Dogma only arises when the religious society, distinguishing itself from the civil, becomes a moral society, recruiting itself by voluntary adherents. This society, like every other, gives to itself what it needs in order to live, to defend itself, and propagate itself. Doctrine necessarily becomes for it an essential thing; for in its doctrine it expresses its soul, its mission, its faith. It is necessary also that it should carry its doctrine to a degree at once of generality and precision high enough to embrace and to translate all the moments of its religious experience and to eliminate all alien and hostile elements. Controversy springs up and threatens to rend it. The Church then chooses and formulates a definition of the point contested: it enacts it as the adequate expression of its faith, and sanctions it with all its objective authority: dogma is born. From that moment also the two correlative notions of _orthodoxy_ and _heresy_ are formed. Orthodoxy is official and collective doctrine; heresy is individual doctrine or interpretation.... By and by symbols or confessions of faith are formed, and these become the standards of faith and practice in the various churches that adopt them. This long evolution is fully justified in the eyes of reason. It is a movement of the mind as legitimate as it is necessary. The germ must become a tree, the child grow to manhood, the image be transformed into the idea, and poetry give place to prose. It is possible to be mistaken as to the nature, origin, and value of dogma, but not as to its necessity. The Church may make a different use of it in the future, but it will not be able to dispense with it, for the doctrinal form of religion answers to an imperative need of the epoch of intellectual growth at which we have arrived. No one can either reverse or arrest its development.... The word dogma is anterior to Catholicism. It had two senses in Greek antiquity: a political and authoritarian sense, designating the decrees of popular assemblies and of kings; this is the meaning which dominates and characterises the Catholic notion of dogma. But the word had also in the schools of Greece an essentially philosophical and doctrinal meaning; it designated the characteristic doctrine of each school. The Protestant Churches have inherited this latter sense of the word: it is in perfect harmony with the spirit and the principle of Protestantism. Dogma, in the Protestant sense, means the doctrinal type generally received in a Church, and publicly expressed in its liturgy, its catechisms, its official teaching, and especially in its Confession of Faith.[1]