03 - The Creed

    III THE CREED

I THE first vow which is renewed in Confirmation is a vow of character, The second is a vow of belief. We pledge ourselves to take the Apostles’ Creed as our rule of faith.

Question. Dost thou believe all the Articles of the Christian Faith, as contained in the Apostles’ Creed?

Answer. I do.

Why do we have a Creed? In the Apostolic Church, we read [Acts vm. 37] that the only credal requirement was no longer than * I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.’ These words are not in some of the oldest manuscripts of the Book of the Acts, but they are certainly very ancient.

Then, almost from the beginning the Church met the influences of surrounding philosophies and religions. The straight and simple teaching of our Saviour was in danger of being overlaid or distorted. So the Church had to ask of those who came to be baptized and confirmed that they made clear that they understood the content of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. The time came, for instance, when men protested that Jesus Christ was not truly man, they said that He only seemed to be man, God used Him only to show the Divine Nature in a dramatic succession of events, entering Him at His baptism and leaving Him at the crucifixion. Marcion protested that He came down suddenly from heaven, a full-grown man. So we have the details in this brief Creed that the Son of God was born of a woman, whose name is given, that he died at a definite time in history, under a Roman governor, whose name is also given, and then what seem unnecessary words are used to emphasize the fact of His sharing death with humanity. He was crucified, dead, and buried: He descended into hell.’ Again, the time came when men said that God is not really omnipotent: He shared, they thought, the dominion of the world with evil, either impersonal or personal, and the outcome was in doubt. So the first paragraph of the Creed became necessary to make clear that the Christian believes that the Father controls every action of the universe as its only and omnipotent Sovereign Lord. In other words, the Creed is not a hard, outward thing, invented, either early or late, by a group of ecclesiastics, and pushed down relentlessly over the reluctant minds of Christ’s disciples, but it is a breathing, living witness in history to the love of God for man, as this love was revealed once for all in Jesus Christ. It grew naturally and necessarily as it strove jealously and lovingly to guard this love from all the shadows with which a surrounding world might darken its light and its joy. The Creed is not to be thought of as a barrier or a stumbling block, but as a radiant help towards the complete trust in the love of God, revealed in our Lord Jesus Christ. ii

Further, in making the Apostles’ Creed the only test of our understanding of Christian teaching, the Church discriminates between essentials and unessentials. The essentials are very few. There is a wide range of truth and doctrine which the person who is baptized and confirmed need not consider. Nothing is asked about the way in which the Bible is inspired; nothing is said about the form of Christian worship; nothing is said about the Christian ministry.

Even within this brief Creed there are distinctions. The Church, in its Catechism, has, after the Creed, this significant question and answer, Question. What dost thou chiefly learn in these Articles of thy Belief?

Answer. First, I learn to believe in God the Father, who hath made me, and all the world.

Secondly, in God the Son, who hath redeemed me, and all mankind.

Thirdly, in God the Holy Ghost, who sanctifieth me, and all the people of God.

There are some things much more important than others in these ’ articles of our belief/ We should try to grasp these first and let the subordinate parts group them selves about them.

Still further, it is right that we should go back to the most ancient creed of which we have record: ’I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God/ This means for us that in the character and life of our Saviour we have the complete revelation of the character and life of God. Coming down to the deepest truth in that revelation, we find the short sentence, *God is love’; and we hear our Master say, ’Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest/ In the recent ’Life of John Singer Sargent/ we find the criticism which the great painter made of a portrait which one of his pupils had painted. ’That said Sargent, ’is not a head: it is simply a collection of features/ So, some Christians make of the Creed, not one supreme assertion of joyful trust in God’s love through Christ, but a series of hard definitions, which together do not proclaim the great Head of the Church, but make only a confused blur of His shining Face. The first question you should ask your self as you say the Creed, is not, ’What does the Church mean by the second coming of Christ, or by the resurrection of our bodies?’ but rather this: ’Do I surrender myself with complete trust and love to the loving heavenly Father revealed by my Saviour?’ To repeat the Creed is an act of personal allegiance to the loving God.

