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WESTMINSTER STANDARDS AS A CREED ' ’ THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WESTMINSTER STANDARDS AS A CREED AN ADDRESS Delivered before the Presbytery of New York, November S, 1897, on the occasion of the celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Completion of the Westmin¬ ster Standards BY BENJAMIN B. WARFIELD PROFESSOR IN THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY AT PRINCETON NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1898 Copyright, 1898, by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS TROW DIRECTORY PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK Zo THE PRESBYTERY OF NEW YORK AT WHOSE APPOINTMENT IT WAS PREPARED AND BEFORE WHOM IT WAS DELIVERED, THIS ADDRESS IN ITS PRINTED FORM IS NOW DEDICATED WITH AN EXPRESSION OF THE AUTHOR’S SENSE OF THE HONOR CONFERRED UPON HIM BY THEIR APPOINTMENT, OF HIS HEARTY PARTICIPATION IN THEIR LOVE FOR OUR NOBLE STANDARDS, AND OF HIS EARNEST DESIRE THAT THIS ADDRESS, WHICH IS BOTH THEIRS AND HIS, MAY BE USED OF GOD IN MAKING KNOWN IN WIDER CIRCLES THE TRUE NATURE OF OUR STANDARDS AND IN INTRENCHING THEM MORE DEEPLY IN OUR OWN HEARTS 3 p 3 ■ . THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WESTMINSTER STANDARDS AS A CREED Fathers and Brethren :— It would be difficult for me adequately to ex¬ press the pleasure which it gives me to respond to your invitation to join with you to-day in celebrating the fifth jubilee of the gift of the Westminster Standards to the world. The task you have laid upon me, of seeking to set forth the significance of that gift, though it has its difficulties arising from its magnitude, cannot fail to appeal powerfully to one who has, in all sincerity and heartiness, set his hand to these Standards as “ containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures.” It is not merely a duty but a pleasure to bear witness to the truth of God as we apprehend it, and to give a reason from time to time for the faith that is in us. I cannot, indeed, hope to tell over to-day all that the Westminster Standards are to us—to unfold in detail all that has for two cen- 2 The Significance of turies and a half made them precious to a body of Christians who have been second to none in intelligence of conviction, evangelistic zeal and faithfulness of confession. But if I were to essay to express in one word what it is in them which has proved so perennial a source of strength to generation after generation of Chris¬ tian men, and which causes us still to cling to them with a devotion no less intelligent than passionate, I think I should but voice your own conviction were I to say that it is because these precious documents appeal to us as but the em¬ bodiment in fitly chosen language of the pure gospel of the grace of God. The high value that we attach to them and that leads us to gather here to-day to remember with gratitude before God the men who gave them to us, and to thank God for this supreme product of their labors, is but the reflection of our conviction that in these forms of words we possess the most com¬ plete, the most fully elaborated and carefully guarded, the most perfect, and the most vital ex¬ pression that has ever been framed by the hand of man, of all that enters into what we call evangel¬ ical religion, and of all that must be safeguarded if evangelical religion is to persist in the world. How they came to be this, it is to be my task this afternoon to attempt to recall to our remembrance. the Westminster Standards I It is a humbling exercise to reflect on the dif¬ ficulty which has been experienced by the gospel of God’s grace — or evangelical religion, as we currently call it nowadays—in establishing and preserving itself in the world. The proclama¬ tion of this gospel constitutes the main burden of the Scriptural revelation. And, after the varied and insistent statement which it received at the hands of the great company of inspired men whose writings make up the complex of the Scriptures — and especially after its rich pro¬ phetic announcement by Isaiah; its marvellous exposition in the language of living fact in the fourfold narrative of the life of Jesus; its full dialectical development and explanation by Paul, as over against almost every possible mis¬ conception ; its poignant assertion by John, cut with the sharpness and polished to the brilliancy of a gem—one might well suppose that it had been made the permanent possession of men, etched into the very substance of human thought with such boldness that even he that ran could not fail to read it, with such depth that it could never again be erased or obscured. But it was 4 The Significance of not so. There is no other such gulf in the his¬ tory of human thought as that which is cleft be¬ tween the apostolic and the immediately suc¬ ceeding ages. To pass from the latest apostolic writings to the earliest compositions of unin¬ spired Christian pens, is to fall through such a giddy height that it is no wonder if we rise dazed and almost unable to determine our where¬ abouts. Here is the great fault—as the geolo¬ gists would say—in the history of Christian doc¬ trine. There is every evidence of