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Now, suppose one whose very interpretation of that singular addition to the great commandment, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind,' is, that to love God with all our mind' must surely be a divine injunction to think our best. For such an one, perhaps, no readier approach to the subject can be made than by considering that the great, all-important word Faith, round which nearly all religious controversy rages, has two aspects, which have found expression in English in two convenient terms, Belief and Creed.

These, the moment they are pronounced, carry with them, in their very Saxon and Latinised forms, to a sensitive ear, a certain suggestion of difference of quality, which further consideration will only serve to define and accentuate.

This difference between two terms that are so intimately related may fairly be signalised by saying that Creed is Belief intellectualised; and some clear apprehension of this mental operation of intellection will at once illuminate for us the nature of that distinction between them which we all instinctively recognise.

Belief can never be separated from action: its natural expression is its utterance in conduct; its seat, therefore, is in the heart, where the springs of all our intelligent activities lie. There, penetrated with the forces of our emotional life, it derives all its power to affect our behaviour. But this belief can at will be projected from its central seat within the breast, and intellectually regarded and scrutinised as an object of pure thought. This faculty of thought will then subject it to analytic processes, drawing out its separate constituents in sharply enunciated propositional form; thence proceeding to connect the enunciations in logical concatenation. And it will find at last, perhaps, its completed satisfaction in such co-ordination and subordination of the several elements as shall make of them a harmonised system: a logical whole, governed and illuminated by a certain unity of idea, which shall answer to the unity of the intelligence which has been thus so busily at work.

Thus we have Belief, the impulsive spring of conduct, exhibited as an intellectualised product, as a Creed. This, then, may now be described

as so much of the substance of the things believed and rested upon by the person of whose voluntary life they are at once the basis and the springs,—so much of the contents of this substantial Faith (which itself can never be disjoined from works) as the speculative intellect can detach.

When we once realise this distinction, so commonly described in the language which sets in opposition the head and the heart, then we are on the way to a clear and intelligible explanation of some familiar commonplaces, which yet are of great significance: as, l.g., that when the main force of the spiritual vitality is suffered to expend itself in the speculative, contemplative consideration of the objects of its faith, there is apt to be found an undue subtraction from their effectiveness in practical life. And, again, that a religious man's life is for the most part very imperfectly explained by the clearest statement of his creed-though it be most sincerely and intelligently held-so that, in common parlance, we often say that a man is much better, or alas, much worse than his creed.1 1 See Note I.

These considerations may well suggest to every intelligent Christian man the still deeper and more comprehensive inquiry: viz., What is the just relation of Belief to that Truth which is its objective? And, more especially, what is the actual and necessary relation of a Creed to these two?-for it is this relation to Belief and to Truth which gives all their meaning to the words and phrases of formulated statements. It may further appear that this last is a question which depends for its answer upon another, simpler, but more fundamental, viz., What is the inevitable, the necessary limitation of Words? Let them be ever so well and fitly chosen, what is the limitation of Words, as an adequate exponent and expression, not now of Thought alone, but of Truth, in its completed sense of Reality: i.e. of Reality as related to us?

If these two added words seem to express a certain limitation, a little reflection will convince us that it is at all events a natural and even a necessary one. For all that can be legitimately named Reality implies of necessity a tacit, implicit reference to the reality of our own personal existence. Reality may be admitted, of

course, to be, and that to any extent, transcendent; nay, there may be, and I am convinced there is, that contained in the nature of the apprehension of it by ourselves, which amounts to evidence that it is infinite in the scope of its transcendence. But it is not with this that our argument is at present concerned. It is not the measurable or the immeasurable extent of it that now occupies us, but solely the connotation of the word Real; not the extent, but the intent of the term that we need to define : neither is it at present the qualities we may find ourselves compelled to attribute to it, though these are of supreme interest to us. It is rather the core and nucleus of the thing itself. And no other definition is capable of carrying any clear meaning with it than that which makes our own personal existence the standard we must apply--that personal existence of which we are each of us directly aware. As real as we ourselves are in our personal life, is the utmost we can claim to signify by the term Reality.2

I put aside, for the present, the large and

2 See Note 2.

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