ESSAY.

CHAPTER I.

A Creed-A sense in which the term is not used in this Essay.

THE subject, which it is the intention of this Essay to develop, is strictly political in its character. It involves the great question of human LIBERTY:— liberty to think, to speak, to write, and to act. Are we free to use the minds which God has given to us? to utter the thoughts which we may have conceived? to enjoy whatever we may possess? or must we be the servants of "many masters," and yield our rights to the combinations of our fellow-men?

The controvertist, afraid of the popularity to which such a view is entitled, or of the all-absorbing interest which human beings might take in such a discussion, may probably be startled at the position I take. In his judgment the whole subject is far more sacred. It is not political, he will say, but, occupying higher and holier relations, it is, he will complacently tell us, ecclesiastical. And pray what is ecclesiastical? Is the human mind to be put off with a high-sounding technical term? If the church, as

such, be a divine institution, is not civil government established by a divine ordinance? Have not the Apostles exhorted us to "stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free?" Have they not bidden us to be on our guard, lest we should be "again entangled with the yoke of bondage?" and warned us against the lordship which ambitious ecclesiastics would aspire to exercise?

With such scriptural precedents before us, and particularly when they are sustained by the whole history of the Jewish commonwealth, we may safely, and without rebuke, use the strongest terms, and appropriate the most vivid ideas, belonging to political science. And assuredly the criticism, which I have supposed to be made, will come with an ill grace from those, who ought best to know, how often and how long, and under what desolating circumstances, church and state have been united; who ought to be fully aware how very sensitive the public mind in this country is, in relation to that matter; and who ought to be apprised of the fearful prognostics which are now foreboding the most serious ecclesiastical troubles in the old world. Mankind, at this present hour, are deeply agitated on this subject; and that because circumstances are forcing them to discuss the great question of LIBERTY.

It is said that Napoleon, who has been so celebrated for intellectual power and magnificent project, and who lost ALL in the mighty and bloody game he played, because he descended to imitate the dynasties he had sought to crush, regretted very much that he

could not unite the temporal and spiritual power in his own person. "It is only in Christianity," he remarked, "that the pontificate is thus separated from the civil government. In the Roman republic the senators were the interpreters of the will of Heaven; and this power gave stability to the government. In Turkey, and in all the east, the koran is both civil law, and religious law." It is moreover said, that he "would have established a new order of jesuits. He would have had a body of unmarried men, devoted to his will, in order to direct, through them, the reli gious, moral, and political opinions of youth." There is not then so great a dissimilarity in these matters, that an identity of principle should be disowned, and all analogy discarded. Ecclesiastical men, it would seem, when on the side or under the control of the political chieftain, are his best and surest guides to despotism; and when opposed to his plans, or the advocates of human liberty, even a Napoleon would be foiled and defeated.

Why should the creed system not be viewed in its political bearings? or as a political matter?* The church is a community, and the nation is a community. The civil officer is a ruler in a community, and the spiritual officer is a ruler in a community. And if the church be constituted by an ELECTION on the part of Jehovah, and if the election be an official matter, as I take it to be,† then the church and the nation are coextensive. Of course, though we must

* I use the term POLITICAL in a general sense.

†See my lectures on the first three chapters of Genesis.

consider them to be altogether distinct, and the civil and ecclesiastical officer to be, each in his own place, accountable to the great governor of the world, yet the social attributes of the two are alike, and the term political, in its general acceptation, is correctly used in the present discussion.

The reason why I use the term, and so strenuously defend its use, is simply this:-It is desirable that the precise import of the technical words, CREEDCONFESSION OF FAITH, and the exact place which the ecclesiastical instruments, so denominated, occupy, should be distinctly ascertained. When we condemn

these documents, and the use that is made of them, their advocates promptly and pertinaciously enough reply"You have a CREED yourselves, and thus are inconsistently holding fast to the very thing you professedly reject. Thereby you show that it is utterly impossible to get along without creeds; of which your own experiment affords ample proof." I wish therefore to have it understood, that the argument here pursued is not in collision with the nature of christianity, and the philosophy of the human mind: and that the thing condemned is a creed as an instrument of ecclesiastical, RULE, or as a political expedient by which ecclesiastics obtain a dominion over the human mind. Those who are engaged in the present controversy, and who have been so severely censured on account of the official obliquities imputed to them, are offended by, and cannot be reconciled with, the policy of ecclesiastics; but PROTEST against councils and decrees as the reformers did, and view the systems of doctrine and govern

ment imposed on human consciences, as oppressive and as unwarranted as any papal measures which roused Luther and his compeers. The reader is now apprised of the nature of the following discussion, and consequently prepared for the details I am about to give.

To proceed then. The term CREED signifies belief. CONFESSION signifies an acknowledgment or avowal of some particular thing-as an opinion or a doctrine. In this simple view of the term every man must have a creed, who has any desire to know the truth, or who has made truth the subject of his study. His creed is made up of what he believes his confession includes whatever he has avowed as his belief.

The latter term was applied to the ecclesiastical symbols under review after the reformation. The reformers were accused of holding doctrines repugnant to the peace and well being of society, for which they were arraigned at the bar of civil courts, as well as that of public opinion. Certain things imputed to them they disclaimed, and certain other things they confessed.

The doctrines which they avowed, or the instruments of writing in which those doctrines were stated and avowed, were called their coNFESSIONS: -the confessions of their faith, or of what they believed. They intended thereby to show that they were not traitors to the commonwealth under which they lived, and that they held no doctrines which were inimical to the well-being of society. These instruments have been perverted by their followers, and have been employed, like the early CREEDS, against which the reformers themselves protested, as tests of