THE ATHANASIAN CREED.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
have read with horror your High-Church correspondent's plan of mutilating the Athanasian Creed. What is to become of history, if its most venerable materials are thus trifled with, and if those whose very watchword, I had almost said war-cry, is, "Reverence for antiquity," set the sacriligious example ?
, Why, Sir, we shall have the Commination Service tampered with next, and before long our Evangelical friends will clamour for the excision of the Transubstantiation clauses in the Prayer- book, and I know not what besides. Write new ones, by all means, but don't let us alter the grand old documents. What would you think of a geologist who proposed to alter the structure of a fossil because he failed to find in it certain higher developments? What, in fact, do we think of the people who touch up the skies of the "old masters" and rewrite Shakespeare? All this is odious, though well-meant vandalism, but it only means want of culture, and a fatal absence of the historic sense.
The old documents may not express altogether our present opinions—it would be very odd if they did—but the history of opinion itself becomes unintelligible without them. You can deal with the Athanasian Creed in three ways :-1. You can leave it out. 2. You can doctor it. 3. You can read it as an in- teresting bit of history. If you leave it out, you will be called a wise man. If you doctor it, you will be called a weakling. If you read it historically, you may be misconstrued, but, in fact, you will be doing justice all round ; for whilst reverencing the speculations of the past, you will have the opportunity of showing why they can be no more injurious to the present than the Pope's Bulls. I remain, Sir, with all reverence for every line of authentic history, the Athanasian Creed included,
ONE OF THE LIBERAL CLERGY.
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