The older I grew, the smaller stress I laid on those controversies and curiosities (though still my intellect abhorreth confusion), as finding greater uncertainties in them than I at first discovered, and finding less usefulness where there is the greatest certainty. The Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments are now to me as my daily bread and drink, and as I can speak and write over them again and again, so I had rather read and hear of them than of any of the school niceties. And this I observed also with Richard Hooker and with many other men. - RICHARD BAXTER.

I have found in this way the preciousness of the simple creeds of antiquity, the inward witness which a Gospel of facts possesses, and which a Gospel of notions must always want; how the most awful and absolute truths, which notions displace or obscure, are involved in facts and through facts, may be entertained and embraced by those who do not possess the faculty of comparing notions, and have a blessed incapacity of resting in them. F. D. MAURICE.

No sober-minded man will hold an opinion against reason, no Christian against Scripture, no lover of peace against the Church. - ST. AUGUSTINE.

III.

THE CREDENDA.

No memorandum of the first principles of Church Unity is complete that leaves dogma wholly out of the account. Men cannot act in concert without credenda, and since Christianity, looked at as a great movement for the betterment of human life, of necessity demands concert of action, of necessity also credenda it must have. Aware of this, the Bishops at Lambeth assembled set forth, under the head of dogma, "The Apostles' Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol; and the Nicene Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian Faith."

We shall be the better able to appreciate the strength of this position if, first of all, some thought be given to the manner in which dogma, as such, stands related to religion. It may be objected that this is a question for the schools, and for the schools only; but the days of the discipline of the secret are ended. Theology can no longer rest content with sitting, in pillared seclusion, far away from the common resorts of men. The other sciences have quitted their academic retirement and have come out into the open. Queen of them though she be, Theology has

no choice but to do as they have done, or run the risk of being thought to have abdicated her sovereignty. In these democratic days queens who are only such in posse make a poor showing. I venture therefore upon a definition, and ask you to think of a dogma as a statement set forth, either by an individual teacher or by some teaching body, to be taken for true, while confessedly not susceptible of logical demonstration.

It is evident that, as thus defined, dogmas are by no means the exclusive possession of the Christian Church. Pure science employs dogma very sparingly, but the mixed sciences are tolerant of it in large measure. Geometry, for example, a pure science, makes use of dogma under the name of the "postulate;" the postulate being an unproved assertion, the taking of which for granted facilitates the proof of other things, and thus by a sort of retroaction justifies itself. Nevertheless, Geometry, as a rule, is shy of dogma, and deals for the most part with what is directly provable. Not so Biology, and the mixed sciences in general; - here dogma abounds, commonly veiled under the name of "working hypothesis." The so-called "law" of natural selection is an instance in point. No one alleges that natural selection has been demonstrated, or is demonstrable; nevertheless, it is taught, and taught with much positiveness, by those who hold it. In fact, to question this particular working hypothesis brings down upon the questioner in some quarters censure as sharp, if not as heavy, as that which in old times fell to the lot

of those who disparaged the dogmas of the Church. Politics also and Sociology are full of dogma. The proposition "Universal suffrage makes for the good of a free people" is a dogma. The nation to which we belong sets it forth as a thing to be believed, although nobody pretends that it is susceptible of proof. It is an American dogma. The different schools of medicine again set forth dogma almost without stint. There is, for example, the antiseptic dogma, and over against it the aseptic; the very fact of the co-existence of the two dogmas being of itself evidence that neither the antiseptic nor the aseptic hypothesis admits of absolute proof. Should proof be ultimately forthcoming, the dogma that triumphed would thenceforth cease to be dogma, having become transmuted into verified fact. Meanwhile, nevertheless, the surgeons, whether of the antiseptic or the aseptic way of thinking, do not scruple to go on practising in accordance with that one of the two dogmatic bases to which they the more incline.

But if the thing itself be so obvious a necessity of human thought and life, how, one may very naturally ask, has the name for the thing come to incur the odium which, as all must own, attaches to it?

An easy way of answering the question would be to attribute the unpopularity of religious dogma directly to the hardness of men's hearts, to their obstinate determination to stay in the dark when the choice of walking in the light is offered them. But of the most intensely dogmatic teacher that ever trod the earth,

it is written that "the common people heard Him gladly." He taught as one having authority, that is to say, dogmatically, and the multitude followed Him all the more gladly on that account. It is therefore only reasonable to suppose that some portion at least of the disfavor in which dogma has come to be held is a deserved disfavor, the unpopularity an unpopularity merited and earned.

We shall be strengthened in this conviction if we consider two or three of the ways in which the principle of dogma has been abused, wounded in the house of its friends. There has been, for instance, a strong disposition always, on the part of opinionated men, to set forth their own private notions upon all sorts of subjects, as if, instead of being notions, they were decrees. A dogma, like a projectile, has momentum in proportion to the amount and strength of the explosive back of it. When a toy pistol is fired off with all the pomp and circumstance that usually attend the discharge of a three-hundred pounder, the lookers-on smile, they cannot help it. The dogmatist in this way does dogma more harm in a sentence than he can undo in a volume; for the thought of authority enters into all our conceptions of dogma, and for a personal utterance to carry authority the man who makes it must convince us either that he is inspired of some intelligence higher than the human, or that he is an expert in the department in which he undertakes to instruct us, or else that he is the mouth-piece of a very considerable number of con