OF FEELING NOT SECURED.]

The importance of the element of feeling has been most perceived in
times when the religious current was strongest. At these times, its
expression would not be hemmed in by rigorous formulas. The first
communication of religious doctrines has always partaken of a broad and
free rendering; apparent discrepancies were disregarded. To reduce all
the utterances of the prophets and the apostles to definite forms and
rigid dogmas, was to misconceive the situation. We may well suppose that
the New Testament writers would have refused to subscribe the Athanasian
Creed or the Westminster Confession; not because these were in flat
contradiction to Scripture, but because the way of embodying the
religious verities in these documents would be repugnant to their ideas
of form in such matters. The creed-builders may have been never so
anxious to give exact equivalents of the original authorities; yet their
fine distinctions and subtle logic would have, in all probability, been
ranked by Paul and Peter among the latter-day perversions of the faith.
The very composition of a creed would have been as distasteful to the
first century, as it is incongruous to the nineteenth.

The evil operation of religious tests, and of the accompanying
intolerance of the public mind as shown towards any form of dissent from
the stereotyped orthodoxy, admits of a very wide handling. It is of
course the problem of religious liberty. Some parts of the argument need
to be reproduced here, to help us in replying to the objections against
an unconditional abolition of compulsory creeds.

In conversing, many years ago, with the late Jules Mohl, the great
Oriental scholar, professor of Persian in the College de France, I was
much struck with his account of the nature of his duties as an expounder
of the modern Persian authors. These authors, for example the poet Sadi,
were in creed adherents of the ancient Persian fire-worship,
notwithstanding the Mohammedan conquest of their country. They were, of
course, forbidden to avow that creed directly; and in consequence, they
had recourse to a form of composition by _doubles entendres_, veiling
the ancient creed under Mohammedan forms. Mohl's business, as their
expounder, was to strip off the disguise and show the true bearings of
the writers, under their show of conformity to the established opinions.

This is a typical illustration of what has happened in Europe for more
than two thousa