He discards

his language as it now stands may seem to imply. the article of the Eternal Generation of the Son. We are sorry for this; it seems to us to overthrow the true doctrine of the Trinity. But New England Orthodoxy has done as much before, without allowing the necessity of any such consequence. Altogether, however, we have no taste for his toleration towards Unitarianism, as though it were part and parcel still of the ruptured New England Church. His view of the Atonement, if we get hold of it at all, seems to us to turn it into a pure fiction, and we see not how his Christ can be considered along with it to have much more substance than a Gnostic phantasm. If an æsthetic salvation is all that we need, sin must resolve itself at last into something less than the vast moral evil it is always represented to be in the Scriptures. We know very well the general false conception which it is the object of Dr. Bushnell to exclude; but that may be done far more effectually, we think, in a different way. We dislike again his opposition to what he calls Dogma in christianity, which must include, if we understand him, all systematic or scientific theology. Christianity is indeed primarily life, not doctrine; but it is such a life as requires to take full possession, in the end, of our whole human being. This includes knowledge as well as action; and why then should not the contents of the new creation lay claim to our understanding full as much as to our Will? Just here Dr. Bushnell falls into contradiction with himself; his New England habit of thought gets the better of the right churchly tendency, that lies involved in another part of his system. It is just because Christianity is a new life, that it must work like leaven into our whole existence, generating a theology or theoretic religion in its own form, as well as a religion of mere feeling and practice; and just for this reason, too, it must be a process going forward from one age to another. All life is historical, not a dead outward tradition, but an inward continuously active movement. Dogma then, historically taken, forms an essential element in the constitution of the Church. Christianity starts in the Apostles' Creed, and can be true in any age only as it continues to grow forth from this as its root; but it is not bound by any means confessionally, through all time, to the limits of Creed; just as little as the man is required to take his measure from the child, out of which, notwithstanding, all his growth springs. Dr. Bushnell is not prepared to do justice to the historical objective character of Christianity, as it meets us in the Universal Church. N.

THE

MERCERSBURG REVIEW.

JULY, 1849.

NO. IV.

THE APOSTLES' CREED.

III. Its Material Structure or Organism.

THE articles of the Creed, in its full form, gather themselves up, in the first place, into three parts; the first treating, as our Catechism has it, of God the Father and our creation; the second of God, the Son, and our redemption; the third of God, the Holy Ghost, and our sanctification. Christianity rests throughout on the mystery of the Ever Blessed Trinity, as revealed for the apprehension of faith through the incarnation of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

In this way, however, the three parts of the Creed now mentioned, fall back ultimately upon a single proposition, affirming the fact of the revelation thus made by Christ. The whole

Christian faith, as we have had occasion to say before, finds its primary central utterance in the confession of Peter: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." This accordingly must be taken as the foundation article of the Creed, on which its whole subsequent structure is to be regarded as resting from the beginning. This does not imply, of course, that Christ is in any way the ground or source of the Trinity itself, but only that the being and presence of God under this form come by him to an

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actual revelation in the world. He underlies in this way the entire mystery of the new creation, as it is in the process of being brought to pass through the Church; which is said accordingly to be built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone.

This confession of Peter is well suited to exemplify the true conception of the Creed, as it has been already represented and explained. It is no mere opinion, borrowed from others or the product of private reflection, to which utterance is thus solemnly given. It is the conviction of faith, as immediately exercised upon the living person of the Redeemer himself. Others might think him to be Elias, or Jeremias, or some other of the ancient prophets, but Peter knew him to be more than all this; the revelation of his higher nature, his immediate union with God, had made itself felt in the inmost soul of the disciple as a part of his own life; and so he was prepared to exclaim in the language, not of speculation, but of lively heart-felt creed, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. That the confession carried in it this high character, we are expressly assured by our Saviour himself. "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona," we hear him saying; "for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven."

