Shall it be another dogma? No; not even if it be called a fundamental one such as the authority of Scripture. For this very dogma, formulated by tradition, is therefore human and contingent, and is open to criticism like all the rest. With what then, or in the name of what, shall dogma be criticised? Shall we, with Rationalism, take a moral or philosophical axiom as the criterion? We should then violate the autonomy of the religious consciousness; we should denaturalise religion itself, by subjecting it to an external rule; and Dogmatics, basing its fabric on an alien principle, would produce a hybrid structure that would be rejected by believers and philosophers with equal disdain. The principle of criticism of Christian dogmas can only be the principle of Christianity itself, which is anterior to all dogmas, and which it is the aim of dogmas to manifest and to apply. Now the principle of Christianity is not a theoretical doctrine: it is a religious experience--the experience of Christ and His disciples through the centuries. It is the Gospel of salvation by the faith of the heart, the revelation of a moral relation, of a new relation, of a filial relation, created and realised between the man who is sinful and lost, and the Father who calls and pardons him. Such is the initial germ from which the whole Christian development has sprung, and by which consequently that development should and can be judged. This generative principle of the life and of all the dogmas of the Church being laid down, and the distinction established between the ideal principle and its successive realisations, all of them necessarily incomplete, the criticism of dogmas will be effected automatically, without violence, and with fruit. It will be enough to tell the story of the genesis and evolution of each of them. It will then be seen what contingent and perishing elements have entered into it in the course of history. Christianity is an organism whose soul is immortal, but whose body is renewed unceasingly by the fact that its materials are in constant movement, and that they are gathered from the various environments through which it has to pass. The philosophical notions which have served it as a temporary expression, and which are doubly dead to-day, either because civilisation has advanced, or because they were without vital connection with the initial Christian experience, fall from the tree like withered leaves or lifeless branches. As to the others, in which the sap still rises from the mother root, they will be seen to be transformed, to grow and flower from year to year under the same salubrious breath of criticism. Our discipline, religiously faithful to the principle of Christian piety, may often find itself in conflict with the administrative powers of the Church, but never really with the Church itself. 3. _The Science of Dogmas and Philosophy_