118 



CONFESSION. 



Tertullian, 

 A.U. £00. 



Grigen, 

 520. 



Apostles' 

 weed. 



the earliest document of this kind is to be found in the 

 writings of Irenaeus, who flourished towards the end of 

 tlie second century of the Christian sera. In his trea- 

 tise against heresies, (lib. i. cap. 2.) this father affirm?, 

 that " the faith of the church planted throughout the 

 whole world," consisted in the belief of " one God, the 

 Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and sea, 

 and all that are in them; and one Christ Jesus, the Son 

 of God, who became incarnate for our salvation ; and 

 one Holy Spirit, who foretold through the prophets, the 

 dispensations and advents, and the generation by the vir- 

 gin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, 

 and the ascension in the flesh into heaven, of Christ Je- 

 sus our beloved Lord, and his appearing from heaven 

 in the glory of the Father, to unite together all things 

 under one head, and to raise every individual of the 

 human race ; that unto Christ Jesus, our Lord and God, 

 and Saviour and King, every knee may bow and every 

 tongue confess : that he may pronounce just sentence 

 upon all." 



In various parts of Tertullian's writings similar state- 

 ments occur, which it is unnecessary particularly to 

 quote. We shall only remark, that in one of them, the 

 miraculous conception of Christ by the power of the 

 Holy Ghost is distinctly mentioned ; that in another, 

 he declares it to have been the uniform doctrine from 

 the beginning of the gospel, that Christ was born of 

 the virgin, both man and God, ex ea nalum hominem et 

 Detim ; and that in each of these, faith in the Father, 

 Son, and Spirit, is recognised as essential to Christian- 

 ity. The following passage we cite, for the purpose of 

 marking its coincidence with the Apostles' Creed, to 

 which Ave shall have occasion soon to advert. " This," 

 says he, " is the sole, immoveable, irreformable rule of 

 faith, viz. to believe in the only God Almighty, maker 

 of the world, and his son Jesus Christ, born of the vir- 

 gin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, the third day 

 yaised from the dead, received into heaven, now sitting 

 at the right hand of the Father, about to come and judge 

 the quick and the dead, by the resurrection also of the 

 flesh." Tertullian De Virg. pel. 



The summaries contained in the works of Origen, 

 nearly resemble the preceding ; any difference between 

 them being easily accounted for, from the tenets of the 

 particular heresies against which they were directed. 

 In his Commentary on John's Gospel he thus writes : 

 " We believe that there is one God, who created all 

 things, and framed and made all things to exist out of 

 nothing : We must also believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, 

 and in all the truth concerning his Deity and humani- 

 ty ; and we must likewise believe in the Holy Spirit, 

 and that, being free agents, we shall be pumshed for 

 the things in which we sin, and rewarded fo/ those in 

 which we do well." 



According to Cyprian, the formula, to which assent 

 was required from adults at their baptism, was in these 

 terms : " Dost thou believe in God the Father, Christ 

 the Son, the Holy Spirit, the remission of sins, and 

 eternal life, through the holy church ?" This was call- 

 ed by him Symboli Lex, the Law of the Creed ; and by 

 Novation, Regula Ventatis, the Rule of Truth. 



From these and similar sources, the different clauses 

 of what is commonly called the Apostles' Creed appear 

 to have sprung. For, though it was long believed to 

 be the composition of the apostles, its claims to such 

 an inspired origin are now universally rejected. Of 

 its great antiquity, however, there can be no doubt ; 

 the whole of it, as it stands in the English liturgy, ha- 

 ving been generally received as an authoritative con- 

 fession in the fourth century. Towards the end of that 



century, Rufinus wrote a commentary on it, which is 

 still extant, in which he acknowledges, that the clause 

 respecting Christ's descent into hell was not admitted 

 into the creeds either of the Western or the Eastern 

 churches ; and that the epithet " catholic," was not at 

 that time applied in it to the church. Its great sim- 

 plicity and conciseness, besides, prove it to have been 

 considerably earlier than the council of Nice, when the 

 heretical speculations of various sects led the defenders 

 of the orthodox faith, to fence the interests of religion 

 with more complicated and cumbrous barriers. 



The Roman or Western Confession, previous to the 

 fourth century, seems to have been the same with that 

 formerly quoted from Tertullian, with the addition of 

 the articles from the Baptismal Creed, concerning the 

 Holy Spirit, remission of sins, and the church. But 

 that of the Oriental churches, in consequence probably 

 of that philosophising spirit, which most unhappily in- 

 duced many of their divines to attempt the explana- 

 tion of subjects altogether beyond the reach of human 

 comprehension, employed various expressions with re- 

 gard to the divinity and filiation of Christ, which ap- 

 pear to have been for some time peculiar to itself, but 

 which were afterwards adopted in substance by the 

 Nicene fathers. 



In the celebrated council at Nice, in which Arianism was 

 not only condemned but proscribed, the confession esta- 

 blished as the universal standard of truth and orthodoxy 

 runs thus: "We believe in one God, Father Almighty, 

 Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and 

 invisible; and in one Lord Jesus, the only begotten Son 

 of God, begotten of the Father, or essence of the Father, 

 before all ages, God of God, Light of Light, true God 

 of the true God, begotten not made, con substantial or 

 coessential (opowrux;) with the Father ; by whom all 

 things were made ; who for us men, and for our salva- 

 tion, descended from heaven, and became incarnate by 

 the Holy Spirit, of the virgin Mary; and was made 

 man, was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, suffer- 

 ed, and was buried ; and rose again the third day ac- 

 cording to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, 

 and sits at the right hand of the Father, and will come 

 again with glory to judge the quick and the dead, of 

 whose kingdom there will be no end : And in the 

 Holy Spirit who spake by the prophets : And in one 

 holy, universal, and apostolical church. I confess one 

 baptism for the remission of sins. I expect the resur- 

 rection of the dead, and the life of the world to come." 



It were endless to specify the particular shades of dif- 

 ference by which the Arian confessions, (the number 

 of which amounted nearly to twenty in the space of a 

 very few years), were distinguished from each other. 

 Suffice it to say, that while they agreed generally in 

 substance, especially in rejecting the Nicene term 

 ifAowioi, as applied to the Son, their variations of ex- 

 pression concerning the nature of his subordination to 

 the Father, were so astonishingly minute, as almost to 

 bid defiance to any attempt which might be made, at 

 this distance of time, to determine in what then - real 

 and essential differences consisted. 



Macedonius having denied not only the divinity but 

 the personality of the Holy Spirit, maintaining that he 

 is only a divine energy diffused throughout the universe, 

 a general council was called at Constantinople, A. D. 

 381, in order to crush this rising heresy. The confes- 

 sion promulgated on this occasion, and which " gave 

 the finishing touch to what the Council of Nice had left 

 imperfect, and fixed in a full and determinate manner 

 the doctrine of the Trinity, as it is still received among 

 the generality of Christians," exactly coincides with -the 



Confesaan 

 Of Faih. 



Oriental. 



Roman 



Confessio'it 



Nicene, 

 A. D. 325, 



Arian. 





Constant^ 

 uopolitan, 

 A.D. 381. 





