And when we turn to post-Christian religious history, he is apt to treat all the great developments of religious and ethical thought from the time of the Apostles to our own day as simply worthless and even mischievous corruptions of the original, and only genuine, Christianity. He tends to reduce Christianity to the _ipsissima verba_ of its Founder. The Ritschlian dislikes Dogma, not because it may be at times a {164} misdevelopment, but because it is a development; not because some of it may be antiquated Philosophy, but simply because it is Philosophy.[1] In order to treat fairly this question of doctrinal development, it must be remembered that what is commonly called dogma is only a part--perhaps not the most important part--of that development. Supreme as I believe to be the value of Christ's great principle of Brotherhood, it is impossible to deny that, if we look in detail at the moral ideal of any educated Christian at the present day, we shall find in it many elements which cannot explicitly be discovered in the _ipsissima verba_ of Christ and still less of his Apostles. And development in the ethical ideal always carries with it some development in a man's conception of God and the Universe. Some of these elements are due to a gradual bringing out into clear consciousness, and an application to new details, of principles latent in the actual words of Christ; others to an infusion of Greek Philosophy; others to the practical experience and the scientific discoveries of the modern world. Christianity in the course of nineteen centuries has gradually absorbed into itself many ideas from various sources, {165} christianizing them in the process. Many ideas, much Hellenic Philosophy, many Hellenic ideals of life, many Roman ideas of government and organization have thus, in the excellent phrase of Professor Gardner, been 'baptized into Christ.' This capacity of absorbing into itself elements of spiritual life which were originally independent of it is not a defect of historical Christianity, but one of its qualifications for being accepted by the modern world as a universal, an absolute, a final Religion.