Consensus Tigurimis, and the Confessionea Gallicana, Belgica, and Helvetica II. The Consensus Tigurimis, or " Consensio niutua " in re sacramentaria ininistrorum Tigurinse Ecclesiai et D. J. Calvini" was intended, as its title bears, to mediate betwixt the Zwinglian and the Genevese or Calvinian doctrine of the Sacraments. It was drawn up in 1549, and consisted of twenty-six articles. The Confessio Gallicana has been attributed, although doubtfully, to Calvin himself. It was accepted by a Reformed synod in France in 1559, and presented in the following year to Francis II. It A r as confirmed at a synod in Eochelle in 1571, and remained up to modern times the confession of the French Reformed Church. The Confessio Belgica is said to have been composed originally as a private document by Guido of Bres in 1562. First printed in French, it soon appeared in Dutch, and gradually gained such general acceptance among the con gregations in the Netherlands that it was confirmed at the Synod of Dort, 1618, as the confession of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Confessio Helvetica II. was drawn up by Bullinger in 1564, and held in great esteem not only by the Swiss churches but by the Reformed congregations of Poland, Hungary, and Scotland. The well-known Decrees of the Synod of Dort, printed in 1619, also claim to be added to the series, and a host of Catechisms, which also possessed more or less confessional authority the famous Heidelberg Catechism and the Genevese Catechism, amongst others. The Arminians had their Confessio or Declaratio, composed by Simon Episcopius about 1622, and the Sociniaus their Racovian Catechism, adopted, as the name
bears, at Racow in Poland in 1605.
4. To this long series of Protestant confessions there remain to be added the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, and the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is the doctrinal standard, not only of the Church of Scotland, but of the chief Presbyterian churches both in Britain and in America. The former were gradually prepared, chiefly it is said by Cranmer, and passed through various phases, beginning with the ten articles of 1536, and attaining the number of forty-two in 1552, till they were finally settled as thirty-nine (1562-1571). To this series of confessional documents also belong what are known as the Lambeth Articles, composed by Archbishop Whitgift in 1575, but which were never accepted as authoritative, and the Irish Articles, supposed to have been chiefly composed by Archbishop Ussher in 1615.
The Irish Articles form an appropriate transition to the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is said to have borrowed from the former some of its special phraseology. The Westminster document was the outcome of the great Puritan agitation of the 17th century, and as it is the last, so it is one of the most elaborate and finished of the long series of Protestant confessions. The Westminster Assembly met in the autumn of 1643, and sat for upwards of five years. The Confession of Faith was completed in the third year of its existence in 1646, and laid before the English Parlia ment in the same year. It never attained, to any position of legal authority in England. But in Scotland it was accepted in the year following its composition by the General Assembly of the Kirk, as " agreeable to the Word of God, and in nothing contrary to the received doctrine, worship, discipline, and government of this Kirk," aud two years afterwards, on the 7th February 1649, it was ratified and approved by the Estates of the Scottish Parliament. The Westminster Confession thus took the place in Scotland of the old Scoticana Confessio Fidei of John Knox. It retained this position of authority in 1690, when Presby- terianism was finally established in Scotland, and possesses, as we have said, symbolical authority, not only for Scottish Presbyterianism, but for the large Presbyterian churches in America and Australia which have sprung from it or own. connection with it. The Confession of Faith extends to thirty-three chapters, ranging over the most abstruse topics of theology ; and along with it are generally printed tho Larger and Shorter Catechisms, which have also been approved by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, but which do not possess the legal or statutory authority of the Confession.
The study of creeds and confessions in their theological import is known as the study of symbolical theology, a name familiar to all students of German theological litera ture. Winer s Confessions of Christendom (translated in Clark s Foreign Theological Library, 1873) and Matthes s Comparative Symlolik (Leipsic, 1853) are specimens of this branch of theological study. For the literature of the creeds with which the article has chiefly dealt, the student may be recommended to Luniby s History, more than once quoted, but above all to Dr Swainson s elaborate volume, to which we have also referred. A forthcoming work by Dr Schaff, in three volumes, entitled The Creeds of Christendom, ivitli a History and Critical Notes, will probably contain the most exhaustive discussion of the subject in English literature.
(j. t.)
CREEK INDIANS. See Indians.
CREFELD, or Krefeld, a town of Germany, capital of a circle of the same name, in the province of Diisseldorf, twelve miles north-west of the town of that name, 125 feet above the sea. This town is one of the finest in Rhenish Prussia, being well and regularly built, while the surround ing fertile district is almost entirely laid out in gardens. It is the most important seat of the silk and velvet manu factures in Germany, and in this industry the greater part of the population of town and neighbourhood is employed. There are upwards of 200 silk factories, and large quantities of silk goods are exported, chiefly to the United States. The other industries of the town, especially cotton and woollen weaving, are very considerable, and about 2000 gardens in the neighbourhood give employment to a large number of workers. The manufactures to which Crefeld owes its prosperity were introduced by religious refugees from the neighbouring duchy of Juliers about the close of the 17th century. Population (1875), 62,905.
CREMA, an ancient town of Lombardy, in the province of Cremona, on the right bank of the Serio and on the rail way from Eergamoto Cremona, twenty-five miles E.S.E. of Milan. Population (1871), 8154. It is well built in tho midst of a rich agricultural district, is inclosed by a ditch and old fortifications and has a castle, a cathedral (of date about 1400) and luunerous other churches, and several palaces. It has n;anufactures of lace, hats, thread, and silk ; and the vicinity produces excellent flax.
be said to have been the general practice of the ancient world, with the important exceptions of Egypt, where bodies were embalmed, Judaea, where they were buried in sepul chres, and China, where they were buried in the earth. -Iu Greece, for instance, so well ascertained was the law that only suicides, unteethed children, and persons struck by lightning were denied the right to be burned. At Rome, one of the XII. Tables said, " Hominem mortuum in urbo ne sepelito, neve urito ;" and in fact, from the close of the republic to the end of the 4th Christian century, burning on the pyre or rogus was the general rule.[1] Whether, in any of these cases, cremation was adopted or rejected for sanitary or for superstitious reasons, it is difficult to say.
Embalming would probably not succeed in climates less
- ↑ Macrobius says it was disused ill the reign of the younger Theodosius. (Gibbon, v. 411.)
