A social and universal as much and even more than it is an individual fact, it is in the social life of the species, in organised religious societies, in their institutions, their common worship, their liturgy, their rules of faith and discipline, that religion objectively realises its fundamental principle, manifests its inner soul, and develops all its power. It is only as a social manifestation that it can become an object of scientific study, and that it has need of explanation. Moreover, a religious life which remains hidden in the individual consciousness, which does not communicate itself, which does not create any spiritual solidarity, any fraternity of soul, is as if it were not; it is a mere film of feeling, an ephemeral poetic flower, which has no more effect on the individual himself than it has on the human race. From these considerations springs a method. The dogmatic treatment of religious knowledge will have for its subject the tradition of the religious society as it is fixed, conserved, and developed in its historic monuments. It will consider that tradition from the symbolic point of view, as the objective revelation of the inner life of the Church, and of its piety. The tradition will then appear not as something dead and immutable, but as a power continuing in ourselves. To grasp this soul in its fruitful continuity and in the perpetual renewal of the external organism; to comprehend them in their living unity; to tell the story of the genesis of dogmas and their endless metamorphoses as a constant and necessary incarnation of the principle that is manifested in them; to follow this uninterrupted chain in history, and prolong it into our own life,--such is the method, at once critical and positive, conservative and progressive, firm in piety and always deferential to science, which critical symbolism enables us to apply to all religious creations. The error of that form of religious knowledge called _Orthodoxy_ is that of forgetting the historically and psychologically conditioned character of all doctrines, and of desiring to raise into the absolute that which is born in time, and which must necessarily modify itself in order to live in time. Impotent to arrest the current of ideas and the movement of minds, it can only establish its rule by political measures, by regulations enacted and applied like civil laws--decisions of popes, bishops, or synods, trials for heresy, dogmatic tribunals. Orthodoxy has lost the sense of the symbolical character of Confessions of Faith, which, however, it still names symbols. Its misfortune and its failing is to be anti-historical.