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 DOGMATIC RELIGION; 
 
 A Lecture delivered in Great S. Marys Church, Cambridge^ 
 m Sunday Oct. 25th, 1885, 
 
 BY THE 
 
 Rev. The Hon. A. T. LYTTELTON, M.A., 
 
 Master of Selwyn College ; Examinittg Chaplain to the Bishop 
 of Ripon. 
 
 PRICE TWOPENCE. 
 
 W. P. Spalding, 43, Sidney Street.
 
 DOGMATIC RELIGION. 
 
 As this course of Lectures is intended to deal 
 with some of the chief of the great doctrines of the 
 Church, there are two preliminary questions which 
 may occur to many, and which are the outcome of 
 certain very important tendencies of modern thought. 
 We may be asked in the first place why we lay such 
 stress upon the Church, We ma}- be called upon, that 
 is, to justify our belief in the Church as a divine insti- 
 tution, as something more than one among many sects. 
 This question was dealt with last Sunday, and I wish 
 to-day to address myself to the second of the two pre- 
 liminar}^ difficulties to which I have referred, viz., the 
 objection to Doctrine as such. W^hy, it may be and 
 has been asked, do you tell us about doctrines ? What 
 is the use of dogmas when we want to learn about life 
 and practice ? We can believe and rejoice in the 
 existence of a Church, of a body of faithful people, we 
 are anxious to secure the permanence and the growth 
 of true religion, but dogmatic religion is a different 
 thing; we cannot accept it, for we know that it has 
 proved a mere hindrance to the genuine spirit of 
 Christianity. 
 
 This is the difficulty of which I wish to speak to- 
 night, and I will say, at the outset, that the feeling 
 which I have tried to describe is one for which I have 
 much sympathy, and which I believe to be a natural 
 and almost an inevitable feeling. Nevertheless, we 
 cannot call ourselves Churchmen, we cannot, I believe, 
 even call ourselves Christians, without accepting a 
 whole system of doctrines, or, if you choose to call 
 them by a more invidious name, a whole system of 
 dogmas. In order, therefore, to establish and to justify
 
 our position, it is necessary to show that dogma is not 
 a mere human invention, not an arbitrary system 
 injurious and unnecessary to true rehgion, but an 
 essential element in Christianity, and not only necessary, 
 but in the highest degree helpful to practical rehgious 
 life. 
 
 There are three main opinions which are opposed to 
 the dogmatic character of religion. First, there is the 
 belief that religion is an affair of the emotions alone, 
 and not of the intellect ; secondly, there is the belief 
 that religion is only morality ; and lastly, there is the 
 behef that religion, or at least Christianity, consists 
 only in a deep reverence for the Person of Christ, and 
 that dogmas and definitions are not only unnecessary, 
 but actually injurious to that reverence. I will take 
 these in order, merely premising that I do not intend to 
 deny the partial truth of any one of them. Religion is 
 an affair of the emotions, it does deal with morahty, it 
 is built upon a profound reverence for the Person of 
 Christ. I maintain, however, that these are one and 
 all incomplete accounts of it. 
 
 I. It IS not easy to state fairly the objection of 
 those who hold that rehgion is only emotional. And the 
 reason that the emotions must be stirred, so far as 
 we know, by some object, something outside the mind 
 and the feeling. But if there must be an object to stir 
 the emotions, there must be some knowledge of the 
 object, and to communicate that knowledge there must 
 be something of the nature of definition, or at least des- 
 cription, of the object, and such a description must be 
 more or less dogmatic. But I will state it thus, as I sup- 
 pose is generally intended, that the object which excites 
 our religious emotions, need be only vaguely conceived 
 in the mind; and that it does not matter what the 
 nature of God is conceived to be so long as we worship 
 Him, for religion is worship, and worship is emotion. 
 
