ach man for himself. So an authority in
literature does not say to his students: The Merchant of Venice is a
great drama; you may accept my judgment on that--I know. Upon the
contrary, he opens their eyes; he makes them see; he makes their hearts
sensitive so that the genius which made Shylock and Portia live
captivates and subdues them, until like the Samaritans they say, "Now we
believe, not because of thy speaking: for we have heard for ourselves,
and know." That is the only use of authority in a vital, realm. It can
lead us up to the threshold of a great experience where we must enter,
each man for himself, and that service to the spiritual life is the
Bible's inestimable gift.

At the beginning, Christianity was just such a first-hand experience as
we have described. The Christian fellowship consisted of a group of men
keeping company with Jesus and learning how to live. They had no creeds
to recite when they met together; what they believed was still an
unstereotyped passion in their hearts. They had no sacraments to
distinguish their faith--baptism had been a Jewish rite and even the
Lord's Supper was an informal use of bread and wine, the common elements
of their daily meal. They had no organizations to join; they never
dreamed that the Christian Gospel would build a church outside the
synagogue. Christianity in the beginning was an intensely personal
experience.

Then the Master went away and the tremendous forces of human life and
history laid hold on the movement which so vitally he had begun. His
followers began building churches. Just as the Wesleyans had to leave
the Church of England, not because they wanted to, but because the
Anglicans would not keep them, so the Christians, not because they
planned to, but because the synagogue was not large enough to hold them,
had to leave the synagogue. They began building creeds; they had to.
Every one of the first Christian creeds was written in sheer
self-defense. If we had been Christians in those first centuries, when a
powerful movement was under way called Gnosticism, which denied that God,
the Father Almighty, had made both the heaven and the earth, which said
that God had made heaven indeed but that a demigod had made the world,
and which denied that Jesus had been born in the flesh and in the flesh
had died, we would have done what the first Christians did: we would have
defined in a creed what it was the Christians did believe as against tha