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"I have no creed. I am honestly and anxiously hunting one. For a long time I thought that I had found a sound one in Emerson. But a careful study of his writings taught me that of all Pyrrhonists he is the prince. Can a creedless soul aid me in my search? Verily, no. He exclaims, 'To fill the hour that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for repentance or an approval.
This trumpet blast has awakened sympathetic echoes from all sorts and conditions of men, although that creedless Christian, James Whitcomb Riley, regarded it with genial contempt, thinking that the philosophy it represented was not only futile, but dangerous, in that it ignored the deepest facts of human life.
It will come as soon as this General goes. For I now will demand the right to drop Berthe Louison, and to be my own self. To be Alixe Delavigne to one bright, loving human soul only, in this land of arid solitudes, of peopled wastes. The land of the worn, scarred human nature, which, blind, creedless, and hopeless, staggers along under the burden of misery under the menace of the British bayonet."
Hence he is never so inadequate as when he is universal; he is never so limited as when he generalises. This is the fallacy in the many modern attempts at a creedless creed, at something variously described as essential Christianity or undenominational religion or a world faith to embrace all the faiths in the world.
The deep stillness of the late night is broken by a stirring, and the morning star of creedless faith, the last and brightest of the stars, the star that owes its light to the coming sun is in the sky. There is a stirring and a movement. There is a stir, like the stir before a breeze.
But it prevents us from positing the existence of such creedless races, in any age, as a demonstrated fact. We have thus, in short, no opportunity of observing, historically, man's development from blank unbelief into even the minimum or most rudimentary form of belief.
Though the Christian era had not then begun, Socrates died the death of the Christian; and though Hume was not a Christian in theory, yet he, too, died the death of the Christian, humble, composed, without bravado; and though the most skeptical of philosophical skeptics, yet full of that firm, creedless faith, that embraces the spheres.
And well may thoughtful Hearts Heave with foreboding swell and heavy fears, To mark, how mad opinion doth infect Thy children; how thine apostolic claims And love maternal are regarded now, By creedless Vanity, or careless Vice. For time there was, when peerless Hooker wrote, And deep-soul'd Bacon taught the world to think, When thou wert paramount, thy cause sublime!
Once before we felt similarly when one of the boys died at camp. It was like an only sister leaving the family circle. Miller seemed to enjoy the discomfiture of the rest of us. This creedless old Christian had fine strata in his make-up. He and Jack planned continually for the future. In fact they didn't live in the present like the rest of us.
It is when he says that he is simply a citizen that nobody can possibly believe him. But indeed the case is yet more curious than this. The one argument that used to be urged for our creedless vagueness was that at least it saved us from fanaticism. But it does not even do that. On the contrary, it creates and renews fanaticism with a force quite peculiar to itself.
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