The proposed

revision.

ards than to assault the Bible. Hence it is that the Presbyterian Church has always sustained the brunt of the fight for the integrity of God's truth. "We gratefully acknowledge", said the Wesleyan Methodist Conference in its address to the Presbyterian Alliance," the faithful and unfaltering testimony which your Church has borne throughout her entire history on behalf of the divine inspiration and authority of the Word of God." Said the Baptist Association in its greeting to the same body: “ The Presbyterian Church has been the magnificent defender of the Word of God throughout the ages." Above all others, she has borne, bears now, and will continue to bear, on her name the odium, and upon her person the blows, provoked by and aimed against the Word of God. Humbly yet proudly she can say to her Lord, "The reproaches of them that reproached Thee fell on me."

Let no Presbyterian be alarmed over the proposed revision of the Confession of

Faith. In regard to marriage with a deceased wife's sister and the duties of civil magistrates the Confession has already been twice revised. But neither the past nor the proposed revision has impaired or will impair in any way the integrity of our Calvinistic system of doctrine.

The Revision Committee appointed in In the North1890 by the Northern Presbyterian Church ern Church. brought in after two years' deliberation a report recommending twenty-eight changes in the Confession. These pro

posed changes, most of them very slight, involved no reconstruction of the Confessional system of doctrine. This the proposed revision would not have changed; just as the Revised Version of the Scriptures has not changed the doctrinal system contained in the Authorized Version, which, by the way, is only thirty-six years older than our Confession.

The Northern General Assembly in the spring of 1900 appointed a large committee to consider again the question of re

In the Southern Church.

vision and report to the Assembly of 1901. Seven months later this Committee, having thoroughly examined the answers made by the Presbyteries at their fall meetings to the General Assembly's inquiry touching their attitude toward the question of revision, reported that while the returns" clearly indicated that the Church desired some change in its creedal statement, either by revision, or supplemental statement, or both, yet "the returns indicate plainly that no change is desired which would in any way impair the integrity of the system of doctrine contained in the Confession of Faith.”

The last Southern General Assembly was opposed to any change whatever in the Confession. It directed, however, that in future editions the following statement be printed as a foot-note to chap. x, paragraph 3: "The language of the Confession. cannot by any fair interpretation be construed as teaching that any of those who die in infancy are lost." Whether the or

dering by an Assembly of foot-notes to the Confession be a constitutional and wise procedure, future Assemblies will decide. As regards, however, the teaching of the Confession concerning the salvation of infants dying in infancy, the proposed footnote clearly expresses the unanimous judgment of the highest court of the Presbyterian Church.

Amid this revisional agitation the reader Not a quesshould never lose sight of the fact that the tion of orthodoxy. Confession is only one of our Standards. The Shorter Catechism, to say nothing of the Larger, is as soundly Calvinistic as the Confession, yet no revision of the Catechisms has ever been proposed or thought of. The question at issue, therefore, is not a question of orthodoxy, and no Presbyte-' rian need be alarmed for the integrity of that historic and Scriptural system on which and for which his Church has stood from the beginning, and will surely stand to the end.

i