Lord Shaftesbury has publicly proposed an address by the Laymen
of the English Church to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York on the subject of the Athanasian Creed, to the follow- ing effect :—" Without passing any opinion on a document so long received by the Church, we express an earnest desire that measures be taken to render the recital of it in the public services of the Church no longer compulsory." The objection to this pro- posal is that it will divide clergymen into the two classes of " Damnatory " and " Undamoatory," and make the recital of the Creed by the former far more emphatic and bigoted than before, and this, even though they be some of those who, while clinging hard to the Creed, "explain away" the datnnatory clauses most completely. There is always a certain amount of danger in Per- missive Bills, especially for a State Church. If you permit the clergy to omit at discretion the hopeful clause in the Burial Ser- vice, you make the recital of it almost a deliberate expression of personal confidence in the salvation of the deceased ; and if you give a discretion to omit the prediction that Non-Athanasians will perish everlastingly, you make the prediction that they will, uncomfortably significant. On the whole, we suspect it is the least evil of the two for those who disapprove the Athanasian Creed to stay away from church on Athanasian days, or to signify their dissent by sitting down, till the Creed or its damnatory poetics is authoritatively omitted.
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