This distinction has another advantage. It alone permits the Christian

thinker to be equitable in his judgments in regard to all religious

forms, to place himself at a truly historical point of view, and to

reconcile, without weakness and without violence, what is due to truth

and what to charity. Every sincere endeavour to express or to realise

Christianity in a system or in a church becomes respectable so soon as

you know how to discover in it, under formulas however strange and

practices however gross, some effects of the Christian principle or

some signs of its presence. If disdain and contempt are not

permissible with regard to any type of Christianity however different

from our own, neither is illusion to be tolerated with regard to our

own church or to our personal piety. Perfection is nowhere to be

found. Each community may repeat, and the larger, older, and more

numerous it becomes the more will it need to repeat, the words of the

Apostle Paul: "Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended," etc.

(Phil. iii. 13, 14). The habit we have got into of putting all the

truth on our side and all error on the side of others, of thus opposing

light and darkness, not only falsifies the judgment; it sours the heart

and poisons piety, it dries up the feeling of fraternity, and is the

perpetual sign of individual or collective vanity. Let each examine

himself, let him judge his church without complacence in the light and

spirit of Christ; he will soon attain to more humility and truth. He

will never identify any particular church or its dogma with

Christianity itself. However pure its teaching, however generous its

deeds, he will reckon that this is, after all, but a commencement of

Christianity, a mere nothing compared with what the Christian principle

should have accomplished in the world in eighteen centuries.

Such is the feeling with which we should approach the history of

Christianity. The field is vast; the vegetation in it is infinite; we

must content ourselves with incompleteness. Being neither able nor

desirous to say everything, I have been obliged to seek a commanding

point of view from which it would be possible to take in that history

in its entirety, and to take a bird's-eye view of the course it has

followed. Faithful to this idea, namely, that the Christian principle

is like leaven or a seed thrown into a gross, heavy mass of anterior

traditions which it was meant gradually to raise and to transform, it

is this struggle and this progress that I desire especially to

describe. I shall endeavour to show how Christianity, always borrowing

its forms from the environment in which it realises itself, after

enduring them for a time, subsequently frees itself from and triumphs

over the inferior and temporary elements which fetter it, and manifests

from age to age a greater independence and a purer and higher

spirituality. This progress is slow, obscure, oft interrupted,

hindered by reactions or by moments of arrest; none the less striking,

however, does it appear when, rising above these secondary

complications, one measures the distance between the points of

departure and arrival. Not only has Christianity never been better

understood than in our own day, but never were civilisation or the soul

of humanity taken in their entirety more fundamentally Christian. When

one follows the history of Christianity from this higher point of view,

one sees that it has passed through three very distinct phases and

assumed three essentially different forms: the Jewish or Messianic, the

Graeco-Roman or Catholic, the Protestant or modern, form. Let us see

how it has passed from the one to the other.

2. _Jewish, or Messianic Christianity_

The first of these periods is usually omitted or suppressed. Being

unable to admit that Catholicism is not the work of Christ and the

apostles, or that the Church has varied its dogma or its institutions,

Catholic theologians naively imagine that the first Christian

communities of Jerusalem and Antioch resembled those of Rome, Milan,

and Lyons in the fourth century; that Peter was the first of the popes

and exercised for five-and-twenty years the supreme pontificate; that

the apostles appointed bishops everywhere as their successors and the

heirs of their power. In this way the history of Christianity became,

in the Catholic tradition, a tissue of legends.

The theologians of Protestantism arrived by another road at an

analagous conclusion. Under the influence of the dogma of the verbal

inspiration of the New Testament, they were led to make of apostolic

Christianity an ideal and abstract type which all the ages ought to

force themselves to imitate and reproduce. And, as they profess to

have returned to this type both in regard to ideas and to institutions

and morals, they have made of this apostolic period the first chapter

of the history of Protestantism, just as the Catholics have made of it

the first chapter of the history of Catholicism. In both cases, it

loses all distinct physiognomy and all reality.

By dissipating these prejudices, historical criticism has completely

resuscitated that first form of Christianity. It is no longer possible

to confound it with any other. It had its contrasts, its passions, its

storms. Neither Jesus nor the apostles lived in the ideal or in

paradisiacal peace. They quarrelled and were divided in the Church of

Jerusalem as in our own. The subjects of the quarrels were different,

but they did not consider them less grave than those which vex and

trouble us. Peter, James, and Paul were not less divided in the first

century over the question of circumcision and of the relations between

Jews and Gentiles, than were Luther, Zwingle, and Calvin in the

sixteenth over the doctrine of the Lord's Supper. From both camps,

then as now, they sent forth pamphlets and anathemas. There were two

opposite parties. There were the stubborn holders of tradition and its

authority, and there were the innovators, or the partisans, sometimes

as rash as they, of liberty of faith and individual inspiration; and

between the two there were the men of conciliation and the golden mean

who were preoccupied especially in preventing schisms and arranging

truces and treaties of peace, to be followed in their turn by new

crises and fresh storms.

In this first form of Christianity, as in all that have followed it,

there was a certain dualism, a mixture of heterogeneous and soon

hostile elements. The struggle was bound to arise between the

Christian principle and Jewish tradition. The new seed sown in that

ancient soil could not germinate without rising in it and in places

breaking up the thick hard crust. In the books of the New Testament

that have preserved to us the picture of that first and powerful

germination, side by side with the principle to which belongs the

future we necessarily find old things which are on the way to death.

It will be seen what an error they commit and what a wrong they do

themselves who, misconceiving this historical complexity, sanctify and

deify both these opposite elements, and place on the same level the

eternally fruitful grain, and the chaff to-day dried up and utterly

inert, a mere remnant of the Jewish stalk that bore it.

Conceived in this religious matrix of Judaism, the Christian principle,

if I may so speak, could only take in it a body essentially Jewish in

structure, substance, colour. I only speak, of course, of the body of

this primitive Christianity, not of its soul, which, as I have shown,

was altogether new. Now, its body was Jewish on two sides and in two

aspects: by the persistence of the authority of the Law of Moses, and

the practical observance of its precepts, from which the disciples of

Jesus did not dream of detaching themselves; and, secondly, by the

apocalyptic Messianism which dominated Jewish thought from the time of

the Maccabees, and with which the first Christians were perhaps more

imbued and more possessed than all the rest of their people.

Faith in the evangel of Jesus, full and joyful communion with the

Father, habits of Jewish devotion, Messianic hopes,--all this formed,

in the consciousness of the first disciples, a mixture of various

elements and of things of very unequal value. These elements, in

gradually revealing their disparate nature, could not fail to enter

into contradiction and to engender conflicts in the very heart of

apostolic Christianity. It was these contradictions and conflicts

which set Christian thought in movement, and produced the life and

progress of that early age, so that one may always rightly consider it

as a creative and classic epoch, and hold it up as a normal example to

the churches of all time; on condition, however, that it be not

considered as an immutable mass of eternal verities, but taken in its

natural movement, in its constant effort of progressive enfranchisement

with regard to the past, in its heroic ascent towards religious forms

and ideas, freer, more human, more conformed to the universal

character, to the spirituality, and to the pure morality of the

religion of Jesus.

"What, then," it will be said, "did not the Christ set His disciples

free at the outset from all the errors and superstitions of the past?

Did He not at once give them perfect dogmas, a completed form of

worship, an immutable and completed system of ethics?" No; Jesus did

nothing of the kind. So far from formally and systematically

criticising the traditional religion of His people, so far from making

_ex cathedra_ that selection which the vulgar looked for, Jesus

expressly refused it, as a method essentially false and irreligious.

He did not wish to abolish anything by mere authority; He preferred

rather to confirm the tradition in its totality, of which He was the

heir and not the executioner. "Think not that I am come to destroy the

Law or the Prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil" (Matt. v.

17).

His method was quite different. It was the method of the sower to whom

He loved to compare Himself. In the furrow made by His word in the

ancient soil of Judaism, He quietly and gently deposited new germs. In

the traditional and theocratic notions of His race He placed contents

altogether different drawn from His own religious experience, and from

the sense of His filial relation to the Father. He then left time to

do its work, to develop one after another the consequences of the

principles He had planted in human souls. He sowed, and He and others

reap from age to age the harvest He has sown.

Consider His attitude towards the Law of Moses. Not a jot or tittle of

it is to fail or be neglected. He strengthens it rather than relaxes

its claims; He deepens it, carries it inward, makes it infinitely more

spiritual and searching. He gathers it up into two great commandments,

and constrains the Law itself, if I may so speak, to surpass itself and

transform itself into pure evangelical morality. That is what He meant

by declaring that His work would be the fulfilment of the Law. Nothing

was less violent; but nothing, at bottom, was more revolutionary....

It is easy now to see the consequences of this method; history has

revealed them. But those who heard the words of Jesus could not

perceive these consequences. They had no idea probably that the day

would come when to be faithful to the Master they would be obliged to

break with Moses. They did not suddenly break with Judaism. Indeed,

they had found in their new faith new motives for fervour and

exactitude in their Mosaic piety. The first Christians in Jerusalem

were honoured of all the people because of their assiduity in the

Temple worship and for their exemplary devotion. They are therefore

not enfranchised yet; they will have to free themselves from Judaism in

the school of events into which they will be led by the Spirit of Jesus

that is with them and dwells in them. The Christian principle will

have to reconquer its independence of the Judaism which dominates and

hems them in on every side. This will be the work of more than a

century of conflict and controversy. All Christians will not enter

into the movement with the same decision; they will not march abreast

on the path of liberty. Many will be stupid and turn back. Progress

would not have been made if the Divine Spirit that had raised up Jesus

had not raised up valiant men like Stephen, Saul of Tarsus, Barnabas,

the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and that of the Fourth

Gospel, to carry on the struggle against the bondage of Judaism and

carry it to complete victory. When you pass from the one to the other,

from the discourse of Stephen to the Epistle to the Galatians, from the

Epistle to the Romans to the Johannean theology, you clearly see the

march of progress. At the end of the first century Christianity is so

independent of national and traditional Judaism that the one treats the

other, without any further scruple, as an alien and hostile religion.

