to the call confess Christ in the character in which He is preached, the only Son of God, the Lord and Saviour; they believe in Him, and in God through Him; but familiar as it is to us through the accepted creeds of the Church, such an expression as 'I believe in the Holy Ghost' is entirely foreign to the New Testament. What the apostles asked was not, Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? but, Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed— believed, that is, in Jesus? (Acts 192). It is better, in thinking of what is essential to a Christian confession, to keep to New Testament lines. The Spirit will have its proper place in the interpretation of Christian experience; but to introduce the bare term into the primary confession, and to present the Spirit as an object of faith co-ordinate with Christ, is both to desert the New Testament, and to beguile ourselves with an illusion of knowledge about the divine nature which has no Christian value. As long as the experiences which come to men by believing in God through Christ are what they have been, the explanation of them from the divine side, as wrought by the Spirit of God, will find its due; but apart from this explanation, which surely has no proper place in the creed, there is no call to allude to the Spirit.

It is no unimportant confirmation of this view that the historical creeds of Christendom all betray a certain degree of embarrassment in their treatment of the article on the Spirit which they nevertheless agree to introduce. The most ancient, the 'Apostles' Creed, has definite affirmations to make about the Father and the Son, but when it comes to the Spirit it has not a word to add. The Nicene Creed had originally the same form at this point: it ended with the words, 'and in the Holy Ghost.' The Constantinople text, which dates from 381, ventures on expansion: '(I believe) in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceedeth from the Father [and

the Son]; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spake by the Prophets.' The haphazard and incongruous character of these additions needs no comment. In reality, the proper expansion of the article on the Spirit-that in which the meaning of 'the Spirit' is discovered-is to be found in the latter clauses of the Apostles' Creed: it is in the existence of the Church as the fellowship of believers, in the consciousness of forgiveness and in the assurance of immortality, that the Spirit is real, an object of knowledge and experience to believers: apart from these experiences, we could not even know there was any such thing. Even one who has every disposition to make the most of traditional Christian thinking, and who heartily agrees that no one knows all that a Christian means by 'God' unless he includes in the term all that is meant by 'Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,' may on grounds like these be convinced that every Christian interest is secured by the simple confession suggested above. And what is also of much importance, the one thing needful, the Christian attitude to Christ, is not compromised by being set on the same level with something which has not primarily the same character at all.

Another objection, not quite unlike this in principle, is that the confession proposed is too indefinite. Almost any one, it will be said, might adopt it. It could be made by an Arian as well as by an Athanasian. No one who has assented in any degree to the argument of this book will be puzzled by this objection. The confession which is here advocated as a sufficient basis for the unity of the Church could not be made by any one; it could only be made by those who take up what the most careful investigation has shown us to be the Christian attitude to Christ, and it can be no part of our intention to exclude any such from the Church. The differences which we associate

with the names Arian and Athanasian are differences which emerge in another region than that in which we confess our faith in Christ-in an ulterior region; and all such differences, where the Christian attitude to Christ is maintained in the sense which we have already made clear, must be dealt with by other means than excommunication. Arianism and Athanasianism both give answers to a question which multitudes of genuine Christians never ask. Once it is asked, the mind must be allowed to find the answer to it freely. One may be convinced, as the writer is, that the Arian answer is quite unreal, and as convinced that the Athanasian answer explains nothing. It is not on the answer at all that a man's Christianity depends, but on something antecedent even to the question; and it is this antecedent somethingthe believing Christian attitude to Christ, and the sense of Christ's unique place as determining all our relations to God-it is this, and not the metaphysics of Christ's Person, which alone is entitled to a place in the creed. If we wait for unity in the Church till all Christians accept the same Christology, we may as well give up the thought of unity at once.

Many minds will regard it as a more serious objection to the proposed confession that it ignores much which it has been customary to identify with Christianity, and which they would be inclined to affirm with emphasis just because it is so often called in question.

Thus it makes no mention of the supernatural birth of Christ: it has nothing corresponding to the clause in the Apostles' Creed, 'conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary.' The answer to this would be on the same line as that to the objection that there is no separate mention of the Spirit. It is not intended at all to dispute the Virgin birth. Everything that we have seen of Christ in the course of our study, every impres

sion that has been made on us of His solitary greatness and of His unique relations to God and man, is congruous with a unique presence and operation of God at His entrance into the world, and adds to its credibility. No purely historical evidence will ever make the supernatural birth of Christ credible except to a mind which has already, on independent grounds, surrendered to the impression of the supernatural in His Person. No one can deny that it is possible so to surrender. All through the earliest records, as we have seen, Christ reveals Himself to men, by word and deed and influence, in that character and greatness which demand and evoke faith; He reveals Himself as the only Son of God, the Lord and Saviour of men, and wins recognition and devotion in that character; but He does so without making the faintest allusion anywhere to the manner in which He came into the world. It is easy to find reasons why He should not have done so, even assuming that the gospel narratives of His birth are true; but that does not alter the fact that without disclosing the secret of His origin at all Jesus sought and found faith from men. It was the same after He left the world. As has been pointed out above (p. 14), the gospel rested on the apostolic testimony to Jesus, and the testimony did not reach so far back as His birth. It covered only the period within which Jesus was manifested to Israel-'beginning from the baptism of John until the day when He was taken up' (Acts 1 22). We cannot go wrong if we limit the fundamental confession of faith to the character in which Jesus presented Himself and was afterwards by His apostles presented to the world, without introducing into it, as essential conditions or presuppositions of faith, matters of fact which originally had no such significance. The question which Jesus asks, and which is of vital importance, is Who say ye that I am? not, How think ye that I came

to be? No doubt the two questions must be related somehow, but happily it is possible to answer the first, by assuming the Christian attitude to Christ, while the other remains in abeyance; and all that is urged here is that this ought to be recognised in the confession of the Church.

Other two objections, which would be serious if they were well founded, must also be referred to. The first is, that no mention is made of Christ's resurrection. This is a misunderstanding. Christ's resurrection is assumed when we confess our faith in Him as Lord. We do not believe, in the sense of having religious faith, except in a living person, and the term Lord expresses our assurance that the Person in whom we believe not only lives but reigns. This does not answer every question raised by the resurrection; indeed there may be many questions in this region which it is beyond our power to answer. We may never be able to define the relation of the crucified body of Jesus to the body of His glory, to picture the process by which the one was transformed into the other, to rationalise the relations of the two modes of being. We may never even be able to estimate with precision the meaning or the value of the New Testament evidence at any given point. But the soul which believes in the exaltation of Jesus as Lord can safely be left to the free and reverent exercise of intelligence on such points.

The other objection, which would be equally serious if it were true, is that no mention is made of the atonement. If by the atonement is meant the doctrine that there is a peculiar connexion between the death of Christ and the forgiveness of sins, then it may be noted that in this respect the brief confession of faith which we have in view is at one with the so-called œcumenical creeds. There is no mention of the atonement either