Chapter IV. (Continued) the Signs of a Universal and Spiritual Society
Section II. The Creeds
In the last section I defended my view of Baptism as the sign of admission into a Spiritual and Universal Kingdom, grounded upon our Lord’s incarnation, and ultimately resting upon the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, against the different Quaker, Protestant, Philosophical, and Romanist theories, which are current respecting it. But I have very much failed of my purpose, if I have not led the reader to observe that Baptism, according to this idea of it, is also the justification of many of those Quaker, Protestant, Philosophical principles, which were considered in the first part; one step towards the satisfaction of that great idea of a Church, one, indivisible, and imperishable, to which the Romanist clings with such honourable tenacity.
That man is a creature prone to sense, rising above it by virtue of a union with an invisible Teacher, is the doctrine of Quakerism. Baptism embodies that doctrine, and converts it, as Fox wished that it should be converted, from a mere doctrine into a living fact. The only foundation, says the Calvinist, for faithful action and for sound hope, is the belief that we are God’s elect children. Baptism offers to men that foundation; it tells them that they are chosen of God, and precious. It makes this foundation, what Calvin and all earnest Calvinists have felt that it ought to be, not dependent upon our feelings, apprehensions, and discoveries, but on the will and word of God. At the same time the distinction which it draws between the new and the old man, the man in Christ who alone can be raised and glorified, and the old man which is to be utterly abolished, is a far finer, clearer, more practical distinction than any which the exclusive Calvinist has been able to reach. It denounces the unclean living into which the believer in an absolute separate election for him is in such danger of falling, as absolutely incompatible with the knowledge and enjoyment of God which is eternal life; and yet it does not treat any living man as lying beyond the pale of God’s covenant. Philosophers say that man can only be that or do that which is according to his constitution; he cannot be made by some miraculous process something else than he is; or, if he can, that power must be an injurious one. Baptism declares man’s true and right constitution to be that of union with God, and separation from Him to be a violation of that only order according to which, as reason and experience alike shew, he can live. It is a fact that men are living anomalously; it is their own testimony that in doing so they are following their natures. Baptism declares that those who will are taken out of that inconsistent condition to which they are prone, and are taken into a reasonable condition, in which they may live so long as they remember the covenant of God. Finally, Romanism demands that by some direct, visible, permanent token, which all may acknowledge, it shall be felt that God has established the true, Divine, Catholic body upon earth; that it is the same from age to age; that the members are brought under a condition of Divine and spiritual discipline, are invested with mighty privileges, are laid under mighty responsibilities, are trained for a high and glorious condition. Of this demand, Baptism is the accomplishment, in a larger, fuller sense, than the Romanist will at all admit. By this sign we claim him, and hundreds of thousands in the East and West, whom he has anathematized, to be members of the Church and body of Christ; by this sign we protest against him and them, when by any acts or any theories they degrade the spirituality, or narrow the universality, of that fellowship into which they have been admitted, and so (as far as in them lies) make void the covenant and the purpose of God.
I wish now to consider whether there be any other notorious facts which can only be explained on the same principle as this of the existence of Baptism; facts appearing on the face of them to import that there is a spiritual and universal constitution of society for mankind; facts denied to have that significance by a number of warring parties; facts which establish their claim to be what they seem to be, by the help which they afford us in justifying and realising the leading principles of each of these parties, and in reconciling them with each other. The first which presents itself is this:—
There is actually found at this present day, in every Christian country, a certain document called a Creed. It is not necessary to inquire minutely at what time it was formed. Let it be admitted that there is an obscurity over its origin; that we cannot say who put it into that shape in which we now see it. From whatever quarter it may have come, here it is. It has lasted through a great many storms and revolutions. The Roman empire has passed away; modern European society has risen out of its ruins. Political systems have been established and overthrown; religious systems have been established and overthrown. Even the physical world has undergone mighty alterations, and our conception of its laws is altogether changed. The very languages which were spoken in all parts of the world when the Gospel was first preached, have given place to others; but this, “I believe,” remains. It is substantially what it was, to say the very least, sixteen hundred years ago. During that time it has not been lying hid in the closet of some antiquarian. It has been repeated by the peasants and children of the different lands into which it has come. It has been given to them as a record of facts with which they had as much to do as any noble. In most parts of Europe it has been repeated publicly every day in the year; and though it has been thus hawked about, and, as men would say, vulgarized, the most earnest and thoughtful men in different countries, different periods, different stages of civilisation, have felt that it connected itself with the most permanent part of their being, that it had to do with each of them personally, and that it was the symbol of that humanity which they shared with their brethren. Reformers who have been engaged in conflict with all the prevailing systems of their age, have gone back to this old form of words, and have said that they lived to reassert the truths which it embodied. Men on sick beds, martyrs at the stake, have said that because they held it fast, they could look death in the face. And, to sink much lower, yet to say what may strike many as far more wonderful, there are many in this day, who, having asked the different philosophers of their own and of past times what they could do in helping them to understand the world, to fight against its evils, to love their fellow-men, are ready to declare that in this child’s creed they have found the secret which these philosophers could not give them, and which, by God’s grace, they shall not take away from them.