More adhesive still to the Christian principle, less easy to strip off,

was the second Jewish wrappage, apocalyptic Messianism. Jesus had so

thoroughly consecrated it by calling Himself the Messiah and by

inaugurating the kingdom of God, that His Gospel might be named a

"Christian Messianism." In His discourses He seems to have confirmed

it still more expressly than the Law of Moses. No doubt He proceeded

in both cases alike. In all the theocratic notions which constituted

this popular Messianism, He lodged a new content, a religious and moral

element which must, in the long run, make them burst their trammels and

elevate Messianism above itself. But He did not bring to it any

negative and abstract criticism, any more than He did to the divers

parts of the Mosaic tradition; He never said either that it must be

abandoned or that it must be retained; He deposited in it the new

principle; but He left in it many obscurities, abandoning to time and

to the force of things the care of drawing forth the consequences and

clearing up confusions.

For His own part He wished simply to maintain intact beneath these

apocalyptic forms the principle and the inspiration of His inward

piety. It was in accordance with these that He interpreted the popular

beliefs, adapting them with a perfect sovereignty to the moral aim and

nature of His work. As with the Mosaic Law, so with Messianism; He is

its Master, not its slave. He uses it, but does not abandon Himself to

it. These hopes never trouble the clearness of His religious vision;

they do not take away His self-possession, or alter the direction,

always exclusively moral, of His acts. He accepts the title of

Messiah, but only after substituting the idea of the suffering and

humiliated for the national and triumphant Messiah. If He preaches the

kingdom of God, He takes care to explain the conditions and the true

goods of the kingdom--humility, repentance, childlike confidence,

righteousness, disinterested love, the joy of serving God and man. He

leaves to men of the flesh the pomp and splendour which dazzle the eyes

of the flesh. He admires the grandeur of John the Baptist more than

that of Herod. The kingdom of God will not come with ostentation. It

will begin like an unseen seed that a man puts into the ground.

At the outset of His work Jesus encountered a mysterious temptation.

This was the conflict of His consciousness with the seductions of the

popular Messianism. He triumphed over it with difficulty; but

thenceforth He was always on His guard in that direction. Is it not

remarkable that this very temptation returned to Him through the mouth

of Peter? Jesus treats as Satan the first of His apostles, and refers

to the devil in person and the prince of darkness suggestions of this

nature which tend to make Him deviate from the road marked out by the

inspiration of His heart. He avoids the title Messiah until the day

when He is able to join with it the image of the Cross. He disdains

the title, "Son of David," preferring to all others that of "Son of

Man," a title that was not open to the same mistakes. On this road of

renunciation He must sacrifice not only His ease, His joys, and His

repose, but also, at each step, some of the beliefs of Israel, and some

of the glories of the Messiah. He never hesitates. His people reject

Him, and He turns to His Father and says to Him: "Even so, Father, for

so it seemed good in Thy sight." He agonises in Gethsemane, the

Messiah agonises in Him, and He prays thus: "Father, not My will, but

Thine be done."

Hence comes His freedom of spirit, the elevation of His view in the

interpretation of events, as also His pious and trustful reserve in

face of the enigmas and obscurities that His glance cannot penetrate.

John the Baptist is beheaded in prison: singular destiny for that

formidable Elijah who was to inaugurate by thunder and lightning the

Messianic era, the dream of all patriots! Is Jesus offended by it?

Does He hesitate to declare that John at that very moment is "the Elias

which was for to come"? What a defiance to the oracles of the popular

Messianism! When the sons of Zebedee desire Him to reserve for them

the foremost places in His future kingdom, He merely speaks to them of

the baptism of martyrdom, and teaches them that they must leave such

things at the disposal of the Father. No doubt, He never contradicts

apocalyptic predictions; on the contrary He applies to Himself all the

promises of glory and of triumph; but always in subjection to the

Father's will. Asked as to the date of the Messiah's advent, He

answers that He does not know, that they must observe the blossoms on

the fig-tree and the signs of the times around Himself; that they must

watch and pray, possess their souls in patience, and abandon to the

Father the decisions of which He keeps the impenetrable secret.

I speak of freedom of interpretation and of pious reserve, not of

hypocritical and sceptical accommodation. We cannot doubt that Jesus

accepted at the outset, and shared, at bottom, the Messianic beliefs in

which He had been trained like all the children of His race. That His

disciples, in reporting His discourses on this point, exaggerated and

materialised them, need not be denied. But, on the other hand you can

hardly explain the unanimity of the earliest Christian tradition in

expecting His return upon the clouds if Jesus had professed entirely

opposite ideas. After all, is there anything more astonishing in His

sharing on this matter the hopes of His time than in the fact of His

having explained certain mysterious maladies as His contemporaries did

by demoniacal possession, or of His attributing Psalm cx., as did

certain of the rabbis, to King David; to the first Isaiah the work of

the second, and to Moses the redaction of the Pentateuch? These

current and traditional ideas, however, which came to Him, not from

heaven, but from His race and His environment, never succeeded in

corrupting the immutable purity of His inner piety or in falsifying the

divine inspirations of His heart. Whenever there was contradiction

between the Messianic beliefs or the Law of Moses, on the one hand, and

the consciousness of Jesus, on the other, it was not the latter but the

former that gave way and were transformed.

The disciples were not so free as the Master. Their faith remained a

long time bound to these hopes of the future. Why had they left all

and followed Him but because He had appeared to them to be the bearer

and the depository of the divine promises? His death, which seemed to

belie their beliefs, only served to give them another turn. They

corrected prophecy. Instead of one Advent of the Messiah they imagined

two, the first in humiliation, the second in glory. The one having

been realised, they expected the other with a more ardent confidence.

No one doubted it was near. The apostle Paul lived in this hope as

well as the author of the _Apocalypse_, the compilers of the synoptic

gospels, and the editors of "The Teaching of the Apostles." The time

is short: the Master comes: _Maranatha_. This was the watchword of all

the early Christians. This faith in the imminent return of Christ and

of the end of the world dominates all the thoughts as well as the

feelings of the apostles: it determines and colours their Christology,

their theory of Redemption, their ethics, their idea of salvation, so

that to expound their writings and estimate the worth of their

reasonings, the historian must always read them and explain them in

this light. It is for this reason that their Christianity merits the

name of Messianic, and could not be, in this Jewish form, an absolute

_norm_ for all the ages.

The disciples of Jesus, however, found themselves in a school in which

they could not perpetually mistake the lessons. The Christian

principle had appeared to be at one with Messianism; it was something

altogether different and could not continue for ever to be mixed up

with it. Under the contradiction of events and the action of the

spirit of Jesus, they soon began to see the dawn of a process of

spiritualisation in their apocalyptic beliefs. This progress is

manifest in the letters of St. Paul when read in their order and with

attention. In the first, he hopes before he dies to witness the advent

of the Lord. But, from the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, the

image of death and martyrdom begins to interpose itself between his

faith and that glorious ideal, which evermore seems to recede into the

future. It never entirely disappears, but this preoccupation with the

return of Jesus diminishes and occupies a smaller space in his later

epistles. On the contrary, the work of Jesus, considered in the past

and in its redemptive efficacy, the Christian life conceived as a life

of faith and love, as an imitation of Jesus Christ and an inheriting of

His Spirit, receive ever-increasing developments. Insensibly, the

centre of gravity of apostolic Christianity changes; from the

hypnotising contemplation of the Messianic future, it passes to the

sanctifying meditation on the passion of Christ, on His teaching, and

redeeming work. This is best seen in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and

in the Fourth Gospel, in which the Jewish Messiah is transformed into

the eternal _Logos_, the light of all men here below, and the principle

of the universal religion.

The work of emancipation that men alone could not accomplish, God

Himself achieved. The conquests of the Church in the Empire, and

especially the double and irreparable ruin of Jerusalem and the Jewish

nation under Titus and under Hadrian, opened on the future other

prospects. The world continued. It was necessary to settle down and

live in it. Montanism was merely a last outburst of fever. By the end

of the second century, Jewish Messianism was so nearly dead that its

obstinate adherents were regarded as heretics by the Church at large.

Organised into a hierarchy, the Church substituted itself resolutely

for the ancient people of Israel, and represented itself as heir to the

ancient promises. The advent of the kingdom of God becomes the advent

and the victory of the Catholic Church over all the other powers of

earth. The Messianic Theocracy is transformed into a Church Theocracy.

Messianism gives place to Catholicism.

3. _Catholic Christianity_

Transplanted from the poor and arid soil of Hebraism into the rich and

fruitful loam of Graeco-Roman civilisation, the Christian plant was

sure to grow apace and be transformed. Catholicism is as much Pagan as

Apostolic Messianism was Jewish--from the same causes, and according to

the same law. More Greek in the East, more Roman in the West, it bears

always and everywhere the traces of its origin. Study successively all

the features of the Catholic Church, and you will find on each of them

this indelible mark.

The dogmas of the Councils and the theology of the Fathers, who does

not see at the first glance their true character? Who does not see

that the material is Greek in form, in colour, in every fibre of its

tissue? Whence came those terms and notions, of which Hebraism knew

nothing, but which the theologians of all the schools will henceforth

bandy to and fro--those abstract concepts, substance and hypostasis,

nature and person, essence and accident, matter and form? Whence came

the science of the Fathers of the Church, their exegesis, their

history, their logic, their psychology, and that lofty metaphysic which

has so completely transformed the Prophetic into a Platonic firmament?

All this came from Athens, Ephesus, Samos, and Miletus, _via_

Alexandria and Rome. The Justins, the Athenagorases, the Clements and

the Basils, Athanasius even more than Arius, Jerome as well as

Augustine, had been nourished from their childhood on Greek and Latin

literature. They had read Plato, Heraclitus, Zeno, Philo, Cicero,

Posidonius, and Seneca as much and more perhaps than the Old Testament.

What is there astonishing in the fact that their theology should have

followed step by step the theology of neo-Platonism until this latter,

for Augustine, should have become the true introduction to the Gospel,

and that in the Middle Ages the names of Plato and Aristotle should

have been invested with an authority not less than those of Isaiah, St.

Paul, and St. John?

