worship, but such as springs from sympathy in great fundamental spiritual principles, which have an undying root in humanity, and exist in our highest consciousness as the revelation of something above and beyond ourselves. Earnest and thoughtful natures feel there is a mysterious awfulness in these principles, and pray with trembling for a more complete realisation of them in heart and life. Men call them by various names,-conscience, the voice of God, the moving of the Spirit, the highest reason; but they mean at bottom one and the same thing: a profound sense of relationship and responsibility to an Invisible Power, in whom their highest conceptions of excellence terminate, in self-devotion to whose will they find the strongest incentive to virtuous exertion, and from reliance on whose justice and mercy comes their firmest support under sorrow and trial. When these principles stand before us in the light of history, fixed and embodied in a life of perfect religiousness, like that of the Christ of the New Testament, they acquire a distincter aspect and more decisive influence; human reverence and affection more largely mingle in them; the Divine itself is humanised; and the spiritual sympathy which grows out of them, and unites men in faith and worship, becomes at once purer and more intense. This is what no dogmatic creed, no intellectual shaping of theological opinion, ever can accomplish, but, as experience has shown, constantly prevents. Our spiritual sympathies are universal, and widen with the enlargement of our knowledge and the expansion of our faculties; whereas our intellectual conception of the subjects most deeply affecting us, is individual, and becomes increasingly so, as that individuality of character, which is a sure result of advancing civilisation, is more fully developed. The Infinite Mind has a common relation to the universal soul of humanity, and we are all drawn towards it, as soon as the spiritual life is awakened in us, by an attractive force, which carries with it the highest aspirations of our being. Every mind that has a faith of its own, and does not merely reflect an authoritative faith, hews its way, through doubt and error and ignorance, to the central light of existence; but through that passage, narrow and tortuous as it may be, a vivifying beam reaches it, more directly and more efficaciously than it could be reached through any other avenue. Man's power of conceiving God, and God's manifold dealings with the human soul, is conditioned by the original constitution of his mind, by the influences which have developed it, and by the culture which it has received. It is only through his own mental vision that each man gets a sight of the living God. He cannot see through the eyes of another mind. Of no two men is the intellectual form of religious belief on any one subject, if they think at all, precisely the same. Yet the

faith which consoles and strengthens, which preserves and guides, is compatible with all these forms. Moral conditions alone are indispensable. We know, on the very highest authority, that "the pure in heart shall see God."

Nor is this diversity of intellectual conception obviated by the interposition of a Divine Life, like that of Christ, between God and men. That Life, by the sympathy and the trust which it inspires, draws up our religious affections and our moral aspirations towards the Infinite Source of all perfection, but leaves the speculative intellect as free as before to come to its own conclusions on matters which are metaphysical rather than spiritual. Metaphysical theories, the most diverse and antagonistic, have spun themselves continually round a common centre in Christ. Indeed provision seems expressly to be made, by the very composition of the Christian Scriptures, for this free and varied exercise of the understanding. They are fragmentary, and multiform. Their central light nowhere shines out in one full and clearly defined orb; but on various sides, and through different media, each with some refraction of its own, gleams forth on the reverent eye with a splendour not too strong to overpower it, yet suggestive of infinitely more than is revealed. The light so imbibed is incorporated, if we may so express it, with the individuality of each believing soul. Through these endless modes of access, each appropriates the life of Christ in his own way; brings his own heart and his own reason to interpret and combine these scattered elements of Divine truth, and to read them off into meaning under the light of his own highest consciousness and experience; and by this free endeavour to enter into the mind of Christ, gets a living hold of it, and finally becomes one with him and God. No complete and stereotyped impression, made all at once, could possibly exert the same kindling effect on the soul, or equally bring the free action of the human faculties into harmonious coöperation with the quickening spirit of God. But this is precisely what dogmatic creeds aim at effecting. They would fain reverse the beneficent order of Providence and wise constitution of Scripture. They fill up with their arbitrary determinations the wide space which had been left free to the discursive intellect. They attempt to define the undefinable, and to arrest in permanent forms what must, from its very nature, be fluctuating and progressive as the understanding which holds it. By anticipating for future ages doctrinal results,-perpetuating mere opinions in definite formulas,—they imply distrust in the creative and regulative force of the grand root of spiritual principle, of which all dogma is but the ceaseless product, ever decaying and ever renewed. They will not leave God to take care of his own work through his human instruments from generation to

generation. They forget the words of the poet, so simple yet so profoundly true:

"God is his own interpreter,

And he will make it plain."