continuity— but, oh, at how much lower a level! The rich vein of evangelical religion has run well-nigh out; and, though there are masses of apostolic origin lying everywhere, they are but fragments, and are evidently only the talus which has fallen from the cliffs above and scattered itself over the lowered surface. Thus it came about that the deposit of divine truth in the apostolic revela¬ tion did not supply the starting-point of the de¬ velopment of doctrine in the church, but has rather from the beginning stood before it as the goal to which it was painfully to climb. Through how many ages men needed to strug¬ gle slowly upward before they even measurably recovered the lost elevation! No doubt the es¬ sence of evangelical religion remained the im¬ plicit possession of every truly Christian heart, the Westminster Standards 5 and this implicit presence of so great a light lent a glow to every Christian age. JSTo doubt the constituent elements of evangelical doctrine found disjointedly more or less explicit recognition at the hands of every really great Christian thinker, and we may piece these fragments together into a mosaic picture of the real Christian heart of each period. INo doubt there persisted every¬ where and always an instinctive protest, fed by the Word and quickened by the demands of the Christian life, against the deteriorated concep¬ tions of the day ; and this protest flared up from time to time into a flame of vehement resistance to some more than usually widespread, or some more than usually aggressive, or some more than usually deadly assault upon some essen¬ tial element of that truth by which alone men could live, and would not be allayed until the whole truth in question had been brought to clear consciousness and guarded expression. Early monuments of such struggles for funda¬ mental elements of evangelical religion we pos¬ sess in those forms of sound words which we know as the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian formulary, in which the evangelical doctrines of the Trinity in Unity and of the Person of Christ receive such lucid, comprehensive, and circum¬ spect statement as has safeguarded them through 6 The Significa7ice of all subsequent time, and against every hitherto conceivable encroachment of misbelief. But it was not until four centuries had dragged by that, in reaction upon an incredibly audacious on¬ slaught upon the very core of evangelical relig¬ ion, the Church was enabled to rise upon the broad and strong wings of a great religious genius, to something like a full-orbed apprehen¬ sion of the treasures she possessed in the gospel of God’s grace. Augustine compassed for her the privilege of this splendid vision, and for a season she basked in its glory. But what that generation thus achieved, it lacked the power fully to se¬ cure for its successors. It fixed its own attain¬ ments in no firmly outlined and detailed formu¬ lary of ecumenical authority ; and it had not itself passed away before the lines drawn so sharply and boldly by the master-hand of Au¬ gustine began to fade again out of the conscious¬ ness of men. We can trace the increasing ob¬ scuration from age to age. Not more than a cen¬ tury had elapsed before the tenacity and distinct¬ ness with which the gospel in its entirety was grasped had so far relaxed, that it was possible even for the best Christians of the time, men like the great and good Cresarius, to betray it into one of those futile and fatal compromises with the Westminster Standards 7 its persistent enemy which have proved in all ages the snare of good men and the ruin of the truth. No wonder that three centuries later it lay lan¬ guishing and dying in chains in the person of one who nobly bore the fit name of the “ Ser¬ vant of God,” * and to whose honor, as to a light shining in a dark place, we should do well to pause to pay some grateful tribute to-day. Then the pall of ecclesiasticism was dragged over the corpse, and the dense primeval night seemed to have settled again upon the face of the earth. But it is a long night that knows no dawn ; and just when the darkness seemed most hopeless, a streak of light appears again on the horizon and the sun springs suddenly up and climbs the heav¬ ens. The Reformation we call it: Zwingli, Luther, Calvin—these are its heralds: and what it really is is the gospel of God’s grace brought back to earth. Ah! how men greet it! Crushed under the weight of their sin, with nothing but their poor, human strength to lift it, and nought reached to their help but the hand of a church much too ob¬ viously human, how joyously they welcome again the outstretched hand of God ! And how the glad news spreads until all Europe is filled with its echo, and men everywhere rise from the ashes of their despondency, stretch themselves awake, * Fulgentius Goteschalcus — “illustrious servant of God.” 8 The Significance of put on new courage, and go forward in the hope of God. Surely now, we will say, flung into the midst of this mass of awakened men, with the memory of their despair fresh on them and the experience of their deliverance keen in their hearts, the gospel has come to stay. But no: the clouds at once gather again. Melancthon him¬ self, trusted