An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant | Page 4

all of the thinkers with whom we have to deal will have been, in their
own time, of the number of avowedly Christian men. Some who have greatly furthered
movements which in the end proved fruitful for Christian thought, have been men who in
their own time alienated from professed and official religion. In the retrospect we must
often feel that their opposition to that which they took to be religion was justifiable. Yet
their identification of that with religion itself, and their frank declaration of what they
called their own irreligion, was often a mistake. It was a mistake to which both they and
their opponents in due proportion contributed. A still larger class of those with whom we
have to do have indeed asserted for themselves a personal adherence to Christianity. But
their identification with Christianity, or with a particular Christian Church, has been often
bitterly denied by those who bore official responsibility in the Church. The heresy of one
generation is the orthodoxy of the next. There is something perverse in Gottfried Arnold's
maxim, that the true Church, in any age, is to be found with those who have just been
excommunicated from the actual Church. However, the maxim points in the direction of
a truth. By far the larger part of those with whom we have to do have had acknowledged

relation to the Christian tradition and institution. They were Christians and, at the same
time, true children of the intellectual life of their own age. They esteemed it not merely
their privilege, but also their duty, to endeavour to ponder anew the religious and
Christian problem, and to state that which they thought in a manner congruous with the
thoughts which the men of the age would naturally have concerning other themes.
It has been to most of these men axiomatic that doctrine has only relative truth. Doctrine
is but a composite of the content of the religious consciousness with materials which the
intellect of a given man or age or nation in the total view of life affords. As such, doctrine
is necessary and inevitable for all those who in any measure live the life of the mind. But
the condition of doctrine is its mobile, its fluid and changing character. It is the
combination of a more or less stable and characteristic experience, with a reflection
which, exactly in proportion as it is genuine, is transformed from age to age, is modified
by qualities of race and, in the last analysis, differs with individual men. Dogma is that
portion of doctrine which has been elevated by decree of ecclesiastical authority, or even
only by common consent, into an absoluteness which is altogether foreign to its nature. It
is that part of doctrine concerning which men have forgotten that it had a history, and
have decided that it shall have no more. In its very notion dogma confounds a statement
of truth, which must of necessity be human, with the truth itself, which is divine. In its
identification of statement and truth it demands credence instead of faith. Men have
confounded doctrine and dogma; they have been taught so to do. They have felt the
history of Christian doctrine to be an unfruitful and uninteresting theme. But the history
of Christian thought would seek to set forth the series of interpretations put, by
successive generations, upon the greatest of all human experiences, the experience of the
communion of men with God. These interpretations ray out at all edges into the general
intellectual life of the age. They draw one whole set of their formative impulses from the
general intellectual life of the age. It is this relation of the progress of doctrine to the
general history of thought in the nineteenth century, which the writer designed to
emphasise in choosing the title of this work.
As was indicated in the closing paragraphs of the preceding volume of this series, the
issue of the age of rationalism had been for the cause of religion on the whole a
distressing one. The majority of those who were resolved to follow reason were agreed in
abjuring religion. That they had, as it seems to us, but a meagre understanding of what
religion is, made little difference in their conclusion. Bishop Butler complains in his
Analogy that religion was in his time hardly considered a subject for discussion among
reasonable men. Schleiermacher in the very title of his Discourses makes it plain that in
Germany the situation was not different. If the reasonable eschewed religious protests in
Germany, evangelicals in England, the men of the great revivals in America, many of
them, took up a corresponding position as towards the life of reason, especially toward
the use of reason in religion. The sinister cast which the word rationalism bears