Such are the Articles of the Church; believed by few, unknown to many, winked at by all, because religion is practically a matter of indifference to most, and while custom and fashion enforce conformity with the Church, the brain troubles not itself to analyse the claim, or to weigh the conditions of allegiance. Men have become so sceptical as to regard all creeds with indifference, and the half-conceived unbelief of the clergy, sighing with mental reservations, and formally asserting belief where the thought and the lips are at variance, appears to have eaten the heart out of all religious honesty in England, and men lie to God who would revolt at lying to man. If belief in the Articles is now a thing of the past, then the Articles should also pass away; if Churchmen have outgrown these dogmas, why do they suffer them to deface their Prayer-Book, to barb "the shafts of the sceptic, and to give power to the sneer of the scoffer?"
WISE men, in modern times, are striving earnestly and zealously to, as far as possible, free religion from the cramping and deadening effect of creeds and formularies, in order that it may be able to expand with the expanding thought of the day. Creeds are like iron moulds, into which thought is poured; they may be suitable enough to the way in which they are framed; they may be fit enough to enshrine the phase of thought which designed them; but they are fatally unsuitable and unfit for the days long afterwards, and for the thought of the centuries which succeed. "No man putteth new wine into old bottles, else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred; but new wine must be put into new bottles." The new wine of nineteenth century thought is being poured into the old bottles of fourth century creeds: and sixteenth century formulas, and the strong new wine-bursts the bottles, while the weak new wine that cannot: burst them ferments into vinegar in them, and often becomes harmful and poisonous. Let the new wine be poured into new bottles; let the new thought mould its own expression; and then the old bottles will be preserved unbroken as curious specimens of antiquity, instead of being smashed to pieces because they get in the way of the world. Nothing is more to be deprecated in a new and living movement than the formulating into creeds of the thoughts that inspire it, and the imposition of those creeds on those who join it. The very utmost that can be done to give coherency to a large movement is to put forward a declaration of a few cardinal doctrines that do not interfere with full liberty of divergent thought. Thus, Rationalists might take as the declaration of their central thought, that "reason is supreme," but they would be destroying the future of Rationalism if they formulated into a creed any of the conclusions to which their own reason has led them at the present time, for by so doing they would be stereotyping nineteenth century thought for the restraint of twentieth century thought, which will be larger, fuller, more instructed than their own. Freethinkers may declare as their symbol the Right to Think, and the Right to express thought, but should never claim the declaration by others of any special form of Freethought, before acknowledging them as Freethinkers. Bodies of men who join together in a society for a definite purpose may fairly formulate a creed to be assented to by those who join them, but they must ever remember that such creed will lose its force in the time to come, and that while it adds strength and point to their movement now, it also limits its useful duration, if it is to be maintained as unalterable, for as circumstances change different needs will arise, and a fresh expression of the means to meet those needs will become necessary. A wise society, in forming a creed, will leave in the hands of its members full power to revise it, to amend it, to alter it, so that the living thought within the society may ever have free scope. A creed must be the expression of _living thought_, and be moulded by it, and not the skeleton of dead thought, moulding the intellect of its heirs. The strength of a society lies in the diversity, and not in the uniformity, of the thought of its members, for progress can only be made through heretical thought, _i.e_., thought that is at variance with prevailing thought. All Truth is new at some time or other, and the fullest encouragement should therefore be given to free and fearless expression, since by such expression only is the promulgation of new truths possible.