The confession utters, in the most immediate and direct way, the fact of Christianity, the new order of life it has brought into the world, as apprehended under its most general character in the person of Christ. The object so apprehended by faith, and thus at once brought to utterance, is no doctrine or report simply concerning Christ, but the glorious reality of the incarnation itself, as exhibited in him under a historical and enduring form. Christianity resolves itself ultimately into this mystery. It has its principle and root in Christ's person. So are we taught most clearly and fully, in the New Testament. The Word reveals itself in him, not by outward oracle or prophecy, but by becoming flesh; he is the living comprehension of the truth he proclaims, the actual world of grace itself, which he unfolds and makes known. He is the way, the truth, and the life, by whom alone it is possible for any one else to come to the Father. He is the resurrection and the life; not the proclaimer simply of the

doctrine of a future state and the soul's immortality, but the very ground and medium of the whole fact. The new creation which is, at the same time, the end and completion of the old, starts from the mystery of his person, and holds from first to last in the power of the indissoluble union, thus established between earth and heaven, eternity and time. The incarnation is the deepest and most comprehensive fact, in the economy of the world. Jesus Christ authenticates himself, and all truth and reality besides; or rather all truth and reality are such, only by the relation in which they stand to him, as their great centre and last ground. In him are hid thus all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. He is the absolute revelation of God in the world; the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image of his person. As all this, he is no object primarily of intellection, but can be apprehended only by faith; and in this form, he constitutes the sum and substance of Christianity, as it lives in the consciousness of the Church and finds its expression in the Creed.

It is easy to see here the difference between the contents of faith as actual, and its contents again as simply potential. Peter's christianity, at the time of this confession, fell far short of the sense he had of the new creation in Christ Jesus after the day of Pentecost. It included no apprehension of Christ's sufferings and death, of his resurrection and ascension, or of his glorious mediatorial kingdom. It brought with it no knowledge of the Holy Ghost as he works in the Church, no knowledge of the Church itself, or of its cardinal attributes, no distinct sense of the glorious prerogatives and privileges comprehended in its communion. We have no right to suppose, that the mystery, even of the holy Trinity, or the doctrine of our Saviour's true and proper divinity, as afterwards defined, came clearly into Peter's view, when he uttered his wonderful confession. It would have been hard for him probably, to say, what view he had precisely of Christ's person, or what exactly he expected from his life. He was simply overwhelmed with the felt power of God's presence, as it broke upon him, under a form transcending all other revelations, in the "glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." And yet his faith, in this form

of primitive and undivided simplicity, was, in its own nature, universal and complete. In its apprehension of Christ, as a living reality, it embraced in truth the entire meaning and power of Christ, as set forth afterwards in the full Creed. All its articles were there, though still to a great extent only under a latent or potential form. As the new creation grows forth actually from the mystery of Christ's person, being from first to last the evolution or developement simply of capabilities, relations and powers, that are treasured up in him from the beginning; so the sense of what Christ is as the incarnate Word, when it enters the soul by faith, however circumscribed the horizon of its sight may be at the first, brings with it surely, in the end, by proper culture, all that the full idea of Christianity requires. The mere notion of Christ, or an abstract thought made to stand for him in the Unitarian sense cannot, of course, do this; but it is the very character of faith, as distinguished from all fancy of opinion, that it is called into exercise and determined in the nature of its action, by the supernatural object from which it is filled, as form, with its proper contents. As the real apprehension of Christ thus, it can embrace him only as he actually is, from the beginning, and must carry in itself thus an inward necessity of development always under the same form and no other. Of all this we are indirectly assured, by the high honor put on Peter's confession when it was first spoken. This stands not simply in the marvellous and sublime benediction which was pronounced upon his faith, considered as his own, but still more in the proclamation made of its value and power for the future Church. "Thou art Peter"-now, indeed, first worthy in full of thine own name "and on this rock," (the living Creed here incorporated with thy life,) "I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”* Narrow as the foundation

Nothing can well be more miserable in its way, than the shifts which have been resorted to here to wrest this great passage out of the hands of the Romanists. Some turn it into a sort of pun or ambiguous play on Peter's name, in which Christ pointed to his own person, as he spake, to show the true sense of his riddle. Others make the doctrine avowed in Peter's confession, to be the rock on which the Church is built. All in full disregard of the context, as well as of the special stirring solemnity of the whole