Now a man who has noticed these facts, and has settled it in his mind that, whatever they mean, they must mean something, would certainly wish to inquire into the nature of this document which has been diffused so widely, has lasted so long, and has seemed to so many different persons of so much value. He will find, I think, that it differs from all the digests of doctrines, whether religious or philosophical, which he has ever seen. A man is speaking in it. The form of it is, I believe. That which is believed in is not a certain scheme of divinity, but a name—a Father, who has made the heaven and the earth: His Son, our Lord, who has been conceived, born, and died, and been buried, and gone down into hell, who has ascended, and is at the right hand of God, who will come to judge the world: a Holy Spirit who has established a holy universal Church, who makes men a communion of saints, who is the witness and power whereby they receive forgiveness of sins, who shall quicken their mortal bodies, who enables them to receive everlasting life. The Creed is evidently an act of allegiance or affiance; and since it has ever been connected with Baptism, one must suppose that from Baptism it derives its interpretation. If by that act we are acknowledged as spiritual creatures, united to a spiritual Being, by this act we claim our spiritual position, we assert our union with that Being. The name into which we are adopted there, is the name we confess here. Those acts which, having been done for all mankind, were the warrant for our particular admission into the covenant, are the acts which we here proclaim to be the warrant of our faith and our fellowship. So far the form is consistent with its apparent object. But is it also consistent with the idea of Christ’s kingdom which the Bible develops to us? There we found the primary postulate of such a kingdom to be a condescension of God to man, a cognizance taken of the creature by the Creator; the second, an apprehension of God by men, a recognition of the Creator by the creature. By grace are ye saved; by faith are ye saved. The position is freely given; a position of union and fellowship with another, a position of self-renunciation; the power is given wherewith to claim it: then comes the claim itself. Such seems to be the testimony of Scripture: and the relation in which the Creed stands to Baptism, and their common relation to that name and that kingdom which Scripture is revealing, surely expounds, in a remarkable way, that testimony.
But there is another creed possessing apparently equal authority with the one of which I have spoken, adopted perhaps into earlier use in the Eastern part of Christendom, and recognized by the Western ever since the age of Constantine. If it should be found that these two creeds clash with each other, or that they are not constructed upon the same principle, or that they do not both connect themselves with the idea of which we have spoken, the evidence from the preservation of either would certainly be weakened. Or if, these differences not appearing, it should seem that one could be conveniently substituted for the other, that there is nothing distinct and peculiar in each, one might be puzzled to account for the existence of both, at least as universal symbols. To see whether any of these objections apply, I would urge the reader to a thoughtful comparison of the two documents. First I would ask him whether in reading that which we call the Apostles’ Creed, considering it as a declaration of the name into which he is baptized, he do not feel that it is meant to proclaim the distinct personality of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, as signified by certain relations in which they have been manifested to men? Then whether another question do not arise in his mind, which he may perceive from history has arisen also in other men’s minds:—Is there not a more mysterious and awful relation implied and prefigured in these? Does not the name express such a relation? Is not the knowledge of this, as the ground of those relations, part of the revelation which has been vouchsafed to us; one of the deep things which cannot indeed be understood (for who understands the mystery of his own ordinary human relations?) but which lies so immediately beneath those facts which most concern us all, is so needful as the interpretation and reconciliation of those facts, has been so eagerly felt after in all ages, that if it be not disclosed to the heart and reason of man, they will be tormented with such dreams and imaginations concerning it, as must make the acknowledgment of the Divine Unity impossible?
