Our Unitarian Gospel

by Minot J. Savage

Anything like evidence? Not heard of or thought of. Anything like quiet brooding of those who supposed they were, under the influence of the Holy Ghost, receiving divine and sacred truth? The farthest possible from any conditions that could be suggested by such a thought.

And at the last, though undoubtedly the majority of the Church at that time was Unitarian, as I told you the other day it was the decisive influence of the Emperor Constantine which settled the controversy. Thus came into existence in the fourth century the oldest of the church Creeds which is recognized as authoritative in the Catholic, the Anglican, and the Episcopal churches of the present time.

And this Nicene Creed, if I had time to go into it and analyze it, I could show you contains elements which no intelligent man in any of these churches thinks of believing at the present time; and yet nobody dares suggest a change, or the bringing it into accord with what the intelligence of the modern world knows to be true.

Let us pass on, and consider for a moment the Apostles' Creed, so called. There was a time in the Church when people really supposed that the apostles were its author. There are persons to-day who have not discovered the contrary. I crossed the ocean a few years ago when on board were a bishop of one of the Western States and a young candidate for orders who was travelling with him as his pupil. I fell into conversation with this young man, and found that he really believed that the twelve clauses of the Apostles' Creed were manufactured by the apostles themselves. He had never discovered anything to the contrary.

A still more astonishing fact came to my knowledge last year. During that discussion over Ian McLaren's creed, in which so many people were interested last winter, Chancellor McCracken, of the University of New York, published a letter, in which he referred to the Apostles' Creed as written eighteen hundred years ago. It took my breath away when I read it. I wondered, Could the chancellor of a great University possibly be ignorant of the facts? Would he state that which he knew was not true? I could not explain it either way. I was compelled to think, if he was thoughtless and careless about it, that he had no business to be about a matter of such importance. But he said the Apostles' Creed was written eighteen hundred years ago.

Now what are the facts? The apostles had nothing whatever to do with the creed, as everybody knows to-day who chooses to look into the matter. It grew, and was four or five hundred years in growth, one phrase in one shape held in a certain part of the Church, another phrase in another shape held in another part of the Church, people holding nothing so sacred about it but that they were at perfect liberty to change it and add to it and take away from it, until, as we get it to- day, it appeared for the first time in history at about the year 500. And yet it stands in the Church to-day claiming to be the Apostles' Creed.

And this Apostles' Creed, if it were a part of the purpose I have in mind this morning, I could analyze, and find that it contains elements which nobody accepts to-day; and yet nobody dares to propose touching it, such is the reverence for that which is old. So much more reverence does the world have for that which is old than for that which is true.

If you approach a Churchman in regard to his belief in the resurrection of the body, he will say, Of course, we do not believe in the resurrection of the body: we believe in the resurrection of the soul. But he does not believe in the resurrection of the soul, either.

Let me make two statements in regard to this. In the first place, if he does not believe in the resurrection of the body, he has no right to say it, because the House of Bishops, representing the whole Church of the United states, in an authoritative pastoral letter issued within three years, declares that fixity of interpretation is of the essence of the creeds. No man, then, is at liberty to change the interpretation to suit himself.

And then, again, nobody, as I say, believes in the resurrection of the soul. Why? Because that statement, with the authority of the House of Bishops that nobody has any business to change or reinterpret, carries with it a world underneath the surface of the earth to which the dead go down; and resurrection means coming up again from that underground world. Nobody believes in any underground world to-day. You cannot be resurrected. That is, you cannot rise again unless you have first gone down. It is the ascent of the soul we believe in to-day, and not its resurrection, much less the resurrection of the body.