readnaught to remake the educational system of a
whole state; militarism, which in the days of war cries, Give me your
best youth to slay, leave the crippled and defective to propagate the
race, give me your best to slay; militarism, which lays its avaricious
hand on every new invention to make gregarious death more swift and
terrible, and when war is over makes the starved bodies of innumerable
children walk in its train for pageantry,--we are not resigned to that.
We count it our Christian duty to be tirelessly unresigned.

Here is a new mood in Christianity, born out of the scientific control of
life and the modern ideas of progress, and, however consonant it may be
with the spirit of the New Testament, it exhibits in the nature of its
regulative conceptions and in its earthly hopes a transformation within
Christianity which penetrates deep. Progressive change is not simply an
environment to which Christianity conforms; it is a fact which
Christianity exhibits.

II

This idea that Christianity is itself a progressive movement instead of a
static finality involves some serious alterations in the historic
conceptions of the faith, as soon as it is applied to theology. Very
early in Christian history the presence of conflicting heresies led the
church to define its faith in creeds and then to regard these as final
formulations of Christian doctrine, incapable of amendment or addition.
Tertullian, about 204 A. D., spoke of the creedal standard of his day as
"a rule of faith changeless and incapable of reformation." [3] From that
day until our own, when a Roman Catholic Council has decreed that "the
definitions of the Roman Pontiff are unchangeable," [4] an unalterable
character has been ascribed to the dogmas of the Church of Rome. Indeed,
Pius IX, in his Syllabus of Errors, specifically condemned the modern
idea that "Divine revelation is imperfect, and, therefore, subject to
continual and indefinite progress, which corresponds with the progress of
human reason." [5] Nor did Protestantism, with all the reformation which
it wrought, attack this central Catholic conception of a changeless
content and formulation of faith. Not what the Pope said, but what the
Bible said, was by Protestants unalterably to be received. Change there
might be in the sense that unrealized potentialities involved in the
original deposit might be brought to light--a kind of development which
not only Protestants but Catholics like Card