ch, and no longer understood. (3) The needs of worship
and organisation. (4) The effort to adjust the doctrine of religion to
the prevailing doctrinal opinions. (5) Political and social
circumstances. (6) The changing moral ideals of life. (7) The so-called
logical consistency, that is the abstract analogical treatment of one
dogma according to the form of another. (8) The effort to adjust
different tendencies and contradictions in the church. (9) The endeavour
to reject once for all a doctrine regarded as erroneous. (10) The
sanctifying power of blind custom. The method of explaining everything
wherever possible by "the impulse of dogma to unfold itself," must be
given up as unscientific, just as all empty abstractions whatsoever must
be given up as scholastic and mythological. Dogma has had its history in
the individual living man and nowhere else. As soon as one adopts this
statement in real earnest, that mediaeval realism must vanish to which a
man so often thinks himself superior while imbedded in it all the time.
Instead of investigating the actual conditions in which believing and
intelligent men have been placed, a system of Christianity has been
constructed from which, as from a Pandora's box, all doctrines which in
course of time have been formed, are extracted, and in this way
legitimised as Christian. The simple fundamental proposition that that
only is Christian which can be established authoritatively by the
Gospel, has never yet received justice in the history of dogma. Even the
following account will in all probability come short in this point; for
in face of a prevailing false tradition the application of a simple
principle to every detail can hardly succeed at the first attempt.

_Explanation as to the Conception and Task of the History of Dogma_.

No agreement as yet prevails with regard to the conception of the
history of dogma. Muenscher (Handbuch der Christl. D.G. 3rd ed. I. p. 3
f.) declared that the business of the history of dogma is "To represent
all the changes which the theoretic part of the Christian doctrine of
religion has gone through from its origin up to the present, both in
form and substance," and this definition held sway for a long time. Then
it came to be noted that the question was not about changes that were
accidental, but about those that were historically necessary, that dogma
has a relation to the church, and that it represents a rational
expression of the faith. Emphasis w