the philosophy of religion. They expound or defend or relate
the intellectual statements, the formulae of religion. Such discourses
differ essentially from dogmatic sermonizing. For what is a doctrine?
A doctrine is an intellectual formulation of an experience. Suppose
a man receives a new influx of moral energy and spiritual insight,
through reading the Bible, through trying to pray, through loving and
meditating upon the Lord Jesus. That experience isn't a speculative
proposition, it isn't a faith or an hypothesis; it's a fact. Like the
man in the Johannine record the believer says, "Whether he be a sinner
I know not: but one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I
see."

Now, let this new experience of moral power and spiritual insight
express itself, as it normally will, in a more holy and more
useful life, in the appropriate terms of action. There you get that
confession of experience which we call character. Or let it express
itself in the appropriate emotions of joy and awe and reverence so
that, like Ray Palmer, the convert writes an immortal hymn, or a body
of converts like the early church produces the _Te Deum_. There is the
confession of experience in worship. Or let a man filled with this new
life desire to understand it; see what its implications are regarding
the nature of God, the nature of man, the place of Christ in the scale
of created or uncreated Being. Let him desire to thus conserve and
interpret that he may transmit this new experience. Then he will begin
to define it and to reduce it, for brevity and clearness, to some
abstract and compact formula. Thus he will make a confession of
experience in doctrine.

Doctrines, then, are not arbitrary but natural, not accidental but
essential. They are the hypotheses regarding the eternal nature of
things drawn from the data of our moral and spiritual experience. They
are to religion just what the science of electricity is to a trolley
car, or what the formula of evolution is to natural science, or what
the doctrine of the conservation of energy is, or was, to physics.
Doctrines are signposts; they are placards, index fingers, notices
summing up and commending the proved essences of religious experience.
Two things are always true of sound doctrine. First: it is not
considered to have primary value; its worth is in the experience
to which it witnesses. Second: it is not fixed but flexible and
progressive. Someone has railed at theology, defining