No man, then, is at liberty to change the interpretation
to suit himself.
And then, again, nobody, as I say, believes in the resurrection of the
soul. Why? Because that statement, with the authority of the House of
Bishops that nobody has any business to change or reinterpret, carries
with it a world underneath the surface of the earth to which the dead
go down; and resurrection means coming up again from that underground
world. Nobody believes in any underground world to-day. You cannot be
resurrected. That is, you cannot rise again unless you have first gone
down. It is the ascent of the soul we believe in to-day, and not its
resurrection, much less the resurrection of the body.
Now a word in regard to another of the great historic creeds.
The third one to be shaped was the Athanasian Creed. Curiously named
most of these are. There was a tradition in the Church that Athanasius,
who was one of the great antagonists of the Council of Nicaea, wrote
this creed called after his name; but, as a matter of fact, the creed
was not known in the Church in the shape in which we have it now until
at least four or five hundred years after Athanasius was dead.
The Athanasian Creed dates from the eighth or ninth century; and in
this for the first time there is a clear, explicit, definite
formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. It never had been shaped in
perfection until the time of the Athanasian Creed; and this creed
contains among other things those famous damnatory clauses? which the
Episcopal Church in this country, to their credit be it said, have left
out of their Prayer Book.
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