A Commentary on the Confession of Faith

This Commentary on the “Confession of Faith” consists of an analysis of its chapters and sections, with proofs and illustrations of its doctrines. It aims to bring out the natural and historically-established sense of the text. Its design is to stimulate and facilitate the study of this excellent body of Christian truth among theological students, Bible-class scholars, ruling elders and ministers. It was first published in 1869, and, having been circulated in Great Britain and Ireland as well as in America, the Board of Publication has been encouraged to issue a new edition.

Two appendices have been added to this edition. The first contains the statement of the representative theologians, Dr. Charles Hodge and Dr. Henry B. Smith, as to the sense in which the historical Presbyterian Church understands intrants into her ministry to accept the “Confession of Faith as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures;” in which understanding the two branches of the Presbyterian Church are thus shown to have been perfectly agreed. The second appendix contains the only two official explanations of the sense in which the Westminster Confession is understood by their respective denominations made by representative bodies — i. e. the “Auburn Declaration” in 1837 and the “Declarative Act” of the United Presbyterian Synod of Scotland in 1879.

In the mean time very much light has been thrown upon the Westminster Assembly and its proceedings by the labors of the Rev. Dr. A. F. Mitchell, professor of ecclesiastical history in St. Mary’s College, St. Andrews. In 1867 and 1874 he published with a learned introduction, the Minutes of the Westminster Assembly and his Baird lecture for 1882, The Westminster Assembly, its Histoiy and Standards. The new information, however, relates entirely to the sources from which the doctrine of our standards was drawn, and to the part performed by the several persons co-operating in their composition. It does not give occasion to the modification of a single interpretation advanced in this Commentary.

While the doctrine of this Confession is in perfect harmony with that of the Reformed divines of Holland and Switzerland, especially with the form their doctrine assumed after the rise of what has been called “the Covenant Theology,” nevertheless Dr. Mitchell shows that it is drawn almost entirely from British sources: “There was perhaps no branch of the mediaeval Church where the system of doctrine developed by Augustine had so unquestionably retained its old supremacy to the last as the Anglo-Norman. The system of its greatest theologians, Anselm and Bradwardine, appropriated by Wyclif and the Lollards, continued or revived by Tyndale, Frith, Barnes and their coadjutors, may be said to have formed the substratum of the Reformed teaching.” “With respect to the doctrine of the covenants, which some assert to have been derived from Holland, I think myself now, after careful investigation, entitled to maintain that there is nothing taught in the Confession which had not been long before in substance taught by Rollock and Howie in Scotland, and by Cartwright, Preston, Perkins, Ames and Ball in England. The remarkable treatise of Ball on The Covenant of Grace was published with recommendatory notices by Reynolds, Cawdrey, Calamy, Hill, Ashe and Burgess at the very time the Assembly began to frame its Confession.”

Dr. Mitchell proves that the Confession was conformed in the order of its chapters and the type of its doctrine more to the “Articles of the Irish Church” than to any other model. These were drawn up by Archbishop Ussher in 1615, when he was professor of divinity in Trinity College, Dublin. The correspondence of the Larger Catechism is also very striking with the Body of Christian Doctrine, a compilation attributed to Ussher when a youth, and circulated in the Westminster Assembly.

Princeton, N. J., June, 18S5.

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