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The dream of Redemption. It is not technical creeds for which the Church as a whole stands, but for certain vital principles which concern the life of the soul, and its relation to God and man. Virtue has always been a dream of the heart. But how inaccessible is virtue, with a past of unforgiven sin! The height of our ideal of redemption is conditioned upon the depth of our realization of sin.
Try to make them see clearly the Divine truths which are implied, not only in their creeds, but in their simplest household words; and-" "And fail as Socrates failed, or rather worse; for he did teach himself: but I shall not even do that." "Do not despair in haste.
Old creeds were allowed to remain unaltered, long after portions of them had been found to be unscriptural; and error was subscribed as a matter of course. The result was, a distrust of everything held by such parties, unless it was supported by the plainest and most decisive proofs. I was now in a state of mind to go down quietly and almost unconsciously into utter unbelief. And I went down.
"Not a creed, my friend," Colonel Sullivan replied precisely. "But the result of a creed. The result, thank God, of more creeds than one." Captain Augustin cast a wild eye at the straining, shrieking rigging; the sloop was lurching heavily. But whether he would or no, his eye fluttered back and rested, fascinated, on the Colonel's face.
The prospect of complete amalgamation between the British and the original settlers would have seemed to be a good one, since they were of much the same stock, and their creeds could only be distinguished by their varying degrees of bigotry and intolerance.
Can they bring beauty into all this aggressive hate and ugliness?" "Certain hope and peace," she said, "that peace which is understanding, and that understanding which explains all creeds and therefore tolerates them." "Toleration! The one word a religious man loathes above all others! His pet word is damnation "
"It teaches us the way to heaven," said Grace. "And you are trying to live for heaven?" "I try to shun all evil as sin. Can I do more?" All the minister's creeds, and doctrines, and confessions of faith, which he had ever considered the foundations upon which Christian life was to be built, seemed, for a moment or two, useless lumber before the simple creed of this loving, pure-hearted maiden.
To him it was a good police system, and so when rightly importuned he gave, with becoming moderation, to all faiths and creeds. A couple of generations back in his ancestry there was a renegade Jew who loved a Christian girl, and thereby moulted his religion. When Cupid crosses swords with a priest, religion gets a death stroke. This stream of free blood was the inheritance of John Jacob Astor.
For while, at Oxford and elsewhere, a strong current has set back against the unimpeded progress of truth, while the attempt has been made, and not without a transient success, to rivet old fetters upon the hearts and intellects of men, another school, borrowing their metaphysics from Germany, and their notions of Christianity from the common creeds, have set up science in opposition to faith, and have treated religion, with more or less openness, as if it were a worn-out superstition.
These are awful words, but, my dear friends, I can only ask you if you think them too awful to be true? Do you believe the Christian religion? Do you believe the Creeds? Do you believe the Bible? For if you do, then you believe that the Lord Christ, who was born of the Virgin Mary, and crucified under Pontius Pilate, is the Maker, the Master, the Ruler of this world, and of all worlds.
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