our thought of God and in our experience of God, God himself participates.

There was a time when men thought of God as a monarch ruling a rebellious world. He was not only a king, but the king of an empire in revolt. It is no caricature of some conceptions of the relation of God to the world to say that God was almost like the warden of a penitentiary, ruling rigorously over an unwilling body of criminals, each one of whom deserved to hang and toward whom even the utmost severity short of eternal damnation was to be considered large and unmerited mercy.

We have come to see clearly that this is not an adequate conception of God. God is a Father and the Father of all His children, good and bad. Whatever He does by way of discipline He does as a father might do. Not only so, as the father's life is the life of the child, so God's life is inwrought into the life of the world. The sorrows of human life are His

God is working out His own diversified experience in the experiences of humanity. What we work out with fear and trembling God works in us to will and to do His good pleasure.

This conception of God forever does away with the possibility of divine heartlessness. If wicked men go to war and murder one another, God looks upon it not as a thing of no concern to himself, nor yet simply in the light of a just retribution inflicted upon the ill-deserving. God's own life is in the struggle. The life of God is being born again through agony and pain. "In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old." (Isaiah 63: 9.)

God suffers to redeem. Not only is He afflicted in the afflictions of His people, but the Angel of His presence saves them. God is no passive sufferer. God is no hopeless, misanthropic invalid. God has not settled down into a condition of

meek acceptance of inevitable sorrow. God suffers that He may save.

The world is to be saved. The sorrows of human life are not hopeless. He who has given us the cross as the triumphant expression of an adequate faith has not left us to suffer hopelessly in the world for which Christ died. God suffers with His people that He may redeem them.

The evil of an unchanging creed is that it leaves no room for the guidance of the Holy Spirit. It says "I believe in the Holy Ghost" but leaves very little for the Holy Ghost to do. Its creed is a graven image. For by what process of reasoning can it be shown to be more idolatrous to make gods out of wood than out of words; out of logs than out of logic; out of stones than out of syllogisms; out of dirt than out of definitions? The evil is not in making creeds, any more than it is in painting pictures of Christ; but it is in holding before the eyes of men a work of men's hands as a substitute for the spiritual experience of God. Whosoever shall break one of the least commandments and shall teach men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. The second commandment is not the least of the commandments, and he violates it who makes an unyielding creed and teaches men so.

IV. THE REPEAL OF OBSOLETE CREEDS

It is often exceedingly difficult to accomplish the formal repeal of an obsolete creed. The older it is and hence the farther it is removed from the life of to-day, the more difficult it is to secure its technical repeal. Sentiment will have come to attach its own meanings to venerable words and phrases until it seems a sacrilege to remove it from its time-honored place in the organic law of the church.

Moreover, the proposal to remove it will often rouse this challenge: Why should we not seek to bring our decadent faith up to the level of that expressed in the creed rather than to lower our credal tests to conform to an admittedly changed and presumably deteriorated condition?

This view was strongly presented before the National Council in 1886 in a paper by Dr. George R. Leavitt. A committee had been appointed to report on the state of the churches and ministerial supply, but instead of a report it presented two quite independent papers, one by Dr. Quint on "Ministerial Supply," and the other by Dr. Leavitt in answer to the question whether the disappointingly small accessions to the churches might be due to too high a standard prevalent among them either with respect to Christian duty or doctrinal confession. He assumed that our churches in general "would decline to receive as members, persons who insist upon the liberty to dance, to play cards, to attend the theater and the opera," and to do certain other things which he specified in a rather long list. He admitted that in some places where "local laxity prevailed" a person who did one or more of

these things might conceivably become a member of a Congregational church, and he stated the issue thus:

Perhaps this statement is sufficiently clear and full to bring before us the customary tests restricting admission to our Congregational churches. The question before us is: Will it be wise to modify these tests? It is to be observed that the question is not whether, in our judgment, a person can be hopefully a Christian who is not able to meet these tests, but rather whether we should shape our terms of admission in especial view of an assumed class of such persons? Or, rather, again, it may be said to be, whether we ought to recast our tests in such a manner as to secure a greater certainty that we do not turn any true Christian away, even at an involved addition of risk of receiving to our membership, in increased numbers, two classes of persons,-the unconverted and the inconsistent.

In the matter of creed tests he was equally emphatic. It seemed to him entirely certain that Jesus on the night of the last supper would have refused the sacramental cup to Peter or John, or any of the others, if one of them had expressed a doubt as to the eternity of future punishment:

Or. again, suppose John to have risen there, and presented to the Saviour his scruples: "My beloved Lord, in the past I have believed in the righteousness and the certainty of the revealed judgment upon the impenitent. But since hearing more fully of your wonderful teachings concerning love, as the essential spirit of the Gospel, above all, since seeing it so divinely exemplified in your life, I cannot, suffer me to say it, I cannot believe that any soul will be finally lost. I know your teachings upon this terrible subject. I do not overlook that you have given so great and so explicit emphasis upon these teachings within the present week. But I cannot receive them. I cannot believe that there is to be a separation, forever, of the righteous and the wicked. This part of your teaching is too severe. May it not be relaxed?" Under these circumstances would the Saviour, is it conceivable, have put that memorial cup to the lips even of John-the cup of death and life? Or suppose Thomas to have declared a doubt, as cherished by him, of the divine authority of the words of Christ, and of the entire volume of Scripture. Or suppose Nathanael to have questioned whether a guileless life would not be a sufficient claim for salvation, expressing a doubt of the efficacy or the necessity of a sacrificial atonement for sin.

With respect to doctrine, his convictions were quite as strong. He believed our doctrinal tests to be Scriptural in

the sense that the customary creeds could be established by proofs deduced from Holy Scripture. He referred to the then recently published creed of 1883 in terms that implied a conviction that this document involved a dangerous letting down of the doctrinal standards of the denomination. Those of us who knew and honored Dr. Leavitt and who never esteemed him more highly than when he differed from us in judgment, can imagine with what fervor he uttered this protest against any abatement of stringent doctrinal tests as a condition of church membership:

Shall we let down the bars? This is the question, brethren, of the National Council. This was not the question in the early decades of this century, when our life was spiritually renewed and our great benevolent and missionary work was inaugurated in the beginnings of an imperial history. It was not a question at Boston in 1865; it was not a question at Oberlin in 1871, when President Finney laid his hands upon us in dying benediction. But this year this is one of the questions raised for us. Standing in this place of high survey, hearing the Saviour charging us, Lift up your eyes and look upon the field; seeing these vast cities, with their formidable problems; surveying this great continent lying east and west to the oceans; looking toward the millions of a South where the bars have been down for a hundred years, shall our word be, "Lower the bars?" Is this a part of the work which presses upon the conscience of this Council? Is this in the message for the hour? Have we then had such success in the process of revision of creeds? Has our latest attempt so promoted peace and spiritual power? Has it so manifestly obtained the favor of Heaven, that we are encouraged to go further on this line with our creeds, and even to reach beyond and lay hands upon our covenants also? Shall we lower the bars which for so many of us were not too high for our infant feet, nor for those of our children?-safeguards which, in times of sacred experience, moved by the Holy Spirit, we and our awakened churches have so plainly raised a little higher, though still not too high, for the feet of the children, or for the simplest of spiritual wayfarers. Shall we, under the clarified spiritual gaze of the men whose honored names here encircle us, let down the bars?

But whether it be called a lowering of the bars or not human creeds have their day and cease to be, and no man would have contended more strongly than Dr. Leavitt against the spiritual right of creeds to tyrannize over the souls of men, however earnestly he might have contended for a particular creed.