 Now, though it is true that emotion is a great force 
 in human affairs, it is not true that emotion by itself 
 has much power. The mere feeling of dependence, to
 
 which some would reduce the whole of religion, has 
 never produced great effects, cannot indeed produce 
 them ; it cannot rouse masses of men, it cannot concen- 
 trate them in one great action, urge them towards an 
 object. So also with the emotions of love, awe, fear, ad- 
 miration. Apart even from the necessity of an object for 
 these emotions, you will find that they are powerful in 
 proportion as their object is clearly conceived, and held 
 in the mind. The great movements of humanity, the 
 great stages of the world's history, have been produced 
 either by the natural instincts or wants of mankind, Hke 
 the hunger which drove the northern barbarians down 
 upon the Roman empire, the craving for wealth which 
 conquered and is colonising America, or by the force of 
 some great intellectual conception, some dogma pre- 
 senting an object to men's minds, and compelling them 
 to reach out towards it. It was the dogma of the Unity 
 of God which made a small Syrian tribe a permanent 
 power in the history of the world, which more than a 
 thousand years later laid Southern Europe at the feet of 
 Arabia ; it was the dogma of the equality of man which 
 opened the gulf of revolution between the i8th and 19th 
 centuries. No mere emotion could have produced the 
 Temple of Jerusalem, or the Mahommedan conquests, 
 or the French Revolution, or the Crusades, or the 
 Reformation, or the discovery of America. Scrutinize 
 each great moment of the world's history, and you will 
 find, underlying the forces which brought it about, either 
 a natural instinctive craving, or an intellectual concep- 
 tion, a dogma. 
 
 It is true that individuals can be powerfully affected 
 by mere emotions, or by emotions whose object is so 
 vaguely conceived that it can scarcely be called intel- 
 lectual at all : but by their very nature the influence of 
 such emotions must remain individual and particular. 
 It can be communicated indeed, but only by contagion ; 
 it cannot be perpetuated and widely disseminated, it 
 dies when its first manifestations pass away, for the very 
 reason that it is only the intellect that can generahze,
 
 only the reason that supplies a universal language. 
 Emotions can for a time inspire a crowd ; intellectual 
 conceptions alone can permanently Instruct and elevate 
 mankind. A definite faith, a clear perception of an 
 intellectual object can be held in common by men in 
 different countries and in widely separated centuries ; 
 and if religion is to be more than the record of the par- 
 ticular feelings of particular men, If it is to be a com- 
 mon possession, a general force, it must be founded on 
 intellectual conceptions, and defined by the definiteness 
 of its object ; in a word. It must be dogmatic. 
 
 II. But It may be said, we grant that religion is 
 more than emotion, but still it is not dogmatic. Religion 
 deals with moraHty alone ; it consists in the recognition 
 of the highest moral laws. In the practice of a complete 
 and lofty moral system. The sermon on the Mount, 
 which Is said to consist of moral precepts alone, is the 
 only standard of Christianity ; creeds and confessions 
 are worse than useless. 
 
 If we enquire why this attractive theory Is so com- 
 monly held, and held by men of strong practical sense, 
 we shall find, I think, that it Is adopted in consequence 
 of the dogmatic disputes and divisions among Christ- 
 ians, and as a reaction from them. In pure morality, It 
 is thought there can be no difficulty, no difference of 
 opinion, no schisms, no anathema. Let us agree to for- 
 get the dogmas which theologians have Invented, and 
 fall back upon those great moral truths which Christ 
 stated so powerfully. Religion is not emotional, it is 
 intellectual ; but its fundamental conceptions are ethi- 
 cal rather than theological or metaphysical. 
 
 Dogma, then, is responsible for the divisions of Chris- 
 tians ; substitute morality for theology, and we shall 
 have no more divisions. Is this perfectly certain ? Is 
 it certain that the moral differences between men, both 
 in theory and In practice, are not as great as the doc- 
 trinal ? We need not look at the morality of heathen 
 countries to discover these differences ; take a Christian 
 country, penetrated for hundreds of years with the
 
 teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, and you will hnd, 
 if you examine the ethical notions of all but thoroughly 
 religious men, that they are confused, contradictory, 
 and often bitterly hostile to each other. Study the 
 various systems of moral philosophy, seek to reconcile 
 the differences between Kant and Bentham, between 
 Spencer and Comte, and you will be able to realize the 
 difficulty of uniting mankind by a common theory of 
 morality. If you talk to a thoughtful and cultivated 
 man of the world, and try to find some common ground 
 on which to discuss questions of ordinary conduct, you 
 will often find your assumptions denied, your first 
 principles ignored. There can be, in purely speculative 
 questions, no greater difference than that which divides 
 the Utilitarian from the Intuitional moralist, and it is a 
 difference which is not yet set at rest. 
 
