considered, and my worship is to be directed.
Hence we can see that, like the other Creeds, it deals with the
_revealed facts of God's existence_.

2. Notice that in the Creed it is the existence of GOD which is
defined. Faith does, in other forms, enter upon a consideration of
doctrines which introduce _Man_ to our view.

Predestination and Election,
Justification by Faith alone,
Sanctification,
Assurance and Perseverance,
Original Sin,
Sacramental Grace,
Sin after Baptism,

{118} and other facts and truths, on which Revelation has thrown the
only true light, are dealt with, for instance, in the Articles and
Homilies. And the Bible is the Court of Appeal in all such
perplexities. But it is no disparagement to the importance of those
truths, if we acknowledge that they do not appear in our Creeds.

The Creeds are the respectful reply of the Christian to God's
disclosure of Himself to His children. One (the Apostles' Creed) is
the reply of the Christian as such. Another (the Nicene) is the reply
of the Christian after careful self-examination. And this Third is the
reply of the Christian Student, as he meditates upon the furthest
extent of our knowledge of God.

3. But it will be said, "The Nicene Creed partly, and the Athanasian
Creed altogether, are not, in their origin, utterances of peaceful
meditation, but, rather, of polemical controversy. Heated contentions
and bitter strife are called to our minds by their terms, and not the
atmosphere of the heaven of heavens."

It may help us to a right use of the Creeds in worship, if we think of
these controversies as the meditations of a very large family. When a
deliberation can be held in a room, we can quietly put forward a
suggestion, quietly find out what fault there is in it, and as quietly
substitute a better statement than the first, guarded from the error
into which we were likely to fall. But when the family which
deliberates is distributed around such a space as the Mediterranean
Sea, the voices are apt to become loud and harsh: instead of tentative
suggestions, diffidently put forward, we are likely to hear dogmatic
assertions, made with {119} all the energy of the human lungs. The
voices which arose from the members of that Parliament of the Faith
present a greater variety of languages than the tongues at Pentecost.
In the Church's Meditation on the Being of God, and on the Person of
Jesus, we hear the Spaniard, the Gaul, the W