Christ and to amend his work, and to do it better than he hath done."*

Though we would subscribe to the whole scripture, or any confession drawn up in its phrase and matter, yet this will not serve for union and communion. They tell us heretics will subscribe to the scriptures; and I tell them, that heretics may subscribe also to their confessions, and force a sense of their own upon them; and that God never left them to make better confessions, and fitter to discover heresies, than scripture doth afford."

"The papists have set up whole volumes of councils and decrees for the rule forsooth, because the scripture is dark and all heretics plead scripture. And what have they done by it, but cause more darkness, and set the world and their own doctors too, in greater contentions."

"Thus men lose themselves, and abuse the church, because God's word will not serve their turn as a rule for us to unite upon. This is the one rule that God hath left, and men will needs blame this as insufficient, and mend God's works by the devices of their addle brains, and then complain of divisions when they have made them!"

“The rule that all must agree in must be made by one that is above all, and whose authority is acknowledged by all.Never will the church have full unity till the scripture sufficiency be more generally acknowledged. You complain of many opinions and ways, and many you will still have, till the one rule, the scripture, be the standard of our religion."+

"Two things have set the church on fire, and been the plagues of it above one thousand years. 1. Enlarging our creed, and making more fundamentals than ever God made. 2. Composing, and so imposing, our creeds and confessions in our own words and phrases.”‡

In pursuing the subject, this fearless advocate of the authority and sufficiency of scripture, imputes the introduction and multiplication of human creeds among christians to the artifices of

* Works, vol. 4, 653. † Ib. 673. Ib. vol. 3. 76.

H

their great spiritual enemy; who, as he proceeds to observe in the style of his day, "will needs be a spirit of zeal in the church; and he will so overdo against heretics, that he persuades them they must enlarge their creed, and add this clause against one, and that against another, and all was but for the perfecting and preserving of the christian faith. And so he brings it to be a matter of so much wit to be a christian, as Erasmus complains, that ordinary heads were not able to reach it. He had got them with a religious zealous cruelty to their own and others' souls, to lay all their salvation, and the peace of the church, upon some unsearchable mysteries about the trinity, which God either never revealed, or never clearly revealed, or never laid so great a stress upon; yet he persuades them that there was scripture proof enough of these; only the scripture spoke it but in the premises, or in darker terms, and they must but gather into their creed the consequences, and put it into plainer expressions, which heretics might not so easily corrupt, pervert, or evade. But what got he at this one game?"

"He got a standing verdict against the perfection and sufficiency of scripture, and consequently against Christ, his spirit, his apostles, and the christian faith that it will not afford so much as a creed or system of fundamentals, or points absolutely necessary to salvation and brotherly communion, in fit or tolerable phrases, but we must mend the language at least. He opened a gap for human additions, at which he might afterwards bring in more at his pleasure. He framed an engine for an infallible division, and to tear in pieces the church, casting out all as heretics that could not subscribe to his additions, and necessitating separation by all dissenters, to the world's end, till the devil's engine be overthrown. And hereby he lays a ground upon the divisions of christians, to bring men into doubt of all religion, as not knowing which is the right. And he lays the ground of certain heart-burnings, and mutual hatred, contentions, revilings and enmity.'

This catalogue of public evils, still flowing from creed-making in the church, is sufficiently appalling, to say nothing of the

* Works, vol. 2, 896.

more horrible persecutions of former days; but this is not all. There are other evils from the same source, which, though less obvious to the public eye, are of incalculable extent and severity, bringing distress of conscience and anguish of spirit to private christians, and spreading a baleful influence over their motives and characters.

