church. Where her divines have differed,
you have had the varying opinions spread before you. You have not been
told that the mind of every churchman has always been a replica of the
mind of every other churchman. Personally, I feel grateful that this has
not been the case. As I say my creed and begin "I believe in God, the
Father Almighty," I realize that the aspect of even such a basic belief as
this, is the same in no two minds; that it shifts from land to land and
from age to age. I know that God, as he is, is past human knowledge and
that until we see Him face to face we can not all mean just the same thing
when we repeat this article of belief. But I realize also that this is not
due to the mutability of the Almighty but to man's variability. The Gods
of St. Jerome, of Thomas Carlyle and of William James are different; but
that is because these men had different types of minds. Behind their human
ideas stands God himself--"the same yesterday, to-day and forever." So we
may go through the creed; so we may study, as you have been doing, the
beliefs of the church. Everywhere we see the evidences of the working,
upon fallible human minds of a dim appreciation of something beyond full
human knowledge--

"That one far-off divine event
Toward which the Whole Creation moves."

We have a wonderful church, my friends. It is a church to live with; a
church to be proud of. Those who miss what we are privileged to enjoy are
missing something from the fulness of life. We have not broken with the
historic continuity of the Christian faith: there is no chasm, filled with
wreckage, between us and the fathers of the church. Above all we have
enshrined our beliefs in a marvellous liturgy, which is ever old and ever
new, and which had the good fortune to be put into English at a day when
the force of expression in our Mother tongue was peculiarly virile, yet
peculiarly lovely. I know of nothing in the whole range of English
literature that will compare with the collects as contained in our Book of
Common Prayer, for beauty, for form, for condensation and for force. They
are a string of pearls. And indeed, what I have said of them applies to
the whole book. When I see Committees of well-meaning divines trying to
tamper with it, I shudder as I might if I witnessed the attempt of a guild
of modern sculptors to improve the Venus of Milo by chipping off a bit
here and adding something there. Good reasons exist for changes,
doubtles