Everything else sinks below that highest level of faith; and once you surrender loyally to Him in this act of faith, everything else falls into place. It is exactly as Sargent said of a portrait, if the head is correctly drawn, the eyes, nose, and mouth present no difficulties: they find their necessary places.

Possibly a man might believe himself perfectly orthodox on every article of the Creed, and yet lose its soul. This would be an application of our Lord’s words, ’What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul. The soul of the Creed is, ’God is love in I now ask you to think what we mean when we say, ’I believe".

If I see a burning house, and watch it till it is reduced to ashes, I may rightly say that I know that the house has burned down. If I am not at the scene of the burning, but am told that the house has burned, I do not, strictly speaking, know that the house has burned. But, if I have confidence in the veracity of the man who has given me the information, I may say that I believe that the house has burned.

I may be just as sure of the fact as if I had been an eye-witness. There faith or belief begins. Further, I may infer certain facts from the facts which I know. I see a richly carved chair. I know the chair. I infer that at least one man made the chair. I do not, strictly speaking, know that any one made the chair. A tree might have been struck by lightning, and the forces of nature might have made this chair. But, from my past experience, I do not believe that the chair is due to accident. I believe that human hands fashioned it. The Creed is made up largely of in formation and inference. The second paragraph is a summary of our Saviour’s life, as the facts are recorded in the New Testament. The first paragraph is largely inference. Here is this marvellous world. My reason refuses to believe that it is an accident. I find intelligence in it and behind it. So, by inference, I say, ’I believe in God, the Maker of the earth.’ But, more important than information and inference is knowledge. In so far as I test the facts of the Creed, they cease to be merely in formation and inference: I come, at length to feel, to know, that God is my Father, who, through the Holy Spirit, speaks to me, warning me, encouraging me, giving me vision and aspiration. I come to know that there is forgiveness of sin, because I know that He has forgiven me. Above all, I come to know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, because every day, as I read, and reflect, and listen to the inner Voice, I learn to know through Him who God is. From another point of view, we may say that the Creed is made up of personal religious experience, historical statement, and the dogmatic conclusions of the Church. These are only other words for knowledge, information, and inference. In either case, knowledge or personal religious experience is always paramount. Unless the information and inference, the history So and the theology, are transmuted into life and experience they are of no value. The original form of the Nicene Creed began not with ’I believe/ but with ’We believe/ This is still the use in the Eastern Church. Whether we use’T or ’We’ in this great affirmation of our faith, we are not merely individuals or groups of individuals, but we are speaking for the whole Church, affirming the historic confidence of Christendom. There is a cathedral in Uganda where every Sunday morning seven thousand black people come together for Christian worship. I am told that when these seven thousand Christians say together the Apostles’ Creed the stranger is overwhelmed with the witness of the Church. The whole Church in all its history is speaking, through these simplehearted, earnest negroes. They are not capable of analyzing the various articles of the Creed. They know nothing of critical scholarship or of theology. But they do know God their Father, Christ their Redeemer, the Holy Spirit who speaks to their consciences. And with enthusiasm and joy they proclaim their trust in their glorious Lord. No wonder the stranger is moved. The Church is saying its Creed; and the individual stranger, perhaps burdened with difficulty and doubt, is caught up in the majesty of it. Inevitably he cries out, ’Lord, I too believe; help thou mine unbelief/ The individual may take him self too seriously, talking about his honesty, and inferring that others are either unintelligent or dishonest. The Creed whether it begins with ‘I’ or ’We* is not an individual act, but the act of a congregation. A man, with trust and love, has a right to enter into the trust and love of all the Church, of which he is a tiny and in significant part.

