A somewhat striking religious phenomenon took place yester- day week,
in the shape of a really crowded meeting, mostly com- posed of elderly laymen, at St. James's Hall, from which a satellite meeting was thrown off to the Hanover Square Rooms, to protest against any meddling with the Athanasian Creed. Mr. Hubbard took the chair, and spoke of himself as one who had had his difficulties in early youth about the damnatory clauses, diffi- culties which further investigation had got over ; and he thought that the remedy for these difficulties was "a more learned clergy and a better taught laity." The speeches were many, and some of them eloquent. Lord Salisbury spoke of the Athanasian Creed as if it had a sort of life of its own, to which you could "offer an affront," and ridiculed the notion of asking the House of Commons, "that highly honourable, but somewhat combative assembly," with "its amendments and counter-amendments, divisions and cross- divisions," to discuss grave questions of theology. That would be a telling remark to any one who had not had experience of the Lower House of Convocation ; but any one of the clergy who had had that experience might have honestly said to members of the House of Commons, in the words of Tennyson :— " — your passions matched with mine, Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wino." A live working-man, Mr. Hopkins, was got to support the Creed, and Alderman Bennett called it "essentially the creed of the people ; " but as we have shown elsewhere, no one really addressed himself to the graver grounds on which Christians reject it, and a few thousand earnestly conservative adherents, mostly of the middle-classes, will hardly gain for it the coveted title of "the People's Creed."
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