That is Israel's way of praying! that is how a poor ill-endowed Semite, belonging to the occipital races, unhelped by the Aryan genius and ignorant that religion is a metaphysical conception, talks religion! and we see what a different thing he makes of it.
But, finally, the original Semite fell more and more into the shade. The Aryans came to the front, the notion of religion being a metaphysical conception prevailed. But the doctors differed in their metaphysics; and the doctors who conquered enshrined their victorious form of metaphysics in a creed, the so-called Creed of St. Athanasius, which is learned science like the Nicene Creed, but learned science which has fought and got ruffled by fighting, and is fiercely dictatorial now that it has won; learned science with a strong dash of violent and vindictive temper. Thus we have the three creeds: the so-called Apostles' Creed, popular science; the Nicene Creed, learned science; the Athanasian Creed, learned science with a strong dash of temper. And the two latter are founded on the first, taking its data just as they stand, but dressing them metaphysically.
Now this first Creed is founded on a supposed final charge from Jesus to his apostles: 'Go ye and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!'[1] It explains and expands what Jesus here told his apostles to baptize the world into. But we have already remarked the difference in character between the narrative, in the Gospels, of what happened before Christ's death, and the narrative of what happened after it. For all words of Jesus placed after his death, the internal evidence becomes pre-eminently important. He may well have said words attributed to him, but not then. So the speech to Thomas, 'Because thou hast seen me thou hast believed; blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed!'[2] may quite well have been a speech of Jesus