There is one more thought in connection with this subject of what we mean when we say, ’I believe.’ The Church has two Creeds: the Apostles’ and the Nicene. The Nicene is longer and more elaborate, but has the same meaning. The Church assigns the shorter and simpler Creed to the Service of Baptism; the longer, more detailed Creed to the Service of the Holy Communion. This is a tacit admission that the Church expects growth in the expression of the faith of its children. Devout men in the Church have urged that the very first Creed put on the lips of the young be the Creed of the Apostolic Church, ’I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God’; that they go on later to the Apostles’ Creed; and still later, to the Nicene Creed. There is much to be said for this emphasis upon our increasing faith beginning with Apostolic simplicity. I believe that the time will come when we shall return to this divine trust in God’s truth. But, whether this come to pass or not, the principle of growth is already emphatic in the present teaching of the Church. As the Lord Christ was satisfied with the follower who said, ’Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief/ so I am sure that He is glad to have His Church accept in this present time, any earnest person who utters, with a like modest and reverent hesitation, the Creed of Christendom. The important fact to remember, however, is that the man in the Gospel story did not rest content with his partial belief; we may be sure that as he entered into fuller obedience to Christ he had a fuller Creed. So when a man says, ’Help mine unbelief/ he does not smugly rest content with his unbelief, but really prays to have his faith grow richer. That prayer is not achieved when a man puts himself on a pedestal of intelligence, and says that he believes as much now as any honest man who knows anything at all can possibly believe. If a man grasps anything of the truth as it is in Jesus Christ, he sees before him the infinite reaches of the mystery of the Love of God, and he dare not, out of sheer honesty, put any limits to what God may convince him is true. In the light of God’s illimitable truth a man’s sense of honour fades into the honour of God.

IV We are now ready to examine the details of the Apostles’ Creed* i The first paragraph of the Creed is our belief in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.

Really to believe in God is the beginning and the end of all life. I remember when I was still a collegian I was trying to persuade a comrade to believe in Jesus Christ.

He was patient and kind, but turned at length upon me with the confession: ’I think I could believe in Christ, if only I could believe in God. The trouble is that I don’t believe in God/ So the first question an earnest man must ask himself is whether he really believes in God. The Christian believes in God first by information. If he has had a good mother, she has taught him even as a little child to say, ’Our Father/ He asks many questions, and she tries to explain who God is.

She tells her child that God made him and all the world: she points to the stars and the flowers, the hills and the sea; that is, she teaches him by inference to believe in God. And all the time she finds in him an instinctive tendency to believe. When the boy becomes a man, he puts away childish things. He may become bewildered, and he may even put away whatever faith in God his childhood has given him; but, if he be wise, he will listen reverently to the heroes of the ages, who in prophesy and poem, in biography and history, declare that they know God, and that therefore He is. That information ought to make a man stand still and think. The reverent scientist looks through his telescope and sees the order of the stars, then through his microscope and sees the order of the minute life within a drop of water. He sees law and order, growth and beauty; and he must ask whence it comes.

It is preposterous, he thinks, to believe it accident. Equally preposterous, he thinks it, to ascribe it to warring creators. There must be one Mind who has made and who now controls the heavens and the earth. The familiar illustration will never grow stale which tells of men who found a box of letters arranged in the words of Ham let’s soliloquy. One man said the wind blew them into this exact order; another, more sane, was sure that a mind had arranged the letters deliberately in these majestic sentences. It is hard for most people who know even a little of the world not to say, /I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth/

Information and inference lead inevitably to knowledge, to experience. Josiah Royce in one of his books x says that the plain man knows what is meant by saying, ’Out of the depths have I cried/ He knows, writes Professor Royce, that there are depths, that out of them he can cry, and that the being who hears his cry from the depths is God. In other words, out of his desperate need he discovers God. The immortal illustration of God’s revelation of Himself in our time is the story of Miss Keller. Helen Keller, a little child blind, deaf, dumb, was taught by a teacher to communicate with the outside world through the touch of the hand. This teacher, able to control everything that came into the child’s life, determined that she should know nothing of God till she had reached a certain age; then Phillips Brooks came, and told the child of God. When he had finished, there was a smile on the child’s face, and she said, through her teacher, *I have always known Him, but I never before knew His name.’ To that child in the darkness and the silence God had come. To her He was known face to face.

1 Sources of Religious Insight, p. 228 f. To believe in God is not always easy.

Days of doubt may come. There are many stern riddles which the human mind can not solve. The chief difficulty is that the natural world does not always speak of love. On a bright May morning all is joy and peace. But the day comes when men read of the earthquake, the tidal wave, the tornado, and the eruption of a volcano.