helper and worthy companion of Lu¬ ther, first systematic expounder of the newly re¬ covered gospel, Melancthon himself readmits the old “ evil leaven of synergism,” and, amid the tur¬ moils that ensue, the Lutheran churches succeed in only partially recovering the lost ground. They are able, accordingly, to establish them¬ selves, not on the pure gospel of the grace of God, but as their Formula Concordias witnesses, only on a somewhat neutral territory over which the old humanitarianism could urge some sort of claim. Thus these churches lost the hope of giv¬ ing its final and complete formulation to the prin¬ ciples of evangelical religion. Meanwhile, in the grace of God, better things were being wrought by the Reformed. They it was who were most cruelly ground under the heel of the oppressor ; they it was, consequently, who most passionately cast their hearts' hope upon the God of salvation. And so, all over the Reformed world, voices were raised giving expression to the the Westminster Standards 9 doctrines of grace with a fulness, a richness, an absoluteness never before known. Reformed Confessions sprang up everywhere in a luxuriant growth, written often by the hands of martyrs, wet always with their blood, and each and all de¬ claring through martyr lips, which spoke not only in the fear of God but out of ardent love to Him, and face to face as dying men with their Judge and their Redeemer, all the words of this life. It is a century of struggle and suffering which is distilled into these Confessions—a century of patient endurance and faithful testimony which, in their glowing and uncompromising language, speaks out, with a firmness and clearness and ful¬ ness never before attained, the principles of that gospel by which alone the soul can live, and the full sweetness and strength of which men taste only in times like those. At last the gos¬ pel had come to its rights ; at last men seemed to have laid hold upon it with a clearness of appre¬ hension and an ardor of embrace which could never more be loosed. But the treasure was not even yet to be re¬ tained without a final and supreme struggle. One evil had hitherto been spared the Reformed Churches. Every conceivable assault had been made upon them from without, but no serious in¬ ternal treason had as yet endangered the purity io The Significance of of their confession. With the second century of their existence even this trial was to fall upon them. It came in what we know as the Remon¬ strant Controversy, in which the old humanita¬ rian conceptions, the violent assertion of which had been the occasion of Augustine’s republica¬ tion of the gospel of grace, and by the more measured and subtle working of which evangeli¬ cal religion had been gradually throttled in the Latin Church, reappeared in the very bosom of the Reformed Churches themselves and jeopard¬ ized the purity of their assertion of the gospel. We all know how the new danger was tran¬ scended. Met in ecumenical synod at Dort, the Reformed Churches gave renewed and serious consideration, in the light of Scripture alone, to those elements of evangelical religion to which exception had been taken, and with one tongue, voicing the testimony of the whole Reformed world, bore their solemn witness to them as es¬ sential elements in the gospel of God’s grace. But the end was not even yet. Transferred to English ground the assault was continued for a third of a century longer under circumstances which gave it the highest conceivable force and speciousness. Here sacerdotalism, in the form of Anglican prelacy, presented itself in the disguise of the Reformed religion itself. Here humani- the Westminster Standards u tarianism put on the garments of light, allied it¬ self with religious fervor, and ran up by insensi¬ ble stages into a mysticism which confounded human claims with the very voice of God. This is the meaning of what we call the Puritan Con¬ flict which, from the theological side, was nothing else than the last deadly struggle of evangelical religion—the gospel of God’s grace—to preserve itself pure and sweet and clean in the midst of the most insidious attacks which could be brought against it—attacks, the strength of which resided just in the fact that now its old-time foes ap¬ proached it with the sword in hand, indeed, and with no loss of their undying hatred, but un¬ der its own banner and clothed in its own uni¬ form. It was a battle to the death; and the arts of war could not but be learned in its progress. To meet so protean a foe, attacking at every point with weapons of unexampled fineness and tactics of unimagined subtlety, a skill of fence and a wariness of defence unknown before were nec¬ essarily developed ; and, with them, those high qualities which underlie them—keenness of per¬ ception, clearness of vision, firmness of purpose, accuracy of aim, precision of movement straight to the essential goal. Men trained in this school could not be content with merely general state- 12 The Significance of ments of the truth by which they lived, and which would long since have been wrested from them had they held to it with only a broad and, there¬ fore, loose grasp. In the strenuousness of the conflict they had not only