om we have to deal will
have been, in their own time, of the number of avowedly Christian men.
Some who have greatly furthered movements which in the end proved
fruitful for Christian thought, have been men who in their own time
alienated from professed and official religion. In the retrospect we
must often feel that their opposition to that which they took to be
religion was justifiable. Yet their identification of that with religion
itself, and their frank declaration of what they called their own
irreligion, was often a mistake. It was a mistake to which both they and
their opponents in due proportion contributed. A still larger class of
those with whom we have to do have indeed asserted for themselves a
personal adherence to Christianity. But their identification with
Christianity, or with a particular Christian Church, has been often
bitterly denied by those who bore official responsibility in the Church.
The heresy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next. There is
something perverse in Gottfried Arnold's maxim, that the true Church, in
any age, is to be found with those who have just been excommunicated
from the actual Church. However, the maxim points in the direction of a
truth. By far the larger part of those with whom we have to do have had
acknowledged relation to the Christian tradition and institution. They
were Christians and, at the same time, true children of the intellectual
life of their own age. They esteemed it not merely their privilege, but
also their duty, to endeavour to ponder anew the religious and Christian
problem, and to state that which they thought in a manner congruous with
the thoughts which the men of the age would naturally have concerning
other themes.

It has been to most of these men axiomatic that doctrine has only
relative truth. Doctrine is but a composite of the content of the
religious consciousness with materials which the intellect of a given
man or age or nation in the total view of life affords. As such,
doctrine is necessary and inevitable for all those who in any measure
live the life of the mind. But the condition of doctrine is its mobile,
its fluid and changing character. It is the combination of a more or
less stable and characteristic experience, with a reflection which,
exactly in proportion as it is genuine, is transformed from age to age,
is modified by qualities of race and, in the last analysis, differs with
individual men. Dogma is that portion of doctri