Can you, upon reflection, doubt that wherever subscription or assent to a creed of man's making, has been established as a necessary condition of christian communion, especially if it embraced the deep and disputable points in theology, there may have been thousands of the humble, sincere, and pious followers of Christ, who have been debarred from the joy of testifying in the church their love and gratitude to him, because they could not in conscience submit to the imposition of such a creed? And must you not believe that thousands of others, who in the unsuspicious period of youth, or under the influence of newly excited feelings of devotion and piety, have been led by implicit confidence in their spiritual guides to set their names to whatever was proposed to them as proper, have afterwards, upon examining their professed creed, been perplexed with difficulties in comprehending it, and agitated by doubts of its accordance with scripture; or, if they escaped these evils, have incurred still greater, by attaching to their creed an authority which is due to the divine word alone, and enlisting themselves as partisans of a sect, exposed to all the baleful influence of a narrow, exclusive and uncharitable spirit. Baxter, deeply sensible of these evils, points out some of them in his Directions for Young Christians. "It is," he says, " a most dangerous thing to a young convert, to be ensnared in a sect; it will, before you are aware, possess you with a feverish, sinful zeal for the opinions and interest of that sect; it will make you bold in bitter invectives and censures against those who differ from them; it will corrupt your church communion, and fill your very prayers with partiality and human passions; it will secretly bring malice, under the name of zeal, into your mind and words; in a word, it is a secret, but deadly enemy to christian love and peace.

* Works, v.
1, p. 40.

1

With a full conviction of the evils attending the use of creeds and confessions of faith as terms of communion, as well as the absurdity of the practice, how could this church have taken other ground respecting them, than it ever has taken? And how could it now depart from its first foundation? "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." And what is our inducement for departing from it? What is the great utility of such creeds and confessions? We can discern none. Their inutility, indeed, would of itself be a sufficient objection to them; though such an objection is hardly applicable, since in a case of so much delicacy and importance as undertaking to regulate the faith, or prescribe to the conscience of another, every act, which is not positively beneficial, must be positively evil, and not merely useless.

But let us inquire what are the benefits, which may be supposed to result from the use of creeds and confessions of faith in the church. Is it said that they are valuable as summaries of the christian faith and doctrine, presenting in a connected view the leading truths of the bible? If so, may they not serve every purpose as manuals of religious instruction, or helps to piety and devotion, without being used as tests of fitness for church communion? May not all enjoy the full benefit of them, without their being imposed upon the consciences of any? And was it not the original design of the framers of the Westminster confession and catechism, that they should be used for such legitimate purposes only?

The assembly of divines at Westminster, we are informed, did not make the confession of faith they drew up a legal standard of orthodoxy; nor till forty years after was subscription or assent to it required of any layman or minister as a term of christian communion. And when a motion was made in the assembly that the answers in the shorter catechism should be subscribed by all the members, the proposition was rejected as an unwarrantable imposition. Yet these men were far from having attained to just notions. of religious freedom; as Milton says of them," they taught compulsion without convincement, persuading the magistrate to use it, as a stronger means to sub

due and bring in conscience than evangelical persuasion." Shall we then, who understand " the perfect law of liberty," so pervert the design of these theological compends, as to impose them as tests of faith upon all, upon the old and the young, the learned and the unlearned, before we admit them to our communion and allow them to give expression to their feelings of pious gratitude as believers in Christ; and thus require them to profess, what it is scarcely possible should be real, a belief in the abstruse and deep results of metaphysical divinity, which those profound theologians, who had spent years in working them out, could not be induced to subscribe to? This we could not do. To substitute such a test for the simple terms of the gospel would seem to us a daring usurpation of authority in Christ's kingdom, and a cruel infliction upon our fellow-servants under him.

But, to return, will it be said that requiring assent to these summaries of faith will have the good effect of promoting a belief in the great doctrines of our holy religion, a uniformity in "the faith once delivered to the saints?" So it may have been thought in other times, when christians supposed, or acted as if they supposed, that men could, at will, believe or not believe; when profession of faith was taken for faith itself, and when an outward formal assent to certain doctrines was considered of more value, than an internal conviction of the truth. This kind of delusion was natural enough in that church and among those with whom the bible was a sealed book, and who were not expected to form religious opinions, but to profess what were dictated to them by their spiritual guides. But among those who have opened the bible to all, and declared it to be the right and duty of all to examine the scriptures, and judge for themselves what are the truths revealed to us from heaven, it will not be pretended by any who have not relapsed from their protestant principles, that a real belief of christian doctrines can be attained in any other way, than by exercising one's own reason and judgment in understanding the evidence upon which they are founded. Consequently it must be admitted, that requiring a formal assent to certain doctrines cannot be the means of producing a real belief in them.