Search -
Boston Lectures, Christianity and Scepticism. 1871-1872
Boston Lectures Christianity and Scepticism 18711872 Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II, CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE THE MOLD OF CHRISTIAN CHARACTER. THAT which a man holds by the head, and by heart, as the truth, vital to his soul's want, that prop... more »erly is his Creed. It is to him the supreme truth, felt to be such, and grasped with a clear comr pleteness of conviction, and held with a trustful holding worthy to be termed in such matter a Faith. It is the truth he has found true to his spiritual needs ; the truth, or scheme of truths, if it be such, that verifies itself to his craving heart, as measuring and answering his sense of trouble and wrong, his felt sin and conscious guilt. He has found and embraced it as the Adequate Truth that opens to his soul the Way and the Life. That is the man's Creed; and less than this will ever be found to lack somewhat that essentially belongs to the full significance of that term. No man properly has a creed, till in his deepest soul he beholds, owns, welcomes, trusts the truth that meets his want, and delivers himself over, heartily obedient to that truth. He may have had his little experiments at a Faith, his notional admissions of truth, endemic or A inherited; he has felt the sting of sin, the ache of conscience, the power of an endless life, aud so may have speculated quite religiously, and set in order certain wisdoms that his soul has within reach in its serious moods ; some theory of bread, when his hunger shall grow too sharp ; his scheme of the infinite when his finite shall fail him; and he wraps these thin persuasions about him as a religion. But with all these, he has not attained to a Faith. Creed, properly, he has none, and little more than the elements and preparations of one. For what truth soever a man heartily entertains, on terms that entitle it to be called his Faith or Creed, is not held simply, but ...« less