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The doubts which he sometimes unguardedly expressed had relation, we are constrained to believe, to the glosses of commentators and creed-makers and the inconsistency of professors, rather than to those facts and precepts of Christianity to which he gave the constant assent of his practice. He sought not his own.
It is worth while to live in these days to know the possibility of such monumental constructive work in one's own lifetime. The creed-makers must have a thorough literary training; no mere vocabulary of philosophy will answer. Like the Elizabethan divines, they must rule the living word, which shall echo for a century yet to come.
The doubts which he sometimes unguardedly expressed had relation, we are constrained to believe, to the glosses of commentators and creed-makers and the inconsistency of professors, rather than to those facts and precepts of Christianity to which he gave the constant assent of his practice. He sought not his own.
Side by side with the executive officers who will reorganize the Christian forces, there will stand great creed-makers, giant theologians, firm, logical, scientific, and convincing, who, out of the vast array of new facts brought forth by modern science, will produce new creeds, a new catechism, a new dogmatic series.
The idea of Protestant sectarian creeds is largely the same. The members cannot be trusted to interpret the Bible for themselves, so the creed-makers have to do it for them. The difference is in degree and power of oppression rather than in kind. The entire idea is fundamentally wrong. Speculative theology cannot save any one and sectarian creeds are harder to understand than the Bible itself.
It was the creed-makers who first gave such legal restrictions the strength of moral obligations, and announced that their infraction would be punished by divine agencies, even if they should escape human retribution. Many hurtful acts, indeed, came to be viewed as crimes alike against God and man, and punishable in the interests of both.
Philo, in his poetic fancy, speaks of God associating with the virgin soul and generating therein the Divine offspring of holy wisdom; the Christian creed-makers enunciated the irrational dogma of the immaculate conception of Jesus.
What creed-makers did was to put these ancient axioms of morality on record, and offer them to the world as codes of religious observance. They could not have been of primitive origin, since the most of them do not exist among the savage tribes still with us.
No one can more sincerely wish to have the frivolities of superstition and the endless multitude of nothings which arrogant creed-makers have impiously superadded to pure christianity removed from the church than I do; but wisdom must direct in this great and necessary work. It was those who had more zeal than discernment who asked if they should pluck up the tares from among the wheat?
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