The Catholic notion of dogma vanishes with all the rest. To speak of an immutable and infallible dogma, in Protestantism, is nonsense; that is to say, if we accept the dictionary definition of dogma--the promulgation by the Church of an absolute formula. The decision of a Church cannot have more authority than that Church itself. Now, no Protestant Church holds itself, or can hold itself without denying itself, to be infallible. How then could it communicate to its definitions an infallibility that it did not itself possess? Protestant confessions of faith are always conditioned in time, and can never be definitive; they are always revisable, consequently they are always liable to criticism and to reform. Thus ceases the solidification of traditional dogma. The old ice melts beneath the breath of knowledge and of piety. The river takes again its natural course, and evolution, under the control of a perpetual criticism, becomes the law of religious thought, as of all other human activities. From these observations and analyses (necessarily abridged) the true nature of Protestantism will have become sufficiently clear. It is not a dogma set up in the face of another dogma, a Church in competition with a rival Church, a purified Catholicism opposed to a traditional Catholicism. It is more and better than a doctrine, it is a method; more and better than a better Church, it is a new form of piety; it is a different spirit, creating a new world and inaugurating for religious souls a new regime. It is equally evident that Protestantism cannot be imprisoned in any definitive form. It leads to variety of formulas, rites, and associations as necessarily as the Catholic principle leads to unity. No limit can be set to its development. Always interior, invisible, ideal, the religious principle that it represents accompanies the life and activity of the spirit into all the paths that man may pursue and in all the progress he may make. Nothing human is alien to it; nor is it alien to anything that is human. It solves the problem of liberty and authority as it is solved by free and ordered governments; it does not suppress either of the terms, but conciliates them by reducing authority to its pedagogic _role_, and by making the Christian spirit the soul and inner rule of liberty.