still smell a rat in them; and the time has passed when Bunsen's Evangelical phrases could fascinate the Evangelicals. Such language, however, does also actual harm, because it proceeds from a misunderstanding and prolongs it. For it may be well to read between the lines of a man labouring with an experience he cannot utter; but to read between the lines of a notion-work is absurd, for it is of the essence of a notion-work not to need it. And the Athanasian Creed is a notion-work, of which the fault is that its basis is a chimæra. It is an application of the forms of Greek logic to a chimæra, its own notion of the Trinity, a notion unestablished, not resting on observation and experience, but assumed to be given in Scripture, yet not really given there. Indeed the very expression, the Trinity, jars with the whole idea and character of Bible-religion. But, lest the Unitarian should be unduly elated at hearing this, let us hasten to add that so too, and just as much, does the expression, a Great Personal First Cause.
Learned pseudo-science applied to the data of the Bible is best called plainly what it is,—utter blunder; criticism of the same order, and of which the futility will one day be just as visible, as that criticism about the two swords which some way back we quoted. To try to tinker such criticism only makes matters worse. The best way is to throw it aside altogether, and forget it as fast as possible. This is what the good of religion demands, and what all the enemies of religion would most deprecate. The hour for softening down, and explaining away, is passed; the whole false notion-work has to go. Mild defences of it leave on the mind a sense of the defender's hopeless inability to perceive our actual situation; violent defences read, alas! only like 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'