Or shall we pass to the constitution of the Church? What is that but

the exact counterpart of the constitution of the Roman Empire: the

parish modelling itself on the municipality, the diocese on the

province, the metropolitan regions on the great prefectures, and, at

the top of the pyramid, the bishop of Rome and the papacy, whose ideal

dream is simply, in the religious order, the universal and absolute

monarchy of which the Caesars had first set the pattern? Or would you

consider the moral life and the type of piety? It is true that at the

outset, and so long as the persecutions continued, there is a great

contrast between Jewish or Christian morals and manners and those of

Roman or Greek society. But, with time, the contrast is singularly

attenuated. If the Church conquered the world, the world had its

revenge within the Church. What is that monkish asceticism imposing

celibacy on the clergy, exalting virginity, multiplying pious works of

merit, and replacing, by factitious and sterile duties, the duties

dictated by nature and essential to society,--what are all these but

survivals of a dualism and the imitation of an ideal which, come from

the East, seduced the feverish imagination of an expiring world? The

monks, the anchorites and their theology of impotent celibates, did

they save Egypt, Syria, and Byzantium?

During this time, what did worship, adoration, religion, properly

speaking, become? Between earth and heaven there reappeared the whole

ancient hierarchy of gods and demi-gods, of heroes, nymphs, and

goddesses, replaced by the Virgin Mother, angels, demons, saints. Each

town, each parish, every fountain, had its patron or its patroness, its

tutelary guardian, to whom they addressed themselves more familiarly

than to God in order to obtain temporal blessings and the grace for

every day. The saints have their specialities like the minor deities

of former times. Some cured fevers, some diseases of the skin. This

one had charge of travellers, that of harvests, a third of articles

that had been lost, a fourth of needed heirs in families in danger of

decay. With this mythology, all the superstitions were revived, down

to the grossest fetichism: pilgrimages, chaplets, litanies, the

veneration of images, signs of the cross, rites and sacraments

conceived after the manner of the ancient mysteries. And all this is

done with a sort of unconsciousness, very gradually, and as the effect

of a zeal that was supposed to be Christian. The heads of the Church

recommend missionaries not to destroy the temples of the false gods,

but to consecrate them to the true one, and to replace their images by

images of the saints, and the rites of the old cults by similar

ceremonies. Names and etiquettes were thus changed, but not the things

themselves. At Rome, beneath the basilica of St. Peter, a superb

statue was erected to the Prince of the Apostles. This was formerly a

statue of Jupiter. Its great toe has been worn down by the kisses of

the faithful. Before Christianity, they kissed the foot of the master

of the gods; now they kiss the foot of Peter. Is the cult of a

different order and the devotion of a higher quality?

These, however, are but the forms of Catholicism; let us go deeper and

try to reach its generating principle. This principle should be found

in the central dogma of the Catholic system, that in it which commands

and regulates all the parts, which constitutes its unity and strength.

To designate this central dogma is not difficult. The catechism

teaches us that it is the dogma of the Church, of its infallibility and

traditional continuity, of its divine origin and supernatural powers.

Protestants affirm that they belong to the Church because they belong

to Christ. Catholics reverse the terms: no one is in communion with

Christ, no one really belongs to Him, unless he belongs to the Church.

Thus faith in the Church and submission to the Church are put into the

forefront and remain the one thing needful and essential. One is a

Catholic by the fact of his implicit acceptance of the sovereign

authority of the Church; one ceases to be a Catholic when that

submission ceases. From which it is easy to conclude that the

principle of Catholicism is the realisation of the Christian

principle--that is to say, of the reign of God and of Christ, in the

form of a visible institution, an organised social body, an external

power, exercising itself by means of that which is the very soul of the

institution--a priesthood endowed with supernatural functions and

attributes.

The immediate consequence of this first principle was the rupture of

the organic union realised in the Gospel of Christ between the

religious element and the moral element. Nothing is more striking in

the Sermon on the Mount and in all the Parables of Jesus, nothing

better attests the superiority of Christianity to anterior cults,

nothing proves with greater force and clearness that it is the perfect

and definitive Religion, than that mutual penetration, that fusion,

that identification, in a word, of religion and morality, till then

separate and often opposed to each other. The Christ did not desire in

religion anything that was not in morality, or in morality anything

that was not religious. Thus did He bring back piety from without, and

made of it the inner inspiration which penetrates and transforms the

whole life, a hidden flame, a ferment acting from the centre to the

surface, the soul in the body, ever invisible and everywhere present.

He thus founded the absolute autonomy of the religious and of the moral

life which no longer are divided, but appear simply as the two sides of

consciousness; the one interior and turned towards God, the other

exterior and turned towards the world. In creating in us the sense of

our sonship to God, Jesus did not admit the intervention of any

external authority between the Father and the child. The universal

priesthood, with which, by His spirit, He invests the least of His

disciples, excludes in principle all supernatural priesthood. "Call no

man master on earth, for one is your Master in heaven; and all ye are

brethren." The children must have free access to the Father.

But, from the moment the Christian principle, instead of entering as

divine inspiration into the consciousness, sets itself up as a visible

institution in society, it is evident that this organic union is

broken, and the autonomy of the individual consciousness compromised.

The religious element affirms itself on its own account, and imposes

itself from without on the mind of the faithful as a divine authority.

The ancient dualism, which the Gospel surmounted, reappears in a

profounder form; it brings in its train a universal

supernaturalism--that is to say, a mechanical conception of the

relations between God and the world. Instead of a penetration we have

a superposition of two elements. The clergy separates itself from the

laity and superposes itself upon it as the necessary intermediary

between earth and heaven. Religious society, constituted under the

form of a government, superposes itself upon the civil society that it

desires to rule; grace superposes itself upon nature, acting on it from

above in the sacraments; the morality of the Church, in so far as it is

a supernatural morality, superposes itself upon the natural morality of

conscience; revelation upon reason; divine dogmas upon human science;

the spiritual power of the priest upon the temporal power of the family

and of the State. Everywhere, within and without, the division breaks

out, and you see arise in man and in society an intestine struggle

which will never end; for these two original forces that it brings into

conflict, religion and nature, are equally powerful and eternal.

Catholicism began, then, in the Church of the second century when,

under the unconscious action of tradition and of pagan habits, the need

was felt of objectivising and materialising the Christian principle in

an external fact, of imprisoning the kingdom of God in a visible

institution, the immanent revelation of the Holy Spirit in the

decisions and acts of a priesthood. This tendency, once born, would be

irresistible. Ideal and transcendent as it was at first, the Christian

principle would become ever more external and political. Absorbing all

Christianity, and holding in its hands all the graces of God, the

Church would naturally present itself to the world as the permanent

mediator and the grand magician. It was its part to effect the

salvation of sinners, and, for this, it would need, like the ancient

priests, to offer daily to God an agreeable oblation, an expiatory

sacrifice of infinite value to atone for the infinite sins of the

world. Thus the Church transformed the commemoration of the death of

Christ into a _real_ renewal of the sacrifice on Calvary; the Holy

Supper became the mass; the fraternal table was turned into an altar;

the elder or presbyter was changed into a priest and pontiff, and the

bread of the communion into a divine victim. The dogma of

transubstantiation was bound to follow; to the materialisation of

Christianity in the Church corresponds the materialisation of God in

the host.

By virtue of the same principle, Christian piety becomes devotion,

_i.e._ a ritual and meritorious practice, as in the ancient cults. But

we must not be unjust and attribute something to Catholicism that it

condemns. It does not say that external practice is sufficient; the

Church esteems it vain and even culpable unless accompanied by the

affections and the will.

* * * * *

The first and principal act of piety is submission to the Church. Its

dogmas may be irrational, contradictory; its commandments may seem

arbitrary, foreign to the natural conscience, sometimes in

contradiction with it; no matter.

Reason, conscience, all must abdicate, and all submit.... In the

Church, the Christian state must always be a state of minority, for the

tutelage that it accepts will never cease. And the authority of the

Church, being on this point sovereign and indefectible, could not

remain invisible and indeterminate. An imperious logic pushed it from

the first to incarnate itself in its organs, more and more apparent and

simplified. First it was lodged in individual bishops, then in

councils, until the Pope when speaking _ex cathedra_ became the sole

authority. In 1870 the Council of the Vatican, by promulgating the

dogma of Papal infallibility, drew the irresistible conclusion from the

premises laid down in previous centuries. The evolution of Catholicism

was completed. The transformation of Christianity into a sacerdotal

theocracy was achieved. The first is realised and exhausted in the

second, and the distinction we established, when speaking of the

essence of Christianity, between the Christian principle and its

historical realisations, is not merely effaced; it no longer has any

meaning.

From which follow two consequences which every day become more clear

and patent. The first is that the Catholic Church, notwithstanding the

desires of Leo XIII., is fatally condemned to be intolerant and

intransigeant towards all others. The second is that it is

contradictory to expect any reform in that Church, or even to speak of

it; for the Church could not admit the necessity of reform without

renouncing all its pretentions. A river never turns back to its

source. Catholicism can only exist by struggling for supremacy. It

must be all or nothing.

At the same time, things are not so simple as our systems. The logic

of ideas does not exhaust the reality of life. Behind abstract

principles there are pious souls.... In Catholicism there has always

been a latent Protestantism, by which I mean a protest, mute or spoken,

direct or indirect, of the Christian principle against the oppressions

of external and tyrannical authority.... Without the continuous

presence of the Christian spirit in the Catholic Church, the

Reformation would have been impossible. Without the triumph of the

sacerdotal spirit it would have been unnecessary. Protestantism sprang

out of Catholicism because it was virtually contained in it.

4. _Protestant Christianity_

It is strangely to mistake the nature of the Protestant Reformation of

the sixteenth century to see in it a sort of semi-rationalism, the

inconsistent exercise of free examination, or the revolutionary

introduction of a foreign philosophical principle into the warp and

woof of Christianity. You have only to read the biography of the

Reformers and to make a slight analysis of their soul to form an

entirely different idea of their work. The first and almost the only

question which preoccupies and troubles them is an exclusively

religious and practical question: "What must we do in order to be

justified before God? How may we attain to peace of soul and to the

assurance of pardon and of life eternal?" To find this peace, this

pardon and salvation, which the Church could not procure for them, they

determined to turn back and quench their thirst at the primitive

sources of the Gospel. They went back to the original documents

because they were persuaded that Christianity had been corrupted in the

course of centuries; they wished to have it in its purity. Their whole

reformation was to consist in this restoration of primitive truth.

But history never recommences. This return to the past and this

re-reading of the Bible were accompanied by a religious experience and

an act of consciousness which made of their enterprise something

essentially new and original, and which rendered it immeasurably

fruitful. It is unnecessary to seek elsewhere than in psychological

experience the germ of Protestantism. It was in the humble cell of a

convent at Erfurt and in the soul of a poor monk that the drama was

first enacted from which sprang the revolution that has changed the

face of the world.

