by His grace faithful to Him, and they who knew not the Church of God, whom the Church below knew not how to win, or, alas! neglected to win them, but whom Jesus looked upon, and the Father drew to Himself, whom His inner light enlightened, and who out of the misery of our fallen state, drawn by His unknown grace, looked up yearningly to Him, their unknown God yet still their God, for He made them for Himself. There, out of every religion or irreligion, out of every clime, in whatever ignorance steeped, in whatever hatred or contempt or blasphemy of Christ nurtured, God has His own elect, who ignorantly worship Him, whose ignorant fear or longing, He who inspired it will accept. No! ask any tolerably instructed Christian person, and his instinct will respond what every teacher of the Church everywhere knows to be the truth. Ask himWill any soul be lost, heathen, idolater, heretic, or in any form of hereditary unbelief or misbelief, if in good faith he was what he was, living up to the light which he had, whencesoever it came, and repenting him when he did amiss. All Christendom would answer you, God forbid! He would not be saved by that law which he professeth,' but he would be saved in it, by the one love of God the Father Who made him, and of God the Son Who redeemed him, and of God the Holy Ghost Who drew and in His measure sanctified him." These are the words of Dr. Pusey, spoken years ago1, and if there are any of you who have at times felt overset by such doubts and questionings, as they are intended to relieve, I trust that they may find them as helpful and as cheering, as they have been to others, myself 1 Sermon on Responsibility in Matters of Faith (1872), p. 37. included. The truth is that the controversies to which this Creed, and more especially our translation of its condemning clauses, has given rise, have had the effect of causing too many persons to approach it from a wrong point of view. They have unfortunately learned to regard it as defining the limits, within which the salvation of other men is possible, and therefore as chiefly condemnatory in its character, instead of being, as it is rather, an act of faith and worship on our part towards God,a solemn confession of the truth, which we believe, and of our responsibility, if we let it slip. And here I cannot forbear quoting in conclusion the words of another writer 1, now alas! no longer of our Communion, "The Athanasian Creed is not a mere collection of notions however momentous: it is a Psalm, a hymn of praise, of confession, and of profound homage, parallel to the Canticles of the elect in the Apocalypse. It appeals to the imagination quite as much as to the intellect. It is the war-song of faith, with which we first warn ourselves, then each other, and then all who are within its hearing and the hearing of the truth, who our God is, and how we must worship Him, and how vast our responsibility will be if we know what to believe, and yet believe not. It is 'The Psalm that gathers in one glorious lay All chants that e'er from heaven to earth found way, (Keble, Lyra Ap. cxv.) 1 Newman, Grammar of Assent, p. 129. See also Appendix IV. ADDRESS II. WE now come to the doctrine of the Athanasian Creed, as an exposition or rather a defence of the Catholic Faith; and I say defence rather than exposition because it is a mistake to regard it, as so many do, as an attempt to explain mysteries, which cannot really be explained, being rather a series of counter-statements in denial of various heresies, into which the speculations of rash dogmatists had led them. The doctrine of the Creed then falls chiefly under two heads: I. Its teaching in regard to the Holy Trinity; II. Its teaching in regard to the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ: the rest of the Creed being merely a repetition of the chief articles relating to our Lord and the final Judgment of mankind, which are presumed to have been already learned from the Apostles' Creed. We will consider to-day the third and next three verses, which relate to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and will continue the subject, as it is expanded in the next twenty-two verses in the succeeding Address. "And the Catholick Faith is this, That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;" "Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance," "For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost." "But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal." Now the first general idea which we have to grasp is this, that in God, as He has revealed Himself to us in the New Testament, there are Three Persons, so distinct as to perform separate acts, yet so united as to be but one God. "Three in One and One in Three," as we sing in our hymn. Thus in the words of the Creed "there is One Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost, but the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal." The glory of the Three Persons is "equal," because the Godhead of the Son and of the Holy Ghost is not less divine than that of the Father, being one and the same with it. The Majesty is "co-eternal," because, as there never was a time when the Father was not God, so there never was a time, when the Son was not God, nor a time when the Holy Ghost was not God. So that (as we learn also from the Nicene Creed), the whole Three Persons are to be worshipped and glorified together. But now I will ask you to fix your attention upon the fourth verse, which I have passed over, but which is really the most important verse of this portion of the Creed, which relates to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. "Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance." 1 C The two clauses of this sentence relate to the two most serious forms of error on the subject of the Holy Trinity which disturbed the early Christian Church. 1. The words "confounding the Persons," describe the doctrine of several false teachers, who lived from the close of the second century to the middle of the third, a doctrine which is generally called Sabellianism, from one of them, whose name was Sabellius'. These false teachers, in their professed desire to uphold the unity of the Divine Nature, virtually denied the existence in it of Three Persons, speaking of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, as if they were but three ways in which God had revealed Himself to man, or three characters, which He had assumed, or again, three influences, or extensions of the Divine Nature, so that the Father might be at one time the Son, and at another the Holy Ghost, while some of them even held, or were believed to have held, that the Father suffered on the cross; and others taught that the Son and the Holy Ghost, when they had accomplished the work for which they had come forth from the Father, would return into, and be eventually so merged in Him, as to lose their personality. This doctrine took various forms, but how fatal in any of them it must have been to any right understanding of the Gospel, how fatal to the truths of Christ's mediation and atonement anyone can see at a glance. A perfect antidote to it, I need hardly remind you, is provided for us in our Lord's last discourse with His disciples in the fourteenth chapter of St. John and the two following chapters, where 1 Robertson's Church History, vol. i. p. 86. Date of Sabellius, about 260. |