 But it may be said these are theoretical matters, 
 and theory is always debateable ; in practice we are 
 all agreed. So we are to found our religion on the 
 common practice of morality, to unite our Church upon 
 the common observance of the precepts of the Sermon 
 on the Mount, or perhaps only of the Decalogue. It is 
 a vain hope. The practical differences between men 
 are greater and certainly more important than the 
 theoretical ; there is less actual agreement, less possi- 
 bility of common action, between a sinner and a saint 
 than there is between a Catholic and an Independent, 
 between a Calvinist and an Arminian. Go to an un- 
 christian man of the world with the Sermon on the 
 Mount, take the most vital, the most obvious of the 
 moral laws laid down in it, and you will find that not 
 only does his practice go counter to it, but that he 
 is ready to defend his practice by argument. It is vain 
 to talk of moral agreement between men when, for in- 
 stance, to break the Christian law of purity is commonly 
 declared in the world to be a necessity and no sin. 
 
 And it should be noticed that, in Europe at least, 
 the agreement that does exist in ethical theory and 
 practice has been won for us by centuries of dogma.
 
 The morality of Christ has been accepted because of 
 the belief in His Divinity ; the ethics of the Gospel, the 
 moral system of the Church are now so ingrained in 
 the minds of men that a great part of them has become 
 natural and instinctive, but they are now instinctive 
 because they were once the outcome of a dogmatic 
 faith, the fruit of those intellectual conceptions which 
 we are now called upon to discard. If there is more 
 practical agreement among modern nations on moral 
 questions than there was in the ancient world, it is 
 because civilization has been accompanied for eighteen 
 hundred years by a great dogmatic system. You say 
 that creeds and dogmas cause doctrinal divisions and 
 rehgious disputes ; it is at least equally true to say that 
 creeds and dogmas have produced whatever moral 
 agreement there is ; and you cannot legitimately assume 
 that when you have discarded the doctrines you will 
 continue to enjoy the moral harmony which, as an 
 historical fact, depends upon them. 
 
 But I do not allow that it is accurate to say that the 
 divisions among Christians are caused by dogmas. No 
 doubt they are, in most cases, caused by differences of 
 opinion about speculative subjects, but the dogmas, the 
 accurate definitions of faith, the creeds of the Church, 
 have been produced by the divisions, not the divisions 
 by the creeds. It was not the Nicene definition of our 
 Lord's Divinity that produced the Arian heresy or the 
 Arian schism, but it was the heresy that compelled the 
 Church to define and to dogmatize. So long as there 
 are, as there always must be, intellectual conceptions 
 at the root of all moraHty, of all practical life, men will 
 be found to differ about them. They differed about 
 them before there existed any dogmatic definitions 
 of them ; the contests which raged round the defini- 
 tions, the birthpangs of the creeds, were not caused by 
 the dogmas, but by the differences of opinion which 
 necessitated the dogmas ; and those differences have 
 been lessened rather than increased by the definitions 
 which they produced.
 
 But, at all events, it should be recognised that 
 whether a system of pure morality without dogma is 
 possible or not, it is not religion. You may wish to do 
 without religion altogether, but if there is to be any- 
 thing corresponding to the universal meaning of the 
 word, it must include more than a system of morality. 
 I may not yet have proved my right to declare that 
 religion must be dogmatic, but I can confidently appeal 
 to the common meaning of language, to the common 
 experience of men, to support the assertion that mere 
 morahty satisfies neither the accepted signification of 
 the word religion, nor the rehgious cravings of the 
 human heart. If undogmatic religion means mere 
 morality, we may as well say at once that the choice 
 lies between dogmatic religion and no religion at all. 
 
