This outlook, however, has already gone beyond the limits fixed for these introductory paragraphs and must not be pursued further. To treat _in abstracto_ of the method of the history of dogma in relation to the discovery, grouping and interpretation of the material is not to be recommended; for general rules to preserve the ignorant and half instructed from overlooking the important, and laying hold of what is not important, cannot be laid down. Certainly everything depends on the arrangement of the material; for the understanding of history is to find the rules according to which the phenomena should be grouped, and every advance in the knowledge of history is inseparable from an accurate observance of these rules. We must, above all, be on our guard against preferring one principle at the expense of another in the interpretation of the origin and aim of particular dogmas. The most diverse factors have at all times been at work in the formation of dogmas. Next to the effort to determine the doctrine of religion according to the _finis religionis_, the blessing of salvation, the following may have been the most important. (1) The conceptions and sayings contained in the canonical scriptures. (2) The doctrinal tradition originating in earlier epochs of the church, 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