Creatorship—See [Life, Source of Man’s].
CREATURE, A NEW
The author of that noble hymn, “The God of Abraham praise,” was Thomas Olivers, the Welsh Methodist evangelist, popularly known as “the cobbler of Tregonan,” but who became a signal instance of the power of grace to change the heart and to quicken genius. Left an orphan early in life, he grew up neglected in learning and morals, and became known as the worst character in all the country round. But a sermon by George Whitefield, at Bristol, entirely changed the character of the young man, and the current of his life. Of that change he himself said: “When that sermon began, I was one of the most abandoned and profligate young men living; before it ended I was a new creature. The world was all changed for Tom Olivers.”
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Credentials, Negative—See [Realism, Refraining from].
Credentials of Merit—See [Appreciation of Character].
Credit Refused—See [Need, Refused in the Hour of].
CREEDS, INSECURITY OF
It is natural to desire a few firm and unshakable beliefs. If we can only formulate the eternal verities and tuck them away in pigeon-holes ready to our hand when wanted, we feel a certain sense of security. To run the fundamental principles into molds and have them forever after in cast-iron rigidity and indestructibility is surely, we imagine, a consummation devoutly to be wished.
But soon we encounter unexpected and vexatious and puzzling difficulties. Truth has a way of losing its trueness by the very act of being exprest. Exprest, or squeezed out, it does, indeed, too often become; and nothing but an empty husk, a hollow form, remains. How often one has the vaguely haunting and curiously baffling sense that, if one were to say a certain thing, that thing would immediately cease to be so; and, that if one had only refrained from a certain other utterance, the thought intended would not have lost, so unaccountably, its quality of truth! In other words, how many times does truth show itself to be of a nature quite too shy to be caught and tamed, too slippery to be grasped, too elusive to be held fast! To take a homely illustration, Mrs. Smith says to Mrs. Brown, “I am more polite than you,” and straightway an assertion that might have been true, if unuttered, becomes glaringly false. An able lawyer was once arguing a case in court when the judge interrupted him by declaring, “That is not the law.” “It was the law, your Honor, until your Honor spoke,” was the two-edged rejoinder. Some such ironical retort is constantly being flung back at us by the inscrutabilities that we attempt to fathom. We know not well (tho we are learning) the subtle ways they “keep, and pass, and turn again.”