of doctrines; and the faith which it enjoins, as is manifest from the definition and historical examples in Hebrews xi., is not an intellectual faith in the doctrines of a metaphysical theology, but a living faith in the moral government of the world and a heroic conduct in life, as the necessary expression of such faith. The mere intellectual orthodoxy on which the Christian Church has, by the tradition of centuries, placed such a high value, is, in the apostolical estimate, plainly worth nothing; for the devils also believe and tremble, as St. James has it, or as our Lord himself said in the striking summation to the Sermon on the Mount, "Not they who call me _Lord, Lord_, shall enter into the kingdom, but they who do the will of my Father who is in heaven. By their works, not by their creed, ye shall know them."[19] Nevertheless, the exaltation of the dogma has always been a favourite tendency of the Church, and the besetting sin of the clergy. With the mass of the people, to swear to a curious creed is always more easy than to lead a noble life; while to the clerical intellect it must always give a secret satisfaction to think that the science of theology, which is the furthest removed from the handling of the great mass of men, has in their hands assumed a well-defined shape, of which the articulations are as subtle and as necessary as the steps of solution in a difficult algebraic problem. The late Baron Bunsen, for many years Prussian ambassador in London, one of the most large-minded and large-hearted of Christian men, in the preface to his great _Bibel werk_, devotes a special chapter to Dogmatism as a vice of the clerical mind leading to false views of Scripture; over and above what he calls the modern revival of scholastic theology in Germany, he enumerates four dominant epochs of ecclesiastical life in which this anti-evangelical tendency has prominently asserted itself. These are--(1) the dogmatism of the great Church councils in the reigns of Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian; (2) the medieval scholasticism of the Western Church; (3) the Protestant scholasticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; (4) the dogmatism of the Jesuits, Perron, Bossuet, and others. Had this dogmatic tendency of the Church contented itself with tabulating a curious scheme of divine mysteries, though it might justly have been deemed impertinent, and here and there a little presumptuous, yet it might have been condoned lightly as a sort of clerical recreation in hours which might have been worse employed; but it could not be content with this: it passed at once into action, and in this guise prevailed to deface the fair front of the Church with gashes of more bloody and barbarous inhumanity than ever marked the altars of the Baals and Molochs of the most savage heathen superstitions.