Somebody asked Voltaire if you could kill a cow by incantations, and he answered, “Yes, if you use a little strychnine with it.”  And that would seem to be the attitude of the present-day Anglican church-member; he calls in the best physician he knows, he makes sure that his plumbing is sound, and after that he thinks it can do no harm to let the Lord have a chance.  It makes the women happy, and after all, there are a lot of things we don’t yet know about the world.  So he repairs to the family pew, and recites over the venerable prayers, and contributes his mite to the maintenance of an institution which, fourteen Sundays every year, proclaims the terrifying menaces of the Athanasian Creed: 

Whoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick faith.  Which faith, except one do keep whole and undefiled; without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.

For the benefit of the uninitiated reader, it may be explained that the “Catholick faith” here referred to is not the Roman Catholic, but that of the Church of England and the Protestant Episcopal Church of America.  This creed of the ancient Alexandrian lays down the truth with grim and menacing precision—­forty-four paragraphs of metaphysical minutiae, closing with the final doom:  “This is the Catholick faith:  which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.”

You see, the founders of this august institution were not content with cultured complacency; what they believed they believed really, with their whole hearts, and they were ready to act upon it, even if it meant burning their own at the stake.  Also, they knew the ceaseless impulse of the mind to grow; the terrible temptation which confronts each new generation to believe that which is reasonable.  They met the situation by setting out the true faith in words which no one could mistake.  They have provided, not merely the Creed of Athanasius, but also the “Thirty-nine Articles”—­which are thirty-nine separate and binding guarantees that one who holds orders in the Episcopal Church shall be either a man of inferior mentality, or else a sophist and hypocrite.  How desperate some of them have become in the face of this cruel dilemma is illustrated by the tale which is told of Dr. Jowett, of Balliol College, Oxford:  that when he was required to recite the “Apostle’s Creed” in public, he would save himself by inserting the words “used to” between the words “I believe”, saying the inserted words under his breath, thus, “I used to believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”  Perhaps the eminent divine never did this; but the fact that his students told it, and thought it funny, is sufficient indication of their attitude toward their “Religion.”  The son of William George Ward tells in his biography how this leader of the “Tractarian Movement” met the problem with cynicism which seems almost sublime:  “Make yourself clear that you are justified in deception; and then lie like a trooper!”