The Christian Creed - Tapa blanda

THERE are many students of Theosophy who have been, and indeed still are, earnest Christians; and though their faith has gradually broadened out into unorthodoxy, they have retained a strong affection for the forms and ceremonials of the religion into which they were born. It is a pleasure to them to hear the recitation of the ancient prayers and creeds, the time-honoured psalms and canticles, though they try to read into them a higher and wider meaning than the ordinary orthodox interpretation. I have thought that it might be of interest to such students to have some slight account of the real meaning and origin of those very remarkable basic formulae of the Church which are called the Creeds, so that when they hear them or join in their recital the ideas brought into their minds thereby may be the grander and nobler ones originally connected with them, rather than the misleading materialism of modern misapprehension. I have spoken of the ideas originally connected with them; I ought perhaps rather to say the ideas connected with the ancient formula upon which all the most valuable portion of them is based. For I do not mean to say for a moment that any large number of the members, or even of the leaders, of the Church which now recites these Creeds have for many a century known their true meaning. I do not even claim that the ecclesiastical councils which edited and authorized them ever realized the full and glorious signification of the rolling phrases which they used; for much of the true meaning had already been lost, much of the materializing corruption had been introduced, long before those unfortunate assemblies were convoked.