PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
The call for a new edition of this work in less than a year after its publication is an agreeable surprise to the author, and fills him with gratitude to the reading public and the many reviewers, known and unknown, who have so kindly and favorably noticed it in American and foreign periodicals and in private letters. One of the foremost divines of Germany (Dr. Dorner, in the Jahrbüher für Deutsche Theologie, 1877, p. 682) expresses a surprise that the idea of such an oecumenical collection of Christian Creeds should have originated in America, where the Church is divided into so many rival denominations; but he adds also as an explanation that this division creates a desire for unity and co-operation, and a mutual courtesy and kindness unknown among the contending parties and schools under the same roof of state-churches, where outward uniformity is maintained at the expense of inward peace and harmony.
The changes in this edition are very few. The literature in the first volume is brought down to the present date, and at the close of the second volume a fac-simile of the oldest MSS. of the Athanasian Creed and the Apostles' Creed is added.
P. S.
NEW YORK, April, 1878.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
This edition differs from the second in the following particulars:
1. In the first volume several errors have been corrected (e.g., in the statistical table, p. 818), and a list of new works inserted on p. xiv.
2. In the third volume a translation of the Second Helvetic Confession has been added, pp. 831 sqq.
P. S.
New York, December, 1880.
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION.
The call for a fourth edition of this work has made it my duty to give the first volume once more a thorough revision and to bring the literature down to the latest date. In this I have been aided by my young friend, the Rev. Samuel M. Jackson, one of the assistant editors of my "Religious Encyclopædia." The additions which could not be conveniently made in the plates have been printed separately after the Table of Contents, pp. xiv-xvii.
The second and third volumes, which embrace the symbolical documents, remain unchanged, except that at the end of the third volume the new Congregational Creed of 1883 has been added.
Creeds will live as long as faith survives, with the duty to confess our faith before men. By and by we shall reach, through the Creeds of Christendom, the one comprehensive, harmonious Creed of Christ.
P. S.
New York, May, 1884.
The fifth edition was a reprint of the fourth, without any changes.
PREFACE TO THE SIXTH EDITION.
Since the appearance of the Creeds of Christendom, 1877, no work has been issued competing with it in scope and comprehensiveness. The valuable collection of W. W. Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism, 1893, and W. J. McGlothlin, Baptist Confessions of Faith, 1911, are limited to separate Protestant bodies. The extensive collection of Karl Müller, 1903, is confined to the creeds and catechisms of the Reformed Churches. Professor W. A. Curtis of the University of Edinburgh, in his History of the Creeds and Confessions of Faith in Christendom and Beyond, gives the contents of creeds and an account of their origins, not their texts. C. Fabricius, in his Corpus confessionum, etc., 1928, sqq., proposes in connexion with colaborers to furnish not only the texts of the Christian creeds, but also the texts of hymns, liturgies, books of discipline, and other documents bearing on Christian doctrine, worship, and practice. For example, 250 pages of Volume I are devoted to hymns, and 250 pages to "The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1924."
The new material of the present edition is the following:
Volume I. Additions to the literature; notices of the Church of the Disciples and the Universalist and Unitarian Churches; and changes and additions, as, for example, on the primitive creeds and the Russian Church.
Volume II. In the fourth edition Dr. Schaff, in view of the new importance given in Canon Law to papal utterances on doctrine and morals, added one of the important encyclicals of Leo XIII., who was then living. To this encyclical have been added bulls on the Church, by Boniface VIII., 1302, Anglican Orders, by Leo XIII., 1896, "Americanism" and "Modernism" by Pius X., 1907-10, and Pius XI.'s encyclical on Church Union, 1928.
Volume III. Additions giving Recent Confessional Declarations and Terms of Union between Church organizations. The material on the latter subject, so closely akin to the general topic of the book, makes it quite probable that Dr. Philip Schaff, in view of his pronounced attitude on Church fellowship and union, would have included it, were he himself preparing this edition of the Creeds of Christendom.
David S. Schaff.
Union Theological Seminary
New York, January, 1931