learned how to state the gospel sharply, distinctly, precisely; they had, so to speak, lost the power of stating it otherwise than with clearness and exactitude and force. As well expect the veteran fresh from the wars to bungle in his fence; nay, his blade takes instinc¬ tively the correct attitude of guard, and eye and wrist move in such organic harmony that it would be only with an effort that either could prove false to its fellow. As well expect the mountain¬ eer who has trodden the peaks from infancy to stumble heavily over his arretes and passes; he knows not how to do otherwise than to step cleanly and surely and firmly, and he instinctively plants his feet where they cannot be moved. So, when this company of Puritan pastors was gath¬ ered from the parishes of England which they had saved for the gospel, and was bidden, “Write down this gospel,” they could not do otherwise than write it down with that rich com¬ pleteness which had nourished their own souls and the souls of their flocks in those times of conflict and often almost of despair, and with that precision in which alone it could preserve its the Westminster Standards 13 integrity and power in the face of the violent and insidious foes to the attacks of which it had been, in their own experience, exposed. It is because the Westminster Standards are the product of such men, working under such circum¬ stances, that they embody the gospel of the grace of God with a carefulness, a purity, and an ex¬ actness never elsewhere achieved, and come to us as, historically, the final fixing in confessional language of the principles and teachings of evangelical religion. Sixteen centuries of strug¬ gle toward the pure apprehension of the gospel lay behind them, culminating in that ultimate proclamation of evangelical truth which we call the Reformation. More specifically, a hundred and fifty years of the development of Reformed theology lay behind them, culminating in the vindication of the purity of the gospel by the Reformed world as over against the Remonstrant adulterations. Most specifically of all, there lay behind them the half century of the Puritan con¬ flict—a half century of working and polishing the jewel of the gospel beneath every hammer that the cruelty of men, and every chisel and file that the ingenuity of men could devise, until it was beaten and cut into the most compact and sharply outlined possible expression of the pure gospel of the grace of God. It is to these historical 14 The Significance of conditions of their origin that the Westminster Standards owe their high significance and value. Historically speaking, this is the significance of the Westminster Standards as a creed. the Westminster Standards 15 II But when we thus say that the historical origin of the Westminster Standards operated directly to give them peculiar completeness and precision as a statement of the gospel, that is as much as to say that they appeal to us not more because they are historically the ultimate crystallization of the principles of evangelical religion, than be¬ cause of the high scientific perfection which they attain, considered as a product of human thought, in their statement of these principles. The scien¬ tific quality of the Chalcedonian formulary, for example, was not due to any speculative interest dominating the minds of its framers, nor to any singular speculative ability characterizing them, but to the thoroughness with which the whole problem with which the document deals was threshed out in the course of the keen and pro¬ longed controversies which preceded its formula¬ tion and prepared the material for its use. This effect is not best expressed by representing the vital processes which go on in a long discussion, affecting the basis of the religious life, as simulat¬ ing in their results a scientific product; it would be more nearly correct to conceive the processes 16 The Significance of of scientific statement as imitating, and that at a considerable interval, the work of organic contro¬ versy. The scientific investigator makes all due effort carefully to consider every possible solution of the problem brought before him, candidly to weigh every conceivable element which may af¬ fect the result, and thoroughly to canvass every combination of the elements possible to imagine; and he hopes, by strenuous diligence, watchful impartiality and thorough manipulation of his material, to reach a result which will do full justice to all considerations, and which will therefore stand permanently in the face of all criticism. But it would seem to be obvious that such a sift¬ ing and weighing cannot go on in a single coolly working mind with anything like the same search¬ ing completeness, or ultimate in anything like the same perfection of result, as when they take place in the caldron of an aroused and deeply moved mass of men striving earnestly to comprehend and express the elements of their faith. Scientific con¬ struction, therefore, bears to vital processes in this sphere, too, very much the same relation as in chemical synthesis: not until the manipulation of the laboratory can outdo the subtle alchemy of life can we expect scientific care to surpass liv¬ ing controversy in producing