[D] This was an address which I delivered before the International Metaphysical League eight or nine years ago. A dogma is a phrase that condenses much thought. It is a short way of stating a great truth, and is supposed to recall that truth to the mind. Like a talisman it is to be repeated. Open sesame--and some great mystery of life is unlocked. A dogma is like a key to a map, a thread to a labyrinth. It is all that some man has brought back from a spiritual exaltation in which he has had a vision of how the world is made; and he repeats it and teaches it as a digest of his vision, a short and handy summary and elixir by which he, and as he thinks anyone else, can go back into his exaltation and see the truth. To him the words seem universally true--true at all times and in any aspect. Indeed, all experience, all thought, all conduct seem to him to be made up of mere illustrations, proofs, and reminiscences of the dogma. It is probable that all the dogmas were originally shots at the same truth, nets cast over the same truth, digests of the same vision. There is no other way of accounting for their power. If the doctrine of the Trinity signified no more than what I can see in it, it would never have been regarded as important. Unless the words “Salvation by Grace” had at one time stood for the most powerful conviction of the most holy minds, we should never have heard the phrase. Our nearest way to come at the meaning of such things is to guess that the dogmas are the dress our own thought might have worn, had we lived in times when they arose. We must translate our best selves back into the past in order to understand the phrases. Of course, these dogmas, like our own dogmas, are no sooner uttered than they change. Somebody traduces them, or expounds them, or founds a sect or a prosecution upon them. Then comes a new vision and a new digest. And so the controversy goes rolling down through the centuries, changing its forms but not its substance. And it has rolled down to us, and we are asking the question, “What is truth?” as eagerly, as sincerely, and as patiently as we may. Truth is a state of mind. All of us have known it and have known the loss of it. We enter it unconsciously; we pass out of it before we are aware. It comes and goes like a searchlight from an unknown source. At one moment we see all things clearly, at the next we are fighting a fog. At one moment we are as weak as rags, at the next we are in contact with some explaining power that courses through us, making us feel like electrical conductors, or the agents of universal will. In the language of Christ these latter feelings are moments of “faith”; and faith is one of the very few words which he used a great many times in just the same sense, as a name for a certain kind of experience. He did not define the word, but he seems to have given it a specific meaning.