(1865.)
on christmas day, as on all other chief holidays of the year, the ministers and congregations of our national church have had the noble privilege and pleasure of standing up and reciting the creed commonly called of st. athanasius. the question of the authorship does not concern us here, but a note of gibbon (chapter 37) is so brief and comprehensive that we may as well cite it:—“but the three following truths, however strange they may seem, are now universally acknowledged. 1. st. athanasius is not the author of the creed which is so frequently read in our churches. 2. it does not appear to have existed within a century after his death. 3. it was originally composed in the latin tongue, and consequently in the western provinces. gennadius, patriarch of constantinople, was so much amazed by this extraordinary composition, that he frankly pronounced it to be the work of a drunken man.” (this gennadius, by the bye, is the same whom gibbon mentions two or three times afterwards in the account of the siege and conquest of constantinople by the turks, a.d. 1453).
whoever elaborated the creed, and whether he did it drunk or sober, the church of england has made it thoroughly her own by adoption.
yet it must be admitted that many good churchmen, and perhaps even a few churchwomen, have not loved this adopted child of their holy mother as warmly as their duty commanded. the intelligently pious
tillotson wishes mother church well rid of the bantling; and poor george the third himself, with all his immense genius for orthodoxy, could not take kindly to it. he was willing enough to repeat all its expressions of theological faith—in fact, their perfect nonsense, their obstinate irrationality, must have been exquisitely delightful to a brain such as his; but he was not without a sort of vulgar manhood, even when worshipping in the chapel royal, and so rather choked at its denunciations—“for it do curse dreadful.” he could keep the faith whole and undefiled by reason, yet did not like to assert that all who had been and were and should in future be in this particular less happy than himself, must without doubt perish everlastingly.
on the other hand one of our most liberal churchmen, mr. maurice, has argued that this creed is essentially merciful, and that its retention in the book of common prayer is a real benefit. mr. maurice, however, as we all know, interprets “perish everlastingly” into a meaning very different from that which most members of the church accept. and his opinions lose considerably in weight from the fact that no man save himself can infer any one of them from any other. for example, if you are cheered up a bit by his notions as to “eternal” and “everlasting,” you are soon depressed again by his pervading woefulness. of all the rulers we hear of—the ex-king of naples, the king of prussia, the elector of hesse-cassel, abraham lincoln, and the pope included—the poor god of mr. maurice is the most to be pitied: a god whose world is in so deplorable a state that the good man who owns him lives in a perpetual fever of anxiety and misery in endeavoring to improve it for him.
what part of this creed shocks the pious who are shocked at all by it? simply the comprehensive damnation it deals out to unbelievers, half-believers, and all except whole believers. for we do not hear that the pious are shocked by the confession of theological or theoillogical faith itself. their reverence bows and kisses the rod, which we cool outsiders might fairly have expected to be broken up and flung out of doors in a fury of indignation. their sinful human nature is shocked on account of their fellow-men; their divine religious nature is not shocked on account of their god: yet does not the creed use god as badly as man?
a chemist secures some air, and analyses it into its ultimate constituents, and states with precise numerals the proportions of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbonic acid therein. just so the author of this creed secures the divinity and analyses it into father, son, and holy ghost, and just as precisely he reports the relations of these. a mathematician makes you a problem of a certain number divided into three parts in certain ratios to each other and to the sum, from which ratios you are to deduce the sum and the parts. just so the author of this creed makes a riddle of his god, dividing him into three persons, from whose inter-relations you are to deduce the deity. an anatomist gets hold of a dead body and dissects it exposing the structure and functions of the brain, the lungs, the heart, etc. just so the author of this creed gets possession of the corpse of god (he died of starvation doing slop-work for abstraction and company; and the dead body was purveyed by the well-known resurrectionist priestcraft), and cuts it open and expounds the generation and functions of its three principal organs. but the chemist does not tell us that oxygen, nitrogen, and carbonic acid are three gases and yet one gas, that each of them is and is not common air, that they have each peculiar and yet wholly identical properties; the mathematician does not tell us that each of the three parts of his whole number is equal to the whole, and equal to each of the others, and yet less than the whole and unequal to either of the others; the anatomist does not tell us that brain and lungs and heart are each distinct and yet all the same in substance, structure, and function, and that each is in itself the whole body and at the same time is not: while the author of this creed does tell us analogous contradictions of the three members and the whole of his god. and the chemist, the mathematician, and the anatomist do not damn us (except, perhaps, by way of expletive at our stupidity) if we fail to understand and believe their enunciations; but the author of this creed very seriously and solemnly damns to everlasting perdition all who cannot put faith in his. in other words, the chemist, the mathematician and the anatomist try to be as reasonable and tolerant as human nature can hope to be; while the author of this creed aims at and manages to reach an almost superhuman unreason and intolerance.
giving him the full benefit of this difference, the fact remains that in other respects he treats his subject just as they treat theirs. he, a pious christian, professing unbounded adoration and awe of his divinity, coolly analyses and makes riddles of and dissects this divinity as if it were a sample of air, a certain number, a dead body. this humble-minded devotee, who knows so well that he is finite and that god is infinite, and that the finite cannot conceive, much less comprehend, much less express the infinite, yet expounds this infinite with the most complete and complacent knowledge, turns it inside out and upside down, tells us all about it, cuts it up into three parts, and then glues it together again with a glue that has the tenacity of atrocious wrongheadeduess instead of the coherence of logic, puts his mark upon it, and says, “this is the only genuine thing in the god line. if you are taken in by any other, why, go and be damned;” and having done all this, finishes by chanting “glory be to the father, and to the son, and to the holy ghost!” and the pious are not shocked by what they should abhor as horrible sacrilege and blasphemy; they are shocked only by the “go, and be damned,” which is the prologue and epilogue of the blasphemy. were the damnatory clauses omitted, it appears that even the most devout worshippers could comfortably chant the “glory be to the father, and to the son, and to the holy ghost” immediately after they had been thus degrading father, son, and holy ghost to the level and beneath the level of their low human understanding. and these very people are horrified by the lack of veneration in atheists and infidels! what infidel ever dealt with god more contemptuously and blasphemously than this creed has dealt with him? can it be expected that sane and sensible men, who have out-grown the prejudices sucked in with their mothers’ milk, will be reconverted to reverence a deity whom his votaries dare to treat in this fashion?
ere we conclude, it may be as well to anticipate a probable objection. it may likely enough be urged that the author and reciters cf the creed do not pretend to know the deity so thoroughly as we have assumed, since they avouch very early in the creed that the three persons of the godhead are one and all incomprehensible. if the word incomprehensible, thus used, means (what it apparently meant in the author’s mind) unlimited as to extension, just as the word eternal means unlimited as to time, the objection is altogether wide of the mark.. but even if the word incomprehensible be taken to mean (what it apparently means in the minds of most people who use the creed) beyond the comprehension or capacity of the human intellect, still the objection is without force. for in the same sense a tuft of grass, a stone, anything and everything in the world is beyond the capacity of the human intellect: the roots of a tuft of grass strike as deeply into the incomprehensible as the mysteries of the deity. relatively this creed tells us quite as much about god as ever the profoundest botanist can tell us about the grass; in fact, it tells relatively more, for it implies a knowledge of the final cause of the subsistence of god, which no future botanist can tell or imply of the grass.
