THE ANTI-CREED HERESY.

We have had ample opportunity already to expose the opposition, in which much of our Christianity at this time stands to the true sense and spirit of the Apostles' Creed.

Unitarianism rejects it as a matter of course. So also the whole Baptist body. But the case is not materially better with Puritanism in general. The Puritan Recorder has boldly avowed the fact that the Creed and Puritanism have not a kindred spirit, that in truth they mutually exclude each other, and cannot stand together, except as the first is taken in a wholly nonnatural sense, and made to mean just the contrary of what it was taken to mean in the ancient church. We have found the N. Y. Observer denouncing also the principle and theory of this ancient faith, in similar radical style, as the beginning of au apostacy which is supposed to have turned the whole church into a synagogue of Satan.

In the last number of the Princeton Repertory, the Rev. Dr. Proudfit, of New Brunswick, has a long and labored article on the Apostles' Creed, which we are sorry to say falls into substantially the same heretical pravity. Our limits here will not allow us to notice it at much length. Nor is that necessary. Enough, that we bring into view simply its leading points, drawing them forth from the mass of irrelevant learning in which they are buried and hid. The article needs no other exposure.

Dr. Proudfit tries hard in the first place to make something dreadful, out of the light in which the Creed is presented by our articles in the first volume of the Mercersburg Review. He will have it, that we make the intuitional consciousness of the Church the fountain of a Divine revelation in some way, independently of the word of God which is contained in the Bible; and with his characteristic dishonesty goes so far even as to insinuate that we follow Strauss as a master, because we had said somewhere that his work shows the necessity of looking for the ground of Christianity in something deeper than the mere outward text of the sacred books, which give us an account of what it was in the beginning. Had we said that Gibbon's abuse of Church History shows the necessity of looking beyond its external facts and persons to the Divine life which was in them, in the style for instance of Neander, there would have been precisely the same room for charging us with taking les sons of an infidel. It is wonderful however how much of this

nasty sort of art and trick our Brunswick Professor has. It seems to be part of his nature.

The view we have taken of the Creed is simple enough. We have granted, that it was not from the start, as to letter and form, just what we find it to be in the fourth century. In spirit and substance however it was always the same, any modifica tions it experienced being nothing more in fact than the bringing out of the sense which had been in it from the beginning. In this view it dates from the time of the Apostles. To say that it was drawn from the New Testament Scriptures is simply absurd; because these were not in existence when the faith of the Church started, and came not into their present canonical form for at least a hundred years after. During all this time however the Church had a rule of faith, a fixed and settled norm of doctrine, everywhere acknowledged and received. This had its seat of course in the life of the Church itself, in the fact of what Christianity was to the consciousness of her actual faith; but we have never dreamed certainly of making it for this reason the product of this subjective consciousness as such. It bad its origin and ground in the objective revelation of Christianity itself, as an outward supernatural fact. This was primarily Christ himself, as in Peter's great confession. Afterwards we have it in full outline in the preaching of the Apostles; from which it passed into the consciousness of the Church; where under the promised guidance of the Spirit it was kept afterwards to its true and proper form, as already mentioned. The Church exercised no other intuition in the case, than that of apprehending and holding fast in such way, under this promised guidance, the real objective supernatural mystery of godliness which had thus been committed to her by the living Christ and his living Apostles in the beginning, and long before the authoritative publication of the N. T. Scriptures, as a more ample record of the same glorious revelation, under her auspices and care; a work for which, as well as for her most faithful guardianship of these "oracles of God," through the long night of the dark ages, (when she was herself so completely sold as some tell us to the powers of hell,) we owe her a debt of filial gratitude and love greater than can be well expressed.

Let Dr. Proudfit and all others whom it may concern, make themselves easy on this point. We have no sympathy with the intuitionalism of Schleiermacher or Morell. We hold Christianity to be a strictly objective supernatural revelation, a mystery in this view wholly above nature both logical and material, which can be apprehended only through faith and by a new

understanding given to us for the purpose by the Son of God alone.

But let our view of the Creed now pass. What we have to do with here is the view taken of it by Dr. Proudfit. His object in trying to set aside our representation, is to make room for another conception which may strip the symbol of its binding authority altogether. It came not in full form as we have it now from the Apostles; it abounded at first in variations; it underwent some additions; therefore it is of no Apostolical necessity for faith. So Puritanism is wont to argue. We undertook to show, that these premises rightly understood led to no such conclusion; because the variations and additions were never such as to change at all the proper unity and sameness of the Creed, in its essential constitution. The regula fidei on which the Church stood from the first, was just the substance of this glorious confession, handed forward from age to age in the life of faith. The Creed is the mirror of this faith as it had been received from the Apostles; and no other form of words can be said to represent truly and rightly the original fact of the Christian revelation. Against this Dr. Proudfit, we say, tries to fight as he best can. He wishes to have it thought, that the Creed had no fixed character in the beginning; that it was formed loosely at first from the Scriptures according to the private judgment of separate churches; that its variations prove the churches to have been much in the same state with our modern Independent ecclesiastical organizations, each of which claims the right of making its own ereed in its own way; and that it is injurious to the Bible accordingly to attribute to it any binding authority whatever in determining the true sense of Christianity. If this be not what the article means, we know not how to find in it any meaning whatever.

