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Rh See Rev. Preb. Smith, “Early History of Credition,” in Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art, Transactions, vol. xiv. (Plymouth, 1882); Richard J. King, “The Church of St Mary and of the Holy Cross, Credition,” in Exeter Diocesan Architectural Society, Transactions, vol. iv. (Exeter, 1878).

CREDNER, CARL FRIEDRICH HEINRICH (1809–1876), German geologist, was born at Waltershausen near Gotha, on the 13th of March 1809. He investigated the geology of the Thüringer Waldes, of which he published a map in 1846. He was author of a work entitled Über die Gliederung der oberen Juraformation und der Wealden-Bildung im nordwestlichen Deutschland (Prague, 1863), also of a geological map of Hanover (1865). He died at Halle on the 28th of September 1876.

His son, (1841–&emsp;&emsp;), was born at Gotha on the 1st of October 1841, educated at Breslau and Göttingen, and took the degree of Ph.D. at Breslau in 1864. In 1870 he was appointed professor of geology in the university of Leipzig, and in 1872 director of the Geological Survey of Saxony. He is author of numerous publications on the geology of Saxony, and of an important work, Elemente der Geologie (2 vols., 1872; 7th ed., 1891), regarded as the standard manual in Germany. He has also written memoirs on Saurians and Labyrinthodonts.

 CREE, a tribe of North American Indians of Algonquian stock. They are still a considerable tribe, numbering some 15,000, and living chiefly in Manitoba and Assiniboia, about Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan river. They gave trouble by their constant attacks upon the Sioux and Blackfeet, but are now peaceable and orderly.

See Handbook of American Indians (Washington, 1907).

 CREECH, THOMAS (1659–1700), English classical scholar, was born at Blandford, Dorsetshire, in 1659. He received his early education from Thomas Curgenven, master of Sherborne school. In 1675 he entered Wadham College, Oxford, and obtained a fellowship in 1683 at All Souls’. He was headmaster of Sherborne school from 1694 to 1696, and in 1699 he received a college living, but in June 1700 he hanged himself. The immediate cause of the act was said to be a money difficulty, though according to some it was a love disappointment; both of these circumstances no doubt had their share in a catastrophe primarily due to an already pronounced melancholia. Creech’s fame rests on his translation of Lucretius (1682) in rhymed heroic couplets, in which, according to Otway, the pure ore of the original “somewhat seems refined.” He also published a version of Horace (1684), and translated the Idylls of Theocritus (1684), the Thirteenth Satire of Juvenal (1693), the Astronomicon of Manilius (1697), and parts of Plutarch, Virgil and Ovid.

 CREEDS (Lat. credo, I believe), or. We are accustomed to regard the whole conception of creeds, i.e. reasoned statements of religious belief, as inseparably connected with the history of Christianity. But the new study of comparative religion has something to teach us even here. The saying lex orandi lex credendi is true of all times and of all peoples. And since we must reckon praise as the highest form of prayer, such an early Christian hymn as is found in 1 Tim. iii. 16 must be acknowledged to be of the nature of a creed: “He who was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, received up in glory.” It justifies the expansion of the second article of the developed Christian creed from the standpoint of the earliest Christian tradition. It also supplies a reason for including in our survey of creeds some reference to pre-Christian hymns and beliefs. The pendulum has swung back. Rather than despise the faulty presentation of truth which we find in heathen religions and their more or less degraded rites, we follow the apostle Paul in his endeavour to trace in them attempts “to feel after God” (Acts vii. 27). Augustine, the great teacher of the West, was true to the spirit of the great Alexandrians, when he wrote (Ep. 166): “Let every good and true Christian understand that truth, wherever he finds it, belongs to his Lord.”

We are not concerned with the question whether the earliest forms of recorded religious consciousness such as animism, or totemism, or fetishism, were themselves degradations of a primitive revelation or not. We are only concerned with the fact of experience that the human soul yearns to express its belief. The hymn to the rising and setting sun in the Book of the Dead (ch. 15), which is said by Egyptologists to be the oldest poem in the world, carries us back at once to the dawn of history.

In a later hymn Amen-Ra is confessed as “the good god beloved, maker of men, creator of beasts, maker of things below and above, lord of mercy most loving.” A similar note is struck in the Indian Vedas. In the more ethical religion of the Avesta the creator is more clearly distinguished from the creature: “I desire to approach Ahura and Mithra with my praise, the lofty eternal, and the holy two.” The Persian poet is not far from the kingdom into which Hebrew psalmists and prophets entered.

The whole history of the Jewish religion is centred in the gradual purification of the idea of God. The morality of the Jews did not outgrow their religion, but their interest was always ethical and not speculative. The highest strains of the psalmists and the most fervent appeals of the prophets were progressively directed to the great end of praising and preaching the One true God, everlasting, with sincere and pure devotion. The creed of the Jew, to this day, is summed up in the well-remembered words, which have been ever on his lips, living or dying: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Deut. vi. 4).

The definiteness and persistence of this creed, which of course is the strength also of Mahommedanism, presents a contrast to the fluid character of the statements in the Vedas, and to the chaos of conflicting opinions of philosophers among the Greeks and Romans. As Dr J. R. Illingworth has said very concisely: “The physical speculations of the Ionians and Atomists rendered a God superfluous, and the metaphysical and logical reasoning of the Eleatics declared Him to be unknowable.” Plato regarding the world as an embodiment of eternal, archetypal ideas, which he groups under the central idea of Good, identified with the divine reason, at the same time uses the ordinary language of the day, and speaks of God and the gods, feeling his way towards the conception of a personal God, which, to quote Dr Illingworth again, neither he nor Aristotle could reach because they had not “a clear conception of human personality.” They were followed by an age of philosophizing which did little to advance speculation. The Stoics, for example, were more successful in criticizing the current creed than in explaining the underlying truth which they recognized in polytheism. The final goal of Greek philosophy was only reached when the great thinkers of the early Christian Church, who had been trained in the schools of Alexandria and Athens, used its modes of thought in their analysis of the Christian idea of God. “In this sense the doctrine of the Trinity was the synthesis, and summary, of all that was highest in the Hebrew and Hellenic conceptions of God, fused into union by the electric touch of the Incarnation.”

Space does not permit enlargement on this theme, but enough has been said to introduce the direct study of the ancient creeds of Christendom.

I. —The three creeds which may be called oecumenical, although the measure of their acceptance by the universal church has not been uniform, represent three distinct types provided for the use of the catechumen, the communicant, and the church teacher respectively. The Apostles’ Creed is the ancient baptismal creed, held in common both by East and West, in its final western form. The Nicene Creed is the baptismal creed of an eastern church enlarged in order to combine theological interpretation with the facts of the historic faith. Its use in the Eucharist of the undivided Church has been continued since the great schism, although the Eastern Church protests against the interpolation 