(1865.) On Christmas day, as on all other chief holidays of the year, the ministers and congregations of our National Church have had the noble privilege and pleasure of standing up and reciting the creed commonly called of St. Athanasius. The question of the authorship does not concern us here, but a note of Gibbon (chapter 37) is so brief and comprehensive that we may as well cite it:—“But the three following truths, however strange they may seem, are now universally acknowledged. 1. St. Athanasius is not the author of the creed which is so frequently read in our churches. 2. It does not appear to have existed within a century after his death. 3. It was originally composed in the Latin tongue, and consequently in the western provinces. Gennadius, patriarch of Constantinople, was so much amazed by this extraordinary composition, that he frankly pronounced it to be the work of a drunken man.” (This Gennadius, by the bye, is the same whom Gibbon mentions two or three times afterwards in the account of the siege and conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, a.d. 1453).
Whoever elaborated the Creed, and whether he did it drunk or sober, the Church of England has made it thoroughly her own by adoption.
Yet it must be admitted that many good churchmen, and perhaps even a few churchwomen, have not loved this adopted child of their Holy Mother as warmly as their duty commanded. The intelligently pious
Tillotson wishes Mother Church well rid of the bantling; and poor George the Third himself, with all his immense genius for orthodoxy, could not take kindly to it. He was willing enough to repeat all its expressions of theological faith—in fact, their perfect nonsense, their obstinate irrationality, must have been exquisitely delightful to a brain such as his; but he was not without a sort of vulgar manhood, even when worshipping in the Chapel Royal, and so rather choked at its denunciations—“for it do curse dreadful.” He could keep the faith whole and undefiled by reason, yet did not like to assert that all who had been and were and should in future be in this particular less happy than himself, must without doubt perish everlastingly.
On the other hand one of our most liberal Churchmen, Mr. Maurice, has argued that this creed is essentially merciful, and that its retention in the Book of Common Prayer is a real benefit. Mr. Maurice, however, as we all know, interprets “perish everlastingly” into a meaning very different from that which most members of the Church accept. And his opinions lose considerably in weight from the fact that no man save himself can infer any one of them from any other. For example, if you are cheered up a bit by his notions as to “Eternal” and “Everlasting,” you are soon depressed again by his pervading woefulness. Of all the rulers we hear of—the ex-king of Naples, the king of Prussia, the Elector of Hesse-Cassel, Abraham Lincoln, and the Pope included—the poor God of Mr. Maurice is the most to be pitied: a God whose world is in so deplorable a state that the good man who owns Him lives in a perpetual fever of anxiety and misery in endeavoring to improve it for Him.
What part of this creed shocks the pious who are shocked at all by it? Simply the comprehensive damnation it deals out to unbelievers, half-believers, and all except whole believers. For we do not hear that the pious are shocked by the confession of theological or theoillogical faith itself. Their reverence bows and kisses the rod, which we cool outsiders might fairly have expected to be broken up and flung out of doors in a fury of indignation. Their sinful human nature is shocked on account of their fellow-men; their divine religious nature is not shocked on account of their God: yet does not the creed use God as badly as man?
A chemist secures some air, and analyses it into its ultimate constituents, and states with precise numerals the proportions of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbonic acid therein. Just so the author of this creed secures the Divinity and analyses it into Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and just as precisely he reports the relations of these. A mathematician makes you a problem of a certain number divided into three parts in certain ratios to each other and to the sum, from which ratios you are to deduce the sum and the parts. Just so the author of this creed makes a riddle of his God, dividing him into three persons, from whose inter-relations you are to deduce the Deity. An anatomist gets hold of a dead body and dissects it exposing the structure and functions of the brain, the lungs, the heart, etc. Just so the author of this creed gets possession of the corpse of God (He died of starvation doing slop-work for Abstraction an............