CREEDS AND WORSHIP.
MR. HENRY SIDGWICK, in an essay * which indicates the most delicate moral discrimination on the ethics of sub- scription and conformity, and as such deserves the closest attention from all those who take a part in debates such as those ou the Act of Uniformity and on University T ests, deprecates the use of creeds in any form of practical devotion on the following im- pressive ground :—" If the majority of the members of any Church," he argues, " have a right to claim that the service should be framed to meet their devotional needs, and therefore in accordance with their dogmatic convictions, the minority, on the other hand, may respectfully urge that these dogmatic convictions need not be introduced in such a manner as to give the maximum of offence to those who do not hold them, and at the same time produce the minimum of devotional effect. The formal recital of creeds is neither a natural expression of the sentiment of worship, nor obviously effective in stimulating devotion ; and the proper place for such abridged statements of doctrine, even supposing them accurately to express the convictions of the existing generation of Churchmen (which can hardly be said of the present Creeds), would appear to be a manual of instruction, rather than a formula of worship." Nothing certainly could war- rant the introduction of any avowal into a devotional service, in- tended for men of many shades of belief, which gives " the maxi- mum of offence to those who do not hold it, and at the same time produces the minimum of devotional effect ;" but Mr. Sidgwick in thus judging of the function and effect of recited creeds, and in de- scribing them as being merely " abridged statements of doctrine," misses entirely, as it seems to us, the mood of sentiment which originally caused their introduction into acts of worship, and the secret of the power they still exercise. In fact, the very intellectual bewilderments and scepticism which make men so reluctant to sign creeds, and so anxious to simplify them, lend an immeasurable depth of gratitude and even joy to the confession of the solid bases of fact, in which Christians find, as they conceive, the his- torical groundwork of their faith. In precise proportion to the number of influences which threaten to undermine faith, and which embarrass the " dim and perilous way " to it, whether these be, as in the world of martyrs, chiefly moral and only secondarily intellectual, or as it may at least often be in our own day, chiefly intellectual, and only secondarily moral, in that proportion must be the rest of heart, and the glad sense of exercising a faculty of vision which only God's grace can bestow, while confessing tersely, but definitely, the divine facts of a universe in many of its aspects so troubled, confusing, and confused. As it was not enough in the times of idolatry to adhere to the devo- tional forms of Christian worship, the heart of the Christian almost compelling him to become what was characteristically called • The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription. By Henry Sidgwick, M.A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. London: Williams and Norgate a ' confessor' of the person and power of Christ,—and this, we take it, not by any means merely as a sign of open loyalty, but also for the sake of clearly rehearsing to his own heart the positive objects of faith on which he finally rested, so in these days of solvent philosophies and critical reconsiderations of history, it is not enough for any Christian who can retain his Christian faith at at all, however much that be, to join in the implicit devotional assumptions of his Church ; for he, too, feels impelled to acknow- ledge with a certain wonder and awe the solid rock which he has found for his feet amid the quicksands of speculative thought. In an age when almost every educated man has at some time or other in his life considered, with more or less of that dread with which we gaze over the precipice whither we feel a morbid desire to leap, the doubts which science has suggested concerning a personal will in the Creator,—who can by any possibility feel the words, ' I be- lieve in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,' to be, if they come from his heart, a mere " abridged statement of doc- trine," and not rather a confession as strange, as startling, as full of witness to the power of God over the tangled threads of our infantine thought, as the confession of the frightened boatmen on the Sea of Galilee, " What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the seas obey him?" In an age which has seen the "Leben Jean" of Strauss and the " Vie de Jesus" translated into almost every European language, and in which the tremor and vibration which such books make have spread far beyond the circle of those who have faced the doubts such books so powerfully ex- press, who by any possibility can add the confession " and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord," whether the words in which His in- carnation be recited express his belief with perfect accuracy or not, without something of the grateful wonder with which Lazarus must have heard the voice which brought him from the tomb, and while still wrapped in grave-clothes came forth to answer it ? In a word, the confession of the revealing Divine acts in which we believe, whatever these may be, whether they be those of the creeds as they are, or of the creeds as we should wish to see them, seems to us one of the most natural and the happiest of the acts of worship, like the joyful confession of the man born blind, " One thing I know, whereas I was blind, now I see." The man who has been wandering by night upon the mountains does not recall and describe with a gladder heart the first glimpse which dawn gave him of the track he had lost, than that with which one who has found or recovered his faith in the divine government of the world and its perfect manifestation in Christ recites, if he can, the words, ' God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God,' or, if he cannot, at least recalls in the simple words of the earliest creed, the history of that crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension which from doubtful legends, have become to him the great landmarks both of human history and of the inward life. The conscious rehearsal of the great acts on which the Christian faith is based seems to us one of the most simple and natural of the acts of worship,—and especially so in an age of bewildering speculation, when we have begun to trust our own theories less and less, and to feel that as science must at; every step study anew the facts of nature and return to them to verify her conclusions, so faith must at every step study anew the revealing acts of God, and return to them to verify her conclusions. The recitation of the creed is an act of intellectual adoration, in a day when the intellect is the source of some of the deepest of our troubles.
