shares consequently fell as rapidly as they had risen. This has been the practical experience of the credit foncier and the credit mobilier of France, which were the first, and remain the greatest examples of the finance companies so named. The credit foncier of England (there has been no credit mobilier in London) has had much the same course as the French companies; large profits for a few years were followed by increasing difficulties, and the locking up of large amounts of capital in hopeless undertakings. The Imperial Land Company of Marseilles has absorbed 200,000, the Santiago and Carril Railway 193,000, and both are failures. The directors in these circumstances have been applying the annual profits to a reserve fund, and addressing themselves to a class of loans and advances on securities differing little from that of ordinary bankers
and many finance companies under various names.CREDITON, a market town of England, county of Devon, on the Greedy, near its junction with the Exe, eight miles north-west of Exeter. Population (1871), 4222. It is situated in a narrow vale, between two steep hills, and is divided into two parts, the east or old town, and the west or new town. The church, formerly collegiate, is a noble edifice, in the later Pointed style, with a fine tower 100 feet in height springing from the centre. There are places of worship for Baptists, Independents, Metho dists, and i Unitarians, a free grammar school with exhi bitions to both universities, blue-coat, national, and infant schools, a mechanics institution, a public library, and a newsroom. There were formerly extensive woollen and serge manufactories there, but the inhabitants are now chiefly engaged in shoemaking and agriculture. Crediton was the birthplace, about 680, of the Anglo-Saxon Winfrid, better known as St Boniface, " the Apostle of Germany." It returned two members to the Parliament at Carlisle in the reign of Edward I., and from 909 to 1049 was the seat of a bishopric, which was afterwards removed to Exeter. Fairfax with Cromwell took possession of Crediton in 1645. The present modern appearance of the town is mainly due to the removal of the old houses by fires which occurred in 1743 and 1769.
CREECH, Thomas (1659-1701), an English translator from the classics, was born at Blandford near Sherborno in Dorsetshire. He studied at "Wadham College, Oxford, and obtained a fellowship first in that college and after wards at All Souls . In 1699 he received a college living, but not more than two years after he hanged himself. The immediate cause of the act was not improbably a money difficulty, though according to some it was a love disappointment ; but Creech was naturally of a melancholic temper. Creech s fame rests on his translation of Lucre tius, in which, according to Otway, the pure ore of the original " somewhat seems refined." But in truth the commonplace equability of its rhymed heroic couplets, the chief merit of which is their straightforward simplicity, is very far from being an adequate translation of the powerful poetry of Lucretius ; and even the easy mechanism of the rhyme is faulty in innumerable cases. Creech s version of Horace, which is still less adequate, was a failure from the first. He also translated the Idylls of Theocritus, the Thirteenth /Satire of Juvenal, the Astronomicon of Manilius, and parts of Plutarch, Virgil, and Ovid. Creech s edition of the text of Lucretius, with notes borrowed from Lamtinus and Faber, has been much used.
CREEDS, or Confessions of Faith, may be defined as authorized formularies of Christian doctrine. The three ancient or, as they are sometimes called, oecumenical creeds are the most important, although the briefest, of such documents, and mainly call for attention in such an article as this. The more detailed confessions since the time of the Reformation will also be enumerated. But their special description belongs to the history of theology, or what the Germans call " Symbolik." Our aim is not to deal with the substance or theological import of the creeds, but only to present to the reader the most recent and satisfactory information as to their origin, history, and acceptance by the church.
Creeds are a gradual growth in the history of the Christian church, but their rudiments may be said to have existed from its first foundation, from the answer of St Peter to our Lord, when asked " Whom do men say that I am 1 " " Thou art the Christ " (Mark viii. 27-29) or the statement of St Paul in the Epistle to the Romans (x. 9), " If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." All subsequent confessions of faith are in fact more or less expanded developments of the original baptismal formula, derived from the commission given by Christ to the apostles in the conclusion of St Matthew s Gospel (xxviii. 19): "Go ye therefore and teach (make disciples of) all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." From this simple acknowledgment of the threefold Name, possibly from the still simpler acknow ledgment of Jesus as " the Christ " or Messiah, have, sprung all the more elaborate credenda of the Christian church.
I. Writers on the creeds have professed to find in the later writings of the New Testament traces of a more definite summary of belief : as in the allusions of the 2d Epistle to Timothy (i. 13) to a " form of sound words ; " and " the deposit," or "good deposit," which was to be kept (1 Tim vi. 20; 2 Tim. i. 14); also in the "faithful words" or "sayings" enumerated in the first and second of these epistles (1 Tim. i. 15; ii. 1 ; iv. 8, 9 ; 2 Tim. ii. 11), and a remarkable passage in the opening of the sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. But it may be questioned how far any of these passages have anything beyond a general meaning. It must certainly be held doubtful whether, supposing they did point to any articles of faith beyond the original statement of the baptismal formula, they could be held to apply to the first apostolic age. All such inferences are two-edged, the presumption of arti culated dogma in any part of the New Testament Scriptures being one of the strangest evidences of the later or non- apostolic origin of these Scriptures.
It is not till a much later age the age of Irenasus and Tertullian (175-200) that we meet with any definite summaries of Christian belief. We may presume, and rightfully presume, that such summaries existed before, and were even rendered to the candidates for baptism under the form of Traditio Symboli ; but no such summaries are traceable in Christian literature before this period. Not to speak of the doubtful genuineness of the writings appealed to such as the alleged Epistle of Ignatius to the Trallians (c. iv) it is admitted by those most anxious " to demonstrate that from the earliest times there existed some form of words in the church of the character of a creed," that the passages quoted either from the writings of the Apostolic Fathers or of Justin Martyr " do not seem to have been meant to be used in this way, if we take them in conjunction with their context " (Lumby s History of the Creeds, p. 12). "Some fancy," says Biugham (Origines, b. x. c. iv), " that the creed may be found in the writings of Ignatius, Clemens Romanus, Polycarp, and Justin Martyr. But Bishop Pearson has rightly observed that these writers, however they may incidentally mention some articles of faith, do not formally deliver any rule of faith used in their times."
