For instance, the Roman Church believes in the efficacy of prayers to the Virgin and the Saints; the Christians of the first three centuries held no such belief; the creeds do not require it; the Reformed Churches regard it as entirely baseless. Therefore it is no part of the Catholic faith. To attack or to disprove it is not to attack a truth of Christianity, but only to disprove an opinion held among some Christians.

2. Again, an opinion may be current among Christians for hundreds of years; it may be held by the vast majority of teachers and believers in any particular age; it may have been held by their predecessors for many ages; yet if it has been repudiated by recognised branches of the Church, and has never found a place in the Catholic formularies, it remains an opinion; it is not an essential part of the Christian faith.

i. For instance: all Christians alike believe in the Atonement, and the forgiveness of sins. Particular theories of the Atonement, and of the manner in which sins are forgiven, have been prevalent in every age, and have sometimes united the suffrages of most Christians. Yet if they have never been formally sanctioned they are opinions only, not matters of faith. Thus, in early days, some leading Fathers and teachers seized upon the metaphor of ransom, used in Scripture to express the results of forgiveness to guilty man. Needlessly pressing the metaphor into spheres to which it was not intended to apply, and which transcend the ken of man's reason, they asked to whom was the ransom paid? They decided, most erroneously and unwarrantably, that it was paid to the devil.1 That opinion prevailed in the Church all but universally for a thousand years, from the days of St. Irenæus to the 1 Irenæus based his error on Heb. ii. 14.

days of St. Anselm. St. Anselm, in his book 'Cur Deus Homo?' decisively rejected it,' and though it had been held so long and so all but universally, yet, being an opinion only and not a doctrine of the faith, it rapidly crumbled into dust; it now finds not one defender; and the faith of Christians was left exactly where it was.

ii. I may add an instance still more crucial. The sole important difference between the Western (or Latin) and the Eastern (or Greek) Church as regards the creeds is in the single word 'Filioque'-'proceeding from the Father and the Son. This last expression, Filioque,' was added to the Nicene Creed at the Provincial Council of Toledo, in Spain, A.D. 589, and afterwards at a Council of Charlemagne's Bishops at Frankfort in 794. Charlemagne wished the Pope Leo III. to insert the word ' Filioque,' and the Pope refused. The word, however-apparently without any formal authorisation-crept into the Nicene Creed, in spite of the vehement protests of the Eastern Church. That Church insisted that when the Council of Constantinople (A.D. 381) had added to the Nicene Creed 'proceeding from the Father,' and that addition had been accepted by the Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431), a decree was passed, under an anathema, that no one should ever make any further addition to the Creed. It has been supposed by some that the whole dispute depends on the difference of meaning between the Greek word for 'proceeding' (EKπорEVÓμεVOV) and the Latin word (procedens). The Greek Church does not deny that in the sense of the Latin word the Spirit proceeds from the Son, but it does not admit the addition to

1 St. Anselm rightly argued that the devil could have no rights over man, and 'quamvis homo juste a diabolo torqueretur, ipse tamen illum injuste torquebat.' Cur Deus Homo? i. 7; Oxenham, On the Atonement, p. 114.

the Creed. 'Yet,' says Bishop Pearson, 'they acknowledged under another Scriptural expression the same thing which the Latins understand by procession, though they stuck more closely to the phrase and language of the Scripture; and therefore when they said "He proceedeth from the Father" they also added "He received of the Son."1 Afterwards, however, divers of the Greeks expressly denied the procession from the Son.'2

iii. Once more. The notion that intolerance is a duty, and that it is not only right but imperative to persecute, torture, and burn those whom the dominant Church of the day may regard as heretics, prevailed for centuries. It was acted upon in age after age to the suppression of God's truth and the unspeakable danger of the faith in the name of which such horrors and crimes have been perpetrated. This belief is still avowed by the Romish Church; yet it involves nothing less than a crime against the Spirit and the Gospel of Christ. It was abhorrent to primitive Christianity, and in spite of its thousand years of dominance it is rightly repudiated by all the Reformed Churches of the present day.

Opinions therefore may be held by Christians, even by the majority of Christians, and by all or nearly all of their accredited teachers in any particular age, and for successive ages, and yet may be disputable opinions; may even be opinions which, when rightly apprehended in the broadening and revealing light, are seen to be erroneous and even hateful. But such opinions form no part of Christianity. The defence of Christianity is unconcerned with

1 τοῦ Υἱοῦ λαμβάνον. Epiphan. Har. lxix.

2 Pearson, On the Creed, Art. viii.; Waterland, Hist. of Athan. Creed, Works, iv. 133; Bishop Harold Browne, Thirty-nine Articles, 114-117.

them. We may repudiate them, while yet we hold fast to the great primitive creeds of Christendom, and believe with all our hearts that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God, the Saviour of the World, and that the Gospel is a direct revelation from the God of all consolation to the suffering and sinful family of man.

It should then be clear that Christianity, as set forth in her universal creeds, may be one thing; and Christianity, as identified with the opinion of even the majority of Christians about a multitude of subjects at any given time, may be quite another.

God's education of us never ceases. The fundamental truths of Christianity are unaltered and unalterable; but the points of view from which they are regarded, and the thousands of minor propositions which have often been attached to them, are altering, and have altered from age to age. They need to be constantly re-examined and revised. For we believe that Christ is with us, not absent from us. He is living, not dead. The inspiration of His Spirit is a continuous influence, an ever-brightening sunbeam, not an exhausted spasm of energy, or a flash of vanished light. It is a beam in the darkness which must broaden and brighten more and more into the boundless day.

One of the most urgent duties of good men in the present day is the simplification of religion into its primitive and essential elements; its purification from centuries of alien influx; its disseverance from elements which owed their origin, not to the teaching of its Divine Founder, but to Pagan or Jewish survivals, to Eastern mysticism, and to Manichean error. It has suffered unspeakably from the ambitions, inventions, and usurpations of men; and most of all from the confusions, corruptions, and ignorance

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which during the Dark Ages, and under the sway of the mediæval Papacy, invaded the God-given liberty of Christians; quenched, or tried to quench, the light which came from heaven; subjected free human souls to the cruel, degraded, and effeminating bondage of ignorant teachers; and utterly marred the truth and beautiful simplicity of the primeval Gospel.

An unprogressive Christianity will be of necessity a stagnant and corrupt Christianity. 'He hath promised, saying, Yet once more will I make to tremble not the earth only, but also the heaven. And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain.' Opinions about Christianity, and systems and churches which have built upon such opinions their superstructures of wood, hay, and stubble, may again and yet again be shaken to the dust; but true Christianity cannot be shaken, for it is an eternal thing.

Let Christians then beware of the inveterate obstinacy, the passionate prejudices, and, above all, the furious and blood-stained idolatry of false traditions, which render impossible the acceptance of new truths. Those new truths, which cause the general opinions of Christians on many subjects to differ widely from age to age, are nothing less than a continuous revelation. Truth is not a stagnant pool, but an ever-streaming fountain; the river is eternal, but its waves are perpetually changing, and being constantly purified and renewed. 'Even within the Church,' says one of our most eminent writers, 'the fulness of truth was only slowly recognised; and the earliest heresy was simply the perverse and obstinate retention of that which had once been the common belief, after that a wider view had been sanctioned by a Divine authority.