Page:On the Revision of the Confession of Faith.djvu/68

60 among men. Nor would it be bettered in this regard by making it speak twice as often about love and half as often of the black facts of human nature and destiny which furnish the occasion of the exhibition of God's love to men, and apart from a full realization of which, we can have no appreciation of the depths of His love.

In closing, then, I reiterate that I cannot but feel that the Confession, if it is to be judged by these three well-chosen examples, must be adjudged to be in no need of revision. And I cannot help noting that all the objections seem to grow out of misapprehension of what the Confession does teach and how it teaches it. Why not so revise it as to make such misapprehension impossible, then? I can only reply, that no document can be framed which is incapable of being misapprehended by the careless reader, and I am bound to say that, in my judgment, the Confession cannot be misapprehended in these points when carefully read. Most of the presently urged objections have arisen primarily in the minds of enemies of Calvinism, whose misapprehension (or misrepresentation) was a foregone conclusion, and have, by dint of much proclamation, been conveyed from them to us—for the best of us are not proof against outside influences. We have tested assertions of this kind, not as we should, by grounded and consecutive study of the whole document, but by momentary adversion to the passages specially attacked, with our minds full of the attack. And so we have seen the sense in them which we were sent to look for. The remedy is not to revise the Confession in the hope of rendering misapprehension of it impossible, but to revise our study of the Confession, in the hope of correctly apprehending it. What the Confession needs is not revision, but study. And the present agitation will have been a boon to the Church, however it eventuates, if it brings the Confession more into