maintain the common heritage, the sacred deposit of the Christian Church. It is necessary to determine the range of Catholicity, or else we may include within the field of Irenics those who have no rights in the Catholic Church, or exclude others from their rightful heritage, and so mistake the scope of our work. On the one hand, there are those who so extend the area of Catholicity as to include what is distinctively Roman or Anglican, and then exclude all others from the Catholic Church. On the other hand, there are those who value so little the Catholic heritage of the Church that they resent the use of the term for institutions and doctrines of their own communion which are truly Catholic. A man or a communion may be Christian without being Catholic, and they may be Catholic and yet fall far short of the ideal of Christ and Christianity.

(3) The third task of Irenics is to determine the consensus of Christianity. This is much wider than Catholicity, and represents a subsequent stage of development. Consensus involves the organisation of different types and parties within the Catholic Church. The consensus is the concord which the several types of Christianity have attained at a particular stage in its development. The consensus is to be distinguished from orthodoxy. That is orthodox which has been finally defined as right doctrine by the supreme authority of the Church. If we could limit orthodoxy to those authoritative determinations to which all bow, consensus and orthodoxy would be co-extensive; but in fact orthodoxy as commonly used is particularistic, because all existing Church authorities, and all Church authorities that have been in the world for centuries, are particular and not universal jurisdictions.

The Greek Church, which prides itself on its orthodoxy, is more comprehensive than others in this respect; for it limits orthodoxy to the determinations of doctrine by the primitive Councils before the division between the Eastern and Western Churches. But even these exclude several Oriental Churches. The only orthodoxy which corresponds

with consensus is that of the Nicene Creed. Hence the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of unity declares it to be "the sufficient statement of the Christian Faith." The consensus is thus more limited than orthodoxy. Eventually they will correspond; but not until the Church has learned much more of the truth than it possesses at the present time.

The consensus becomes more comprehensive with the progress of the Church, and also more complex; so that we have to distinguish between the consensus of the whole Church at different periods of its history and the consensus of two or more particular Churches. Sometimes the consensus expands; then again contracts; but, on the whole, the consensus enlarges with the progress of Christianity. So we have to distinguish between temporary consensus and permanent consensus; between entire consensus and partial consensus. There is a special consensus of the Greek and Oriental Churches: there is another special consensus of the Roman Church with them. There is a consensus of Protestantism, and there is a consensus of the Reformed Churches. All this consensus, the consensus of the entire Church and the consensus of particular Churches, has to be determined; for it indicates the unity and concord thus far attained, the stepping-stones for our advance into the more difficult realm of discord. The consensus of Christianity is vastly more important than the dissensus. No one, who has not studied it, can estimate how vast and magnificent it is when compared with the dissensus. It is like a mighty river, flowing on in majestic silence, whilst its surface is disturbed by erratic currents and noisy wavelets, stirred by mischievous or angry winds. It is the murmur of the ever-flowing stream as compared with the occasional croaking of frogs upon its banks. Taking our stand upon the consensus of Christianity, we may thank God for the progress already made, and look forward with confidence toward a future of complete unity and perfect concord.

(4) The fourth task of Irenics is the study of the dissensus,

in order to find even there the truth which invokes concord and the error which promotes discord. In this field it is the exact and complete antithesis to Polemics. Polemics assumes that it has the truth already in possession, and that its duty is to defend that truth against all assaults, and attack all opposing statements. In the scholastic age of Protestantism, Polemic Theology was attached to Dogmatic Theology on the theory that the Confession of Faith gave the Christian Faith; and it was the duty of the dogmatic theologian so to state its doctrines as to make them impregnable in defence and invincible in attack. In theological schools which still adhere to the scholastic methods one may still find chairs of Polemic Theology.

It is not surprising that such schools should oppose revision of denominational standards and any kind of new dogmatic statement. It is their task to oppose new methods: new statements, new doctrines, everything that is new. They have already attained the final knowledge of the truth; they have nothing more to learn from Bible, Church or the progress of civilisation in the world.

