Excerpt from Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought: Selected From the Spectator

Ment of worship, nor obviously effective in stimu lating devotion; and the proper place for such abridged statements of doctrine, even supposing them accurately to express the convictions of the existing generation of Churchmen (which can hardly be said of the present Creeds), would appear to be a manual of instruction rather than a formula of worship. Nothing certainly could warrant the introduction of any avowal into a devotional service, intended for men of many shades of belief, which gives the maximum of offence to those who do not hold it, and at the same time produces the minimum of devotional effect, but Mr. Sidgwiclc, in thus judging of the function and effect of recited creeds, and in describing them as being merely abridged statements of doctrine, ' misses entirely, as it seems to me, the mood of sentiment which originally caused their introduction into acts of worship, and the secret of the power they still exer cise. In fact, the very intellectual bewilderments and scepticisms which make men so reluctant to Sign creeds, and so anxious to Simplify them, lend an immeasurable depth of gratitude and even joy to the confession of the solid bases of fact, in which Chris tians find, as they conceive, the historical ground work of their faith. In precise proportion to the number of influences which threaten to undermine faith and which embarrass the dim and perilous way to it, whether these be, as in the world of martyrs, chiefly moral and only secondarily intel lectual, or as it may at least often be in our own day, chiefly intellectual, and only secondarily moral, in that proportion must be the rest of heart, and the glad sense of exercising a faculty Of Vision which only God's grace can bestow, while confessing.

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