Page:On the Revision of the Confession of Faith.djvu/22

14 some thousands of office-bearers can adopt as the exact expression of his personal faith. We need not go to the extreme of Mr. Taylor Innis, who says that "there is no honest or sane man who will pretend that any proposition in religious truth constructed by others, exactly expresses his own view of that religious truth"; but this is certainly in a measure true of all extended Confessions. However, then, we should alter the Confession of Faith, whether little or much, however we burdened it with Declaratory Statements, whether many or few, to whatever extent we should substitute for it other creeds, whether new or old, whether long or short, we should be at the end of the process exactly where we were in the beginning. We should still be face to face with a creed which we all could accept for system of doctrine, and which no one of us could accept in all its propositions and phrases. If our present Creed is acceptable to us, then, for system of doctrine—and that it is, ought to be evinced by the mere fact that we have all accepted it as such—it is hardly worth while to embark on extensive projects of revision in order to arrive at precisely the same haven from which we started out.

(3). And so long as we are Calvinists, we may add again, it seems hopeless to expect to improve upon the Westminster Confession in stating the system which we believe. The fact is that the Westminster Confession of Faith registers the high-water mark of the confessional statement of Calvinistic doctrine. Men have spoken of it in these latter days, indeed, as cold, scholastic, logical—standing at an extreme point in the development of Calvinism; and they have repeated these statements until many are ready to believe them. But it is almost impossible to avoid suspecting that such deliverances rest on insufficient acquaintance with the document itself. Logical no doubt it is—is to be logical a fault?—but it is no less devout than logical. The