Touching image of our own experience and of the experience of humanity! We are always making to ourselves some idol or other. It is very difficult for us to realise that God is spirit: we attach ourselves therefore to some fetish of human fabrication. And then, when science comes and takes it away from us, we are troubled and perplexed, as if they had taken from us God Himself. The study of dogmas and their evolution, were it wider spread, would relieve us of our illusions and calm our inquietude. It would teach us that our religious life depends on our faith alone, and that the God Who is its source and end is independent of all theory or representation, because He is infinitely above all human conceptions, and because, in order never to be separated from Him, it suffices that we worship Him in spirit and in truth. CHAPTER III THE SCIENCE OF DOGMAS 1. _The Mixed Character of Dogmatics_ We have shown the necessity of a free criticism of dogmas. This criticism, if it is religious, will at the same time be positive; it will tend not to destroy, but to distinguish, in each dogma, that which is truly religious and permanent from that which is philosophical and fleeting. Such is the object of the discipline that, in the schools, is called _Dogmatics_, or the Science of Dogmas. It remains to define its task and to point out the resources which it has at its disposal. Both points are connected with its relation to the Church and to Philosophy. The science of dogmas has always necessarily followed the life of the one and the vicissitudes of the other. In the religious experiences of the Church it finds the material that it elaborates; from philosophy it borrows the methods according to which it treats this material and the form in which it organises it. This science is, therefore, a mixed science: positive and practical in its object, speculative and theoretical in its procedure, it seeks to connect the religious and moral experience with the rest of the experience of humanity, and to effect the synthesis claimed, in order to their full vigour, by the scientific order of thought and by the moral order of practical life.