but they are lightly esteemed.  They are not had up to a public trial and deposed, but they are treated, and spoken of, in such a way as to discourage men of their type from becoming preachers, and to encourage the other sort.  There are many qualifications that go to forming a good preacher; the holding of the creed of the body is only one.  Yet, with the exception of gross immorality or abandonment of duty, correctness of creed is the only one that is subjected to the extreme penalty of loss of office; the others are secured by different means.  Is it too much to infer that, without the extreme penalty, a reasonable conformity to the prevailing creed might also be secured?

[ELEMENT OF FEELING NOT SECURED.]

The importance of the element of feeling has been most perceived in times when the religious current was strongest.  At these times, its expression would not be hemmed in by rigorous formulas.  The first communication of religious doctrines has always partaken of a broad and free rendering; apparent discrepancies were disregarded.  To reduce all the utterances of the prophets and the apostles to definite forms and rigid dogmas, was to misconceive the situation.  We may well suppose that the New Testament writers would have refused to subscribe the Athanasian Creed or the Westminster Confession; not because these were in flat contradiction to Scripture, but because the way of embodying the religious verities in these documents would be repugnant to their ideas of form in such matters.  The creed-builders may have been never so anxious to give exact equivalents of the original authorities; yet their fine distinctions and subtle logic would have, in all probability, been ranked by Paul and Peter among the latter-day perversions of the faith.  The very composition of a creed would have been as distasteful to the first century, as it is incongruous to the nineteenth.

The evil operation of religious tests, and of the accompanying intolerance of the public mind as shown towards any form of dissent from the stereotyped orthodoxy, admits of a very wide handling.  It is of course the problem of religious liberty.  Some parts of the argument need to be reproduced here, to help us in replying to the objections against an unconditional abolition of compulsory creeds.

In conversing, many years ago, with the late Jules Mohl, the great Oriental scholar, professor of Persian in the College de France, I was much struck with his account of the nature of his duties as an expounder of the modern Persian authors.  These authors, for example the poet Sadi, were in creed adherents of the ancient Persian fire-worship, notwithstanding the Mohammedan conquest of their country.  They were, of course, forbidden to avow that creed directly; and in consequence, they had recourse to a form of composition by doubles entendres, veiling the ancient creed under Mohammedan forms.  Mohl’s business, as their expounder, was to strip off the disguise and show the true bearings of the writers, under their show of conformity to the established opinions.