A Catechism for Adults: I.—“I believe”

Extract

At first sight there is something arid about a creed. But a Christian ignores the creed at his peril. It is fatally easy to drift along in a tide of emotional devotion, and precisely because our devotion is not disciplined by the rule of faith, to become stranded on the sands of sentiment. No individual has sufficient balance or insight to receive the full content of revelation, and each individual tends to inject some personal bias into his formulation of the faith; the tendency is to interpret in terms of our own psychological structure and interests. This is seen even in the great Saints and Doctors of the Chinch, but they, since they are holy, accept the correction of their bias from the Church, and receive, within the Church, a life that complements their insufficiency. This is even more markedly the case when the individual is living on his religious emotions, on unregulated devotional responses, which, since they lack the defining and purifying influence of the creeds, very easily degenerate into mere superstition. No doubt faith can co-exist with superstition; but the thorns grow very fast, and can soon choke the good seed. It is a good rule which says that the more strongly the emotions are stirred, the more urgently credal definition is required. This is not to say that emotion, feeling and devotion do not play their part in religion. Of course they do, for Christ claims the whole person, and human feeling is used by the Holy Spirit as a way in to the furthest places of the soul.