inal Newman have willingly
allowed--but whatever had once been stated as the content of faith by the
received authorities was by both Catholics and Protestants regarded as
unalterably so. In the one case, if the Pope had once defined a dogma,
it was changeless; in the other, if the Bible had once formulated a
pre-scientific cosmology, or used demoniacal possession as an explanation
of disease, or personified evil in a devil, all such mental categories
were changelessly to be received. In its popular forms this conception
of Christianity assumes extreme rigidity--Christianity is a static system
finally formulated, a deposit to be accepted in toto if at all, not to be
added to, not to be subtracted from, not to be changed, its i's all
dotted and its t's all crossed.

The most crucial problem which we face in our religious thinking is
created by the fact that Christianity thus statically conceived now goes
out into a generation where no other aspect of life is conceived in
static terms at all. The earth itself on which we live, not by fiat
suddenly enacted, but by long and gradual processes, became habitable,
and man upon it through uncounted ages grew out of an unknown past into
his present estate. Everything within man's life has grown, is growing,
and apparently will grow. Music developed from crude forms of rhythmic
noise until now, by way of Bach, Beethoven and Wagner, our modern music,
still developing, has grown to forms of harmony at first undreamed.
Painting developed from the rough outlines of the cavemen until now
possibilities of expression in line and colour have been achieved whose
full expansion we cannot guess. Architecture evolved from the crude huts
of primitive man until now our cathedrals and our new business buildings
alike mark an incalculable advance and prophesy an unimaginable future.
One may refuse to call all development real progress, may insist upon
degeneration as well as betterment through change, but, even so, the
basic fact remains that all the elements which go to make man's life come
into being, are what they are, and pass out of what they are into
something different, through processes of continual growth. Our business
methods change until the commercial wisdom of a few years ago may be the
folly of to-day; our moral ideals change until actions once respectable
become reprobate, and the heroes of one generation would be the convicts
of another; our science changes until ideas that