MUCH of each church creed is only an indication to the world as to what part of the Bible the makers of it had canvassed. When a ship anchors at New York, and begins to unload a cargo of oranges and pine-apples you perceive at once that that vessel does not come in from all nations, from Greenland and England, and Germany, but from some island or port in the southern sea. It is thus in the world of theology. When you pick up a confession of faith of any church and read a few pages, you perceive at once that the book has not come in from all the great Bible of the Almighty, but that this particular ship has received its cargo from Dort, or Nice, or Geneva. Far be it from you, I hope, to despise these human compendiums of truth, for a book is valuable if, in condensed form, it makes only a tolerable estimate of the divine truth; for going to the Bible yourself alone you would not be able to deduce so full or true a philosophy of life and salvation. When the Westminster Assembly sat in council for four years, it is fairly presumable that they summed up the doctrines of the Bible as would have been impossible to the world that stood in vast multitude without. Hence it would be folly and vanity not to confess the value of their great digest. But after all this admiration, we know that creeds are not the places where divine wisdom fully expresses itself, but are the places where the mind fails, places where the mind gives up and seeks rest. The creed of the Baptist only informs us where the student paused; and the creed of the Fatalist only tells us what verses he read. Thus all these compendiums are marks set up to tell us where the toiler quit work.—David Swing.