Here then we have the heresy of the Puritan Recorder openly paraded in the pages of the Princeton Repertory, by a learned Professor of the Reformed Dutch Church! For let it be observed, the question is not at last whether our theory of the rise of the Creed is to be considered correct or not; but whether the Creed, hvever it may have risen, is to be regarded as still truly and really the norm, as far as it goes, the fixed doctrinal matrix and mould of the Christian faith for all ages. It was so regarded, we know, in all ages before the Reformation. It was so regarded also by the first Protestant Churches. Dr. Proudfit makes a show indeed of proving the contrary, by quoting passages from their Confessions that make the Bible to be the rule of faith against all human traditions. But this is pitiful quib

bling. They professed notwithstanding to hold fast to the Creed as a true exposition of the Christian faith. They never dreamed of sundering the Bible from the mind of the Church as it had stood in previous ages in every form and shape, and turning it over to the judgment of any and all persons for such interpretation as might happen to seem fit. They owned the necessity of a confessional norm for the right use of the Bible; and the necessary beginning of this, the archetypal and primitive symbol of Christianity, they acknowledged to be the Apostles' Creed. However it might have come to its present settled form, they held it to be a true expression of what the Christian faith was as received by the Church in the first ages from the Apostles, from which as a rule of belief the same Church in later times had no right to depart. But this is just what the article before us is not willing to admit; for the admission would be at once fatal to its whole argument.

True, the article affects to speak respectfully of the Creed. Ursinus, Vossius, Heidegger, we are told p. 614, enumerate as catholic or universal the Apostolic, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds; and among these "the shortest, simplest, most comprehensive, and most strictly scriptural is without doubt the Apostolic." But then the drift of the whole discussion notwithstanding is to make this acknowledgment of no force. There is no conflict among these catholic creeds. They are strictly the one faith of the primitive church; and one must be interpreted by the rest to be of any real force. This fact however Dr. P. seeks to hide. His art is to throw all as much as possible into uncertainty and confusion. Then the Creed is for him a mere bundle of received maxims, brought together in a simply outward way; than which no conception can be more false or more contrary to sound faith. It is a most perfect unit; an organism, in which every part is true only as it grows forth from the whole. It is a mirror reflecting thus at every point the original life of the universal church. This Dr. P. has no power to see; and so he will not allow it to be of true symbolical authority, in its own whole and only true original sense, for the interpretation of the Bible. He shows throughout a strong dislike to this sense, especially as it comes to view in the article of the church as the organ and medium of salvation; and openly repudiates as contrary to the Scriptures the whole sacramental and mystical side of Christianity, without which the Creed for the first Christians would have had no meaning whatever.

But what need is there of analysis to make out the point, that Dr. Proudfit rejects the authority of the Apostles' Creed, as the

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In no oth-
Is not this

fundamental rule and norm of the Christian faith? er view, can his article be taken to have any sense. just what he finds fault with in the Mercersburg Review, that it seeks to bind the interpretation of the Bible by the Apostles' Creed? Either he honestly holds the Creed, as we have it and however it came, for such a symbol, or he does not. If he does 30 hold it, what ground of quarrel can he have with us for allowing to it the same authority? If not, what farther proof is wanted to fix upon him, in common with Unitarians and Baptists, the stigma of the Anti-Creed heresy?

To sustain himself in his desperate position, he finds it necessary in the next place to contend that the faith of the first ages was based upon the independent use of the Bible, without any other standing rule of faith, in the pretended style of the modern sect system; and he has the hardihood to think of forcing this outrageous misrepresentation, not only upon the times of Irenaeus and Tertullian, but even upon the Nicene period itself!

Is it asked now, by what hocus-pocus this feat of historical legerdemain is performed? We answer, it is done in the sim'plest and most characteristic way imaginable. The whole art and mystery of the thing consists in shifting the point in debate, so as to make it turn on the question only whether the early church regarded and used the Holy Scriptures as of Divine authority in matters of religion; about which, so far as we know, there never has been any sort of doubt. Will it be believed, that so learned a man as the Rev. Dr. Proudfit of New Brunswick lays himself out systematically to prove, by quotation upon quotation, first that Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, &c., and then that Athanasius, Chrysostom, Basil, the Gregories, &c., of a later day, all held and taught the inspiration and binding authority of the Scriptures in the Christian Church; and that this should then be gravely taken by him as proof, that they owned and acknowledged no guiding rule, no governing norm, for determining the true sense of these Scriptures, but left it to private judgment to settle their sense as it best could on the outside of the Church?

The thing is absolutely ridiculous. Who does not know that the Fathers all held the Bible in the highest veneration? The Catholic Church has always honored it as of Divine authority. We owe the sacred deposit altogether to her care. She formed the canon of the New Testament, deciding what it should contain and what it should not contain, and affixing to it the stamp of inspiration. And what she produced in such form, she has most religiously and faithfully preserved through all ages.