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But it is not by striking balances between these pains and pleasures that the total effect of the creed is to be measured; but by the permanent influence on the mind of seeing things in their true light and dispersing the old halo of erroneous imagination.

I have always thought drunkenness a wild and almost fearful pleasure, rather demoniacal than human; but drunkenness, out here in the roaring blackness, on the edge of a cliff above that hell of waters, the man's head spinning like the Roost, his foot tottering on the edge of death, his ear watching for the signs of shipwreck, surely that, if it were credible in any one, was morally impossible in a man like my uncle, whose mind was set upon a damnatory creed and haunted by the darkest superstitions.

I remember meeting, in one of the French Mediterranean dependencies, with a Prussian nobleman, a well-bred and pleasant man, who was fond of expounding the Prussian creed. He was said to be a political agent of sorts, but he certainly learned nothing in conversation. He talked all the time, and propounded the most monstrous paradoxes with an air of mathematical precision.

"Did he really?" "Oh, you've no idea how tired he grew of flannel and ginger-beer! Many a time he's said to me, 'My boy, learn to take what's set before you, even at an alderman's table. Ah, his was a generous creed, Miss Wallingford!" "Yes, I suppose it was," said Julia submissively.

When Barlaam had thus spoken, and taught the king's son the Creed which was set forth at the Council of Nicaea, he baptized him in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, in the pool of water which was in his garden. And there came upon him the grace of the Holy Spirit.

The Renaissance had taught cultivated Italians how to live at peace with a creed in which they no longer believed; and their easy-going scepticism was combined with a traditional conviction that the priest knew better than any one how to deal with the poor, and that the clergy were of distinct use in relieving the individual conscience of its obligation to its fellows.

The phraseology employed in this paragraph is closely similar to the words addressed by Christ to Nicodemus, and often used by Himself, as in John v.; and they may well have filtered through to the Baptist, by the lips of Andrew, Peter, and John, who would often retail to their venerated earliest teacher what they heard from Jesus. Consider, then, the Baptist's creed at this point of his career.

Thousands marched cheerfully to death from among the ranks of humble citizens, for it was part of Calvin's creed that men ought to suffer martyrdom for their faith without offering resistance. Judges were known to die, stricken by remorse, and marvelling at their victims' fortitude. At Dijon, the executioner himself proclaimed at the foot of the scaffold that he had been converted.

For, judged by what was most essential to it, the Catholic church human to the core, human in its errors and sins, human in its upward striving was, at its best, a society for disciplining men in the higher life. And that creed which sounds so strange to our ears, we may best translate thus: Eternity bids you to goodness.

Knowest thou not that in the creed of the Persians each mortal is watched on earth by a good spirit and an evil one?