Articles. Bishop Seabury "doubted of the need of articles at all." Others appear to have thought with him, and there was much delay. An effort was then made to write a statement out of hand to supplement, or supply, the supposed lacks of the old. The plan was abandoned only after "the impossibility of agreement in a new form was shown," and after "the inherent folly of the proposition was exhibited."

Current history, in the matter of the "Articles of Religion" prepared by the Joint Commission for the Methodist Church in Japan, which is to be organized in May, 1907, illustrates our point of contention. The historical preamble to the Articles says: "The Nippon Methodist Kyokwai shall be permanently founded on the fundamental doctrines of Holy Scripture, as unfolded by Christ and his apostles, formally stated in the 'Articles of Religion' embodied in this plan of organization," etc. These "Articles of Religion" are eighteen in number, and are a recension of the TwentyFive Articles, adding no new doctrinal statement and eliminating no matter of importance. In fact, the Confession is the Twenty-Five Articles abridged. Very many of the Articles are, with the slightest verbal changes, the same. Elsewhere there are substitutions of terms and phrases. One Article only is entirely eliminated the one on the use of "an unknown tongue" in the services of the Church. Several others are combined, in one case three Articles combining to make a single one. The reference to original sin, or guilt, is omitted from Articles II. and VII., but the

*See Appendix, II.

title of original sin is retained for the Japanese Article, also numbered VII. This tenet says that "Christ died for the sins of the whole world." In the Article on the Church the spirit of the ritual for the reception of members is added in these words, "And whose mission is to evangelize the world in obedience to our Lord's command," which is well, particularly in the Confession of a Church newly organized in a heathen land; but it is a truth that was never in dispute, and is written in large letters on every page of modern Christian literature.

The organization of the Methodist Church of Japan is an event of tremendous moment; and had there been felt a need for it, the movement might have been signalized by the promulgation of new formulas, or at least by the addition of a number of new titles showing doctrines not catalogued in the "mother symbol." But not a new dogma is proposed; not even a new title is added, but on the contrary a half dozen disappear. The teaching of the Nipponese Confession is that of the Twenty-Five Articles. It is not a new formulary, nor a restatement, but a technical recension.

As religious thought broadens, the necessity for the historical confession grows measurably less. It is an expedient of Christianity in the days of its distress, and should be rigidly confined to those exceptional matters of difference which history plainly indicates as being the proper elements of such a formulary. "The Christian religion is greater than any possible

"See Chapter IX., page 156.

interpretation of it," says Dr. Charles Cuthbert Hall. "The whole conception of orthodoxy, as meaning conformity to a standard drawn up by authority and officially adopted as the touchstone of belief, no longer satisfies the most spiritual minds, who desire only to know and utter the truth as that truth is revealed in Holy Scripture and certified inwardly to the believer through the witness of Christian experience." The polemical confession must finally disappear and the apostolic theology be fully recovered. There will then remain but the simple historic creed, the catechism, the homily-which is to-day the normal medium of statement, as the epistle was at the beginning—and the ripened heritage of private interpretation. We need no mentor to instruct us that these observations reach into the realm of the speculative and ideal. Theology is still in its practical stages, and all its surroundings are real. The historic confession has an age and an empire yet before it, but this empire is to embody historical sequences and not yield to empirical exploitations and speculations.

It may be asked: "How, when ascertained, is theological truth to be established, if not in authoritative statements that register the discovery or settlement of each of its contents?" How have the sciences made effective their discoveries and verifications? Not through conventions, nor through the authoritative statements of academies and schools, but through the general conclusions of mankind. Some things in science we know to be settled. These constitute a creed

"Recovery of the Apostolic Theology." (Cole Lectures.)

ing. Other Churchly statements have contributed to the completion of Protestant ideals, but the two historic formularies from which our Articles are descended are the chief pillars of the recovered doctrines and prophecies of the gospel. There was meant to be a subtle doctrinal distinction between the term "Reformed" as appropriated by the Calvinistic Churches of the Continent and that of "Protestant" as left to the Lutheran and Anglican bodies. The distinction is far more than doctrinal: it is historic, prophetic. The two great Protestant Confessions with a court-like writ put the spirit of Rome in the stocks until "the thousand years" of its intransigeance should be past; but the expanded scholastic statements of Calvinism, made under the policing protection of German and English Protestantism, abound with the subtleties of a theology which history has been shut up to the necessity of describing as "Reformed." Though the Calvinistic doctors espoused the cause, they missed, in their zeal for doctrinal abstractions, the first great point of Protestantism. That point subsists permanently with the anti-papal sections of our Twenty-Five Articles. It is worthy of note, and becomes a pertinent record in this connection, that with all the excisions and recensions. practiced upon the English Articles since the first draft made of them, in the time of Edward VI., to the abridgment made less than forty years ago by the Reformed Episcopal Church, not a single one of the important anti-Romish tenets has disappeared, nor has

By consulting the draft of the Articles prepared for the Japanese Methodist Church this observation will be found to

one of them lost its historical force. They cannot pass until the measure of their demands be realized. That demand is the perfect enthronement of the doctrines of the priesthood of believers, justification by faith alone, access of the individual to the person of Christ, the all-sufficiency of the Scriptures as a rule of faith, and the Church as "a congregation of faithful men.” Protestantism did not take its rise in a mere criticism of doctrines, though that was the occasion of its first sign of struggle. It sprang out of the soul of the Erfurt monk who, in hunger of heart, continually cried to himself: "O when wilt thou become holy and fit to obtain the grace of God?" This passion quickly upon its utterance became the passion of a nation, to the satisfying of which the hierarchy of Rome was found to be the one obstacle. Hence the deathless words of protest.

In its more modern use the term confession is of Protestant origin. The German and Anglican Articles-the preeminent types-follow the ancient axiom of inclusions. They are thus found built up as historical protests against heresies and abuses that had gained ascendency in the Christian body. The logical inclusions of future confessions are to be determined by these precedents. The elements to be excluded are those which have not entered into dispute, or, if ever so entering, have passed out of it, or else have so spent their force as to be no longer of historical or polemical moment; as, for instance, the anti-Anabaptis

apply to them also. No important anti-papal protest has been omitted.