Page:On the Revision of the Confession of Faith.djvu/84

76 the Confession! Take a single example of how recklessly it is not infrequently quoted. In speaking of the interpretation of the Scriptures (I., ix.) it sets aside the patristic and mediæval method of torturing a "multiple sense"—literal and spiritual, allegorical and anagogical—out of each text of Scripture, by the decided assertion that the sense "of any Scripture" "is not manifold, but one." On this perfectly obvious and thoroughly scientific statement Mr. Robert Macintosh founds page after page of assault on the Confession, incredibly misinterpreting it to mean that all parts of the Bible teach the same thing! This is just one-quarter of his whole argument to prove the Confession to be obsolete. The assertions which have become so common of late that the Confession is supralapsarian in the third chapter, teaches by implication the damnation of some that die in infancy in the third section of the tenth chapter, and gives insufficient recognition to the love of God as over against His sovereignty, scarcely differ in kind from this proceeding of Mr. Macintosh's.

There is still another attitude which has led to objection in some quarters, during the last year, to the Westminster Standards, without necessarily implying lack of harmony with their doctrine. This is a feeling that the creed is too exclusive, and a desire for Church union and greater catholicity of Church life, based on the undoubted facts that on the one hand the Westminster Standards, while moderately and catholically Calvinistic, are yet exclusively Calvinistic, and on the other, that Christendom is broader than