Luther entered the convent with a faith in the authority of the Church

and in the efficacy of its rites as serious and entire as that of any

monk. "If it was possible," he said afterwards, "to reach Heaven by

monkery, I was resolved to reach it by that road." For years he shrank

from nothing that might render God propitious; he multiplied his acts

of devotion and his works of penance. There is a striking analogy

between the experiences of Luther under the monachal regime and those

of Saul of Tarsus under the discipline of the Pharisaic Law. The

_denoument_ was the same. For the second time, the system of pious

works was found powerless to appease a conscience which roused against

itself the rigour of its own ideal. This struggle against an external

law could only exasperate the sense of sin to the point of despair.

Paul and Luther, in precisely the same manner, experienced the inward

emptiness and radical worthlessness of the religious system in which

they had been trained. The more they had tried to realise it in its

perfection, the more had they found it wanting. Catholicism,

considered as a means of salvation, was rejected by the religious and

moral consciousness of Luther, before it was condemned by exegesis and

by reasoning. To reach this sentence without appeal the Saxon monk had

but to maintain inflexible the demands of the divine law and to

measure, without illusion, the abyss that separated him from God, and

that no human works could fill. It was in this way that he found

himself shut up to the essence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; he found

the peace that fled from him in the pure and simple acceptance of the

glad tidings of the paternal love of God, in the confidence that He

gives gratuitously that which man can never conquer for himself,

namely, the remission of sins and the certitude of eternal life. What

then is faith? Is it still intellectual adhesion to dogmas or

submission to an external authority? No. It is an act of confidence,

the act of a childlike heart, which finds with joy the Father whom it

knew not, and Whom, without presumption, it is happy henceforth to hold

with both its hands. That is what Luther found in Paul's great words:

"The just shall live by faith." In this radical transformation of the

notion of faith restored to its evangelical meaning is to be found the

principle of the greatest religious revolution effected in the world

since the preaching of Jesus.

Let us therefore here set forth the radical opposition between the

Catholic principle and the Protestant principle in order that we may

thoroughly understand the internecine war that was henceforth to be

waged between them. In vain will eminent men in both camps, with the

most generous and conciliatory intentions, arise and endeavour to find

some middle ground, and effect a pacific reunion of the two halves of

Christendom. All compromises, all diplomatic negotiations, will fail,

because each of the two principles can only subsist by the negation of

the other. Having attained to salvation, to full communion with God,

independently of and in collision with the authority and the discipline

of the sacerdotal Church, how could Luther recognise them any longer as

divine and submit to them with sincerity and confidence? The ancient

edifice had been the more thoroughly ruined, inasmuch as it had become

useless and had been replaced. The originality of Luther consisted in

this: his religious enfranchisement sprang from his own piety, and he

founded his freedom on his sense of sonship, on the sense he had of his

quality and titles as a child and heir of God. How could such a

consciousness submit itself to the yoke again without denying itself?

Catholicism, on the other hand, cannot be less intransigeant. To

recognise in any degree whatever that it is possible to a Christian to

enjoy pardon and the sense of the divine fatherhood apart from its

dogmas and its priesthood, would not this be to abdicate all its

pretensions, and to transform itself to the point of destruction?

No doubt, in actual life, this opposition is attenuated by the fact

that in all Catholicism there is a latent Protestantism, and in all

Protestantism a latent Catholicism. Between Port-Royal and Geneva,

between Bossuet and Leibniz, between Leo XIII. and the Anglican Church,

the distance seems but little. It is an illusion. Like two

electricities of the same name, no sooner do they come into contact

than they repel each other and separate more widely than before. In

Catholicism Christianity tends to realise itself as a theocratic

institution; it becomes an external law, a supernatural power, which,

from without, imposes itself on individuals and on peoples. In

Protestantism, on the contrary, Christianity is brought back from the

exterior to the interior; it plants itself in the soul as a principle

of subjective inspiration which, acting organically on individual and

social life, transforms it and elevates it progressively without

denaturalising and doing violence to it. Protestant subjectivity

becomes spontaneity and liberty, just as necessarily as Catholic

objectivity becomes supernaturalism and clerical tyranny. The

religious element is no longer separated from the moral element; it no

longer asserts itself as a truth or a morality superior to human truth

and human morality. The intensity of the religious life is no longer

measured by the number or the fervour of pious works or ritual

practices, but by the sincerity and elevation of the life of the

spirit. All asceticism is radically suppressed. Science is set free

along with conscience; the political life of the peoples, as well as

the inner life of the Christian. Man escapes from tutelage, and in all

departments comes into possession of himself, into the full and free

development of his being, into his majority.

This subjective character of a religion strictly moral stamps itself

with energy on all the specific doctrines of Protestantism. It would

be superfluous to dwell upon the doctrine of justification by faith;

its subjective character is evident. No doubt the term justification

has a legal colour and awakens the idea of a tribunal. But it must not

be forgotten that this tribunal is nothing but the inner court where

man and God meet each other face to face, where man is accused by his

own conscience, and where the sentence which absolves him is the inward

witness of the Holy Spirit, heard by him alone.

The doctrine of the sovereign authority of Scripture in matters of

faith might seem at first sight to set up an external authority. And

it is very true that certain Protestants have often understood it in

the Catholic sense, and have employed it to exercise some violence on

their own conscience or on the conscience of their brethren. But they

never succeed for long; they soon fall into a too flagrant

contradiction. The authority of the Bible is never separated in

Protestantism from the right of the individual to interpret it freely,

and from the personal duty of assimilating the truths he discovers in

it. What therefore are those Protestants doing who attempt to set up a

confession of faith as absolute and obligatory truth but imposing on

their brethren their own subjective interpretation, and, consequently,

denying to others the right which they exercise themselves? Nor let it

be forgotten, on the other hand, that the obligation laid on each

Christian to read the Bible and draw from it his faith is a perpetual

and fruitful appeal to the energy of thought and to the autonomy of the

inner life. The authority of Scripture, so far from being a menace to

Christian liberty, is its invincible rampart. Not only has the

Protestant Christian in the name of the Bible triumphed over eighteen

centuries of tradition, but it is the Bible, an appeal to the Bible

ever better understood, which has saved Protestant theology from

scholasticism, which has prevented it from congealing in a confession

of faith, and which, leaving the principle of the Gospel in an ideal

transcendence in relation to all its historical expressions or

realisations, has maintained, and still maintains, the spirit of reform

in the Churches of the Reformation.

The doctrines of grace and of predestination, which are at the centre

of Calvinism, have no other meaning. Souls religiously inert see in

these doctrines nothing but an abuse of blind power, a sort of divine

_fatum_, breaking every spring in the human soul. Nothing appears to

be more oppressive or more immoral. But this is only an appearance.

There is really no predestination for irreligious souls. This doctrine

is but the expression of the inner basis of all true piety, which is

nothing if it is not the sense, the feeling, of the presence and the

sovereign and continuous action of God in each soul and in all the

universe. No other sentiment gives so much spring and vigour to the

human will, nothing raises it to such a height or makes it so

invincible to all assaults from within and without. "If God be for us,

who can be against us?" etc. (Rom. viii. 31-39). How is it that the

Calvinistic Puritans of New England were the founders of modern

liberty, and the Jesuits, those admirable theorisers on freewill, the

precursors of all the servitudes? It is with predestination as it is

with religion itself. Conceived as exterior to the life of the soul,

it gives birth, no doubt, to a crushing despotism; conceived as an

inward inspiration, sustaining the initiative and even the liberty of

the individual, it becomes, in the Christian soul, the source of a

force which nothing can break or subdue.

But the point at which the antithesis between Protestantism and

Catholicism becomes most patent is the doctrine of the natural

priesthood of all Christians as opposed to that of the supernatural

priesthood of a privileged clergy. The free and perpetual communion of

believing souls with the Father is the foundation of the independence

of each and of the fraternal equality of all. The tap-root of

clericalism is cut. The individual is a priest before the interior

altar of his conscience; the father is a priest in his household; the

citizen, if so he wills, in the city.

The Catholic notion of dogma vanishes with all the rest. To speak of

an immutable and infallible dogma, in Protestantism, is nonsense; that

is to say, if we accept the dictionary definition of dogma--the

promulgation by the Church of an absolute formula. The decision of a

Church cannot have more authority than that Church itself. Now, no

Protestant Church holds itself, or can hold itself without denying

itself, to be infallible. How then could it communicate to its

definitions an infallibility that it did not itself possess?

Protestant confessions of faith are always conditioned in time, and can

never be definitive; they are always revisable, consequently they are

always liable to criticism and to reform. Thus ceases the

solidification of traditional dogma. The old ice melts beneath the

breath of knowledge and of piety. The river takes again its natural

course, and evolution, under the control of a perpetual criticism,

becomes the law of religious thought, as of all other human activities.

From these observations and analyses (necessarily abridged) the true

nature of Protestantism will have become sufficiently clear. It is not

a dogma set up in the face of another dogma, a Church in competition

with a rival Church, a purified Catholicism opposed to a traditional

Catholicism. It is more and better than a doctrine, it is a method;

more and better than a better Church, it is a new form of piety; it is

a different spirit, creating a new world and inaugurating for religious

souls a new regime. It is equally evident that Protestantism cannot be

imprisoned in any definitive form. It leads to variety of formulas,

rites, and associations as necessarily as the Catholic principle leads

to unity. No limit can be set to its development. Always interior,

invisible, ideal, the religious principle that it represents

accompanies the life and activity of the spirit into all the paths that

man may pursue and in all the progress he may make. Nothing human is

alien to it; nor is it alien to anything that is human. It solves the

problem of liberty and authority as it is solved by free and ordered

governments; it does not suppress either of the terms, but conciliates

them by reducing authority to its pedagogic _role_, and by making the

Christian spirit the soul and inner rule of liberty.

By very reason of its superiority, and of the conditions of general

culture that it presupposes, this form of Christianity could only

appear after all the others. The spirit can only become self-conscious

by distinguishing itself from the body in which at first it seems as if

diffused, and by opposing to it an energetic moral protest. "That is

not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterwards

that which is spiritual" (1 Cor. xv. 46. Cf. Gal. iv. 1-5). This

divine plan, which the apostle discovered in the ancient history of

humanity, is repeated in the history of Christianity. The Messianic

form corresponds to infancy, to that brief, happy age in which the

impatient imagination nourishes itself on dreams and illusions which

the experience of life soon dissipates without killing or even

enfeebling the immortal hope at the heart of it. The Catholic form,

which succeeds it, endures longer and corresponds to the age of

adolescence, in which education is painfully prosecuted, and it demands

a strict external discipline and masters whose authority must not be

questioned or discussed. It was in this way that Catholic discipline

and authority conducted the slow, laborious education of the pagan and

barbarian world up to the sixteenth century.

