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 in much of the