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"It is sufficient for the religious conviction to experience the nearness of God in human suffering, and His help in the raising of life out of suffering into a new life beyond all the insufficiency of reason. Indeed, the more intuitively this necessary truth is grasped, the less does it combine into a dogmatic speculation and the purer and more energetically is it able to work."
Not by dogmatic assertion, does it teach the impossibility of comprehending the Ultimate Cause of things; but it leads us clearly to recognise this impossibility by bringing us in every direction to boundaries we cannot cross. It realises to us in a way which nothing else can, the littleness of human intelligence in the face of that which transcends human intelligence.
Nearly all the Balliol dons even those who never spoke of religion seemed to start with the same foregone conclusion, that the dogmatic theology of the churches was as dead as the geocentric astronomy.
We should be compelled to rely, in the one case, upon the untrustworthy gossip of Mussulman chroniclers, and in the other case upon the garbled statements of the "Acts of the Apostles," a book written with a distinct dogmatic purpose, sixty or seventy years after the occurrence of the events which it professes to record.
Is it because ancient pride ends by hardening all hearts, or because the experience of very old races leads finally to egotism, that one now beholds Italy seemingly benumbed amidst dogmatic and pompous Catholicism, whilst the return to the ideals of the Gospel, the passionate interest in the poor and the suffering comes from the woeful plains of the North, from the nations whose sunlight is so limited?
The poor fellow said, "You should have told me that, gentlemen," and deliberately unscrewed the instrument and bled to death. Would not that be the case with many friends of my own? How could I ever hope to make them believe in a second theology, when I had cheated them in the first? With what face could I publish a new edition of a dogmatic creed, and ask them to receive it as gospel?
This operation is what is recorded and demanded in the doctrine of creation: a doctrine which would lose its dogmatic force if we allowed either the moral ideality or the physical efficacy of the creator to drop out of sight.
It would seem to be good commercially, and, as a policy, I should consider it good for art, which must consult the popular taste or lose its vitality. But a pitfall lies between this theory of editorial selection and its successful practice. The editor must really know what the public wants. If he does not, he becomes a dogmatic critic of a very dangerous school.
To this uncritical spirit, leading to the neglect of such books as failed to answer the dogmatic requirements of the Church, may probably be attributed the loss of so many of the earlier gospels. These considerations will, we believe, sufficiently explain the curious circumstance that, while we know the Christ of dogma so intimately, we know the Jesus of history so slightly.
To the public at large, the central point of interest in this special message, however, was the following dogmatic announcement by the President: "It has been solemnly adjudged by the highest judicial tribunal known to our laws that slavery exists in Kansas by virtue of the Constitution of the United States. Kansas is, therefore, at this moment as much a slave-State as Georgia or South Carolina.
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