ne which has been
elevated by decree of ecclesiastical authority, or even only by common
consent, into an absoluteness which is altogether foreign to its nature.
It is that part of doctrine concerning which men have forgotten that it
had a history, and have decided that it shall have no more. In its very
notion dogma confounds a statement of truth, which must of necessity be
human, with the truth itself, which is divine. In its identification of
statement and truth it demands credence instead of faith. Men have
confounded doctrine and dogma; they have been taught so to do. They have
felt the history of Christian doctrine to be an unfruitful and
uninteresting theme. But the history of Christian thought would seek to
set forth the series of interpretations put, by successive generations,
upon the greatest of all human experiences, the experience of the
communion of men with God. These interpretations ray out at all edges
into the general intellectual life of the age. They draw one whole set
of their formative impulses from the general intellectual life of the
age. It is this relation of the progress of doctrine to the general
history of thought in the nineteenth century, which the writer designed
to emphasise in choosing the title of this work.

As was indicated in the closing paragraphs of the preceding volume of
this series, the issue of the age of rationalism had been for the cause
of religion on the whole a distressing one. The majority of those who
were resolved to follow reason were agreed in abjuring religion. That
they had, as it seems to us, but a meagre understanding of what religion
is, made little difference in their conclusion. Bishop Butler complains
in his _Analogy_ that religion was in his time hardly considered a
subject for discussion among reasonable men. Schleiermacher in the very
title of his _Discourses_ makes it plain that in Germany the situation
was not different. If the reasonable eschewed religious protests in
Germany, evangelicals in England, the men of the great revivals in
America, many of them, took up a corresponding position as towards the
life of reason, especially toward the use of reason in religion. The
sinister cast which the word rationalism bears in much of the popular
speech is evidence of this fact. To many minds it appeared as if one
could not be an adherent both of reason and of faith. That was a
contradiction which Kant, first of all in his own experience, and then
through his