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like a great mountain which has deeps of gloom as well as visionary majesties of light." But the voice which speaks to us through it says again, "Come unto Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls." "Him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out." The motto to be inscribed over it is, "The epiphany of the sweet-naturedness and philanthropy of God our Saviour." The "vox humana" is the sweetest stop in the organ of the Creed. From the centre of a human heart He feels round the whole vast circumference of human sorrow.

In their second as in their first part the Creeds are Creeds of sunshine.

The third part of the Creed is concerned with the Holy Ghost; with some consequences of His existence and divinity—viz. the prophetic Scriptures and the Holy Catholic Church; and with certain triumphant corollaries of the whole Creed-"the forgiveness of sin, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting."

Every child of man has three original wants. He is born into a society dislocated and divided by selfishness and passion, with no unity and no moral ideal-he wants a higher form of society. He is born with a nature rebellious to its own higher principle, and full of transgressions against its own rightful law he wants forgiveness. He is exposed to suffering and is fatally bound to die-he wants life.

* ὅτε δὲ ἡ χρηστότης καὶ ἡ φιλανθρωπία ἐπεφάνη τοῦ σωτῆρος, K.T.A. (Titus iii. 4).

Here is the supply. Here is a society, one, universal, holy, continuous, visible. Here is the assertion of forgiveness of sins, both initial in Baptism and subsequently. And as the first article of the Creed began with a declaration of the origin of natural existence from "the Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible," so the last speaks of the other and imperishable existence. Thus the Creed begins with life and ends with life-not with the death which knows no life, but with the life which knows no death!

Such are the two Creeds in texture and character -in their texture based upon facts, in their character inspiring and joyful. There is a parsimony in their list of credenda; a wise disinclination to strain the cords of assent. We find in them no theory of inspiration, of the Atonement, of miracles, of the resurrection of the body; no map of the unseen world. The mode of statement of some articles may have been determined by long controversies, but there is nothing to force us to think of them. The guns of battle have been melted into bells of worship. Articles of controversy are necessary for particular Churches and may require to be signed by their ministers. But the universal Church must speak the language of peace. When the weary and heavyladen ask her for refuge, she cannot invite them to rest upon controversial bayonets with the points turned upward. Every article must be sound, proved, seasoned. Any mere development would be like a rib of dry-rot in a ship, dangerous in itself and likely to weaken the rest of the structure. Ev

ery article must be believable, worthy of belief, believed wherever Christianity as such exists. It must be a Catholic conviction, not a local and temporary opinion. I am thankful that the whole Church has two Creeds; I am almost equally thankful that she has not thirty-nine articles, content, as I am, to receive them for my part, and valuable as they are for English Christianity.

VI

Some important lessons naturally arise about those Primary Convictions, the evidence for which we are to consider together.

The Creed concerns itself with Faith in an Eternal Person, not with mere doctrines even about Him, much less with psychological speculations

about ourselves.

If this be so, moods and feelings are unsatisfactory tests. The heresies of the first century were heresies upon the Person of our Lord; those of the nineteenth century are mainly heresies of the emotion. The remedy against the former was the Scriptural conception of the Person of our Lord; the remedy against the latter is the Scriptural conception of the "theological graces," faith, hope, and charity.

Let us take one question, the answer to which is often supposed to be decisive, "Do I love Jesus?" So it might be were the answerer infallible! A warning is supplied by the greatest delineator of human nature. The aged king asks his three daughters how much they love him. Two of them reply in lofty language; they heap hyperbole upon hyper

bole. Perhaps they were not altogether hypocritical in their professions. But one says comparatively little. Her "heart is richer than her tongue." Which of the three loved him most?

The answer to this question and others of the kind depends, sometimes largely, upon bodily condition. It rises and falls with nerve-storms, with the condition of the biliary ducts. Dyspepsia determines mental vertigo. Blue-pills annihilate a world of visions. Or if not this-when we walk under a pale sky, beneath ghostly trees; when we are sad with the dripping rain and the sobbing wave; much more in the days of sorrow, when we cry, "Wilt Thou break a leaf driven to and fro? and wilt Thou pursue the dry stubble? For Thou writest bitter things against me, and makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth"-the spiritual outlook becomes tinged by the natural inlook. The whole landscape is yellowed by the medium through which we contemplate it. Moods of lofty self-flattery are often no less deceptive. In the Church or in the religious journal, as on the Exchange, high interest means bad security.

We may give fixity to our faith by throwing ourselves into the spirit of the Nicene Creed.

An eloquent historian of the Church has pointed out the remarkable contrast suggested by the place where the Creed was originally pronounced-in Asia Minor. The great cities of that country were

*"L'Eglise et l'Empire Romaine," par M. Albert de Broglie, tom. ii. chap. iv., esp. pp. 68–70.

associated with philosophers and religions-with Poseidon, Phœbus, Artemis, with Pythagoras and Thales. The long elaboration of thought, the pas sionate dreams of imagination, supplied nothing more spiritual than idols, nothing more solid than the sunlit mists of mythology. But within six weeks three hundred and eighteen men, most of them unknown to one another, speaking many languages, and brought from the ends of the world, could give a formula which told of the Divine Nature, of the origin of the world, of the destinies of man; which answered the eternal questions--what am I? from whence do I come? where am I going? -in a shape at once lofty and concise; at once so noble that it almost seems to touch the "Gloria in Excelsis," and so precise that philosophy and legislation can show nothing superior. It has crossed every sea and outlived every generation. Every Sunday in every land; in high cathedrals and in rural churches; in London, Paris, Rome, St. Petersburg; here in New York-it is recited or chanted. This "hymn of the Divine Unity" is also a splendid assertion of the glory of redemption and of the hopes of man; the unchanging record of the Primary Convictions of Christendom. The living and the dead are with us as we repeat the Nicene Creed! The Church deals with us as the nun dealt with the knight when she sent him forth on his quest"As she spake

She sent the deathless passion in her eyes

Thro' him, and made him hers, and laid her mind

On him, and he believed in her belief."*

* 66 'Idyls of the King, The Holy Grail.”