resolved into our trusting Him, appealing to Him, seeking salvation in Him and finding all good things in Him. That is as much as to say that we exist but to glorify and enjoy Him. What is common to both forms of Calvin’s catechetical instruction is, thus, that they alike open with the declaration that men have been created for the very end of knowing God, and in knowing Him of glorifying Him, and in glorifying Him of finding their happiness in Him. Here is the root which has borne the fruit of the opening question of the Westminster Catechism.
The late Dr. A. F. Mitchell has, indeed, suggested that we may go behind even Calvin. “The first question or interrogation,” he says,[1] “which does not seem to have appeared in the former draft of the committee, is taken from the old English translation of Calvin’s Catechism, ‘What is the principal and chief end of man’s life?’” But the source of the answer to this question he does not consider so simple. “The answer to this question,” he suggests, “may be said to combine the answers to Question 3rd in the Catechisms of Calvin and Ames, ‘To have His glory showed forth in us’, and ‘in the enjoying of God’, and it may have been taken from them; or the first part may have been taken from Rogers, Ball, or Palmer, and the second from one of the earliest catechisms of the Swiss Reformation, viz., that of Leo Judae, published at Zürich before 1530”. If this answer goes back to a period before 1530, it goes, of course, behind Calvin, the earliest of whose Catechisms was not published before 1537, and the first edition of whose Institutes itself not before 1536.
It is quite tempting indeed to refer it to Leo Judae’s Latin Catechism, the citation from which given by Dr. Mitchell is strikingly like the Shorter Catechism definition. It runs as follows and Dr. Mitchell is fully justified in speaking of it as important in this connection: “Q. Tell me, please, for what end was man created? A. That we may recog-
- ↑ The Westminster Assembly, etc. (Baird Lecture for 1882), ed. 2, Philadelphia, 1897, p. 432.