Now the Nicene Creed agrees with the Apostles’ altogether in its form and principle. It is still I believe; it is still belief in a name, and not in notions. It differs in this, that it unites with a declaration of the Divine relations to men, a declaration of the relations in the Godhead.
To every peasant and child it speaks of this marvellous subject. Certainly a strange fact, doubly strange when one knows how much it has been the tendency of teachers and priests in all ages to believe that only a few initiated persons are fit to know anything which concerns the name and nature of God; and how much this tendency did actually mingle itself with the awe and reverence of those ages by which these creeds have been transmitted to us. That the doctors of the Church should have allowed the Apostles’ Creed to be heard in every cottage is strange; that they should not have said that this deeper creed, though embodying the principles and data of the other, was only for theologians, is scarcely credible: yet so it was. Now if it were the purpose of God that His name should be revealed to men; if His name, which seems to most of us to be connected with the highest and most esoteric abstractions, be really the only ground of a universal society, we can interpret these facts. What other explanations have been found for them, I wish now to consider.
Objections. The Quaker
To the Quaker it seems quite evident that the invention of creeds is one manifest symptom of the working of that mystery of iniquity which has been always arising to counterfeit and to destroy the kingdom of Christ. The faith which a Christian man exercises in the Divine Invisible Teacher is entirely of an inward spiritual kind. Here it is thrown outward, turned into propositions, made the language of a whole body or congregation, reduced into a nullity.
One side of this objection I considered when I was speaking of the differences between the Quaker and the Lutheran. It is precisely the objection to the acknowledgment of the manifested Word, and arises from a desire, more or less consciously entertained, to divorce the idea of a spiritual object from that of an actual person.
There is, however, mixed with this radical dislike, a feeling of a most different kind—a feeling that mere conceptions, opinions, notions, are most inadequate to the wants of a spiritual being, mere pictures and poor pictures of that which is real. To this doctrine I assent most heartily; there is none which I have been so anxious to maintain throughout this book. The problem how we may be delivered from opinions and notions, how we may rise out of them into another region, is the very one which I am investigating. The history of Quakerism I have found most helpful to me in the inquiry, at least in a negative way; for it shews us, I think, that there is no such certain and direct road into mere notionality, as that of rejecting all common and united forms of utterance. The apprehensions and conceits of each man’s mind, being those which he regards as alone sacred, become his tyrants; and so far as he is able to give expression to those apprehensions and conceits, they become the tyrants over the minds of others. In no society are there so many traditional phrases which have had a meaning once and have lost it, or are rapidly losing it, as in the Quaker society; in no society is there greater bondage to these phrases, a greater dread of exchanging them for any equivalents. And, therefore, without pressing the point again, that by this means all universality is lost, that a body which professed to be for mankind became in a very few years the narrowest and most peculiar of sects, I maintain that the experiment of dispensing with a Confession as a means of promoting Spirituality has been made, and has failed utterly. Once more I claim our strongest opponents as witnesses in our favour. By the character of their arguments, and by the results of their practice, they have increased the probability that if there is to be a kingdom of Christ on earth, a creed, which should present a living object as revealed in living acts to the faith of all men, would be one of the divinely appointed means of its preservation.
Modern Protestant Objections
But the moment we use the phrase, divinely appointed means, the modern Protestant, or Evangelical, steps in, and demands how we dare to claim such a dignity as this for a mere human composition, a mere ecclesiastical tradition? The Bible is the Divine document; it is a gross intrusion upon the rights of the Bible to assert that character for any other.
