What M. Le Roy means by ’interpreting dogmas in the language of practical action’ may be gathered from his own illustrations.  The dogma, ‘God is our Father,’ does not define a ‘theoretical relation’ between Him and us.  It signifies that we are to behave to Him as sons behave to their father.  ‘God is personal’ means that we are to behave to Him as if He were a human person.  ‘Jesus is risen’ means that we are to think of Him as if He were our contemporary.  The dogma of the Real Presence means that we ought to have, in the presence of the consecrated Host, the same feelings which we should have had in the presence of the visible Christ.  ’Let the dogmas be interpreted in this way, and no one will dispute them.’[78]

The same treatment of dogma is advocated in Mr. Tyrrell’s very able book ‘Lex Orandi.’  The test of truth for a dogma is not its correspondence with phenomenal fact, but its ‘prayer-value.’  This writer, at any rate before his suspension by the Society of Jesus, to which he belonged, is less subversive in his treatment of history than the French critics whom we have quoted.  Although in apologetics the criterion for the acceptance of dogmas must, he thinks, be a moral and practical one, he sometimes speaks as if the ‘prayer-value’ of an ostensibly historical proposition carried with it the necessity of its truth as matter of fact.

’Between the inward and the outward, the world of reality and the world of appearances, the relation is not merely one of symbolic correspondence.  The distinction that is demanded by the dualism of our mind implies and presupposes a causal and dynamic unity of the two.  We should look upon the outward world as being an effectual symbol of the inward, in consequence of its natural and causal connection therewith.’[79]

But Mr. Tyrrell does not seem to mean all that these sentences might imply.  He speaks repeatedly, in the ‘Lex Orandi,’ of the ‘will-world’ as the only real world.

’The will (he says) cannot make that true which in itself is not true.  But it can make that a fact relatively to our mind and action which is not a fact relative to our understanding....  It rests with each of us by an act of will to create the sort of world to which we shall accommodate our thought and action. ....It does not follow that harmony of faith with the truths of reason and facts of experience is the best or essential condition of its credibility....  Abstractions (he refers to the world as known to science) are simple only because they are barren forms created by the mind itself.  Faith and doubt have a common element in the deep sense of the insufficiency of the human mind to grasp ultimate truths....  The world given to our outward senses is shadowy and dreamy, except so far as we ascribe to it some of the characteristics of will and spirit....  The world of appearance is simply subordinate to the real world of our will and affections.’