(1865.)
On Christmas day, as on all other chief holidays of the year, the
ministers and congregations of our National Church have had the noble
privilege and pleasure of standing up and reciting the creed commonly
called of St. Athanasius. The question of the authorship does not
concern us here, but a note of Gibbon (chapter 37) is so brief and
comprehensive that we may as well cite it:—“But the three following
truths, however strange they may seem, are _now_ universally
acknowledged. 1. St. Athanasius is not the author of the creed which is
so frequently read in our churches. 2. It does not appear to have
existed within a century after his death. 3. It was originally composed
in the Latin tongue, and consequently in the western provinces.
Gennadius, patriarch of Constantinople, was so much amazed by this
extraordinary composition, that he frankly pronounced it to be the work
of a drunken man.” (This Gennadius, by the bye, is the same whom Gibbon
mentions two or three times afterwards in the account of the siege and
conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, a.d. 1453).
Whoever elaborated the Creed, and whether he did it drunk or sober, the
Church of England has made it thoroughly her own by adoption.
Yet it must be admitted that many good churchmen, and perhaps even a few
churchwomen, have not loved this adopted child of their Holy Mother as
warmly as their duty commanded. The intelligently pious
Tillotson wishes Mother Church well rid of the bantling; and poor George
the Third himself, with all his immense genius for orthodoxy, could not
take kindly to it. He was willing enough to repeat all its expressions
of theological faith—in fact, their perfect nonsense, their obstinate
irrationality, must have been exquisitely delightful to a brain such as
his; but he was not without a sort of vulgar manhood, even when
worshipping in the Chapel Royal, and so rather choked at its
denunciations—“for it do curse dreadful.” He could keep the faith whole
and undefiled by reason, yet did not like to assert that all who had
been and were and should in future be in this particular less happy than
himself, must without doubt perish everlastingly.
On the other hand one of our most liberal Churchmen, Mr. Maurice, has
argued that this creed is essentially merciful, and that its retention
in the Book of Common Prayer is a real benefit. Mr. Maurice, however, as
we all know, interprets “perish everlastingly” into a meaning very
different from that which most members of the Church accept. And his
opinions lose considerably in weight from the fact that no man save
himself can infer any one of them from any other. For example, if you
are cheered up a bit by his notions as to “Eternal” and “Everlasting,”
you are soon depressed again by his pervading woefulness. Of all the
rulers we hear of—the ex-king of Naples, the king of Prussia, the
Elector of Hesse-Cassel, Abraham Lincoln, and the Pope included—the poor
God of Mr. Maurice is the most to be pitied: a God whose world is in so
deplorable a state that the good man who owns Him lives in a perpetual
fever of anxiety and misery in endeavoring to improve it for Him.
What part of this creed shocks the pious who are shocked at all by it?
Simply the comprehensive damnation it deals out to unbelievers,
half-believers, and all except whole believers. For we do not hear that
the pious are shocked by the confession of theological or theoillogical
faith itself. Their reverence bows and kisses the rod, which we cool
outsiders might fairly have expected to be broken up and flung out of
doors in a fury of indignation. Their sinful human nature is shocked on
account of their fellow-men; their divine religious nature is not
shocked on account of their God: yet does not the creed use God as badly
as man?