I would beseech the person who proposes this objection, to ask himself whether he seriously believes that the Bible is the only document, the only thing, which has been preserved to men by Divine care and providence? If he will say boldly, “I do think this,” all debate is at an end. We are reasoning with a person who is separated by the very narrowest plank from absolute Atheism; a plank so narrow and so fragile, that in a very short time, it will be broken down. For, that he should believe this, and yet continue for any length of time to acknowledge a book which is characterised by nothing so much as its strong assertion, that whatever men possess they are to attribute to God’s care and providence, is impossible. But supposing he disclaims, as he no doubt will, very indignantly, any such wicked hypothesis, I would beg him next calmly to consider what assertion of mine it is which offends him. Have I said that the creed is a substitute for the Bible? Have I urged that the creed is necessary, because it supplies information which the Bible does not supply? Have I said that the creed corrects or qualifies anything which the Bible asserts? I have maintained none of these propositions. I have said, “I find a document which has lasted for sixteen centuries or more. It is a document which explains to me the meaning and purpose of the Bible, which shews me that it has done what it proposed to do. As a declaration of the name of God, it proclaims that that which the Bible undertakes to reveal, has been revealed; as an act of faith on the part of men, it proclaims that that faith by which the Bible affirms we are saved, can be exercised.”
Is the doubt, then, why the creed, seeing that it only affirms the principles and facts of the Bible, should be necessary to those who already possess the Bible? The history of Protestantism gives the answer. The Bible, in the hands of its orthodox teachers, was reduced into a set of dry propositions, about the limitations of which they were perpetually fighting. The Bible, in the hands of its Unitarian and Rationalistic teachers, was reduced into a set of dreary truisms, not worthy to be fought about. You talk about the Bible, and the Bible only; but when you are brought to the proof, you give us, in place of it, dry husks of logic or pompous inanities, dignified with the name of simple truths. We want the Bible as it is, in its life and reality; and experience shews that we shall not have it, if we have not some witness of the principles which it embodies.
Again, the doctrine that faith justifies it, as Protestants affirm, the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae. So said Luther, and looked to the creed as the great witness of what he said; as that “confession of the mouth unto salvation,” in which “the heart’s belief unto righteousness” is expressed and fulfilled. Such language seems to the modern Protestant dry, cold, and carnal; what is the warm, juicy, and spiritual language, which he has substituted for it? History replies, endless controversies about the nature, mode, effect, signs, attributes, qualifications of a living or dead faith; controversies in which nothing is forgotten, save the object of the faith and the person who exercises it; controversies which fill the hearts of humble Christians with bewilderment and despair; controversies with which the exercised dialectician detects on each side great acuteness, admirable ingenuity, but regrets that in both the favourite argumentative figure should be the petitio principii. Am I then wrong in claiming the pure Protestant as a witness that this Catholic creed is an essential sign of the kingdom of Christ?
Rationalistic Objections
The rationalist denies that the creed can be a permanent symbol of human fellowship, because it rests upon the acknowledgment of certain events. “Now, assuredly,” he says, “these events could not have met with so much credence, if they had not pointed to certain great principles or ideas which are characteristic of us as members of a race. They do point most clearly to the sense which there is in all men of a something Divine; to the possibility that this should overcome evil, sorrow, and death; to the feeling that it must submit to sorrow and death as a way to that victory. This, which is the essence of the creed, is no doubt universal; it may be traced in heathen and Jewish records; it has survived all the fables with which, in both, it is encompassed. There is therefore every probability that it will survive what are called the facts of Christianity likewise. And this is the more likely, because every day the documents in which those facts are recorded, are subjected to a more sifting analysis, and because every day the evidence in their favour seems to be less decisive.”