a truly scientific statement of vital truth. Whenever the elements the Westminster Standards 17 cast into the crucible of life include all those that enter into the case, and the ferment is violent enough and sufficiently long continued, we may ex¬ pect the ultimate eliminations and combinations to be in the highest sense natural—that is to run on the lines of essential rightness—and the final crystallization to be a scientific product of the first quality. It is to the fact that just this was the process by which the Westminster Standards came into being that they owe their high scien¬ tific character. For, consider how richly represented in the re¬ ligious life of Europe during the formative period of the Reformed theology, and especially in the religious life of Britain during the era when the Westminster theology was in prepara¬ tion, were all those constructions which can with any show of attractiveness be given to the Chris¬ tian religion. I think it may be said that there are only three main forms in which this religion may be plausibly presented to the acceptance of men ; which can acquire—certainly which have ever acquired—a completeness, a self-consistency, a power of presentation, such as tend to give them any extended empire over men’s minds. We may, for our convenience, label these the Sacer¬ dotal, the Humanitarian, and the Evangelical Gospels; and it is among them that the battle of 18 The Significance of the faith must needs be fought out. Possibly there never will be a time when all three will not, in one form or another, be represented in the world ; certainly up to to-day, and apparently as far into the future as our conjecture can pene¬ trate, the supreme task of each has been and will continue to be to make good its position as over against the other two, and to protect its territory from absorption by them. Every attack that has ever been made, or apparently can ever be made, upon evangelical religion—be it as violent or as insidious as it may—will, on analysis, be' found to be a more or less gross, or a more or less sub¬ tle, manifestation of one or the other of these opposing tendencies. No statement of evangel¬ ical religion can stand, therefore, which does not differentiate it, and in differentiating protect it, from these its two perennial and ever-encroach¬ ing foes. And the statement that does perfectly differentiate it from them both will be the high¬ est and most perfect scientific statement of which evangelical religion is capable. It was thus incident to the historical circum¬ stances of their origin that the Westminster Standards should attain the high-water mark of a differentiated statement of the elements of evangelical religion. For the most complete and the most powerful embodiment of the sacerdotal the Westminster Standards 19 tendency is found, of course, in the church of Rome; and never was this tendency so active in its propaganda, so impassioned, so filled with the courage of intense conviction and utter devotion as in those days of the Counter-Reformation, when the Jesuit hosts flung themselves into the work of recovering every inch of the ground lost in the Protestant revolt with a fiery zeal and a fertility of resource which remain until to-day the wonder and example of the world. And while the most complete embodiment of the humani¬ tarian tendency is to be sought in more extreme developments, such as for example Socinianism or rationalizing naturalism, to the workings of which the Reformed Churches were no strangers; its most effective elaboration within the limits of a church claiming to believe in God and His Christ, has ever exhibited itself in that great middle system which under the name of Semi- Pelagianism early allied itself with Roman ec- clesiasticism and in later Romanism became the characterizing feature of the Jesuit theology, and which broke out afresh in the churches of the Re¬ formation in the forms of Lutheran synergism and Remonstrant humanism and sought to poi¬ son the fountains of evangelical religion in their sources. The simple enumeration of these facts will serve to indicate the fires in which the Re- 20 The Significance of formed theology was forged. It would have been a marvel had it emerged from its century of conflict with these forces without having been beaten into something like shape. There was indeed but a single alternative open: that it should be crushed out of existence and pounded into the dust that is spurned by the foot of man, or else that it should come forth from the forg¬ ing compacted into adamant and polished into perfection. And yet the process of the forging of that ex¬ quisite product of scientific theology which we call the Westminster Standards is but half revealed when we recite these broad facts. It was under those hammers that the Reformed theology was beaten into that perfected shape in which it lay in the minds of its adherents throughout Europe in the seventeenth century. Thus it was fashioned into the noble shape in which it was spoken out by the assembled Reformed world at the Synod of Dort or by the Swiss theologians in their For¬ mula Consensus: and thus it would have been spoken out in every centre of Reformed life in all Europe, from