THE COMING CREED

The creeds have gone, so speaks the age,

          The era of the sects is past. Forward!

In spite of saint or sage,

          True freedom has begun at last.

The Christ of God is now no more;

          The Christ of man now sits supreme;

The cross is part of mythic lore,

          The resurrection morn a dream.

The age's progress fears no God,

          No righteous law, no Judge's throne;

Man bounds along his new found road,

          And calls the Universe his own.

Not faith in God, but faith in man,

          Is pilot now, and sail, and oar:

The creeds are shrivelled, cold, and wan;

          The Christ that has been is no more!

Old truths, which once struck deep in hearts,

          Fights hard for life, but fights in vain;

Old error into vigor starts,

          And fable comes to life again.

Old misbelief becomes earth's creed;

          The falsehood lives, the truth has died;

Man leans upon a broken reed,

          And falls in helplessness of pride.

He spurns the hand that would have led,

          The lips that would have spoken love:

The Book that would his soul have fed,

          And taught the wisdom from above.

The ever-standing cross, to him,

          Is but a Hebrew relic vain;

The wondrous birth at Bethlehem

          A fiction of the wandering brain.

He wants no Saviour and no light;

          No teacher but himself he needs;

He knows not of a human night,

          Save from the darkness of the creeds.

Eternal light hide not Thy face;

          Eternal Truth, direct our way;

Eternal Love, shine forth in grace,

          Reveal our darkness and Thy day.

When Horatius Bonar wrote this hymn almost sixty-five years ago he spoke as a prophet. Not much of the present day modernistic apostasy was known in that day. This poem gives a true description of the liberal creed so universal in the Twentieth Century.