But Truth cannot be boxed up and put away for safe keeping. It is too large for any enclosure. It is too strong for any chains. It is too expansive for any measures. Truth appears to men at first afar off with gracious invitation. Most men are content to gaze at her in the distance, conceive her in certain relations, and then go away with their photographic ideals and develop them in unchangeable abstractions. Not so can one know the truth. He who would truly know her, must go up to her with courage and courtesy, follow her about wherever she goes, do her bidding as her faithful knight, run after her, climb after her, pursue her in the heights above, in the depths beneath, and never lose sight of her, for she will lead him a long race, testing him in every way before she gives herself to him as the bride of his soul. Truth is a sacred deposit, a holy tradition in the Church; but it is not to be laid away in a napkin to be restored to the Lord exactly as it was received. If we are

faithful servants, we will use it, and it will increase in our hands, and we shall transmit to our successors manifold gains.

Truth is given to mankind only gradually. He has to learn it little by little in the progress of his education. So nations and races are educated step by step in the progress of the centuries. All institutions, all knowledge, all things living, all religions undergo this heavenly discipline; for the history of mankind is the divine education of our race. When Jesus promised his disciples that the Holy Spirit would lead them into all the truth, he did not mean that the Holy Spirit would lead the apostles into all the truth and leave that truth as an infallible deposit in the Church to which nothing could be added in knowledge and statement. The Holy Spirit did not guide the ante-Nicene Church until the Nicene Creed was given as the final statement of the Christian faith, and then leave the Church to itself to work out the hardest problems of Christianity. He did not cease his guidance at the Reformation. He did not give his last word at the Synod of Dort, or in the Formula of Concord, or to the Westminster Assembly, or through the Book of Common Prayer, or at the Council of the Vatican. He has not left the Christian world in a chaos of discordant theologies with the alternative of submission to an infallible pontiff. There never was a time when the Holy Spirit was more needed by Christians than in our age, and there never has been a time when the Divine Spirit was so operative as in this age of transition. All things are heaving and tossing in the throes that will surely give birth to a nobler, grander Christianity.

The Church of Rome recognised this when it stated the dogma of an infallible pontiff to guide the Church of the present and the future. However much formal error there may be in this dogma, it yet honours the divine Spirit as the present guide of the Church, speaking infallibly through its supreme head. It puts to shame that Protestant scholasticism which has, so far as it could, pushed the Holy Spirit

out of the Church by its insistence upon an irreformable system of dogma. An irreformable dogmatic statement in the present time, even if given by the Pope, is presumptively of more value than an irreformable dogmatic statement of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, pronounced by any assembly of divines or the decisions of any council, however venerable. In fact, there can be no irreformable dogma in any age. All dogma is reformable, and must be reformed in the progress of the Church as she advances under the guidance of the Divine Spirit toward the ultimate, the allcomprehending and all-satisfying truth.

It is necessary to distinguish between truth in itself and in its formal expression. Language is one of the noblest endowments of mankind, but it is not so noble as the mind. It is one thing for the mind to perceive the truth and to conceive the truth; it is another thing to state it in speech and in writing. The statement in human speech can only be partial, inadequate and liable to misinterpretation. If it is necessary to have infallible dogma in stereotyped, irreformable credal statements, it is also necessary to have a stereotyped irreformable Christianity and also a stereotyped, irreformable language. A Christianity that lives and grows, outlives and outgrows all ancient statements. A creed stereotypes, once for all, the faith of those who constructed it. It is an invaluable historic document. But those who use it truly do not confine themselves to its words and sentences; they study them in order to pass through the words, the sentences, the grammar, the logic, the rhetoric, to the inner sense, and so feed upon the substantial truth which they contain. We break through the shells to get at the precious kernels. We strip off the husks to get at the golden grain. We do not swallow the kernels in the shells or the grain in the husks. So we cannot feed upon the truth by merely appropriating the ancient dogmatic statements. We must break through the shells of these statements to the substantial verities.

The statements are the shells, the husks, necessary to