Scotland to Hungary. It was already in a high and true sense a finished product. But in a higher and finer sense there was a finish yet to be given it: a finish which could be acquired only by passage through the yet more severe the Westminster Standards 21 ordeal that awaited it on English ground. There can be no need to recite again the details of the story of how narrow the lines were there drawn within which he must walk who would preserve his good confession : of how sacerdotalism seized the reins of the Reformed Church of England itself and drove rough-shod over the hearts and consciences of her only faithful children ; of how, in the dreadful confusion of the times, humani¬ tarian self-assertiveness obtained control of some of the finest spiritual sinew in the land and set it to demolishing the foundations of the gospel. No wonder that many of the very elect were de¬ ceived and lost the purity of their testimony. But no wonder, on the other hand, that those who endured, because—how else ?—they saw the Invisible One and in the light of that Vision were enabled to keep the word of God’s patience, emerged from the ordeal as from a furnace seven times heated, purified and refined and shaking the very smell of the smoke from their undefiled garments. These were they, who, sitting in solemn conclave in the Jerusalem Chamber, gave forth that serious expression of the faith by which they lived which we call the Westminster Standards: and this is the reason why this their enunciation of the elements of the gospel of God’s grace has a perfection of finish upon it elsewhere unattained, 22 The Significance of —which could not have been equalled bj the work of any other body of men then on the face of the earth, which we can never hope to surpass, and which we can lightly lose or rashly cast from us only when our grasp upon evangelical religion becomes weak or our love for it grows cold. It belongs to the very essence of the situation that an enunciation of the elements of the gospel, springing out of such conditions, should be su¬ premely well guarded from the sides of both its most obdurate foes,—between which it was at the time, only by the greatest circumspection, pre¬ serving itself from being crushed, as between the upper and nether millstones. 'No wonder, then, that even the most cursory reader of the West¬ minster Standards is impressed with the exquisite precision and balance of their statements, with the clearness and purity with which they bring out just the essence of the gospel, and the drastic thoroughness with which they separate from it every remainder of sacerdotal and humanitarian leaven. To read over a chapter or two of the Westminster Confession gives one fresh from the obscurities and confusions of much modern theo¬ logical discussion a mental feeling very nearly akin to the physical sensation of washing one’s hands and face after a hot hour’s work. Here the truth is shelled out clean. No doubt there the Westminster Standards 23 are those whose perverted appetites seem to like more or less chaff in their bread, and who may therefore manage to take offence at this very per¬ fection of statement. And it may be easy to find fault with what we may be pleased to call the polemic flavor of documents so formulated, and to ask whether it is not time to smooth out the frowns of war from our countenance and to speak out our testimony to the gospel of love with the unbroken serenity of a universal peace. As if truth could ever be stated without offence to false¬ hood : as if the very essence of definition lay not in exclusion: as if it were not self-evident that perfect and clean inclusion must always work equally perfect and clean exclusion, and the more complete and perfect the exclusion the more com¬ plete and perfect the definition. The wall that protects the citadel must needs be too narrow in its compass to enclose the foeman’s camp as well: the flask that preserves the precious essence must needs be tight enough to shut out corrupting germs. The Westminster fathers placed nothing in their Standards which they did not think worth fighting for,—nay, which they had not already been called upon to fight for; and it marks the height of their service that they have given it a form securely guarded on every side, on the well- polished surface of which, in particular, the chief- 24 The Significance of est and most persistent foes of the gospel will seek in vain for a foothold. So long, then, as the leavens of sacerdotalism and humanitarianism—of externality in religion and of dependence on flesh—remain, in one form or another, the most dangerous perils to which the gospel is exposed (and it would seem as if this must be as long as human nature endures), so long the statement given the gospel of grace in the Westminster Standards must remain the ulti¬ mate scientific enunciation of the principles of evangelical religion. In the same sense in which the Hicene and Athanasian creeds attained the final expression of the doctrine of the Trinity, and the Chalcedonian definition the final expres¬ sion of the doctrine of the Person of Christ, the Westminster Standards attained the final expres¬ sion of the elements of evangelical religion. Of course, nothing