 III. But of course such a dilemna will be at once 
 rejected. There is a middle course which we may take, 
 and just as it is acknowledged that religion is more 
 than erfiotion, so it will be further allowed that it is 
 more than morality, and yet it will be maintained that 
 it is not dogmatic. Religion, it may be said, is the 
 veneration of a Supreme Being, and the Christian re- 
 ligion is the veneration of that Being as revealed to us 
 in or by the Person of Jesus Christ. Let us therefore 
 gaze upon that Person and study that character un- 
 vexed by definitions, undisturbed by dogmas; it is 
 enough for us to know that He existed, and to have in 
 our hands the record of His words and of His actions. 
 If we are to have a creed, let us limit it to the two 
 articles, I believe in God, and I believe in Jesus Christ. 
 This is the commonest, most attractive form of undog- 
 matic religion, and it has in it this element of truth, that 
 it is the original form of Christianity, the foundation of 
 the whole system of the Church. But because it is the 
 foundation, does it follow that there is to be no edifice 
 raised upon it ? Must the starting point be also the 
 goal ? We know as an historical fact that this was 
 not the actual course of things, and if it is said 
 that the Early Church was as wrong as we are in
 
 8 
 
 making dogmatic statements about the Person of 
 Christ, we may go further back than the Early Church 
 and find dogmatic statements in the writings of the 
 Apostles, and, even more than that, we find them in the 
 words of Our Lord Himself. Though they may not be 
 stated in the later language of the Creeds, it is a fact 
 that in Christ's own teaching there is a mass of 
 informal dogmatic assertions about Himself, about His 
 relation to the Father and His relation to men, which 
 only needed to be compared and drawn out to form the 
 framework of a whole system of dogma.* And you 
 must remember that a great part of what we call 
 dogma is a mere recital of alleged historical facts, and 
 that the foundation for these facts is found not in the 
 speculative writings of Christian philosophers, not in 
 the Epistles of St. Paul, not even in the Gospel of 
 St. John, but in the simplest and earliest narratives of 
 Christ's life, in the records of His Birth, His Death, 
 His Resurrection and His Ascension. 
 
 And, as a matter of common Christian experience, 
 it will be found practically impossible to contemplate 
 steadily and profitably the Person of Christ, or indeed 
 to meditate on the idea of God, without attempting to 
 satisfy the natural wish of the intellect for more definite 
 conceptions of the Nature and Character of Christ, 
 for a clearer view of the Being and Attributes of God. 
 If you put the Bible into men's hands and tell them to 
 be content with that, you will find that if they do not 
 arrive at the positive doctrines which the Christian 
 experience of ages has formulated, they will invent for 
 themselves negative solutions of the problems which 
 are presented solutions every whit as dogmatic 
 as the doctrines they deny. The Unitarians, the 
 most undogmatic of religious sects, are beginning to 
 feel the want of something more than a vague Theism ; 
 
 * The following are a few of the passages which illustrate this 
 statement. Matt. xi. ii, 27; xii. 31, 32; xvi. 18, 27; xviii. ii, 20; 
 XX. 28 ; XXV. 46; xxviii. 19 Mark viii. 38 ; xiii. 32.
 
