relation of sin and
grace, freedom and grace, grace and the means of grace. The number and
importance of the dogmas that were, in the middle ages, really fixed
after Augustine's time, had no relation to the range and importance of
the questions which they raised, and which emerged in the course of
centuries in consequence of advancing knowledge, and not less in
consequence of the growing power of the Church. Accordingly, in this
second stage which comprehends the whole of the middle ages, the Church
as an institution kept believers together in a larger measure than was
possible to dogmas. These in their accepted form were too poor to enable
them to be the expression of religious conviction and the regulator of
Church life. On the other hand, the new decisions of Theologians,
Councils and Popes, did not yet possess the authority which could have
made them incontestable truths of faith. The third stage begins with the
Reformation, which compelled the Church to fix its faith on the basis of
the theological work of the middle ages. Thus arose the Roman Catholic
dogma which has found in the Vatican decrees its provisional settlement.
This Roman Catholic dogma, as it was formulated at Trent, was moulded in
express opposition to the Theses of the Reformers. But these Theses
themselves represent a peculiar conception of Christianity, which has
its root in the theology of Paul and Augustine, and includes either
explicitly or implicitly a revision of the whole ecclesiastical
tradition, and therefore of dogma also. The History of Dogma in this
last stage, therefore, has a twofold task. It has, on the one hand, to
present the Romish dogma as a product of the ecclesiastical development
of the middle ages under the influence of the Reformation faith which
was to be rejected, and on the other hand, to portray the conservative
new formation which we have in original Protestantism, and determine its
relation to dogma. A closer examination, however, shews that in none of
the great confessions does religion live in dogma, as of old. Dogma
everywhere has fallen into the background; in the Eastern Church it has
given place to ritual, in the Roman Church to ecclesiastical
instructions, in the Protestant Churches, so far as they are mindful of
their origin, to the Gospel. At the same time, however, the paradoxical
fact is unmistakable that dogma as such is nowhere at this moment so
powerful as in the Protestant Churches, though by their histor