Then the world seems in possession of a tyrant, crushing men in the teeth of a relentless machine. Who is to interpret the God of nature? The answer is that Jesus Christ has come into the life of men, and by His deeds as well as by His words He has shown men the nature of God. The highest information about the Father has come from Jesus of Nazareth; and those who follow Christ, watching Him, listening to Him, loving Him, find the assurance of their own experience, that His words and His deeds have ultimate authority within them, So the first paragraph of the Creed melts into the second, and the second becomes part of the first.

2 The second paragraph of the Creed is our belief in Jesus Christ; the only Son of the Father: our Lord. Before I ask you to examine the details of our Saviour’s life which follow, I ask you to think of the meaning of these few words. Who is Jesus Christ? As we read the Gospel story we find our Saviour different from all the rest of humanity, even the most saintly, in that He had no consciousness of sin. It is a mark of saintship that it is supersensitive to its own sin. It speaks of sins which ordinary humanity ignores. Christ being obviously of at least saintly character, lacked entirely the consciousness of any sin in Himself.

You need no proof texts. The fourfold Gospel story proclaims it on every page, not by direct assertion, but the indirect and therefore more authoritative implication. Unconscious witness is always the most impressive. This Man, unconscious of sin, spoke words of Himself which make Him different in other ways from all other sane and noble spirits. He said, * Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. From any other these words would be presumptuous. From Him they are altogether natural. He spoke of the commands given by Jehovah through Moses, ’Ye have heard of old time thus and so; but I say unto you this and that/ Even the men by the roadside said, ’This man speaks with authority/ It was the supreme authority of His Father. He did not speak as a prophet, ’Thus saith the Lord/ He was different from all the prophets in that He spoke in His own name: ’I say unto you. Now who is this Man, different from all other men, even the holiest? I could give you a theological answer, but I wish to give you a simpler answer, which may perhaps more directly convey to you the truth. He is not only man, tempted in all points like as we are, though without sin, but He is infinitely more than man. Christian experience, as recorded in the New Testament and through all the years of Christian history, has found in Him *the express image ’ of the Father. In Him * the fulness of the Godhead dwelt’; in Him ’the Word was made flesh/ In Christ men saw in human terms the exact character of God. The best illustration of which I can think is the translation of a great book from one language to another; from Greek, let us say, into English. Every scholar will tell you that an exact translation is impossible. The Greek language hides subtle meanings in its single words; its verbs have shades of meanings which require much circumlocution when translated into an other language, particularly into English. But when the many words have been inserted to make clear these delicate modifications of the single Greek word about which they centre, the concise force and proportion of the original are sacrificed. So it comes about that scholars admit that there is no such thing as an exact translation. The English Psalms have in them more beauty than the Hebrew Psalms.

Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam is richer and finer than the original. On the other hand, Sophocles and Plato have never really been adequately translated, great as many of the translations are. The translations are always less than the music and power of the original Greek.

Now to the Christian the character of God is perfectly translated into human terms in the character of Jesus Christ. The proportion, the emphasis, the most delicate distinctions are there perfectly preserved. So for the Christian, the character of Christ is not similar to the character of the Father, it is not almost like it; but the character of Christ is the character of God.