It is beside the point to argue that the multitude require a definite rule to guide them. This is true in regard to the first principles of religious belief and moral duty; but these are always best inculcated by the living voice of holy and devoted men, filled with the Spirit of Christ, who are taught by their own experience how to apply that spirit to the present wants and capacities of their hearers. It is only the learned, and the learned in a particular department, who pretend to understand the elaborate creeds that have been handed down from a remote antiquity. Even the Prayer-Book of the English Church, which should be the manual of the private Christian, owing to the various dogmatic elements which it contains, " to be understood and enjoyed thoroughly, absolutely compels (it is the language of Dr. Stanley himself) a knowledge of the greatest events and names of all periods of the Christian Church." To the multitude, who have, and can have, no such knowledge, a dogmatic creed is almost necessarily a dead letter, excepting so far as it may be ingeniously interpreted by some living exponent of its meaning (and why such interpreter should not go at once to Scripture it is not easy to see); or, as in darker ages, it may have become a gross embodiment of Christian mythology, acting with a mysterious awe and bewildering wonder on the imagination of barbarians. Let it be admitted that, in both these cases, creeds may have had their temporary use: that, for the educated class, they may have served as an intellectual discipline,-fixed data for many-sided discussion, steps by which they have mounted towards a wider vision of the highest truth,-like hypotheses in philosophy; and that, for the vulgar, they may have answered the purpose of formulas mechanically impressed by constant repetition, through which a faint glimmering of certain great truths has obscurely penetrated into their coarse and heavy minds. But a time comes when the intellect awakes, when men have outlived their spiritual minority, and begin to exercise an independent judgment; first roused to it perhaps by some felt invasion of their natural rights, or some gross insult offered to their reason or their moral sense. In the violent reaction which then inevitably ensues, there is often as much mischief as in the oppression against which it is directed. The most fantastic theology is better than the negation of all firm belief, which is often a consequence of the first escape from absurdity. 'Aoxýpov ἀθεότης μᾶλλον ἢ θεολογία.† Placed under progressive teach

• Eastern Church, p. lix. † Euseb. Præpar. Evangel. ii. 1.

ing, men can be conducted safely from one form of truth to another, as their understanding gradually expands. But irregular snatches of liberty are more perilous than its recognised use. Acriores morsus sunt intermissæ libertatis quam retenta.* While creeds are sincerely retained, they tend to identify the form with the principle of religion, and this necessarily produces intolerance and bigotry; when they are vehemently cast away, the principle is often abandoned with the form, and the result is temporary atheism. Even when this extreme is avoided, error in the opposite direction to the authoritative dogma, and a onesided perverseness, almost always ensue. Creeds have grown, as all who have studied their history are well aware, out of the gradual accumulation of provisions against heresies. Each clause of them usually covers, amidst much partiality and exaggeration, some fundamental truth, the protection of which was the original reason of its introduction. When this partial and exaggerated truth is flung off, the mind swings round by natural oscillation to the opposite point in the arc of vibration, and there it often fixes itself obstinately through the entire history of a sect. Sects are the natural offshoots of an authoritative creed; protests, themselves one-sided, against its one-sided assertions of truth. Ultra-spiritualism or ultra-rationalism; exaggeration of the value, now of faith, and now of works; unqualified affirmation of the divinity of Christ on one hand, followed by its natural consequence of an extreme humanitarianism on the other; -these have, through all time, been the ever-recurring types of sectarian thought and action; but their primary cause may be found in the attempt to fix a dogmatic creed. Dr. Stanley has ventured the remark, that the same error which is noxious in a sect, becomes comparatively harmless as part of a general established belief. It may be so; but we are reminded by the observation, of Hume's defence of an Establishment,-that by generating indifference, it neutralises the bitterness of theological rancour; while the earnest retention of some cherished dogma, which is hardly separable from intolerance, is almost essential to the existence of a sect. We seem, therefore, to be left to the alternative of indifference or bigotry. We cannot but think that a via media is still possible; and that the withdrawal of authoritative creeds would be followed by the extinction, not indeed of different opinions, or of preferences of spiritual sympathy, but of harshly separated and conflicting sects.

We say authoritative; because we do not of course mean to deny that some agreement implied and understood in certain broad views of God and his relations to mankind, felt for the time to be all-important, must form the bond of all close reli

*Cicer. de Off. ii. 7.

† Eastern Church, p. lxx.

gious association; and this may be thought to constitute virtually a creed. But such union, to be harmless, should be spontaneous and voluntary. There should be no outward constraint on the natural expansion and development of the inherited belief. Enlightened and conscientious teachers should be left free to carry forward their hearers along with themselves into wider and nobler views of truth. Generally, it may be affirmed, as a result of experience, that the more comprehensive the bond of ecclesiastical association, the better it is for the cultivation of the religious spirit; and the more comprehensive such bond, with the progress of society, will certainly become. Nor do we assert that the study of old creeds-their origin, composition, and primary design-is an unfruitful one, or can be excluded without injury from the discipline of the professional theologian. Creeds are significant phenomena in the historical development of our religion; landmarks, as it were, and guide-posts to indicate the direction of the winding march of theological opinion. As resting on certain deep convictions which were present to the consciousness of former generations, and covering great truths, which they conceal by exaggeration, they may be of considerable service to the modern student as a starting-point for his own inquiries, and as exercising a silent restraint on the wilfulness of indefinite speculation. With much that Dr. Stanley has said on this subject we entirely agree; but all the benefit, which he and others have argued may be derived from the reverent and candid study of ancient formularies of faith, is fully accomplished by simply leaving them as historical monuments, and is only thwarted by making them authoritative. They are instructive as a record of the past; they can have no binding force, as a form of thought, on the generation which has outlived them. There is an ambiguity on this whole subject of subscription to creeds, which it is high time should be dispelled. what sense are they to be understood as signed? If ex animo, as a true statement of actual belief, let conscientious men consider what they are doing: if as mere forms of the past, serviceable to suggest and to guide, but of no power definitively to rule, let that be distinctly made known to the world. As it is, a sort of jesuitism is constantly practised, perhaps unconsciously, -owing to the present indefinite state of the question. If thought necessary, the creeds and the articles might still be preserved as historical monuments in the public formularies, or at least in the prescribed course of a clergyman's theological discipline. The Church of England might keep her ancient framework, and exercise her highest function more efficiently than at present, without obligatory subscription to them. If still made authoritative, the question must be ever recurring to the mind