Neither are we obliged to make these Articles more particular and minute than the Creed. For since the Apostles, and indeed our blessed Lord himself, promised heaven to them who believed him to be the Christ that was to come into the world, and that he who believes in him should be partaker of the resurrection and life eternal, he will be as good as his word. Yet because this article was very general, and a complexion rather than a single proposition, the Apostles and others our Fathers in Christ did make it more explicit: and though they have said no more than what lay entire and ready formed in the bosom of the great Article, yet they made their extracts to great purpose and absolute sufficiency; and therefore there needs no more deductions or remoter consequences from the first great Article than the Creed of the Apostles. Most true; but still the question returns, what was meant by the phrase 'the' Christ? Contraries cannot both be true. 'The Christ' could not be both mere man and incarnate God. One or the other must believe falsely on this great key-stone of all the intellectual faith in Christianity. For so it is; alter it, and everything alters; as is proved in Trinitarianism and Socinianism. No two religions can be more different;--I know of no two equally so. Ib. s. xii. p. 451. The Church hath power to intend our faith, but not to extend it; to make our belief more evident, but not more large and comprehensive. This and the preceding pages are scarcely honest. For Jeremy Taylor begins with admitting that the Creed might have been composed by others. He has no proof of that most absurd fable of the twelve Apostles clubbing to make it; yet here all he says assumes its inspiration as a certain fact. Ib. p. 454. But for the present there is no insecurity in ending there where the Apostles ended, in building where they built, in resting where they left us, unless the same infallibility which they had had still continued, which I think I shall hereafter make evident it did not. What a tangle of contradictions Taylor thrusts himself into by the attempt to support a true system, a full third of which he was afraid to mention, and another third was by the same fear induced to deny--at least to take for granted the contrary: for example, the absolute plenary inspiration and infallibility of the Apostles and Evangelists; and yet that their whole function, as far as the consciences of their followers were concerned, was to repeat the two or three sentences, that 'Jesus was Christ' (so says one of the Evangelists), 'the Christ of God' (so says another), 'the Christ the Son of the living God' (so says a third), that he rose from the dead, and for the remission of sins, to as many as believed and professed that he was the Christ or the Lord, and died and rose for the remission of sins. Surely no miraculous communication of God's infallibility was necessary for this.