We know what that great mystic, the author of the Fourth Gospel meant, when he put upon our Saviour’s lips the words, ’He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. 5 Through the translucent medium of an absolutely perfect translation, we see in Jesus Christ the love, the character, the very life of the most high God, Every divine trait of character is translated into its human equivalent, and we see God face to face. In Him we know all that Man is and all that God is. He is, in one word, both God and Man, and He is both completely. He did not merely seem to be a man. While He was and is Man, the character of God shines through Him, translated to the last syllable, to the last shade of intricate meaning, in His adorable human life. This opening part of the second paragraph of the Creed is to be distinguished from what follows. It is on a higher, more authoritative level than what follows. It is to be distinguished from it, as knowledge is distinguished from information. It is hardly likely, but it is possible, that a man might believe in this first clause and know nothing of the historic facts which succeed it, or, knowing them, suspend his judgment about them. This first clause for the Christian is direct experience, axiomatic, needing no proof outside his own life. He knows that Christ is the only Son of God because he has lived with Him; he has heard His voice; he has done His will, and therefore he knows His doctrine. He has heard Christ say to him as Christ said once to Philip, ’Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me?* He knows Christ as Saint Paul knew Him; to him too, to live is only one thing it is Christ. Christ is for him an immediate reality, needing no argument or external demonstration. The facts in this second paragraph of the Creed go back to the New Testament for their authority. Scholars are diligently at work upon the difficult problems connected with these facts; and whatever the verdict may be upon this fact or that, the loyalty and belief in Jesus Christ cannot be shaken in the heart and mind and spirit of his real disciples. I am confident that those facts testified by a long Christian history will be credited through all time, but it is important to see that to one who knows the Lord Jesus directly everything else be comes subordinate. Once we truly know whom we have believed, that immediate belief nothing outward whatever can ever remove.

What are these facts of the Creed concerning Jesus Christ? The first is the fact of Christ’s human birth. There is solid ground for believing that the reason for this clause was to assert that Jesus Christ had a human mother. He was not a seeming man, but a man as truly and naturally as any man who has lived. And, to be quite definite, the Creed gives the very name of His mother. Beyond this is the assertion that our Lord’s mother was a Virgin, and that He was born by the operation of the Holy Spirit. We speak of this as the miraculous birth from a Virgin mother. I do not believe that the authors of the Creed put as strong emphasis on this fact as many of us put upon it, because I find that the two great Christian teachers of the first century. Saint Paul and the author of the Fourth Gospel, put little or no emphasis upon it. But it is certainly part of the Gospel record, incorporated in the exceedingly important dual document by Saint Luke, the Third Gospel and the Acts.

What virgin birth may mean I do not know; but neither can I explain my Master. I know Him, but He is a great Mystery. That so transcendent and unique a being should have entered the world in a way different from all other men does not seem to me at all hard to believe. God in Him was making a new creation. The whole world, whether or not conscious of the change, or conscious, much less, of the source of the change, has been different from His day. He has made all things new.

It does not astonish me to think that so radical a change in humanity should have been introduced by the exercise of some law hitherto unknown or unused; for matter and spirit are not mutually exclusive terms; but are always the symbol the one of the other. The birth of any soul into the world is to me so perplexing in its mystery that a little more mystery, or a different mystery, in the birth of the Son of God into the world does not confuse me. The Church, through much of its history, has found in the Virgin birth of our Saviour a great lesson. It is not a proof of Christ’s divinity. That proof is hid in the immediate and authoritative presence of Christ in the human heart. But it is not lightly to be ignored. If at our present stage of scientific inquiry it seem difficult or unnecessary, I should advise the earnest doubter to suspend his personal judgment, and have a deep respect for the faith of the Church. Whatever you do, do not dare to deny a belief which has meant chivalry and honour in rough periods of the world’s history; have a sense of the mystery of life; and await the time when, having seen through a glass darkly, you shall at last see face to face.

I have already spoken of the words which tell us our belief in our Saviour’s physical death. They are definite, assuring us of the Church’s confidence that even in the darkness of death Christ is one with us. The clause * descended into hell ’ has made difficulty. It does not mean that Christ went to the place of torment, but only to that place to which everyone who dies must go. In one of the Epistles, we are told that the Church believes that, during this interval between His death and His resurrection, Christ preached to the ’spirits in prison.’ We may be sure that He did every loving kindness that He had done on earth. In any case, all this clause need mean to us is that Christ not only died as we all die, but even after death, sought or received no special privilege, but was joined with all His human brothers in the experience after death which awaits us all. It is really only one more emphasis upon the fact that He really died. The great fact of all is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Saint Paul spoke of two facts in Christ’s life which to him meant everything: Christ Crucified and Christ Risen. The resurrection of Christ was to the early Church so essential a fact to keep before men always that when a disciple was to be chosen to fill the place in the Twelve Apostles made vacant by the death of Judas, the one qualification necessary for such honour was that the new Apostle must have been a witness of the resurrection. Before these first Apostles died, they committed this witness to others, who were officially chosen to continue it. And so down to our own time there is this living chain of witnesses. Many have died rather than deny the fact. Beyond this we have a unique document, the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, which was written by a great scholar who knew the value of evidence and of words, telling us why he believed that, less than a generation before, Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. At least two hundred and fifty witnesses of the resurrection still lived when Saint Paul wrote. Some of these he had seen, and he had conferred with them.

