argument against revision, satisfactory to myself—and I trust I do not stand anything like alone among the thousands of Israel in this—is that the Confession does not need revision.
Nevertheless, when it fell to my lot to set forth a statement of reasons why revision is not called for,[1] I did not confine myself to this one reason. There are other reasons equally valid; and I stated some of them, too. One of these is, that as office-bearers in the Presbyterian Church, we do not accept the Confession for its ipsissima verba, but only for its "system of doctrine"; and, therefore, so long as we cordially hold to its system of doctrine, we really have no stringent reason for revising it, even though we may fancy ourselves able to improve upon its forms of statement. This is a perfectly valid argument; and it has been proved to be worth stating by the circumstance that the majority of those who have advocated revision have been careful to say that they are not dissatisfied with the system of doctrine, or, indeed, with any one doctrine of the Confession, but are only desirous of changing some of its forms of statement. Now certainly it is worth while saying to these brethren that they have no grievance, that they have not accepted the Confession for more than the system of doctrine, and that seeing that they are not asked to assert that its forms of statement are absolutely perfect and incapable of improvement, they ought to think twice, or even thrice, before they enter into the unsettling path of revision, without prospect, or indeed possibility, of at all bettering their relation to it. I believe this to be, indeed, an absolutely unanswerable argument; one which takes away all color of real necessity for any of the revisions proposed by men who are sound in the faith.
