Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/44

36 Still more is this the case with the kindred subject of confessions and articles of faith. If we regard them merely in their cut and dried results, they may indeed serve many useful ends; they supply stakes to make hedges against intruders, planks to cross our enemy's trenches, faggots to burn heretics. But go to the soil from which they sprang. Watch them in their wild, native, luxuriant growth. Observe the moss which has grown over their stems, the bough rent away there and grafted in here, the branches inextricably intertwined with adjacent thickets. So regarded, they will not be less, but more of a shelter; we shall not value them the less, for understanding them better. Figure to yourselves, as you read any creeds or confessions, the lips by which they were first uttered, the hands by which they were first written. Hear the Apostles' Creed, as it summed up in its few simple sentences the belief of the Roman martyrs. Watch the Nicene bishops meeting each other, and their opponents, and the great Emperor Constantine, for the first time, on the shores of the Bithynian lake. Listen to the triumphant war-songs of Clovis over the vanquished Arians of France and Spain, and you will catch with a clearer understanding the true significance of their echo in the old Latin hymn, Quicunque vult, then first welcomed into Europe. Read the Articles of the English Church in their successive mutilations, excrescences, variations. Go to that most precious of collegiate