ARTICLE IV.—ASSENT TO CREEDS.

MEN are properly sensitive to the obligations of trusts. An assumption of duties, raised by appointment, challenges the conscience and honor of the person who assumes them. When one undertakes to fill a position which involves the management of an estate or power for the benefit of another, it is with the understanding that the beneficiary is the absolute owner of the results, and the judgment seat of equity is always open to the prayers and complaints of a beneficiary whose rights have been abused. The judicial keepers of public conscience will even make search to find the true beneficiaries, when the object of bounty is vaguely described. One who assumes a trust duty, by his act of accepting it, consents to a surrender of his individual views as to the wisdom or unwisdom of the grant, charter, deed, or set of circumstances which have created the position. If the trust is a public office, he finds its terms in public law; and responsibility for the law is on its authors, and not on him. The sheriff may be called to act as hangman, although he thinks that capital punishment is a barbarism, and no stain of blood can be found on his hands after they have pulled away the block and sent a fellow creature into a premature eternity, even if that fellow creature be Oxey Cherry, the colored girl, aged eleven, whom a court in South Carolina recently sentenced to be hanged. If one accepts a position as testamentary trustee under the will of a friend, whose wish he could not refuse, he must deliver over the income, as required by the will, to the son whose use of the money is universally bad, and who makes every dollar a feeder to vice; and the responsibility is upon the testator and the beneficiary. A trustee may resign his trust; otherwise, he must fulfill it.

These general principles are elementary, and may not be controverted, and they apply as well to gifts, grants, and invest

ments for ecclesiastical and theological purposes as to other things.

Assuming these principles, many persons are disposed at once to condemn all advances in thought within religious bodies with a history and traditions, and all instruction in theological seminaries, which differs from any part of the seminary creed to which the instructor has made subscription. Let him sing in tune with the organ which was originally set up, say they, and with all its pipes, no matter if they are windbroken and wheezy. That is the musical standard here, and if he cannot sing to it let him step down from the gallery and cross the highway to some other. If the creed is objectionable, do not subscribe to it; but if a man does subscribe to it, let him stick to it, and teach in conformity with all its statements; no matter if he believes that what is true and just and merciful in it is antagonized and rendered powerless by other statements which bristle with unbelievable rigors.

Is this style of criticism, so freely made alike by men who hold many or all religious opinions in contempt, and by others who hold the religious notions of other centuries in superstitious awe, sound? We submit that this kind of inference is not sound, but is formed from superficial reasoning.

It must be conceded that the courts have, with substantial uniformity, reflected the moral sense of communities in carefully enforcing trusts for religious purposes according to indicated limitations, whether doctrinal or otherwise, and, in cases of doubt, have even resorted to the views of a donor to ascertain the meaning of his words. It must also be remembered that, regarding the matter historically, there have been ages when theology has been enveloped, not in the reverent regard to which it is entitled, but in clouds of mystery and superstition. A charter, raised by human thought and written by human hands in the vernacular, if it but related to religious doctrine, has been considered as more sacred than even a national constitution; the one utterly beyond handling, like a sacred ark; the other open to search, and study, and criticism; the one to be touched only with closed eyes, the key turned on all activities of reason, and in the dismal-swamp atmosphere of a mental condition called, in terrible insult to a noble word,

faith; the other open to reason, and conscience, and true faith, and reverence, and the absolute demands of truth; the one incapable of interpretation, excepting by prelates and councils, convened periodically and usually in the heat of some burning heresy, which is possibly to be "to-morrow's common sense"; the other always open to examination by a living judiciary, representatives of present views of truth and real wisdom which is always waiting for light.

This fact, growing out of human timidity, weakness, and wickedness, as well as out of the temporary limitation of man's spiritual being to the tenancy of a material body, and its ills, and aches, and dreams, is by no means yet dead in organized Christianity, although the Divine founder of Christianity was constantly shocking and rebuking it, not only by His omissions and silences, but by His life of word and deed.