But a moment must arrive when the work of education had succeeded, when

the leading strings essential to childhood began to be a bondage and a

hindrance. The pedagogic mission of the Church, like that of the

family itself, had its limit and its term in the very function it

fulfilled. That function was to make adult Christians and free men,

not men without rule, but Christians having in themselves, in their

conscience and their inner life, the supreme rule of their thought and

conduct. This new age of autonomy, of firm possession of self, and of

internal self-government, is that which Protestantism represents, and

it could only commence in modern times--that is to say, with that

general movement which, since the end of the Middle Ages, is leading

humanity to an ever completer enfranchisement, and rendering it more

universally and more individually responsible for its destinies.

It may be remarked that by this evolution, and under its Protestant

form, the Christian principle was only returning to its pure essence

and its primitive expression. It could only recognise itself, take

cognisance of its true nature, separate itself from that which was not

itself; it could only disencumber itself of every material, temporary,

or local element, of all by which it had become surcharged in the

course of ages, and which was neither religious nor moral, by

remounting to its source, and by renewing its strength, through

reflection and criticism, at its original springs. That is why

Protestantism has taken the form of this return to the past, for in it

Christianity does not surpass itself; it simply tries to know itself

better and to become more faithful to its principle. In the

consciousness of Christ, what did we find was the essence of the

perfect and eternal piety? Nothing more than moral repentance,

confidence in the love of the Father and the filial sense of His

immediate, active presence in the heart: the indestructible foundation

of our liberty, of our moral dignity, of our security, in face of the

enigmas of the universe and the mysteries of death. Is it not to this

eternal gospel that we must always return? To finish its course and

complete its work, will humanity ever discover another viaticum that

will better renew its courage and its hope?

5. _Conclusion_

Here I must stop. At the outset I spoke of a personal confession, and

it seems to me as if it were nearly complete. In sketching the broad

outlines of the religious history of humanity, I have had but one

object; I have wished to show the men of my generation why I remain

religious, Christian, and Protestant. I am religious because I am a

man and do not desire to be less than human, and because humanity, in

me and in my race, commences and completes itself in religion and by

religion. I am Christian because I cannot be religious in any other

way, and because Christianity is the perfect and supreme form of

religion in this world. Lastly, I am Protestant, not from any

confessional zeal, nor from racial attachment to the family of

Huguenots, although I thank God daily that I was born in that family,

but because in Protestantism alone can I enjoy the heritage of

Christ--that is to say, because in it I can be a Christian without

placing my conscience under any external yoke, and because I can

fortify myself in communion with and in adoration of an immanent Deity

by consecrating to Him the activity of my intellect, the natural

affections of my heart, and find in this moral consecration the free

expansion and development of my whole being.

Under this new form, divested of the swaddling-clothes by which at

first it was bound, Christianity always seems to me to be best as it

is, a spiritual and eternal principle, which brings peace to the soul,

and which alone can give harmony and unity to the world. Nothing can

contradict it except evil and error; everything serves and strengthens

it. It is this principle which to my eyes manifests itself with

ever-growing clearness in that heroic love of Science which, in our

time, has created so many marvels and made so many martyrs; this it is

which reveals itself to me in the works of all the great artists, in

that ideal of beauty which enraptures them and brings such generous

tears into our eyes; it is this which I honour and bless in the efforts

of men who interest themselves in the future of humanity, and who in

the political direction of their country or in the work of social

education seek and find some means of raising and ameliorating the

condition of the people: I salute it in the illustrious apostles of all

great causes and in the obscure workers at all humble tasks, from the

mother who teaches her children to join their hands and bend their

knees before the Father in Heaven, to the preacher and the missionary

who faithfully distribute to the hungry soul the bread of the Gospel,

from the sister of charity who devotes her life to the solace of the

sick and suffering, to the thinker who fathoms the mysteries of the

heart and of the universe in order that he may shed on the paths of

erring humanity some rays of light and joy.

Amid the twilight that envelopes us you predict the threatening night;

I see the day that is about to dawn with a new century. Where you see

nothing but discords, conflicts, and confusion, I see a concourse of

forces which, coming from all points of the horizon, are still ignorant

of each other, and, because ignorant, conflicting, but which, by these

very conflicts and collisions, are labouring together in the common

work of elevation and salvation: the mysterious work whose nature

Christ defined in His Gospel, and whose motive-power he created by

breathing into the human heart His own fraternal love. Since then

there has been a secret inquietude at the heart of all egoisms, a

sentence of condemnation on the brow of all abuses and all tyrannies.

The modern world can never settle down again into repose, or fall

asleep in evil and in slavery; it has had a vision it cannot forget; it

has been touched with a flame that cannot be quenched. Many who are

often the best collaborators in this work of redemption know not whence

it comes and whither it tends; they even blaspheme the Christ who

inspires it and the God who maintains it. They know not what they do,

nor what they say: in their ignorance they calumniate that which is

best both in their life and in themselves.

BOOK THIRD

DOGMA

CHAPTER I

WHAT IS A DOGMA?

1. _Definition_

Dogma, in the strictest sense, is one or more doctrinal propositions

which, in a religious society, and as the result of the decisions of

the competent authority, have become the object of faith, and the rule

of belief and practice.

It would not be enough to say that a religious society has dogmas as a

political society has laws. For the first, it is a much greater

necessity. Moral societies not only need to be governed; they need to

define themselves and to explain their _raison d'etre_. Now, they can

only do this in their dogma.

Dogma therefore is a phenomenon of social life. One cannot conceive

either dogma without a Church, or a Church without dogma. The two

notions are correlative and inseparable.

There are three elements in dogma: a religious element, which springs

from piety; an intellectual or philosophic element, which supposes

reflection and discussion; and an element of authority, which comes

from the Church. Dogma is a doctrine of which the Church has made a

law.

All the peoples of antiquity believed that their legislation came from

heaven. In like manner all the Churches have believed, and many of

them still believe, that their dogmas, in their official form, have

been directly given to them by God Himself. The history of evolution,

political and religious, has dissipated these illusions. Every law of

righteousness and truth should, doubtless, be referred to the

mysterious action of the Divine Spirit which works incessantly in the

spirits of men; but, in its historical form, it bears, nevertheless,

the stamp of the contingent conditions in which it is born. The genius

of a people is nowhere more manifest than in its constitution and its

laws, nor the soul and the original inspiration of a Church than in its

dogmatic creations. The work always bears the moral impress of the

workman.

It follows that a Church cannot claim for its dogma more authority than

it possesses itself. Only a Church which is infallible can issue

immutable dogmas. When Protestantism sets up such a pretension, it

falls into a radical contradiction with its own principle, and that

contradiction ruins all attempts of this kind.

In Catholicism the theory of the immutability of dogmas is opposed to

history; in Protestantism it is opposed to logic. In both cases the

affirmation is shown to be illusory. It is with dogmas, so long as

they are alive, as it is with all living things; they are in a

perpetual state of transformation. They only become immutable when

they are dead, and they begin to die when they cease to be studied for

their own sakes--that is, to be discussed.

Dogma, therefore, which serves as a law and visible bond to the Church,

is neither the principle nor the foundation of religion. It is not

primitive; it never appears until late in the history of religious

evolution. "There were poets and orators," says Voltaire, "before

there was a grammar and a rhetoric." Man chanted before he reasoned.

Everywhere the prophet preceded the rabbi, and religion theology. It

may be said, no doubt, that dogma is in religion, since it comes out of

it; but it is in it as the fruits of Autumn are in the blossoms of

Spring. Dogmas and fruits, in order to form and ripen, need long

summers and much sunshine. The best way to describe their nature will

be to trace their genesis.

2. _The Genesis of Dogma_

Dogma has its tap-root in religion. In every positive Religion there

is an internal and an external element, a soul and a body. The soul is

inward piety, the movement of adoration and of prayer, the divine

sensibility of the heart; the body consists of external forms, of rites

and dogmas, institutions and codes. Life consists in the organic union

of these two elements. Without the soul, religion is but an empty

form, a mere corpse. Without the body, which is the expression and the

instrument of the soul, religion is indiscernible, unconscious, and

unrealised.

Which of these two elements is primitive and generative? The answer is

not doubtful. Modern psychology has learnt it in a manner never to be

forgotten from Schleiermacher, Benjamin Constant, and Alexander Vinet.

The principle of all religion is in piety, just as the principle of

language is in thought, although it is not possible now to conceive of

them as being separate. Consider a moment. That religion which time

and custom have transformed, perhaps, into a mechanical round of

ceremonies, or into a system of abstractions and metaphysical theories,

what was it at first? Trace it to its source, and you will find that

these cold blocks of lava once came burning hot from an interior fire.

But this is the parting of the ways. This is the point at which

religious minds separate into widely different groups.

Regarding religion as a saving institution in the form of a visible

organised Church maintained by God and provided with all the means of

grace, Catholicism was bound to end in a sort of mechanical psychology,

and to explain the sentiment of piety as the inward effect of the

outward and supernatural institution. This is done by Bellarmine and

de Bonald, the most consistent of the Catholic theologians.

Protestantism, on the contrary, which makes of the faith of the heart,

of the immediate and personal relation of the soul to God, the very

principle of justification, and of all religious life, was bound none

the less logically to end, by analysis, in a more profound psychology,

and to refer to an inward principle all the forms and manifestations of

religion. Religious history thus becomes homogeneous, and runs

parallel with that of all the other activities of the human mind.

None the less, this subjectivity of the religious principle frightens

many good men. Persons devoted to practice, and unconsciously

dominated by the habits and necessities of ecclesiastical government

and religious teaching, hesitate to enter upon a road so naturally

opened. As, from generation to generation, religion has been taught

and propagated externally by the Church, the family, or special agents,

it is impossible for them to imagine that it was not always so, and not

to trace back to God Himself that chain or tradition of external

instruction. In which they are certainly right. Their only error, but

it is a grave one, is to represent God as an ordinary teacher, the

first of a series, who once acted, like the rest of them, upon His

pupils from without; whereas God works in all souls, acts and teaches

without ceasing through all human masters, and is present throughout

the whole religious education of humanity.