 they feel the coldness of the ordinary Unitarian 
 position, and they also feel that to do away with this 
 coldness they must first answer the question " What 
 think ye of Christ ?" And in answering this question, 
 one of the most eminent of their body, Mr. Stopford 
 Brooke,* has to propound several statements which, 
 whether we accept them or not, are purely dogmatic. 
 He tells us for example that S. Paul was not a behever 
 in the Godhead of Jesus, he tells us that in tlie saying 
 "■ I and My Father are One" Christ was not claiming 
 Divinity for Himself alone, but was declaring " that 
 he held pure human nature to be by right at one with 
 the Divine Nature," he tells us that " man can be 
 sinless." I do not wish to discuss the truth of these 
 statements, but only to show how they exemplify the 
 natural tendency of the devout human mind to frame 
 dogmatic statements about the Person of Christ and 
 the destiny of man. Those who wish to learn the 
 secret of prayer, and still more to gain for themselves 
 the immense help of meditation, will soon find that 
 they cannot advance far in their path without at least 
 striving to acquire dogmatic conceptions which shall 
 satisfy their intellectual cravings. S. Paul's confident 
 declaration, " I know Him whom I have beHeved," 
 was but a personal statement of the truth which his 
 Master affirmed of the Jewish Church " We worship 
 that which we know, for salvation is from the Jews." 
 We cannot believe in God, still less can we worship 
 Him, without knowing Him, and that knowledge is 
 dogma. 
 
 I have gone thus far in my subject without defining 
 exactly what it is we mean by dogma in relation to 
 religion. I have done so purposely, because I wished 
 to deal with the common vague objections to dogmatic 
 religion, which exist even when there is no clear notion 
 of what is meant by dogma. But in trying to answer 
 
 * See a very remarkable Sermon "What think ye of Christ?" 
 preached at the Unity Church, Islington, June 4, 1884.
 
 10 
 
 some at least of these objections, I have indicated what 
 I beheve to be the real significance of dogma to a 
 Christian. It may be stated in a few words. Christian 
 doctrine is the systematic description of the charac- 
 ter of God, so far as it has been made known to 
 man. There are, it may be, outlying and unessential 
 parts of the dogmatic system which are more or rather 
 less than this, and there is one special and important 
 region of dogma which concerns the nature of man, 
 rather than that of God. But the former, those sub- 
 sidiary doctrines which describe to us neither the 
 character of God, nor the spiritual nature of man, may 
 be left out of account ; dogmatic religion will not be 
 overthrown if they are rejected, and if you accept 
 Theology properly so called, you cannot find a stumbling- 
 block in these minor developments and corollaries of 
 Christian doctrine. And the doctrines of the nature 
 of man, such as that of original sin, are in spite 
 of their immense importance in religion, more of the 
 nature of scientific than of religious doctrines. It is 
 with dogma as primarily or essentially theological that 
 we are concerned, and if the nature of Theology as a 
 description of God and of His dealings with man be 
 once acknowledged, it is surely superflous to prove its 
 vast and unique importance. You may or may not 
 agree with this or that article of the Creed, but you 
 cannot honestly deny that it deals with a subject of 
 infinite importance, on which if knowledge is to be had, 
 it must be preferable to vague speculation and contented 
 ignorance. If there is such a thing as religion at all, 
 it must consist in a sense of dependence upon a higher 
 Power, in a belief in God as our Father. Well, then, 
 just as a child gradually grows to know as well as to 
 trust his father, and with increasing knowledge finds 
 his love and his trust also increasing, so surely we are 
 meant to pass beyond the mere instinctive feelings of 
 awe and trust in God, and to acquire a reasonable 
 knowledge, based on experience, of His Character, an 
 ever-increasing certainty of His Love and His Wisdom.
 
 II 
 
 Theology, dogma, is the working out by the accumu- 
 lated experience of Christians of the facts which were 
 revealed to us by Jesus Christ. To give up dogmatic 
 religion would be to shut our minds to what others 
 have learnt, and to fall back upon the small fragment 
 of divine truth which alone each one of us has power to 
 grasp for himself. 
 
