it as the
history of discarded errors. That is a truth and a great compliment
and the definition holds good of the record of any other science.

Now, if doctrines are signposts, dogmas are old and now misleading
milestones. For what is a dogma? It may be one of two things. Usually
it is a doctrine that has forgotten that it ever had a history;
a formula which once had authority because it was a genuine
interpretation of experience but which now is so outmoded in fashion
of thought, or so maladjusted to our present scale of values, as to
be no longer clearly related to experience and is therefore accepted
merely on command, or on the prestige of its antiquity. Or it may be
a doctrine promulgated _ex cathedra_, not because religious experience
produced it, but because ecclesiastical expediencies demand it. Thus,
to illustrate the first sort of dogma, there was once a doctrine of
the Virgin Birth. Men found, as they still do, both God and man in
Jesus; they discovered when they followed Him their own real humanity
and true divinity. They tried to explain and formalize the experience
and made a doctrine which, for the circle of ideas and the extent
of the factual knowledge of the times, was both reasonable and
valuable. The experience still remains, but the doctrine is no
longer psychologically or biologically credible. It no longer
offers a tenable explanation; it is not a valuable or illuminating
interpretation. Hence if we hold it at all today, it is either for
sentiment or for the sake of mere tradition, namely, for reasons other
than its intellectual usefulness or its inherent intelligibility. So
held it passes over from doctrine into dogma. Or take, as an
example of the second sort, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception,
promulgated by Pius IX in the year 1854, and designed to strengthen
the prestige of the Papal See among the Catholic powers of Europe and
to prolong its hold upon its temporal possessions. De Cesare describes
the promulgation of the dogma as follows:

"The festival on that day, December 8, 1854, sacred to the Virgin, was
magnificent. After chanting the Gospel, first in Latin, then in Greek,
Cardinal Macchi, deacon of the Sacred College, together with the
senior archbishops and bishops present, all approached the Papal
throne, pronouncing these words in Latin, 'Deign, most Holy Father,
to lift your Apostolic voice and pronounce the dogmatic Decree of the
Immaculate Conception, on account of which th