Who does not see that to represent things otherwise is to remain in the

crudest and least religious of anthropomorphisms? At bottom, these men

are afraid of losing revelation, which they rightly judge to be

inseparable from the very idea of religion. They object that piety and

the awakening of the religious sentiment must have an objective cause,

and that that cause can only be a revelation of God Himself. Nothing

is more true; but this revelation which is effected without, in the

events of Nature or of History, is only known within, in and by the

human consciousness. This inward inspiration alone enables religious

men to interpret Nature and History religiously. Now, this

interpretation is made by their intellect and according to the laws and

conditions which regulate it. The religious phenomenon therefore has

not two moments only, the objective revelation as a cause and the

subjective piety as an effect; it has three, which always follow each

other in the same order: the inner revelation of God, which produces

the subjective piety of man, which, in its turn, engenders the

historical religious forms, rites, formularies of faith, sacred books,

social creations, which we can know and describe as external facts. It

will be seen what an error they commit, what a mistake they make, who

identify the third term with the first, suppressing the second, which

is the necessary link and forms the transition between the other two.

Whoever will fathom this little problem in psychology, and reflect upon

it with a little attention, will see that all religious revelation of

God must necessarily pass through human subjectivity before arriving at

historical objectivity.

* * * * *

Passing now from the intellectual interpretation to the intellectual

expression of religion, and noting the successive stages through which

it must necessarily advance towards dogma, I remark once more that

man's first language is that of the imagination. The imagination of

the child or of the savage animates, dramatises, and transfigures

everything. It spontaneously engenders vivid and poetic images. At

the beginning, religion, consisting chiefly of emotions, presentiments,

movements of the heart, clothed itself in mythologic forms.... But the

age of individual reflection comes. The image tends to change into the

idea. Men interpret, define, translate it. The religious myth is

replaced by the religious doctrine. These are at first entirely

personal interpretations. Nevertheless, these opinions desire to

propagate themselves, to become general, and, as they are imperfect and

diverse, they engender conflicts which threaten to become schisms.

Myths, appealing to the imagination merely, and only professing to

translate the common emotion, draw souls together and fuse them into a

real unity; individual reason, private exegesis, inevitably separates

them. But the consciousness of the community, thus menaced, naturally

reacts by the instincts of conservation. There is therefore a struggle

between the two, and out of this conflict dogma is born.

A new element must intervene. There must be a Church. Now, all

religions do not form churches. The phenomenon is only produced in the

universalist and moral religions. Strictly speaking, there is no

Church except in Christianity; and no dogmas save Christian dogmas. In

ancient societies, where religion was confounded either with the State,

or with the nationality, the religious unity was maintained and

guaranteed by the same means as the political unity. There were no

dogmas, because dogmas were of no use. As much may be said of Hebraism

and of Islam: in them there were rites, external signs and seals, which

sufficed to weld and to maintain the religious bond.

Dogma only arises when the religious society, distinguishing itself

from the civil, becomes a moral society, recruiting itself by voluntary

adherents. This society, like every other, gives to itself what it

needs in order to live, to defend itself, and propagate itself.

Doctrine necessarily becomes for it an essential thing; for in its

doctrine it expresses its soul, its mission, its faith. It is

necessary also that it should carry its doctrine to a degree at once of

generality and precision high enough to embrace and to translate all

the moments of its religious experience and to eliminate all alien and

hostile elements. Controversy springs up and threatens to rend it.

The Church then chooses and formulates a definition of the point

contested: it enacts it as the adequate expression of its faith, and

sanctions it with all its objective authority: dogma is born. From

that moment also the two correlative notions of _orthodoxy_ and

_heresy_ are formed. Orthodoxy is official and collective doctrine;

heresy is individual doctrine or interpretation.... By and by symbols

or confessions of faith are formed, and these become the standards of

faith and practice in the various churches that adopt them.

This long evolution is fully justified in the eyes of reason. It is a

movement of the mind as legitimate as it is necessary. The germ must

become a tree, the child grow to manhood, the image be transformed into

the idea, and poetry give place to prose. It is possible to be

mistaken as to the nature, origin, and value of dogma, but not as to

its necessity. The Church may make a different use of it in the

future, but it will not be able to dispense with it, for the doctrinal

form of religion answers to an imperative need of the epoch of

intellectual growth at which we have arrived. No one can either

reverse or arrest its development....

The word dogma is anterior to Catholicism. It had two senses in Greek

antiquity: a political and authoritarian sense, designating the decrees

of popular assemblies and of kings; this is the meaning which dominates

and characterises the Catholic notion of dogma. But the word had also

in the schools of Greece an essentially philosophical and doctrinal

meaning; it designated the characteristic doctrine of each school. The

Protestant Churches have inherited this latter sense of the word: it is

in perfect harmony with the spirit and the principle of Protestantism.

Dogma, in the Protestant sense, means the doctrinal type generally

received in a Church, and publicly expressed in its liturgy, its

catechisms, its official teaching, and especially in its Confession of

Faith.[1]

[1] Originally the word dogma signified a command, a precept, and not a

truth (Luke ii. 1, and the Septuagint of Dan. ii. 13; vi. 8; Esther

iii. 9; 2 Maccab. x. 8, etc.). Ignatius of Antioch still uses the word

in this sense. It is not until towards the time of Athanasius or of

Augustine that it begins to be used of the doctrinal decisions of the

Fathers, the Councils, and the Pope. (Cf. also Acts xv. 28, 29. This

is afterwards called a dogma, the only time it is used in the N.T. with

reference to a decision of the Church.)

3. The Religious Value of Dogma

The intolerance of Catholic dogmatism has had consequences so

revolting, and, in Protestantism, wherever this dogmatism has revived,

it has given rise to conflicts so sterile and so lamentable, that

certain minds have gone so far as to deny the utility of dogma in the

largest sense of the word, and have wished to suppress all doctrinal

definition of the Christian Faith. To call dogma either divine in

itself or evil in itself is to go to an unwarrantable extreme. In

religious development, whether individual or social, it has an organic

place that cannot be taken away from it, and a practical importance

that cannot be contested.

Religious faith is a phenomenon of consciousness. God Himself is its

author and its cause; but it has for psychological factors all the

elements of consciousness--feeling, volition, idea. It must never be

forgotten that these verbal distinctions are pure abstractions; that

these elements co-exist, and are enveloped and implicated with each

other in the unity of the ego. In the living reality there has never

existed feeling which did not carry within it some embryo of an idea

and translate itself into some voluntary movement.... As it is

impossible for thought not to manifest itself organically by gesture or

language, so it is impossible for religion not to express itself in

rites and doctrines.

No doubt, in the first period of physical life, sensation dominates,

and at the _debut_ of religious life, feeling and imagination. But as

science springs from sensation, so religious doctrine springs from

piety. To say that "Christianity is a life, therefore it is not a

doctrine" is to reason very badly. We should rather say, "Christianity

is a life and therefore it engenders doctrine;" for man cannot live his

life without thinking it. The two things are not hostile; they go

together. In apostolic times the greatest of missionaries was the

greatest of theologians. St. Augustine at the end of the old world,

Calvin, Luther, Zwingle, at the beginning of the modern world, followed

the example of St. Paul. When the sap of piety fails, theology

withers. Protestant scholasticism corresponds to a decline of

religious life. Spencer, by re-opening the springs of piety, renewed

the streams of theology. Without Pietism Germany would have had no

Schleiermacher; without the religious revival at the beginning of this

century we should have had neither Samuel Vincent nor Alexander Vinet.

If the life of a Church be compared to that of a plant, doctrine holds

in it the place of the seed. Like the seed, doctrine is the last to be

formed; it crowns and closes the annual cycle of vegetation; but it is

necessary that it should form and ripen; for it carries within it the

power of life and the germ of a new development. A Church without

dogmas would be a sterile plant. But let not the partisans of dogmatic

immutability triumph: let them pursue the comparison to the end:

"Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and _die_," said Jesus,

"it bears no fruit." To be fruitful, dogma must be decomposed--that is

to say, it must mix itself unceasingly with the evolution of human

thought and die in it; it is the condition of perpetual resurrection.

Without being either absolute, or perfect in itself, then, dogma is

absolutely necessary to the propagation and edification of the

religious life. The Church has a pedagogic mission that could not be

fulfilled without it. It bears souls, nourishes them and brings them

up. Its role is that of a mother. In that educative mission, we may

add, the mother finds the principle and aim of her authority, the

reason and the limit of her tutelage. In this sense, dogma is never

without authority. But this same pedagogic authority is neither

absolute nor eternal; it has a double limit, in the nature of the

pupil's soul, which it ought to respect, and in the end it would

attain, the making of free men, adult Christians, sons of God in the

image of Christ and in immediate relationship to the Father. If dogma

is the heritage of the past transmitted by the Church, it is the

children's duty first to receive it, and then to add to its value by

continually reforming it, since that is the only way to keep it alive

and to render it truly useful and fruitful in the moral development of

humanity. It is therefore to this idea of necessary dogma, but of

dogma necessarily historical and changing, that we must henceforth

accustom ourselves; and we shall most easily habituate ourselves to it

by tracing its evolution in the past.

CHAPTER II

THE LIFE OF DOGMAS AND THEIR HISTORICAL EVOLUTION

1. _Three Prejudices_

I here encounter three prejudices which are, I think, the most

inveterate in the world. The first is that dogmas are immutable; the

second, that they die fatally the moment they are touched by criticism;

the third, that they form the essence of religion, which rises or falls

with them. I wish to show that dogmas have neither this pretended

immobility nor this delicate fragility; that they live by an inner life

extraordinarily resistant and fecund, and that the criticism of dogmas,

so far from injuring the Christian religion, frees it from the chains

of the past and permits it to manifest its marvellous gift of

rejuvenescence and adaptation to circumstances.

