Atheist to mock at the patent absurdities of the official creed. But one
magnificent protest against this theological fantasy must have been
the work of a sincerely religious man, the cold superb humour of that
burlesque creed, ascribed, at first no doubt facetiously and then quite
seriously, to Saint Athanasius the Great, which, by an irony far beyond
its original intention, has become at last the accepted creed of the
church.

The long truce in the criticism of Trinitarian theology is drawing to
its end. It is when men most urgently need God that they become least
patient with foolish presentations and dogmas. The new believers are
very definitely set upon a thorough analysis of the nature and growth
of the Christian creeds and ideas. There has grown up a practice of
assuming that, when God is spoken of, the Hebrew-Christian God of Nicaea
is meant. But that God trails with him a thousand misconceptions and
bad associations; his alleged infinite nature, his jealousy, his strange
preferences, his vindictive Old Testament past. These things do not even
make a caricature of the True God; they compose an altogether different
and antagonistic figure.

It is a very childish and unphilosophical set of impulses that has led
the theologians of nearly every faith to claim infinite qualities for
their deity. One has to remember the poorness of the mental and moral
quality of the churchmen of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries who
saddled Christendom with its characteristic dogmas, and the extreme
poverty and confusion of the circle of ideas within which they thought.
Many of these makers of Christianity, like Saint Ambrose of Milan (who
had even to be baptised after his election to his bishopric), had been
pitchforked into the church from civil life; they lived in a time
of pitiless factions and personal feuds; they had to conduct their