No doubt, in the first period of physical life, sensation dominates, and at the _debut_ of religious life, feeling and imagination. But as science springs from sensation, so religious doctrine springs from piety. To say that "Christianity is a life, therefore it is not a doctrine" is to reason very badly. We should rather say, "Christianity is a life and therefore it engenders doctrine;" for man cannot live his life without thinking it. The two things are not hostile; they go together. In apostolic times the greatest of missionaries was the greatest of theologians. St. Augustine at the end of the old world, Calvin, Luther, Zwingle, at the beginning of the modern world, followed the example of St. Paul. When the sap of piety fails, theology withers. Protestant scholasticism corresponds to a decline of religious life. Spencer, by re-opening the springs of piety, renewed the streams of theology. Without Pietism Germany would have had no Schleiermacher; without the religious revival at the beginning of this century we should have had neither Samuel Vincent nor Alexander Vinet. If the life of a Church be compared to that of a plant, doctrine holds in it the place of the seed. Like the seed, doctrine is the last to be formed; it crowns and closes the annual cycle of vegetation; but it is necessary that it should form and ripen; for it carries within it the power of life and the germ of a new development. A Church without dogmas would be a sterile plant. But let not the partisans of dogmatic immutability triumph: let them pursue the comparison to the end: "Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and _die_," said Jesus, "it bears no fruit." To be fruitful, dogma must be decomposed--that is to say, it must mix itself unceasingly with the evolution of human thought and die in it; it is the condition of perpetual resurrection.