Page:On the Revision of the Confession of Faith.djvu/92

84 the perfect intellectual standard of faith—the divine truth. We do not ask our people to profess faith in all its articles at the outset of their Christian course: we ask them to set their faces toward it—as they set their faces toward sanctification—as the goal of their understanding of divine truth. It is the standard of the teaching they are to receive, not of the knowledge they have already assimilated: it represents not the minimum of knowledge that the Church demands ere she receives a soul into her communion, but the maximum that she expects to train her people to in the prosecution of her work as a teacher sent from God. Some other churches have creeds which they use as the test of fitness for membership in the society of Christ: and it is, perhaps, not altogether strange that some who have come from them to us should have some slight initial difficulty in apprehending our different practice. But it is strange that those born and bred among us should occasionally fall into the same error. It would be a revolution of our whole point of view were the American Presbyterian Church to undertake a revision of the Confession, or to attempt to frame a new and more primary Confession to substitute for it, on the ground that the present Confession is not throughout believed by our people, or that it is too abstruse or difficult to be easily understood by the less instructed and less advanced among them. The Confession is not a popular document. It does not represent the stage of Christian faith attained by our babes in Christ. It is our standard of teaching, not of membership; and it is addressed to those who, trained in the word of God, present themselves as men learned in the Scriptures to become teachers of others. To them it offers itself as a succinct statement of the teaching of the Word, and as such demands their suffrages. The only legitimate criticism of it will therefore turn on the simple question, whether the doctrine taught in it is the doctrine of the Bible.