I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.

There was a time, twelve or thirteen years ago, when there was no such person as Bert Beelzebub Bubble, now monitor of row one; and, five or six years ago, when there was no such person as Bertha Belinda Bubble his sister, at the moment enjoying the Infants’ Catechism in the hall. There was even a time - though nothing will induce me to tell you how long ago that was - when there was no Father Wilson.

But there never was a time when there was not God. Genesis, the first book in the Bible, (it means “birth, source”) tells us how this world and the people and things in it began; but its first words say that God was before that. God never began {Exodus 3,14).

HE IS WITHOUT BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END.

One day God began to make this world and all that is in it. This is The Creation [to “create” means to “make something out of nothing”; a thing which only God Almighty (“all- mighty,” “able to do anything”) can do.

You can "make" things - a chair, a dress, a cricket-bat, a doll, a scooter, a picture of Father Wilson in Harold Lloyd spectacles . . . if you have the things to make them of. But God made heaven, angels, world, man, animals, trees, sunshine, water, air, out of nothing (Colossians 1, 16 and 17).

When God finished his work of The Creation he looked at it all, and everything was perfect {Genesis 1, 31). In this fair world of his, God never meant that there should be pain, illness, tears, cruelty, death, war; it is not God’s fault that they are in it, as I will try to explain to you next week.

I begin my Creed by saying that I believe in God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, our Father too because we have been baptised (St. John 20, 17), everybody’s Father by creation {Acts 17, 28).