Though he had seen Christ on the Damascus road, he confirmed that vision by a scholar’s thorough investigation of evidence. The institution of the Lord’s Day, commonly called Sunday, as a weekly memorial of the resurrection of Christ, is also a bulwark for the great fact. The evidence for Christ’s resurrection is very strong. The fact of Christ’s ascension into heaven is the description of His final vanishing from men’s sight, to be present forever after, through the Holy Spirit, in the hearts of men everywhere. We no longer think of heaven as up or down. Since men have known that the earth is a ball whirling through space the literal ascension has merged its meaning in a transcendent spiritual fact. Christ, Son of God and equally Son of Man, is in the place of honour in the life of God; for Christ’s victory is both God’s victory and man’s; therefore we say that Christ ’ sitteth on the right hand of God.’ The last clause of this second paragraph of the Creed refers to Christ’s second coining to judge the living and the dead.

Scholars do not agree just what the Day of the Lord means, but we are agreed that we shall all meet this Lord who is both human and divine, as our Judge. Whether Here turn in physical form at a remote day, or return constantly in the Spirit, He is ever brooding over us, loving us, pleading with us, judging us. And before Him we shall stand at the last to know just what we have become. We ought to feel awe and godly fear of that august testing of our character, but there is no other judge who could be so pitiful, so gracious, so patient, as He; for, by His own life on earth, He knows all the difficulties and sorrows of mankind. In our exultant Te Deum we sing, ’We believe that thou shalt come to be our Judge’; and, as we learn to love Him, our love casts out our fear.

3 The third paragraph of the Creed begins with our belief in the Holy Spirit. In the Holy Spirit God speaks to our consciences.

He guides men into the truth. He teaches us to pray. He helps us to be righteous. The Holy Spirit is the bond of fellowship.

He binds the faithful together in the Holy Catholic Church. I shall speak later of the Church in detail. Here it is necessary only to say why the Church is called Holy and Catholic. The Church is holy in -the sense that Saint Paul wrote of the holiness of his friends: he said that they were called to be saints. The Church is called to be holy. But especially is the Church holy because it is organically and corporally the home of the Holy Spirit. It is Catholic because it is everywhere and always it is universal. The next clause is joined more closely to its predecessor than are the other clauses to one another. This is shown by the punctuation; a semicolon being used rather than a colon. The Communion of Saints is simply another name for the Church, another name for the fellowship in and with the Holy Spirit. The Church of to-day is one with Saint Paul, Saint Athanasius, and Saint Francis, and with all the great saints who shall come in the future.

It is one with our own dear ones, unheralded and unsung. All the people bound into the Church in all ages are alive in God, the Ever-Living; and therefore in Him they are alive and known to one another. He is the great medium of all who love Him; through Him they may tell their love one for another. We sometimes speak of the Church Militant (here on earth), the Church Expectant (in Paradise), and the Church Triumphant (in Heaven). But the whole Church is one, altogether and always living, in the always Living Lord. The next clause, ’I believe that there is forgiveness of sins/ is born out of human experience and is therefore one of the facts which the Christian may be said to know. When a man has stumbled and fallen, when he is in the first dismay of his selfishness or his hate, he wonders if God can forgive him. Then, as he surrenders to Christ’s love, it sweeps over him that he never can wander beyond that love. He is as the returning prodigal son in the parable. He knows forgiveness. The story is told of the monk Martin Luther that he had been so oppressed with his unworthiness that he spent all one night in agony on the floor of his cell. In the morning as he entered listlessly into the worship with his brothers he heard as for the first time, I believe that there is forgiveness of sins and in that glad moment his heart found peace. He knew that, without merit of his own, without works, he had won God’s everlasting love. He had but to open his heart to receive it. And he did receive it, henceforth he knew.

