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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 86

Church Creeds

Church Creeds.

A Protestant, and addressing the members of a Protestant Church, I will now further assume that no man and no Council or Church has had authority given it to alter or add to, in anything great or small, by way of development or otherwise, the doctrine of the Founder of Christianity, or to impose the profession of belief in any added doctrine or practice upon the human mind and conscience as a condition of membership of the Church of Christ.—(Continued applause.) But the great bulk of the propositions of fact and of belief in even the earliest creeds and in all the later articles, confessions, and standards of faith, are undoubtedly additions to the primitive doctrine. If we except the first articles in the earliest and the least exacting creed, the Apostles' Creed, which is a superfluous repetition, we shall find scarcely anything in the creeds and standards, increasing as they multiply in the number and oppressiveness of their arbitrary dogmas, that is not an unauthorised addition to the primitive simple doctrines. Again, some of those dogmas which the Churches have superadded to the doctrine of Christ without His page 19 authority, and which they endeavour pertinaciously to force upon the clergy and the laity, are dogmas which, as some of you, I doubt not, know from bitter personal experience, are revolting and odious to the natural conscience and to the understanding of man.—(Loud applause.) I am well aware that at this point I stand on the borders of the deepest mysteries of being and of Providence. Such mysteries, painful and full of perplexity as are many that the course of nature and the constitution of the human mind presents to us, must be endured. Faith reposes in the assurance that they all admit of, and that they will yet receive, explanation—

We trust that somehow good

Will be the final goal of ill.

But while the human understanding bows before the mysteries of God, and awaits His solution of them, may we not—ought we not—to resent the attempts made by men like ourselves, only far more ignorant—(applause)—to represent the hideous dreams that our interpretation, no doubt faulty, of these mysteries sometimes suggests, as articles of Christian faith, and the acceptance of such articles as a condition of salvation?