is easy to see this in the concrete by taking up the life of almost any saint.  It is easy to trace the growth of S. John from the young fisherman, fiery, impatient, who wished to call down fire from heaven upon his adversaries as Elijah did, and gained the rebuke:  “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of,” to the mature and supremely calm and simple experience which is reflected in the Gospel and Epistles.  It is easy to trace the development of the impulsive, zealous Pharisee that Paul of Tarsus was, through all the stages of spiritual growth that are reflected in his Letters, till he is Paul the aged waiting to depart and be with Christ “which is far better.”  You can study it in the confessions of S. Augustine in its first stage and follow it through its later stages in his letters and other writings, and in many another saint beside.  If you have any spiritual experience at all you can trace it in your own case:  you have grown, not through dealing with sin, but through the pursuit of ideal perfection, that perfection which is set before you by the Christian Religion.  You may not feel that you have gone very far:  that is not the point at present; you know that you have found a method by which you may go on indefinitely; that there is no need that you should stop anywhere short of the Beatific Vision.  You do know that your religion is not the deadening repetition of dogmas which the unbeliever conceives it to be, but is the never ceasing attempt to master the inexhaustible truth that is contained in your relation to our Lord.  You do know that however far you have gone you feel that you are still but on the threshold and that the path before your feet runs out into infinity.  Let us go back again to our examination of the experience of the Apostles.  When we examine their training we find there, I think, two quite distinct elements both of which must have had a formative influence upon their ministry.  In the first place there was the element of dogmatic teaching.  There is a class of persons who are accustomed to tell us that there is no dogma in the New Testament, by which they appear to mean that the particular dogmatic affirmations of the Creed are not formulated in the pages of the New Testament, but are of later production.  That, no doubt, is true; but nevertheless it would be difficult to find a more dogmatic book than the New Testament, or a more dogmatic teacher than was our Lord.  And our Lord taught the Apostles in a most definite way the expected acceptance of His teaching because He taught it.  “He taught as one having authority, and not as the scribes,” it was noted.  The point about the teaching of the scribes was that it was traditional, wholly an interpretation of the meaning of the Old Testament.  It made no claim to originality but rather based its claim on the fact it was not original.  Our Lord, it was noticed, did not base His claim on tradition.  In fact He often noticed the Jewish tradition for the purpose of marking the contrast between it and His own teaching.