We next say, * I believe that there is the resurrection of the body/ We do not mean by this that the exact particles which go down to the grave come together to make the resurrection body. Even on this earth from decade to decade the material of the body vanishes, yet the identity of the body persists through all material changes.

There is what in Saint Paul’s paradox [1 Corinthians 15:1-58] we call the spiritual body. We see it shining through the physical body.

It is evident in a smile, a familiar gesture, an inflection of the voice. There are characteristics of the body, when it is inhabited by an ardent and loving spirit, which vanish at death. The body before us ceases to be the body of our beloved. When, therefore, we announce our confidence in the resurrection of the body, we tell our selves that we are sure that we shall be united with all whom we have known and loved, in another sphere of existence. We shall know our relatives and friends; we shall know Plato and Dante; but most of all shall we know the Lord Jesus of Galilee.

There will be that in them which willpreserve and carry over their identity with the past. As we go from strength to strength in the companionship of the Risen Christ, as we grow into His likeness, we shall still know and be known. The final clause of the Creed speaks of our belief that there is life everlasting. Life eternal would be a better translation of the idea of this final trust. For we have the conviction that when this life of time is over we shall enter the eternal Now. In any case there are no negatives in the Creed. We have nothing to say of eternal or everlasting death. For all the Creed may say to us, there is no bar to the larger hope. We may dare to believe, so far as the Creed is concerned, that every being whom God has, made shall, by how ever rough roads and deep tragedy, come at last into the light and joy of the Father’s presence. The same love which died for men on Calvary, we may hope, shall go on giving itself through all eternity, till all are won, and, like the younger son in the greatest of parables, come home to the ever loving Father of us all. The Creed allows us that Christlike hope.

Many good disciples of Christ have no difficulties with the Creed. Loyal to the Church, they accept unquestioningly what the Church presents to them. Others, just as good and just as loyal, have intellectual difficulties. I have tried to show that the Creed is intended to be not a burden but a help. I hope that you feel how beautiful is its trust, and how deep is its conviction in this trust through the faithful in all Christian generations. I wonder if you do not wish to believe it.

Once a visitor to Turner’s studio, after gazing upon one of his ethereal landscapes, said in despair, *I can’t see anything like that in nature.’ Turner looked at him with mingled amazement and pity, saying, ’Don’t you wish you could!’ If you find difficulties with the ancient Creed, I hope that you are not satisfied or complacent in your hesitation. I hope that you wish that you could find peace through the trust of the Church in the loving God our Father and in His most gracious plans for His be loved world. If you truly wish to believe I think that you will come at length to lift up your heart in this great hymn of trust.

You will believe indeed. In any case the Creed is but the door to the acceptance of Christ as your Lord and Saviour. In the Conference at Lausanne in 1927, the report on the Church’s Confession of Faith closed with the paragraph.

While recognizing the place and value of a common Confession of Faith, we would emphasize the supreme importance of personal spiritual experience, and the fact that our faith is in Christ Himself. In the meeting of the Committee this was amended by Bishop Gore to read as follows, Finally, inasmuch as in dealing with the subject of creeds, we have been occupied in considering the place and importance of a common Confession of Faith, we desire at the same time to leave on record our solemn and unanimous testimony that no external and written standards can take the place of that inward and personal experience of union with the living Christy which is the only evidence of spiritual vitality, and that the object of our faith is not any statement about Christ but the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

Thus we may say that the Creed is like the little tugboat which tows the great ocean sailing-vessel out of the harbour. The sailing-vessel is meekly guided on its way by the small steamer till the mouth of the harbour is passed and the great ship is out on the open sea. Then the tug is cut loose; the winds fill the sails of the ship; the depths of the sea are a safe path; and onward goes the vessel to its appointed haven, sure of its own ability to catch the power of God’s winds. The Creed is to the soul of a man who is in search of Christ what that tugboat is to the ocean vessel.

It is to start him, inspire him. Then he feels the winds of the Spirit of God blowing him on; he knows that he shall find the Living One; he shall know Him for himself, and he shall know Him face to face.