Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/420

404 in after and more enlightened times, he should not be supposed to have believed in the religion which he had, from worldly motives, adopted.

The Athanasian Creed is a direct contradiction in terms: if three things can be one thing, then the whole science of arithmetic is at once annihilated, and those wonderful laws, which, as astronomers have shown, govern the solar system, are mere dreams. If, on the other hand, it is attempted to be shown that there may be some mystic sense in which three and one are the same thing, then all language through which alone man can exert his reasoning faculty becomes useless, because it contradicts itself and is untrue.

The great basis of virtue in man is truth—that is, the constant application of the same word to the same thing.

The first element of accurate knowledge is number—the foundation and the measure of all he knows of the material world.

I believe these views of the Athanasian Creed are by no means singular,—that they are indeed very generally held, although very rarely asserted. If such is the case, it were wise to take the opportunity which the new Commission for the revision of the Liturgy presents, to remove from the Rubric doctrines so thoroughly destructive of all true religion, and about which the author, doubtless in mockery, so complacently tells us, that whosoever does not believe them "without doubts he shall perish everlastingly."

The true value of the Christian religion rests, not upon speculative views of the Creator, which must necessarily be different in each individual, according to the extent of the knowledge of the finite being, who employs his own feeble powers in contemplating the infinite: but it rests upon those