30 DECEMBER 1871, Page 3

45 Anglicanus " writes to the Times of last Saturday

to sum up the contributions of the past year to the question as to the adaptation of the Athanasian Creed to the purposes of our English worship. He borrows, apparently from Canon Swainson, the criticism that a more accurate retranslation, while it would soften one of the objectionable clauses, would greatly aggravate another ; from Mr. Ffoulkes the evidence that the creed cannot be shown to have been used in Europe before the ninth century, and his conjectural identification of the Creed wish that furnished by Paulinus to Charlemagne's adviser, Alcuin, in 800 AD.; and " Anglicanus " himself reminds the readers of the Times that the American Epie- copal Church has dispensed with this Creed, and invites our Church to follow her example ; that the Committee of Revision of the Irish Church proposes to leave out the damnatory clauses; and that the present enforced use of the creed has been publicly disparaged by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Bishops of Winchester and St. David's. Finally, we have only recently been told, in an able joint letter from Mr. Joseph Crompton and Mr. J. H. Hutton to the Daily News, that it is a moral scruple about this creed, and this alone, which restrains some men, otherwise willing and anxious to take orders in the English Church, from devoting to it their services. Surely even a prudent and cautious Church might take heart of grace, and dispense at once with—the enforced use at least—of so threatening, puzzling, repelling, and, let us add, so disrespectfully treated a formula.