to withdraw your designation of them as a pestilent doctrine. "Granting that a creed alone will not save any man-does any man truly hold a creed when his conduct is inconsistent with the doctrines therein set forth? . . . If a man says I admit a creed, but shows by and in his daily life that this is a mere assent of the lip, or even of the mind-his course of life giving, in fact, the lie to his professions-every one must admit that such a man is a mere hypocrite, and his pretended belief a mere sham. "If this be so, if he only can be said truly to hold a creed whose conduct is influenced thereby, if the following of Christ's teaching be necessary to salvation, and if the doctrine of the Athanasian Creed be consistent with Christ's teaching, as I conceive it is,—surely the damnatory clauses are not pestilent? "For me at all events they will have a new meaning; and when in the appointed services of the Church the Athanasian Creed comes to be read, I shall no longer hesitate to join in repeating them; as in so doing I shall not be hurling anathemas at any one, but merely insisting on the deep importance of entire self-surrender to Christ, and the absolute necessity of receiving and embracing His doctrine of love, if we would do our duty in this life and hope for happiness in the great hereafter." propose to-day and next Sunday to offer you some remarks suggested by this thoughtful letter. First of all, with regard to the flood of light I threw upon the Athanasian Creed-it is quite true; I did. As it stands mistranslated in the English Prayer-book, it is meaningless. Three persons in one person is as much a contradiction in terms as a square circle or a circular square. But I explained that the Creed was written originally in Latin, and that persona means very often. the character which a person assumes or the part which he plays. The teaching of the Athanasian Creed is, not that there are three individuals in the Godhead, but that the one indivisible God has revealed Himself to us in three characters, viz., as Father, as Son, and as Holy Ghost,-or, to put it more simply still, in nature, in Christ, and in the individual heart. This, as my correspon dent truly says, is intelligible and reasonable. In fact it is the best account of the relation between God and man which has hitherto been formulated. But as for the damnatory clauses, they practically consign to perdition an almost infinite majority of the human race. Only a few men, comparatively speaking, have ever heard of the Creed. And still fewer have attempted to assign to it any intelligible meaning. I do not suppose there was one person present in this chapel the other day, who was aware that the words were susceptible of an intelligible interpretation. Now I need hardly say that reciting words is not the same thing as believing propositions. Suppose, for example, I say to you in English that twice two make four, you will believe me. But if I offered you the same remark in Hebrew, you would not believe me, because until I translated it you would not know what I was talking about. Or suppose, again, I told you it was necessary for your everlasting salvation to believe in "abracadabra," and you accepted my assertion and determined to try. You might rise in your place every Sunday and recite the word—nay, after the manner of Stylites, you might stand on a pillar for thirty years incessantly shouting "Abracadabra, abracadabra, abracadabra !"- but inasmuch as it is a meaningless word, you would never have succeeded in believing in it; and if believing in it were essential to your salvation, you would, after all your pains, be damned. Repeating a number of sentences, without knowing the meaning of the words, is an exhibition of stupidity, not of faith. Declaring you believe that to which you can attach no meaning is not religion, it is one of the worst forms of immorality, it is lying. Only an infinitesimal number of nominal Christians-only those who understand what it means—are capable of believing the Athanasian Creed; and to say that those who do not believe it will without doubt perish everlastingly, is to say that they will be damned because there was no one to explain to them what it meant. My correspondent however-who formerly refused to recite the damnatory clauses, but who now feels himself, owing to my sermon curiously enough, at liberty to do so in the future—says that he will not mean, when he repeats them, to hurl anathemas at any one, but merely to "insist on the deep importance of entire self-surrender to Christ, and the absolute necessity of receiving and embracing His doctrine of love, if we would do our duty in this life and hope for happiness in the great hereafter." Now it seems to me that the damnatory clauses are about as ill-suited to express this, as any collection of words which it would be possible to get together. Whosoever will be saved, they assert, must thus think of the Trinity. If we use the words in their ordinary sense, "thinking of the Trinity" and "embracing Christ's doctrine of love" are two totally different things. They may exist together, but they may just as easily exist apart. The one is a theoretical state of mind, the other is a state of heart and a mode of life. However, anybody has a right to use words in any sense he pleases, provided he tells us exactly the sense in which he does use them, and keeps to it. If we understood the damnatory clauses in the way in which my correspondent interprets them, there would be less objection to our repeating them. But even in his sense they are not strictly true. He |