Page:On the Revision of the Confession of Faith.djvu/89

Rh of teaching to all our pastors. The cry for brief, primary creeds is, therefore, a movement which must be characterized not only as undoctrinal, but anti-doctrinal. It is a direct blow at the right of the people to the whole truth of God.

We must not fail, however, to recognize frankly that, after all these causes of dissatisfaction with the Westminster Standards are eliminated, there remains a residuum—a small residuum—of objections which arise out of doctrinal grounds. There are, no doubt, several kinds of objections to be recognized even here. Some arise merely from the opinion that the truths of the Gospel do not receive the same relative emphasis in the Confession as in the Bible; and these are probably the most frequently urged of all forms of doctrinal objection. Dr. Candlish, in supporting his overture in the Free Church Presbytery of Glasgow, supplies a good example of how they are presented. "The Confession," he is reported as saying, "did not express, in their scriptural proportions, some aspects of the Gospel, and these were such vital and precious truths as the love of God to the world, His free offer of salvation to all men, and the responsibility of every one who heard this gracious call for accepting or refusing it. It was not meant that these truths were not contained in the Confession. He strongly contended that they were in it, but they were not so prominent in it proportionally to the statement of other truths—those of the sovereignty and almighty power of God's grace—as they were in the Bible." It will be remembered that it is with these points that the Declaratory Acts of the United Presbyterians and the