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The Connection between Creed and

I

Conduct.

RECENTLY received the following letter:

May I ask you to explain your meaning in saying that creed has no connection with conduct? If that be so, is not the argument against a cruel or degraded creed weakened? Did the savage cruelty of the Jews towards their enemies bear no relation to their belief that God was the avenger of His people Israel, not the Father of mankind? Were not the horrors of the Inquisition the natural outcome of the medieval belief in a materialistic hell? And did not the gloomy tenets of the Scotch Covenanters bear fruit for good and ill in their stubborn resistance and their terrible sternness ?

"Thank God, many people are better than their creeds; and no doubt there are many who have

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calmly accepted the cruellest doctrines without question, and who would deem doubt devil-born, whose hearts have been nevertheless full of tenderest pity and kindliness. But in most of such instances can the believers be said to give even an intellectual assent to their creeds? Is it not rather a state of passive acquiescence in what they have been taught?

"On the other hand, there are doubtless many who hold that God is Love, and whose lives fall lamentably short of any realisation of that belief. But surely he whose creed teaches him to regard the object of his worship as a Being capable of acts of capricious cruelty such as we should shrink from with horror in a man,—a Being who could condemn His creatures to everlasting torment for not assenting to certain doctrines, would be more likely, if he really believed his creed, to be cruel and revengeful himself, than one who would formulate his religious belief in the words, 'What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?'

That also might be defined, might it not? as

in itself a mere statement to which we could give an intellectual assent, without our conduct being in the least affected. But if we passed beyond the stage of intellectual assent to that of faith, would not conduct follow? And if from giving an intellectual assent to the damnatory clauses we passed to the stage of faith in a God who could so act, would not our whole tone of thought about Him, and consequently our conduct, be lowered ?"

Now I am always grateful for letters of this description. Sometimes they may show me that I have made a mistake; sometimes they may arise from a misapprehension on the part of the writer; but in all cases they are useful. What one person takes the trouble to write, probably a hundred persons think; and it is only a letter which would call forth from me the further explanation that is needed.

In the present case the writer is mistaken as to what I really said, unless through a slip of the tongue I said what I did not mean. I said-at any rate I meant, which is the important thing-not that there was no connection between creed and

conduct, but that there was no necessary connection. There is all the difference in the world between these two statements. I should like in passing to ask you always to pay special attention to adjectives and adverbs. They are quite the most important parts of speech. I remember once in my ladies' class laying down the statement that character was determined mainly by circumstances. After the lecture I received a number of letters protesting against my doctrine -the writers called it my doctrine—that character was determined entirely by circumstances. To which my reply was a very simple one-viz., that it was not my doctrine. If I had held that character was determined entirely by circumstances, I should not have said mainly. So in the present case. From the illustrations used in the letter, it is evident the writer agrees with me that though there is, or may be, a connection between creed and conduct, the connection is not necessary, not constant, not invariable.

Let us ask why not? It will help us, I think, to arrive at a clear understanding of the matter if we notice the various ambiguities attaching

to the word creed. It is used in different senses; it is applied to mental and moral conditions which are totally dissimilar.

(4) A creed may mean what a man professes to believe but does not. Let me refer again, by way of illustration, to the English version of the Athanasian Creed. That would commonly be said to be the creed of all those who stand up in church and recite it, though there is not one in ten thousand of them who attaches to it any intelligible meaning. Unless it has been explained in the way I explained it, it cannot possibly be believed. For as I pointed out to you, any one who understood the word "person" in the English sense of an individual, would be guilty of dividing the Substance," and would therefore, according to the Creed, without doubt perish everlastingly. To avoid this fate he must understand the word in some other sense. But the ordinary man-" the plain man," as he is called by philosophers-does not know of any other signification. He does not know that the Creed was written in Latin, and that persona has several meanings. In saying the Creed he must not attach to the