Dogma, in the strictest sense, is one or more doctrinal propositions which, in a religious society, and as the result of the decisions of the competent authority, have become the object of faith, and the rule of belief and practice. It would not be enough to say that a religious society has dogmas as a political society has laws. For the first, it is a much greater necessity. Moral societies not only need to be governed; they need to define themselves and to explain their _raison d'etre_. Now, they can only do this in their dogma. Dogma therefore is a phenomenon of social life. One cannot conceive either dogma without a Church, or a Church without dogma. The two notions are correlative and inseparable. There are three elements in dogma: a religious element, which springs from piety; an intellectual or philosophic element, which supposes reflection and discussion; and an element of authority, which comes from the Church. Dogma is a doctrine of which the Church has made a law. All the peoples of antiquity believed that their legislation came from heaven. In like manner all the Churches have believed, and many of them still believe, that their dogmas, in their official form, have been directly given to them by God Himself. The history of evolution, political and religious, has dissipated these illusions. Every law of righteousness and truth should, doubtless, be referred to the mysterious action of the Divine Spirit which works incessantly in the spirits of men; but, in its historical form, it bears, nevertheless, the stamp of the contingent conditions in which it is born. The genius of a people is nowhere more manifest than in its constitution and its laws, nor the soul and the original inspiration of a Church than in its dogmatic creations. The work always bears the moral impress of the workman. It follows that a Church cannot claim for its dogma more authority than it possesses itself. Only a Church which is infallible can issue immutable dogmas. When Protestantism sets up such a pretension, it falls into a radical contradiction with its own principle, and that contradiction ruins all attempts of this kind. In Catholicism the theory of the immutability of dogmas is opposed to history; in Protestantism it is opposed to logic. In both cases the affirmation is shown to be illusory. It is with dogmas, so long as they are alive, as it is with all living things; they are in a perpetual state of transformation. They only become immutable when they are dead, and they begin to die when they cease to be studied for their own sakes--that is, to be discussed.