A chemist secures some air, and analyses it into its ultimate
constituents, and states with precise numerals the proportions of
oxygen, nitrogen, and carbonic acid therein. Just so the author of this
creed secures the Divinity and analyses it into Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost, and just as precisely he reports the relations of these. A
mathematician makes you a problem of a certain number divided into three
parts in certain ratios to each other and to the sum, from which ratios
you are to deduce the sum and the parts. Just so the author of this
creed makes a riddle of his God, dividing him into three persons, from
whose inter-relations you are to deduce the Deity. An anatomist gets
hold of a dead body and dissects it exposing the structure and functions
of the brain, the lungs, the heart, etc. Just so the author of this
creed gets possession of the corpse of God (He died of starvation doing
slop-work for Abstraction and Company; and the dead body was purveyed by
the well-known resurrectionist Priestcraft), and cuts it open and
expounds the generation and functions of its three principal organs. But
the chemist does not tell us that oxygen, nitrogen, and carbonic acid
are three gases and yet one gas, that each of them is and is not common
air, that they have each peculiar and yet wholly identical properties;
the mathematician does not tell us that each of the three parts of his
whole number is equal to the whole, and equal to each of the others, and
yet less than the whole and unequal to either of the others; the
anatomist does not tell us that brain and lungs and heart are each
distinct and yet all the same in substance, structure, and function, and
that each is in itself the whole body and at the same time is not: while
the author of this creed does tell us analogous contradictions of the
three members and the whole of his God. And the chemist, the
mathematician, and the anatomist do not damn us (except, perhaps, by way
of expletive at our stupidity) if we fail to understand and believe
their enunciations; but the author of this creed very seriously and
solemnly damns to everlasting perdition all who cannot put faith in his.
In other words, the chemist, the mathematician and the anatomist try to
be as reasonable and tolerant as human nature can hope to be; while the
author of this creed aims at and manages to reach an almost superhuman
unreason and intolerance.
Giving him the full benefit of this difference, the fact remains that in
other respects he treats his subject just as they treat theirs. He, a
pious Christian, professing unbounded adoration and awe of his Divinity,
coolly analyses and makes riddles of and dissects this Divinity as if it
were a sample of air, a certain number, a dead body. This humble-minded
devotee, who knows so well that he is finite and that God is infinite,
and that the finite cannot conceive, much less comprehend, much less
express the infinite, yet expounds this Infinite with the most complete
and complacent knowledge, turns it inside out and upside down, tells us
all about it, cuts it up into three parts, and then glues it together
again with a glue that has the tenacity of atrocious wrongheadeduess
instead of the coherence of logic, puts his mark upon it, and says,
“This is the only genuine thing in the God line. If you are taken in by
any other, why, go and be damned;” and having done all this, finishes by
chanting “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy
Ghost!” And the pious are not shocked by what they should abhor as
horrible sacrilege and blasphemy; they are shocked only by the “Go, and
be damned,” which is the prologue and epilogue of the blasphemy. Were
the damnatory clauses omitted, it appears that even the most devout
worshippers could comfortably chant the “Glory be to the Father, and to
the Son, and to the Holy Ghost” immediately after they had been thus
degrading Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to the level and beneath the level
of their low human understanding. And these very people are horrified by
the lack of veneration in Atheists and infidels! What infidel ever dealt
with God more contemptuously and blasphemously than this creed has dealt
with him? Can it be expected that sane and sensible men, who have
out-grown the prejudices sucked in with their mothers’ milk, will be
reconverted to reverence a Deity whom his votaries dare to treat in this
fashion?
Ere we conclude, it may be as well to anticipate a probable objection.
It may likely enough be urged that the author and reciters cf the creed
do not pretend to know the Deity so thoroughly as we have assumed, since
they avouch very early in the creed that the three persons of the
Godhead are one and all incomprehensible. If the word incomprehensible,
thus used, means (what it apparently meant in the author’s mind)
unlimited as to extension, just as the word eternal means unlimited as
to time, the objection is altogether wide of the mark.. But even if the
word incomprehensible be taken to mean (what it apparently means in the
minds of most people who use the creed) beyond the comprehension or
capacity of the human intellect, still the objection is without force.
For in the same sense a tuft of grass, a stone, anything and everything
in the world is beyond the capacity of the human intellect: the roots of
a tuft of grass strike as deeply into the incomprehensible as the
mysteries of the Deity. Relatively this creed tells us quite as much
about God as ever the profoundest botanist can tell us about the grass;
in fact, it tells relatively more, for it implies a knowledge of the
_Final Cause_ of the subsistence of God, which no future botanist can
tell or imply of the grass.