In the former part of this book I have considered the general meaning and effect of this argument. I have endeavoured to shew how true the assertion is upon which it is grounded, that the belief of a divine humanity has existed in all ages, that it has taken innumerable forms. I have maintained that all these forms have presumed the existence of some more perfect form; that they never have compassed the end at which they aimed; that they have not revealed The Man, the head of the race, while nevertheless they have testified, one and all, with more or less distinctness in proportion as the light which they endeavoured to concentrate was more or less clear, that such a one there must be. When a great man assumed to be this, he became a tyrant and oppressor: in our Lord’s words, a thief and a robber, not the assertor of humanity, but the denier of it. You do not therefore advance one step in weakening the authority of this creed, by producing instances of this worship from ancient or modern history, or by dwelling upon the tendency which they so manifestly indicate. The more you can produce of them the better; the more they are examined the better. They prove that there is such an idea in humanity as you speak of; they prove just as strongly, that with the idea humanity can never be satisfied; they declare that the idea is the idea of an actual living Being, of a perfect Being; of one who should prove his perfectness by entering entirely into the lowest condition into which man has ever entered, and actually rising into the highest of which man has ever dreamed. If these two elements of the lowest humiliation, of the greatest exaltation, be not combined, if they are not combined in acts, the idea is not fulfilled, it waits to be fulfilled; that is to say, we wait for a person who shall do precisely those acts of which the creed speaks. Any others will not avail; any others will not be universal enough, will not be the testimonies that He who performs them is the Man. We are asked then for the evidences of the creed. Our answer is this—You have shewn why it has been believed, what need there was in the deepest heart of mankind that it should be believed. It was believed, not upon the evidence of documents, but upon the simple proclamation of men who had the whole universe against them. They said to men, Christ must be; Christ you have been asking for in every land, through every age: Jesus the crucified is the Christ. The answers were three: The first was,—“There are a thousand Christs; every kingdom and district has its own.” This answer would have been satisfactory, if men had not listened to that other proclamation: “You are members of one body, and therefore you need one Head.” But they did listen to it; they felt it to be true; therefore the thousand could not prevail against the one. No wonder this answer should be revived now; no wonder that when the sense of being one body has so practically forsaken us, the principle which is its counterpart should be so readily abandoned. But I hope I have shewn that there never was so strong a cry for a universal and united fellowship as in this day of division; a cry proceeding from so many opposite corners of the earth, from so many different kinds of men. This reply, then, if it failed once, will not prevail now. The second answer was,—“There is an ideal Christ under these different Christs; and it is this, not they, you are to worship.” The people admitted the doctrine of the philosopher, but they said, “This is the ideal Christ, and here He is manifested to us.” That this argument should be repeated in a day when abstract notions have been so much substituted for living truths, cannot be surprising. Yet we have seen, I think, that there was never more impatience of these abstractions, or a more vehement demand for realities, embodied realities, than at this very time. If then there be an idea of a universal Prince in men’s minds, they will either continue to believe that this idea has been realised in Jesus of Nazareth, or they will seek a realisation of it in some other person. And thus we arrive at the third answer which was made to the proclamation of the Creed in the first ages, and which has been made so often since: “This crucified man is not the perfect Being we look for; we want a warrior, a philosopher, a poet, possessing qualities altogether different from those which are brought out in the Gospel narrative, though we may acknowledge that these too have a certain value of their own.” Such has for twelve centuries been the belief of a large portion of the world which was once Christian. Another portion of it has declared that they see in the Cross the symbol of love triumphing through suffering, in the Crescent only of power claiming dominion over weakness; that the first is a bond of mutual fellowship among the members of a suffering race; the other the pledge of a universal slavery. That the spirit of the Cross prevails very little in the nations which still profess to honour it; that self-sacrifice is very generally and very systematically denied to be the law of our being,—most of us are ready with shame to confess. And therefore the expectation is surely very reasonable, that the experiment which was so successful in the nations of the East, will be made, under other conditions, in the West. We have had many preparatory Antichrists, many sovereigns reigning by the strength of mind and will, and scorning all other right; why should we doubt that this image will be yet more completely manifested?
May God preserve those who live in the day when it is manifested to the world, and when the world goes wondering after it! In that day when intellect and will shall be utterly crushed under the car of the idol which they have set up; in that day when the poor man shall cry, and there shall be no helper, may God teach His saints to proclaim these words to the sons of men: He was born of the Virgin; He suffered under Pontius Pilate; He was crucified, dead, and buried, and went down into hell; He rose again on the third day; He ascended on high; He sitteth on the right hand of God; He shall come to judge the quick and the dead. May they be enabled to say, This is our God; we have waited for Him.
