rld
will permanently accept a view of the Universe {163} which does not
commend itself to its Reason. The Ritschlians talk about the truth of
Religion resting upon value-judgements. I can quite understand that a
value-judgement may tell us the supreme value of Christ's character and
his fitness to be treated as the representative of God to us, when once
we believe in God: but I cannot see how any value-judgement taken by
itself can assure us of that existence. Value is one thing: existence
is another. To my mind a Christian Apologetic should begin, like the
old Apologies of Justin or Aristides, with showing the essential
reasonableness of Christ's teaching about God and its essential harmony
with the highest philosophic teaching about duty, about the divine
nature, about the soul and its eternal destiny. The Ritschlian is too
much disposed to underrate the value of all previous religious and
ethical teaching, even of Judaism at its highest: he is not content
with making Christ the supreme Revealer: he wants to make him the only
Revealer. And when we turn to post-Christian religious history, he is
apt to treat all the great developments of religious and ethical
thought from the time of the Apostles to our own day as simply
worthless and even mischievous corruptions of the original, and only
genuine, Christianity. He tends to reduce Christianity to the
_ipsissima verba_ of its Founder. The Ritschlian dislikes Dogma, not
because it may be at times a {164} misdevelopment, but because it is a
development; not because some of it may be antiquated Philosophy, but
simply because it is Philosophy.[1]

In order to treat fairly this question of doctrinal development, it
must be remembered that what is commonly called dogma is only a
part--perhaps not the most important part--of that development.
Supreme as I believe to be the value of Christ's great principle of
Brotherhood, it is impossible to deny that, if we look in detail at the
moral ideal of any educated Christian at the present day, we shall find
in it many elements which cannot explicitly be discovered in the
_ipsissima verba_ of Christ and still less of his Apostles. And
development in the ethical ideal always carries with it some
development in a man's conception of God and the Universe. Some of
these elements are due to a gradual bringing out into clear
consciousness, and an application to new details, of principles latent
in the actual words of Christ; other