Page:On the Revision of the Confession of Faith.djvu/78

70 Nevertheless, it is surely not nearly so difficult as Principal David Brown expresses himself as thinking, to frame a formula which will "let in all right men and keep out all wrong." The American churches have such a formula. Of course it lies in the courts of the Church to decide what is and what is not "of the system," and Church courts are not infallible, nor always faithful. But Church courts can afford, and do venture, to hold men strictly to the terms of a liberal formula, when they could not to an illiberal one. Overstrictness demands and begets laxity in performance; while a truly liberal but conservative formula binds all essentially sound men together against laxity. In pleading for a liberal formula, therefore, we wish it distinctly understood that we do not plead either for a lax formula, or much less for a lax administration of any formula—within which an essential dishonesty seems to lurk. The American formula appears to us the ideal one, and as nothing more lax than it would be acceptable or safe, certainly a lax administration of it would be unendurable, and, as we have said, essentially dishonest.