The Romish System
Anyone who maintains the creed to be an heirloom of the Church, which has been preserved to men by the providence of God, and which each generation of her members is bound to watch over, as an essential sign and necessary safeguard of her existence, may be said to acknowledge the authority and value of Tradition. He must be, I should think, a rather feeble and cowardly thinker, who is afraid of the name after he has recognized the thing; the creed he believes has been handed down, and that which has been handed down is a tradition. But the Romanist is the great apologist for tradition: how in principle can one who attaches this kind of value to the creed differ from the Romanist?
It is not necessary to inquire to what extent any given Romanist would approve of language like the following: That Scripture is not of itself sufficient to make known all the system which the Church requires; that the notions, opinions, and explanations of the doctors of the Church, partly as elucidatory of Scripture, partly as supplying that which is deficient and was meant to be deficient in it, are authoritative and necessary; that these together with Scripture constitute the ecclesiastical doctrine. I say I shall not inquire whether any particular Romanist writer may have objected to this statement; it will be allowed, I think, that so far as he did, so far he was rejecting, not certain excesses or exaggerations of the Romanist theory, but a characteristic and integral portion of it.
I think if this statement be compared with the view which I have taken of the creed, it will be seen that they are not exactly the same. It will be admitted that there are points of difference; that at all events I do not choose to use the phrases which Romanists use. But is the difference one of terms only, or is it a vital one, indicating an entirely different conception of the purposes for which this document and the other documents bequeathed to us by antiquity exist? I shall reply to this question by translating my words, “The creed is the sign of a spiritual and universal society,” into others which I believe to be equivalent - “The creed is a document which has served as a protection to the meaning of the Scriptures against the tendency which the Church doctors in different ages have exhibited to disturb and mangle them. The creed has served as a protection to the humbler members of the Church against the inclination which the Church doctors of different ages have manifested to rob them of their inheritance, and to appropriate it to themselves.”
These propositions I have already illustrated, in reference to the doctors of Reformed bodies. I have maintained that the Bible, left to their mercies, would have been utterly deprived of its significance; and that had we been left to their mercies, we should have been fed with stones rather than with bread. In making these remarks, I speak only of an inclination, at times a most predominating inclination, which has been discernible in these teachers. I do not mean that there have not been many counteracting influences at work both in their own minds and in the minds of those whom they addressed. I have asserted again and again that there have been and are such influences; and that the more we consider the meaning and object of the Reformation, the more we shall discover of them. But I do assert that it is such an inclination as has needed a most strong and Divine power to resist it; and that power which delights to work by humble instruments, has, I believe, been exerted in a great measure through this child’s creed. I will now endeavour to shew in what sense and under what limitations I conceive similar remarks are applicable to those early teachers whom the Romanist and we both profess to honour, as well as to the pontifical writers, whom he reverences, and whom we, I trust, do not despise.
It was the great glory of the greatest philosopher of antiquity to affirm, What man wants is a knowledge of that which is; he cannot be content with opinions and notions about that which may be. His being will not rest upon this. Society will not rest upon it. The ground of both must be a reality, an invisible spiritual reality; not any scheme or theory about this matter or that. The first Fathers of the Church had the strongest sympathy with this philosopher, precisely because he affirmed this. They felt that he was asking for the very thing which a revelation, if it were a revelation, ought to give. They felt, We have a revelation not of certain notions and dogmas about certain things, but a revelation of God himself. When I say they felt this, I mean that it was the deepest, strongest conviction of their minds, the one which their admirers have always acknowledged to constitute the great charm of their writings. To know God is eternal life. The Church is that society which rests upon the Name and Unity of God, and through which they are made known to man. I ask any lover of the Fathers, whether he will not fix upon these as the two great principles, which by their words and their lives they are illustrating?