There have always been two methods of construing things written or spoken, be they constitutions, charters, public statutes, wills, deeds, contracts, symbols, creeds, or statements. One method is broad, catholic, liberal. It reaches the underlying principles of the instrument. It notes relations. It does not destroy the dial because the shadows which were written on its west side in the morning are missing at noon, and have even gone over to the east in the afternoon. It notes fallibility in everything human, and sees that all human utterances are more or less imbued with inconsistency, want of harmony, and imperfection. But it still trusts human nature and human achievement and the Divine inspirations in man. It sees spots on the sun, but continues to plant, relying upon the source of heat, and to open its eyes for vision, relying upon the source of light. The other method is strict, narrow, literal, petty, sticks always in the bark, yellows in dust, and glories in punctuation and syntax. It sees things only by the light which struggles in through a single window. Universal light makes it blind. At night its torch must still be a tallow dip. Electricity would be impious. The former method contemplates systems, is comparative, analogical, feels outward facts and forces of which all things are more or less resultants. To it the moon is a satellite of a moving planet, that planet a single member of a solar system, and that system an integral part of a universe,

each with relations and changing relations to the rest. To the other the moon is ever only itself, a cold, blackened, worn out, uninhabitable lump of matter, answerable only to some laws of chemistry and philosophy, which are supposed to be unchangeable. But the moon itself is too far away for the latter method. While the former finds daily and nightly use for the telescope, the eye of the latter is always at the microscope.

The broad physician studies the whole physical system of man and searches the universe for analogies, and treats his patients constitutionally; the narrow one feeds his own hobby; sees in each patient a disordered liver, if that is his specialty, and indulges only in local treatment. The strict constructionist in our Lord's time swore by the temple and said his oath was nothing; but bowed in reverence before his oath if he had only sworn by the gold within it. Shylock was a strict constructionist, and Portia gave his philosophy homœopathic treatment by fighting the fire of his strict construction with the fire of her own. The difference was that Shylock believed in his strict method of construction, while Portia redeemed hers by the broad charity and decency which inspired it. The Pharisees were strict constructionists, they were scrupulously particular to tithe cheap herbs, and were immaculate in their vestments. And, whoever else, in the progress of the world's history have disappeared through an indefinite failure of issue, these strict constructionists have never lacked for lineal descendants in the governments, and churches, and theological schools of the world.

Here, then, it is submitted, is the proper solution of the Andover controversy, of the American Board question, and of the continually recurring dispute as to whether men, like Stanley, and Beecher, and Swing, are bound to come out of their several religious communions, which are loved by them, because they cannot accept all which has been included in the doctrines and traditions of these churches.

If a medical school, founded upon the philosophy of Galen and Abernethy has no room for the use of anæsthetics, or of such homoeopathic, hydropathic, and mind-cure remedies as experience demonstrates to be good, because these methods are outside of and even intrinsically different from the original

scope of the philosophy of Galen and Abernethy, although the general system of medical science remains unchanged, or, if religious creeds in seminaries or churches are fetiches, from which even the dust cannot be removed, then the critics of Prof. Smyth, and Mr. Beecher, and Dr. Hopkins are right. And what a mess they would make of it! According to their rules of strict construction, no one can believe in the Scriptures unless he supposes with some of its authors that the world is flat and the firmament solid; that lunatics and epileptics are possessed with intelligent devils; that our Lord intended to come back to earth in the life-time of the apostles and set up a visible kingdom. Nobody can accept Luther, or Pascal, or Wesley, or Newman, or Maurice as teachers without allegiance to the many mistakes of each of these great and good men. The world would be tied, as to an anchor, to the "letter " which kills, and prevented from inbreathing the Spirit which gives life. Col. Ingersoll's audiences would be multiplied by an hundred, and his wit, which is largely aimed at windmills, would be greeted with increased applause.

Lord Eldon, whose religious fervor was warmer when he sat on the bench passing upon a question of ecclesiastical privilege than when he sat in a pew at an offertory, and of whom Miss Martineau said that "it is fortunate for the noted ones of history that there is a wide difference between admiration and contempt," in the leading case of Attorney General vs. Pearsall, 3 Merrivale, 353, was required to construe a trust deed, under which a house had been erected "for the service and worship of God." In his opinion he elaborately argued and concluded that, because any other view of the Godhead than the Trinitarian view was heresy by the law of England, and because any one giving expression to the Unitarian view was punishable for heresy in court at the time the deed was made, the trust was therefore necessarily for Trinitarian worship. His Lordship's reasoning was characteristic of his mind, which trembled at every reform, and saw in it a downfall of Eng. land.

The argument of this article claims:

1. That a liberal construction of instruments is wiser and better than a strict one.