The proof that dogmas are not immutable lies in the fact that they have

a history. That history is as full of conflicts, controversies,

revolutions, as the history of philosophy.... One Church has said of

its dogmas what a Jesuit General said of his Order: _sint ut sunt aut

non sint_! It is an illusion. Momentarily arrested at one point, the

movement begins again at another. In one half of Christendom, and

certainly the most living half, criticism of dogma has never ceased

since the sixteenth century. Even in the bosom of the Catholic Church,

its most skilful advocates, the Moehlers and the Newmans, unable to

deny that Catholicism is not to-day what it was in the first centuries,

have made this strange concession to history; they have applied to

dogmas the theory of development. At Paris in 1682 the dogma of the

infallibility of the Bishop of Rome would have been condemned as an

error. Since 1870 the orthodoxy of 1682 has become the gravest of

heresies. There is no fiction more evident than that of the

immutability of dogmas, whether in the Catholic or in the Protestant

Churches. Like all other manifestations of life, they have an

evolution as natural as it is inevitable. The proof that dogmas are

not religion, and that criticism does not kill them but transforms

them, will appear in what I now proceed to say.

2. _The Two Elements in Dogma; and its Historical Evolution_

Dogma is the language spoken by faith. In it there are two elements: a

mystical and practical element, the properly religious element; this is

the living and fruitful principle of dogma: then there is an

intellectual or theoretical element, a judgment of mind, a

philosophical proposition serving at once as an envelope and as an

expression of religion.

Now, it is not an arbitrary relation which unites and amalgamates these

two elements in dogma; it is an organic and necessary relation. Go

back for a moment to the origin of religious phenomena, and to the

formation of the first and simplest doctrinal formulas. In presence of

one of the great spectacles of Nature, man, feeling his weakness and

dependence with respect to the mysterious power revealed in it,

trembled with fear and hope. This is primitive religious emotion. But

this emotion necessarily implies, for thought, a relation between the

subject which experiences it and the object that has caused it. Now,

thought, once awakened, will necessarily translate this relation into

an intellectual judgment. Thus, wishing to express this relation, the

believer will exclaim, _e.g._ "God is great!" marking the infinite

disproportion between his being and the universal being which made him

tremble.[1] He obeys the same necessity which makes him ordinarily

express his thought in language. Religious emotion then is transformed

in the mind into the notion of a relation, _i.e._ into an intellectual

notion which becomes the expressive image or representation of the

emotion. But the notion and the emotion are essentially different in

nature. In expressing it, and thanks to the imagination, the notion

may renew or fortify the emotion, and dogma may awaken piety; but the

two must not be confounded. The notion is like an algebraic expression

which ideally represents a given quantity, but it is not the quantity

itself. This must be clearly kept in mind if we are to avoid the most

disastrous confusions. In religion and in dogma the intellectual

element is simply the expression or envelope of the religious

experience....

[1] It might be supposed that I make of this elementary experience the

primary root whence all dogmas, including the Christian, have sprung by

a process of evolution. Nothing of the kind. This is but a particular

example. The revelation of Nature is the principle of the dogmas of

the Religions of Nature. Christianity has behind it another revelation

and other experiences: the revelation of God and of a higher life, in

the historical appearance of Jesus Christ. Let a man morally prepared

to hear the Gospel begin to follow Him, listen to His words, penetrate

His soul, comprehend His death, and he will cry out: "God is Love!" as

the spectator of Nature was supposed to exclaim: "God is great!" And

this new proposition, translating a new religious relation, will, in

its turn, become the principle of all Christian dogmas.

The intellectual will therefore be the variable element in dogma. It

is the matter united to the germ, and it is ceaselessly transformed by

the very effect of the movement of life. The reason of this is simple.

We said just now that a religious emotion, like every other, translates

itself into a notion which fixes the relation of the subject to the

object, implied in the emotion itself. But what will this notion be?

With what materials, with what concepts, will the religious man

construct it? Clearly with those at his disposal. His religious

formula will depend on his state of intellectual culture. A child, he

will think and speak religiously as a child. Religious reason and

language have followed the same steps as the general reason....

I am well aware that many Christians imagine that God has revealed to

us dogmas in the Bible, and that they will accuse me of denying

revelation. God forbid! We believe with all our soul in Divine

Revelation and in its particular action in the souls of prophets and

apostles, and especially in Jesus Christ. Only, the question is

whether the revelation of God has consisted of doctrines and dogmatic

formulas. No. God does nothing needless, and since these doctrines

and formulas can be and have been conceived by human intelligence, He

has left to it the care of elaborating them. God, entering into

commerce and contact with a human soul, has produced in him a certain

religious experience whence, afterwards, by reflection, the dogma has

sprung. That therefore which constitutes revelation, that which ought

to be the norm of our life, is the creative and fruitful religious

experience which first arose in the souls of the prophets, of Christ,

and of His apostles. We may be tranquil. So long as this experience

shall be renewed in Christian souls, Christian dogmas may be modified,

but they will never die. But why should we retain dogmas which, in the

nature of things, must always be imperfect? Why not have religion pure

and simple without dogmas? What would happen if we listened to this

cry for pure unmixed religion? By suppressing Christian dogma you

would suppress Christianity; by discarding all religious doctrine you

would destroy religion. How many great and eternal things there are

which never exist, for us, in a pure and isolated state! All the

forces of Nature are in this case. Thought, in order to exist, must

incarnate itself in language. Words cannot be identified with thought,

but they are necessary to it. The hero in the romance, who was said to

be unable to think without speaking was not so ridiculous as was once

supposed, for that hero is everybody. The soul only reveals itself to

us by the body to which it is united. Who has ever seen life apart

from living matter? It is the same with the religious life and the

doctrines and rites in which it manifests itself. A religious life

which did not express itself would neither know itself nor communicate

itself. It is therefore perfectly irrational to talk of a religion

without dogma and without worship. Orthodoxy is a thousand times right

as against rationalism or mysticism, when it proclaims the necessity

for a Church of formulating its faith into a doctrine, without which

religious consciousnesses remain confused and undiscernible.

The mistake that orthodoxy sometimes makes is in denying or desiring to

arrest the constant metamorphosis to which dogma, like all living

things, is subject. So long as they are alive, dogmas have the faculty

of changing and evolving. How is their evolution effected? The

analogy between dogma and language will help us to the answer. A

language is modified in three ways: (1) By disuse, _i.e._ by the

disappearance of words whose contents have vanished; (2) by

intussusception, _i.e._ by the faculty which words have, without

changing their form, of acquiring new significations; (3) by the

renaissance of old or the creation of new words, _i.e._ by neologisms.

Nothing is easier than to establish these three kinds of variations in

the history of dogmas. Some religious formulas perish from disuse;

others acquire a new content; while still others are themselves

renewed. Many doctrines that were once alive and prevalent are seldom

heard of now; they gradually passed out of use. There is hardly a

dogma dating from the seventeenth or the sixteenth century that has now

the same signification that it had at the beginning. The new wine that

has been put into them has modified the old skins. There are limits,

however, to the elasticity of words and formulas. There comes a moment

when the new wine bursts the old skins, and when the Church has to

construct other vessels to receive it. In this way neologisms spring

up in languages, and new dogmas in theology. In the sixteenth century

the dogmas of Justification by Faith and of the universal priesthood

were resuscitated with a new energy. The verses of Horace, on which I

might appear to have been commenting, are eternally true:

Ut silvae foliis pronos mutantur in annos,

* * * * *

Multa renascentur quae jam cecidere cadentque

Quae nunc sunt in honore, vocabula...

* * * * *

The evolution of dogma is possible; why is it necessary? Simply

because the material of which it is composed is in a state of constant

flux and evolution.... We do not mean to say that everything in the

old formulas should be condemned. There are to be found in them many

great and excellent ideas which still retain their truth and power. We

simply say that there is nothing absolute in them, nothing that may be

imposed by authority on Christian thought. It is always with notions

borrowed from current science and philosophy that the Church constructs

her dogmas. But science and philosophy are continually evolving and

carrying dogma in their train. Everything changes, even our manner of

thinking. Why do certain things appear absurd or grotesque in the

imaginations of the past? Because we have lost the faculty for

comprehending them. It is as impossible for us to think in Greek as to

speak in Greek. Since the end of the Middle Ages two or three

intellectual revolutions have occurred which have profoundly separated

us from antiquity and changed the inner and the outer world in which we

live. It will suffice to recall them in a few words in order to deepen

our sense of the decadence of Graeco-Roman dogmatic Christianity, and of

the necessity incumbent upon us to reform and renovate it, if only we

are strong enough to answer to the call of God.

3. _The Crisis of Dogma_

The first of these revolutions was a religious one. Our specific

consciousness as Protestant Christians dates from the Reformation.

Now, the Evangelical Reformation of the sixteenth century was the

rupture of the tradition of the Church, of which the Dogmatics of the

great Councils was the framework and the centre. In breaking the

authority of the Church, the Reformers broke up the basis on which

those ancient dogmas had been built. In appealing to the Word of God

against traditional doctrines, they at least called in question the

Dogmatics of the Councils. After protesting against all the

infiltrations of pagan manners and superstitions into the morals of the

Church, into its organisation and its hierarchy into its worship and

its rites, why should they regard as sacrosanct the ancient philosophy

which had entered into the construction of its dogmas?

On the other hand, the Reformation renewed the Christian consciousness

by its fundamental doctrine of Justification by Faith. Until then

salvation had come through adhesion to the Symbols of the Church and

obedience to its commands. Justification by Faith (and faith here

means the trust of the heart) freed the Christian from the tutelage of

the priesthood and the bondage of Symbols. To maintain that you can

only be saved by believing certain theological doctrines, is the same

as to say that you can only be saved by doing certain works; it is to

add to or to substitute for faith some other condition of salvation.

The second principle of the Reformation therefore also shook the

ancient edifice; in Dogmatics it substituted the internal principle of

Christian experience for the external principle of authority; it made

of Christianity a moral life and no longer a metaphysic. Is it not

right and necessary to give the new principles of the Reformation a new

theological expression? This process has been going on ever since the

sixteenth century and can never cease.

The Reformation displaced the centre of the Christian consciousness.

At the same time there began a scientific revolution which displaced

the centre of the universe. I speak of that which is connected with

the names of Copernicus and Kepler, and which was continued by such men

as Galileo, Newton, and Laplace. Modern astronomy, geology, biology,

etc., have completely changed the outlines and the horizon of our

philosophy, and rendered for ever impossible the popular cosmogonies

which, until then, had reigned supreme. And who does not see the

bearing of this revolution on our views of Scripture, on its

cosmography in particular, and on many of its minor teachings? The

traditional doctrines of creation have been greatly modified, as also

the doctrines as to the origin of evil, suffering, and death. These

discoveries, it is said, have ruined religion, and are destroying

Christian faith. Not so. What is being destroyed is the debris of an

ancient philosophy. But they do compel us, absolutely, if we would

remain in touch with the thought of our age, to modify the formulas by

which the Church has hitherto believed that she might render an account

of the origin and evolution of the universe.