Now, surely, if this be so, the theology of the Fathers must be most precious. They worked their way through infinite confusions into the clear heaven of these truths: God is—He is one—and His unity as not a dead material notion, but a unity of life and love, the foundation of all unity among men. If we have no sympathy with them, with those who first saw the light and rejoiced in it, above all, if we dare to mock them, surely we must expect that it will become every hour less clear to us and to our children. And what if these Fathers, having the idea of God ever before them, rather merged those of man and of nature in it, than perceived that each must be distinct, in order that each may preserve its proper relation to the other; may not this very fault of theirs be only an additional help to us, if we will use it humbly and faithfully? Their works are given to students; to them expressly and exclusively. They are committed, then, to men who have a peculiar vocation, a peculiar responsibility; who need nothing so much as to be taught how prone we all are to worship idols of the cave and idols of the forum; to set up the notions which are fashioned by our own peculiar temperaments, or which are popular in our age, in place of great principles, whereof they are the false likenesses; to be taught this in order that they may perceive the glory of that which is free and universal, and be delivered from the preference which our devil-infected nature conceives for that which is esoteric and self-exalting. This lesson, if it be received at all, must be received from the examples of good men, not of bad; of those whose light makes the darkness visible, not of those in whom all is dark. Why then should we deem the Fathers less valuable because they are capable of imparting it?
Alas! students did not make this use of the Fathers; but just that use which they could not have made if they had ever heartily admired that which was most precious in them, or had not lost the admiration of it through the vanity of possessing something in which other men did not share. They extracted notions, opinions, theories, from the writings of those saints who had declared that men are thirsting, not for theories or notions or opinions, but for the living God, and that they must have that thirst satisfied, or perish. Of course, then, the Bible became to the Patristic, as it did to the Protestant, student a mere congeries of notions; of course he also proclaimed, that to ascertain what these notions are was the great problem of human life, the necessary step to the attainment of everlasting salvation. But this necessary step could not be taken by men generally; they could not find out the true notions. The Fathers must help them. They must interpret the Bible, and supply its deficiencies. Still we are at fault. The Fathers are as unattainable as the Bible. What each of them affirmed, what they agreed in affirming, could be as little ascertained, as what each of the writers of the Bible affirmed, or what they agreed in affirming. There must then be an authority capable of pronouncing on this point, a living authority. Where was it? Was it the whole Church of any given age, or some particular member of it? The first doctrine was plausible, but impracticable; the last, therefore, was adopted. To find the commission was not difficult where the necessity for it was clear. A man was enthroned as the dogmatist of Christendom; he was appointed to say, and could say, what men ought to think. Thus was another stone added—not perhaps the key-stone—to the Romish system. But the system was not all that existed in the ages which gave it birth, and brought it to maturity. There was another element at work. Men still repeated their Paternosters and Credos; eminent men felt, “Here lies the deepest wisdom; no decrees and dogmas can reach the sense of the Scriptures, the sense of the Fathers, like this infantile lore.” And so through the very heart of school divinity there ran a stream of simple faith, a silent acknowledgment that the truth had been revealed, and that the infinite complications of our minds, the various forms under which we are capable of beholding it, need not hinder us from knowing it and loving it. By degrees this faith became more and more obscured; opinion became all in all; then corruptions and infidelity grew and flourished by the side of increasing superstition and slavery. Still, there were holy and brave men, even in the later schools, who sought for a truth beyond opinions. The mystical writers spoke of beholding God, and dwelling in God. Ficinus and the Platonists, at the revival of letters, declared that there was a method of seeking the substantial and the real. But the “I believe” changed the glorious hope of the one, the philosophical idea of the other, into a fact for men. Then it became necessary for Pope Pius IV. to do that openly which had so long been done covertly—to set antiquity at defiance, and to invent a creed of his own. Thanks be to God, he could not do this work effectually! In the nations which acknowledge his infallibility, not his creed, but the Apostles’, is still repeated by mothers and nurses to their infants, still lisped by them in their own language, still taught them by their priests. The words, surely, are not always dead sounds; at all events they may start, some day, into life. Protestants may discover that there is in them the very heart of that Reformation doctrine which the systems of Protestantism have been setting at naught; the Churches which seek for a centre of unity by crouching to Rome, may find in them at once the bond of their fellowship and the charter of their liberation; the Greeks may wake up to the conviction that centuries of alienation have been unable to deprive them and the West of these common symbols, it cannot be God’s will that they should be divided. What a day will that be for the Catholic Church! what a day for the Romish system!