 And this touches the last objection I shall try to 
 meet. It is not dogma itself that some dislike, but the 
 fact that it is imposed upon us from without, that it is 
 Church doctrine. We wish to find out theological truth 
 for ourselves ; we do not want it in historical creeds 
 and cut and dried formulae. Yes, it is true that every 
 man must realise truth for himself, must accept it and 
 make it part of himself; but does that mean that he is 
 to reject all the discoveries, the inferences that others 
 have made, the gradually-accumulated stores of religious 
 experience, which are enshrined in the imperishable 
 formulae of the Catholic creeds ? Is there any science 
 which compels its students to start, each one for himself, 
 from the very beginning, and to shut his eyes to all the 
 earlier work of his predecessors ? He must indeed 
 know what has been discovered, but he must know it 
 not by his own unassisted efforts, but by the Hght of 
 their recorded experience. We admire the child 
 Pascal when we read of his working out some of 
 Euclid's propositions by the sole help of -his own 
 genius, but what should we say of a man who would 
 waste his strength in thus toilsomely fashioning a 
 weapon that lies ready to his hand ? Theological 
 dogma is a science. Its facts are gathered from 
 the Scriptural record of the Incarnate Life, from 
 the teachings of Christ, from the history of the Church, 
 from the manifold experience of saints in all ages. On 
 these materials the reason of the Church has been 
 working, guided by the illuminating power of the 
 Holy Spirit, who formed the Church and dwells in it, 
 and the results are embodied in the creeds, the 
 dogmas, the confessions that have become part of
 
 12 
 
 the Christian consciousness. They are cut and dried, 
 perhaps, useless and misleading when taken by them- 
 selves, but that is because they are guides to a life, not 
 the life itself. Test them by their working power, use 
 them as clues to the bewildering maze of spiritual 
 phenomena, see for yourselves how the laws of the 
 Divine Character, and of the Divine Action have been by 
 degrees traced out and classified and explained, and 
 you will be reluctant to forego the help of these time- 
 honoured monuments of Christian wisdom and saintly 
 experience. Dogma has been accused of blurring and 
 darkening the Person of Jesus Christ ; it is rather, if 
 rightly used, the means of revealing Him to our minds. 
 The Church never calls you to rest in it, but to be led 
 by it to the source of all our light and life, to Jesus 
 Christ, the " Author and Finisher of our Faith." 
 
 Let me recapitulate in a few words the subjects I 
 have attempted to touch. I have tried to show that 
 religion must be intellectual as well as emotional, for 
 ideas, definite intellectual conceptions, lie behind all 
 great human actions ; that on the other hand, religion 
 is more than morality, and that systems of morality will 
 not heal our divisions, or satisfy our religious instincts ; 
 that again, we cannot rest in mere veneration for God 
 or for Christ ; for the intellect must claim its share, and 
 will begin to define the object of our adoration. And I 
 have pointed out that what we call dogma is really the 
 rational interpretation of God's Character as it is re- 
 vealed to us in the Bible, in history, in individual 
 spiritual experience, and above all, in the Person of 
 Christ, and that the authority of the Church is given to 
 it because it has been slowly formed out of the life of 
 the Church, tested by its continuous conformity with 
 Christian experience, proved by its adaptibility to the 
 growth and changing circumstances of the Church. 
 Look along its course, and you will be able to trace a 
 progress, an increasing clearness and fulness of mean- 
 ing, an increasing harmony with the deepest needs of 
 the human soul, and these things are the surest evidence 
 of spiritual truth.
 
 13 
 
 I would ask you, then, in conclusion, not to be 
 repelled by the common and unthinking sneers against 
 dogma, but to study the meaning of Christian doctrine 
 for yourselves. You will come to understand its origin, 
 how it has been evolved from the consciousness of the 
 Church under the pressure of heretical exaggerations 
 and perversions ; you will feel the strength of its 
 guidance into the depths of Divine Truth, the light 
 which it pours upon the mysteries of the soul of man 
 and the Character of God ; and where you cannot 
 understand it, or are tempted to doubt it, you will be 
 patient and humble, remembering that yours is but an 
 individual and isolated mind, face to face with a system 
 that represents the continuous and collective spiritual 
 wisdom of a multitude of Christian thinkers. And 
 thus, even if you ascribe to Church doctrine no further 
 authority than that it is the witness to eighteen 
 centuries of Catholic experience, you will be ready to 
 own that if only in this limited sense the Church is 
 indeed "the Church of the living God, the pillar and 
 ground of the truth." 
 
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