like divine inspiration is attrib¬ uted to any of these documents; nor is it neces¬ sary to invoke any special or peculiar divine superintendence over their production, though he who believes in a God will not fail to perceive Ilis providential working, nor will he who be¬ lieves in the God of the Bible fail to perceive the fulfilment of His promises, in such supreme pro¬ ducts of human thought on divine things as these. What we discover on the surface of these docu- the Westminster Standards 25 ments, however, is the product of historical pro¬ cesses and of historical conditions which not only enabled but compelled their framers firmly to grasp in all their relations and clearly, cleanly, and guardedly to express the truths with which they deal. They mark, in a word, epochs in the his¬ tory of human reflection on the truths of the gospel—epochs in the attainment and registry of special truths ; and they, therefore, in the nature of the case, give these special truths their com¬ plete and final scientific expression. All subse¬ quent attempts to restate them can but repeat these older statements—which were struck out when the fires were hot and the iron was soft—or else fall helplessly away from the purity of their conceptions or the justness of their language. In this fact resides, scientifically speaking, the significance of the Westminster Standards as a creed. 26 The Significance of III It is sufficiently clear that a scientific statement of truth, originating in the manner described and owing its scientific character not merely to closet reflection but to the interaction of the varied in¬ terests and requirements of men’s souls, need not —nay, cannot—lack in vital quality. It will nec¬ essarily bear in its very fibre a coloring from the heart. A product of the intensest intellectual ac¬ tivity, and exhibiting in its forms of statement the niceties of scientific construction, it is never¬ theless the product of intellect working only un¬ der impulse from and dictation of the heart, and in its very forms of statement will be the vehicle of the expression of the needs and attainments of the spiritual life. And thus it comes about that the Westminster Standards appeal to us not merely as, historically, the deposited faith of the best age of evangelical development, and not merely as, scientifically, the most thoroughly thought out and most carefully guarded state¬ ment ever penned of the elements of evangelical religion, but also as, vitally, filled with the ex¬ pressed essence and breathing the finest fragrance of spiritual religion. the Westminster Standards 27 They gravely err who picture to themselves the fathers to whom we owe the formulation of any of the great doctrines of our religion as domi¬ nated by merely speculative interests, or nerved for their task mainly by metaphysical considera¬ tions. It has never been so. Restless specula¬ tion and philosophical pretension have ever been rather the boasts and, let us frankly admit it, the characteristic possessions of the purveyors of heresies and the fomenters of those fatal concilia¬ tions with the thought of the world which have, from the beginning, been the bane of the Church and one of the most serious perils of the gospel. It is not only in the infancy of Christianity that it has been a true testimony that “Rot many wise are called.” A certain speculative inertness, we might almost sa} r , has marked the Church, and even those to whom God, in His providence, has committed the formulation of its treasures of truth, until, goaded into action by intolerable assaults on the very penetralium of their spiritual life, their minds have taken fire from their hearts and risen to compass and proclaim the elements of the higher wisdom of God. The accents which smite our ears, out of our creeds, with such tre¬ mendous emphasis do not indicate the crisp, cold, sharp movements of mere intellection ; they are the pulsations of great hearts heaving in emotion 28 The Significance of and rising to the assertion of the precious truth by which they live. If we read them as merely speculative discriminations, the fault lies in us, not in them. It is because our hearts cannot, like theirs, stand up and answer, “ We have felt! ” * The scoffer who mocks, for example, at the Ni- cene fathers wrangling over a mere iota in fram¬ ing their definition of the Trinitarian relation,f but uncovers the poverty of his own spiritual life and betrays the shallowness of his own religions experience. He that knows his Lord, that has in his periods of despair fled to His sheltering arms and in his periods of comfort rested upon His bosom, I do not say will not, I say cannot, abate one jot or one tittle of his passionate asser¬ tion of His divine majesty. We treat these clean¬ ly cut and nicely balanced phrases as if they were intellectualistic scales weighing minute differences of merely speculative import, only because, and * “ A warmtli within the breast would melt The freezing reason’s colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer’d, ‘ I have felt! ’ ” —In Memoi'iam , cxxiv. f This is the difference between the orthodox formula (,bjxoovaios ) and the semi-Arian ( 5/xoiovcrios ) ; the decided Arian affirmed erepoov