“O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science, falsely so called; which some professing, have erred concerning the Faith.” 1 Tim. vi. 20, 21.
1 These words are addressed in the first place to the Ministers of the Gospel, in the person of Timothy; yet they contain a serious command and warning for all Christians. For all of us, high and low, in our measure are responsible for the safe-keeping of the Faith. We have all an equal interest in it, no one less than another, though an Order of men has been especially set apart for the duty of guarding it. If we Ministers of Christ guard it not, it is our sin but it is your loss, my brethren; and as any private person would feel that his duty and his safety lay in giving alarm of a fire or of a robbery in the city where he dwelt, though there were ever so many special officers appointed for the purpose, so, doubtless, every one of us is bound in his place to contend for the Faith, and to have an eye to its safe custody. If indeed the Faith of Christ were vague, indeterminate, a matter of opinion or deduction, then, indeed, we may well conceive that the Ministers of the Gospel would be the only due expounders and guardians of it; then it might be fitting for private Christians to wait till they were informed concerning the best mode of expressing it, or the relative importance of this or that part of it. But this has been all settled long ago; the Gospel Faith is a definite deposit,—a treasure, common to all, one and the same in every age, conceived in set words, and such as admits of being received, preserved, transmitted. We may safely leave the custody of it even in the hands of individuals; for in so doing, we are leaving nothing at all to private rashness and fancy, to pride, debate, and strife. We are but allowing men to “contend earnestly for the Faith once delivered to the Saints;” the Faith which was put into their hands one by one at their baptism, in a form of words called the Creed, and which has come down to them in that very same form from the first ages. This Faith is what even the humblest member of the Church may and must contend for; and in proportion to his education, will the circle of his knowledge enlarge. The Creed delivered to him in Baptism will then unfold, first, into the Nicene Creed (as it is called), then into the Athanasian; and, according as his power of grasping the sense of its articles increases, so will it become his duty to contend for them in their fuller and more accurate form. All these unfoldings of the Gospel Doctrine will become to him precious as the original articles, because they are in fact nothing more or less than the one true explanation of them delivered down to us from the first ages, together with the original baptismal or Apostles’ Creed itself. As all nations confess to the existence of a God, so all branches of the Church confess to the Gospel doctrine; as the tradition of men witnesses to a Moral Governor and Judge, so the tradition of Saints witnesses to the Father Almighty, and His only Son, and the Holy Ghost. And as neither the superstitions of polytheism, nor the atheistic extravagances of particular countries at particular times, practically interfere with our reception of the one message which the sons of Adam deliver; so, much less, do the local heresies and temporary errors of the early Church, and its superadded corruptions, its schismatic offshoots, or its partial defections in later ages, impair the evidence and the claim of its teaching, in the judgment of those who sincerely wish to know the Truth once delivered to it. Blessed be God! we have not to find the Truth, it is put into our hands; we have but to commit it to our hearts, to preserve it inviolate, and to deliver it over to our posterity.
This then is the meaning of St. Paul’s injunction in the text, given at the time when the Truth was first published. “Keep that which is committed to thy trust,” or rather, “keep the deposit;” turn away from those “profane emptinesses” which pretenders to philosophy and science bring forward against it. Do not be moved by them; do not alter your Creed for them; for the end of such men is error. They go on disputing and refining, giving new meanings, modifying received ones, still with the idea of the True Faith in their minds as the scope of their inquiries; but at length they “miss” it. They shoot on one side of it, and embrace a deceit of their own instead of it.
By the Faith is evidently meant, as St. Paul’s words show, some definite doctrine; not a mere temper of mind or principle of action, much less, vaguely, the Christian cause; and accordingly, in his Second Epistle to Timothy, the Apostle mentions as his comfort in the view of death, that he had “kept the Faith.” In the same Epistles he describes it more particularly as “the Form” or outline “of sound words,” “the excellent deposit;” phrases which show that the deposit certainly was a series of truths and rules of some sort (whether only doctrinal, or preceptive also, and ecclesiastical), and which are accurately descriptive of the formulary since called the Apostles’ Creed 2. And these same sacred truths which Timothy had received in trust, he was bid “commit” in turn “to faithful men,” who would be “able to teach others also.” By God’s grace, he was enabled so to commit them; and they being thus transmitted from generation to generation, have, through God’s continued mercy, reached even unto us “upon whom the ends of the world are come.”