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TESTIMONY OF RE V. ED WIN P. HOOD, 53

" The Athanasian Creed is a most astonishing affair. . . . We have ever been amazed at the boundless arrogance — the haughty, awful impudence of the thing — that any man should dare to say on so dark a subject so much more than God himself has said; should so, from the finite standpoint, close up and moat round the avenues of Infinite mercy and Infinite personality. Truly we may be very tender on such matters, but we cannot read it without a shudder; it is the embodiment of a faith working without love i. e. faith alone] — a faith singing hollow words, rattling like the bones of a skeleton, without a heart. The Athanasian Creed is the feudal keep of Theology; it bristles from all its turrets with cruel spearpoints; every word grins like an opening manchicolation; in it God no longer looks like the Father — Christ no longer looks like the Saviour — the Spirit* no longer looks like the Comforter; it repels — it does not invite — like a stern old battlement of the Middle Ages; it is lonely and divorced from sympathy; it is so cleverly constructed — that castle of words — that it probably contains nothing that any sincere Christian in fact doubts, and yet, perhaps, not one in a million of all the saved could understand it — that Athanasian Creed; and it contains within it dungeons, racks, blocks, and stakes. It is a ruin, however; it has done something to bring indignation on the idea of creeds at