Mr. Sidgwick apparently thinks that there is something much less jarring to a half-conformist in hearing devotional assumptions made in which he can only partly concur, than in hearing the same assumptions positively defined by the worshippers as an express confession of their faith. We cannot say that we so regard it. And we cannot but think that Mr. Sidgwick himself so regards it only because he looks at the creed merely as " an abridged statement of doctrine," and not an act of intellectual adoration,—a recurrence to the ultimate divine facts on which our own capacity to believe is grounded. But as Dr. Newman has pointed out in his Grammar of Assent,' that which is a mere abridged statement of doctrine from one point of view, when you are looking to the argumentative sources of conviction, may very naturally become an act of living worship from another point of view, when you are looking to the faith which has been vouchsafed to you as the spring of life and hope in a world of perplexity and doubt. Mr. Clough has some- where a stanza expressing the thought that it " fortifies his soul" to remember that all real truths will remain, and exercise their influence on the world, even though he himself should cease to be able to discern them. So a man who gazes on the Alps for the solitary time in his life feels it fortify his soul to know that they will continue to stand there in all their silent grandeur, when be can no longer see them, and long after his own body is part of the dust of the earth. Precisely of the same kind is the effect of the recital of their creed on those who believe it. It arrays before their minds in all their grandeur and solemnity the great facts on which their faith is based, and re- minds them that those facts are so, whether their attention be drawn to them or not,—are so behind the clouds of dust in which the world's worries envelope them, as much as in thetransparen t moments of devotion,—in short, that their faith is the consequence of the existence of these great realities, and that these are in no degree the dream of their faith. The difference between this acknowledg- ment,—this confession,'—and the mere recitation of an ' abridged statement of doctrine' as such, seems to us as vast as the difference between an epitome of the doctrine of free will and of absolute morality, and the solemn acknowledgment that there is such an alternative for the soul as sin or virtue, made by the individual con- science when the exposition is over. No doubt a man who in the pre- sence of Necessitarians says superfluously and perhaps combatively, 4 I believe in free will,' may be fairly suspected of wishing to give battle to those who do not hold it, but the man who, even though a Necessitarian should be his companion, while canvassing the nature of a moral peril to which he was about to be exposed, should "I believe in right and wrong, I believe in free will," —would never for an instant be accused of wishing to give the maximum of offence to his companion, while producing the mini- mum of devotional effect on his own mind. Now, what we maintain is that the creed of the English service is in no way recited as a provocative to controversial distinctions, but as a solemn act of spiritual survey over the foundations of faith. Just as a man naturally recalls deliberately the beings for whom he prays and their needs, before praying for them, so with equal naturalness he recalls the Being to whom he prays and His acts, -as a mode of deepening the prayer addressed to Him. What is the most moving prayer in the litany except the invocation of Christ's -help on the basis of a creed,—" By thine agony and bloody sweat, by thy cross and passion, by thy precious death and burial by thy glorious resurrection and ascension, and by the coming -of the Holy Ghost, good Lord deliver us "? And what can be more natural than to survey previously, with a rapid glance, the great story on which our faith is founded, that we may distinguish the groundwork of trust from the superstructure -of devotion, and compare the nature and acts of Him to whom we pray with the long list of our sorrows and our hopes? Mr. Sidgwick, while making out, we think, an unanswerable case for the frank confession by all thinking laymen of the points on which they find a difficulty in accepting the creeds, or even an in- superable obstacle to concurrence in some of their articles, and also for a general willingness to reduce the number of such disputed omfessions, has, we also think, quite failed to realize how substan- 2t:ve an element of worship the recital of a simple creed, especially in these distracted times, really is. We suspect that it "fortifies the soul " of worship fully as much as prayer itself can melt or elevate it.
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