tially, in his childish way, upon the four chief heresies of the fourth and fifth centuries!'

Unlike the Apostles' Creed,' the NicænoConstantinopolitan formula was accepted by both East and West, with one important difference, turning again upon a single phrase. This phrase, added in the West, was the famous Filioque. In the original Greek form of the Creed, the Holy Spirit was set forth as 'proceeding from the Father' ; the Western Churches, in a synod held in Toledo, A.D. 589, added 'and the Son'; and the doctrine of the 'Double Procession of the Holy Ghost' was one of the occasions of the great schism between Eastern and Western Churches which has lasted to our own time. It is hard for us to conceive the fervour—I may add, the rancour—with which this abstruse metaphysical point was debated. For, it must be borne in mind, the question was not of the Mission of the Comforter in the work of Redemption called in theological language His Temporal Mission, His mission in the Economy of Grace. The point at issue was the mode of existence in the Triune Godhead: whether the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father alone— a view which was said to deny the identity of the

Father with the Son-or from the Father and the Son conjointly; against which opinion it was argued that there would then be in the Divine Essence two principles or originating powers. The discussion was at one time very real and earnest; but in the clearer light of modern philosophy it is seen to turn upon matters of which we know nothing. In the phrase of the day, either alternative is alike 'unthinkable,' and the whole controversy is an instructive example of those theological debates, so frequent in the past and possibly not unknown even now, which are interminable so long as the limit of our intellectual powers is unexamined, but which, when our ignorance is once acknowledged, are for ever laid to

rest. There are many questions besides that of the Double Procession of the Holy Ghost, hotly debated in more recent times, of which we hear no word of controversy now, not because the problems are solved, but because they are seen to be insoluble.1

1 It is only just to give a somewhat opposite view to the above, in the words of Charles Kingsley to F. D. Maurice in 1865: The procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son,' Mr. Kingsley writes, is most practically important to me. If the Spirit proceeds only from the Father, the whole theorem of the Trinity, as well as its practical results, falls to pieces in my mind. I do not mean that good

III

When we come to the third great Creed of the Ancient Church, that which wrongly bears the appellation ATHANASIAN, otherwise termed, from its metrical form and its first word, 'The Hymn Quicunque,' we are met by an altogether different class of facts. Instead of being gradually evolved, like the Apostles' Creed, from the thought and conviction of the Church through successive generations, or of being discussed and settled, like the Nicæno-Constantinopolitan Creed, at œcumenical councils, this so-called Athanasian Creed emerges no one can tell whence or how, and is found mysteriously incorporated in the Liturgies of the Churches without any hint as to the source of its authority. That this Latin document was not the work of the Greek father Athanasius is abundantly evident. No Greek original of it was even pretended to exist, and almost every fresh investigation of the evidence leads to some new men in the Greek Church are not better than I. On the contrary, I believe that every good man therein believes in the procession from both Father and Son, whether he thinks he does so or not.'

The writer of these words probably had in his mind the 'Temporal Mission' of the Comforter rather than the mode of His Being. If so, his language is quite consistent with what has been said above.

theory as to its authorship. What is certain is that it was still directed against the different theories as to the Person of Christ maintained during the ages of controversy which followed the Nicæan Council, and that its origin was in the Western Church, probably in its African or its Gallic portion. The date has been very variously assigned. On the one hand, it is plainly later than Augustine, who died A.D. 430; as it contains obvious quotations from that Father's works; and it is as plainly earlier than a synod at Augustodunum1 in France, A.D. 670, by which the acknowledgment of the Creed was enjoined upon the clergy. Again, the substance of it, though not in the form of direct quotation, is found in the Acts of three Spanish synods (Toledo, A.D. 589, 633, 638), from which it appears probable that the document itself already existed in the sixth century. Higher than this we cannot go. It is more than likely that the Creed, or Psalm, as it has been called, came from some monastery of the

1 Otherwise Bibracte, now Autun.

2 Another note of its date is in the fact that it contains no reference to the Monothelite controversy, defined at the Sixth General Council (Constantinople III.). Had the Creed been later it could scarcely have missed this point.

West, and was gradually accepted on its own merits, without reference to its authorship. We note its use in Divine service in the ninth century at Basle; in the tenth century in England. At first it was chanted before the Apostles' Creed, as a kind of introduction to that succinct formulary; we all know the place it now holds in the Anglican Prayer Book; its use being enjoined on just thirteen days of the year, including the great Church festivals. Its use is discontinued in the Episcopal Church of the United States, and is made optional in the disestablished Church of Ireland.

The discussions that have arisen in our own times regarding this formulary are interesting even to those not immediately concerned in them, in the light that they shed upon religious thought both past and present. One thing may be conIt does not,

Iceded to the defenders of the Creed.

It

as often contended, attempt to give an explanation of the Divine mysteries which it asserts. is a series of declarations, with little or no attempt at metaphysical analysis. The formula meets those who endeavoured to explain the Divine mode of existence, not by counter-explanation