Son, and the Holy Spirit,'[1] and the candidate for baptism would naturally come to have a profession of faith to make respecting that whereinto he was baptized; this profession of faith would naturally become just, such a summary as the Apostles' Creed. It contains no mention of either the 'method' or the 'secret,' it is occupied entirely with external facts; and it may be safely said, not only that such a summary of religious faith could never have been delivered by Jesus, but it could never have been adopted as adequate by any of his principal apostles, by Peter, or Paul, or John. But it is, as we have said, the popular science of Christianity.
Years proceeded. The world came into Christianity; the world, and the world's educated people, and the educated people's Aryan genius with its turn for making religion a metaphysical conception; and all this in a time of declining criticism, a time when the possibility of true scientific criticism, in any direction whatever, was lessening rather than increasing. The popular science was found not elaborate enough to satisfy. Ingenious men took its terms and its data, and applied to them, not an historical criticism showing how they arose, but abstruse metaphysical conceptions. And so we have the so-called Nicene Creed, which is the learned science of Christianity, as the Apostles' Creed is the popular science.
Now, how this learned science is related to the Bible we shall feel, if we compare the religious utterances of its doctors with the religious utterances of the Bible. Suppose, for instance, we compare with the Psalms the Soliloquies of St. Augustine, a truly great and religious man; and of St. Augustine, not in school and controversy, but in religious soliloquy. St. Augustine prays: 'Come to my help, thou one God, one eternal true substance, where is no discrepancy, no confusion, no transience, no indigency, no death; where is supreme concord, supreme evidence, supreme constancy,