A third intellectual evolution has been effected in our own time by the

advent of the Historical Method. This has completely upset the

traditional view of the history of mankind. Floods of new light have

been poured upon the prehistoric and historic races of man. Modern

criticism and exegesis have given us an entirely new view of the origin

and contents of many parts of the Old and New Testaments. In every

department of knowledge the historic method has made the point of view

of evolution possible and victorious. It is in vain to oppose it, for

it is the law of life. Those who cling to the doctrine of dogmatic

immutability, whether in the Catholic or the Protestant Churches, are

exactly in the position of the Romish cardinals who covered Galileo

with anathemas and protested energetically against the rotation of the

earth. Neither their protests nor their anathemas prevented the earth

from turning round, and the cardinals along with it. In Protestantism,

a resistance so blind would be the grossest of inconsistencies.

Dogmatic revision is always alive, both in principle and in fact, in

the Churches of the Reformation: in principle, because all Confessions

of Faith are relative, and subordinate to the Word of God; in fact,

because the spirit of research, of criticism, and free discussion has

never ceased to breathe in Protestant Theology, and breathes to-day

more ardently than ever. The work will therefore be completed; I am

sure of it. We may lack the faith and courage to carry it on, but,

failing us, God will not fail to raise up other fellow-workers with

Himself in this great enterprise. Christianity cannot perish; it has

never failed to adapt itself to the state of mind of ages past; in the

future, it will find and make new forms in which to express and

propagate itself, forms adapted to the coming times....

"One day, the monk Sarapion, a man of deep piety and ardent zeal, was

told by the priest Paphnutius and the deacon Photinus that God, in

whose image man had been created, was a purely spiritual being, without

body, without external figure, without sensible organs. Serapion was

convinced by the ascendancy of Catholic tradition and by the arguments

that had been employed. The assistants rose to render thanks to God

for having rescued so holy a man from the wicked heresy of the

anthropomorphists. But, in the midst of their devotions, the unhappy

old man, feeling the image of the God to whom he had been accustomed to

pray vanishing from his heart, was deeply moved, and bursting into sobs

and tears, he threw himself upon the ground, and cried out: 'Woe is me!

Unhappy man! They have taken away my God. I have no one now to cling

to and invoke.'"[2]

[2] J. Cassanius, abb. Massil.: Collatio, X. c. III.

Touching image of our own experience and of the experience of humanity!

We are always making to ourselves some idol or other. It is very

difficult for us to realise that God is spirit: we attach ourselves

therefore to some fetish of human fabrication. And then, when science

comes and takes it away from us, we are troubled and perplexed, as if

they had taken from us God Himself. The study of dogmas and their

evolution, were it wider spread, would relieve us of our illusions and

calm our inquietude. It would teach us that our religious life depends

on our faith alone, and that the God Who is its source and end is

independent of all theory or representation, because He is infinitely

above all human conceptions, and because, in order never to be

separated from Him, it suffices that we worship Him in spirit and in

truth.

CHAPTER III

THE SCIENCE OF DOGMAS

1. _The Mixed Character of Dogmatics_

We have shown the necessity of a free criticism of dogmas. This

criticism, if it is religious, will at the same time be positive; it

will tend not to destroy, but to distinguish, in each dogma, that which

is truly religious and permanent from that which is philosophical and

fleeting. Such is the object of the discipline that, in the schools,

is called _Dogmatics_, or the Science of Dogmas. It remains to define

its task and to point out the resources which it has at its disposal.

Both points are connected with its relation to the Church and to

Philosophy. The science of dogmas has always necessarily followed the

life of the one and the vicissitudes of the other.

In the religious experiences of the Church it finds the material that

it elaborates; from philosophy it borrows the methods according to

which it treats this material and the form in which it organises it.

This science is, therefore, a mixed science: positive and practical in

its object, speculative and theoretical in its procedure, it seeks to

connect the religious and moral experience with the rest of the

experience of humanity, and to effect the synthesis claimed, in order

to their full vigour, by the scientific order of thought and by the

moral order of practical life.

This intermediate position of our science, between the Church and

philosophy, constitutes its independence and its originality. If, as

in Catholicism, it were absolutely subjected to the authority of the

Church, and were limited to receiving, without critical examination,

its successive decisions and traditions, it would be confounded with

the history of dogmas, and would be merely a survival of scholasticism.

On the other hand, if it did not start from the data furnished by

history and by the personal and collective experience of piety,--if it

did not study the Christian life in its objectivity and in its historic

continuity, but abandoned itself to purely subjective and general

speculations--it would be fatally confounded with philosophy. It

escapes this double peril, first, by taking as its object the study of

the doctrinal tradition of the Church, tracing it back to its

generative principle, following it in its successive forms and

necessary evolution; and, secondly, by freely applying to this

objective material the principles and rules of a truly rational method,

a method that may be avowed as such by philosophers. It thus

constitutes the philosophy of religion in general and of Christianity

in particular, setting itself to connect the consciousness of the

Church with the general consciousness of humanity, and establishing or

maintaining between them communications equally profitable to both.

It follows that our discipline, in studying the tradition of the

Church, is independent of philosophy. On the other hand, the fact that

it borrows its methods and processes from philosophy, renders it

independent with regard to the Church. Its freedom springs from its

twofold subjection. Such a little principality, placed between two

great rival Powers without whose help it could not live, maintains its

independence of them both by virtue of their very rivalry, and may

become an arbiter, an element of pacification and good understanding,

between forces which are only hostile because they either do not know

or do not understand each other. Thus the science of dogmas will be

free, pacific, fruitful, on condition that it does not break its

connection on either hand, but remains in close communication with the

two sources of its life, without which it would be liable either to die

of inanition for want of food, or of impotence for lack of liberty.

2. _The Science of Dogmas and the Church_

A religious society cannot dispense either with doctrines or doctrinal

teaching. The more moral it is in its character, the more it needs a

dogmatic symbol which defines it and explains its _raison d'etre_. It

will have its teachers as well as its pastors and missionaries. The

apostle Paul compares the Church to an organism in which each member

has its necessary function, according to the special gift it has

received. "God," says he, "gave some, apostles; some, prophets; some,

teachers" (1 Cor. xii. 28; Rom. xii. 6-8. "Teaching of the Apostles,"

13 and 15). In passing through different lips the Gospel takes

different forms. It creates divers types of doctrine, divers schools

or parties (1 Cor. i. 10-14). It is necessary to instruct the

ignorant, to refute heretics, to heal schisms, to administer reproofs,

to correct the interpretation of texts. This could only be done by

means of discussion, reasoning, exegesis, speculation. It was not an

effort of pure science, but of practical science, in the interest of

the Church itself, with a view to its inner edification and to the

continuous reform of its worship and its faith. The labour of

dogmatics thus sprang up spontaneously in the bosom of the Church

itself, and it has continued its work, not from without, but from

within, through an office which is an essential ministry, an organ of

the Church. It could not be done well in any other way....

A religious society, by the very fact that it endures, creates a

doctrinal tradition, and this tradition soon assumes a divine character

and tends to become an absolute authority. This is the effect of a

psychological illusion characteristic of the religious consciousness so

long as reflection does not put it on its guard against itself. The

object of our faith being divine, we ingenuously transport this quality

into the formula by which it has been transmitted to us, and we hold

this formula to be divine before we have learnt to distinguish between

the essence of faith and its historical manifestations, between the

religious substance of the doctrine and its traditional expression.

Add to the prestige of the past the necessity of educating the new

generations. Every Christian begins as a catechumen, and, in certain

respects, he is and ought to be a learner all his life, for he cannot

fail to see that the collective consciousness is always richer and more

stable than his own. But, if the aim of Christian education is to

produce adult Christians--that is, Christians who, having received the

Holy Spirit, have entered into a direct and permanent relation to the

common Father, and into personal and living piety, they possess an

inward rule of conduct, and along with this a principle of free

judgment. As St. Paul says, our tutelage ends when we have attained to

our majority. The spiritual man judges all, but is judged of none. He

becomes independent of the authority under which he has grown up, as

the full-grown man becomes free from the mother who has borne and

nourished him. He will, doubtless, always gratefully welcome the

tradition of the past; but he feels within himself a higher principle

which gives him the right to amend and the power to increase, in some

degree, the inheritance he has received from his fathers. No one is

either a man or a Christian on any other condition.

The solution of the problem named above is to be found in these

considerations. A tradition which desires to be absolute, which

misunderstands and stifles individual inspiration, is not only an

usurper--it also fails in its mission, which is to make adult

Christians, Christians who are inwardly inspired and autonomous. It is

like those tyrannical mothers who, if they could, would keep their sons

in a perpetual minority. On the other hand, the children, even when

they have attained their majority, should not despise their parents and

disdain the counsels of experience and of age. Individual inspiration

is apt to lead to self-sufficiency and sectarianism; it loses sight of

the link of solidarity which unites the generations, and the social

continuity in which alone progress is made in the religious life, as in

the life of civilisation. The first defect, the tyrannical usurpation

of tradition, predominates in the Catholic Church; the opposite defect,

that of the intransigeance of individual convictions and of Illuminism,

is the plague of Protestant communities. The truth would be found in a

middle course, and in the organisation of a traditional Church stable

enough to receive and keep the heritage of the past, large and flexible

enough to permit in it the legitimate expansion of the Christian

consciousness and the acquisition of new treasure.

To this ideal, Catholicism cannot resign itself without succumbing to

death. Protestantism aspires to it without reaching it; and yet

nothing is more really in the logic of its principle. No Protestant

Church professes to be infallible. Its most solemn Confessions of

Faith have only a provisional value. The spirit of reform breathes in

it without truce, continually. The principal task of the community, as

of the individual, is to amend itself, to advance in knowledge and in

virtue. A Church which should exclude this spirit of reform would

cease to be a Protestant Church. And, of course, the duty of reform

implies the legitimacy of criticism, of an appeal to the Gospel better

understood, of a constant effort to bring the real up to the ideal.

The only matter of importance is to decide aright on the principle or

criterion according to which this criticism shall be made.