without a sufficient or ascertained cause for dislikesimply you have a prejudice against it. That prejudice may be founded on truth, or it may be founded on falsehood; but in so far as it is prejudice it is founded on neither.

Then, again, there is Tradition. Some people have an immense reverence for tradition, and we ought all to have a reverence for it; but we ought not to have such a reverence for it as to prevent us from seeing truth when tradition happens to be opposed to truth.

Some

Then there is also the force of Example. people, as long as they are comfortable in their family or social circle, will adopt any prevalent opinions, for opinions are catching things, and the absence of opinion is still more catching.

Then, especially in religious matters, there is the Force of Association, and here I would speak most tenderly. People's associations may have grown up around a state of things which is passing away, the time comes perhaps when their religious convictions are suddenly rooted up, and a number of things, once implicitly held, are seen to be no longer tenable; yet whilst entertaining serious doubts about the grounds of their own former faith, they cannot receive any new belief because their religious associations have grown up round the old ones. 'Father,' said Luther's wife, 'how is it that when we prayed to the Virgin our prayers were so warm and sincere, but now when we pray to God they are so cold and lifeless?' I was reading the other day of a missionary who found a poor old heathen in tears because he had

thoroughly lost faith in his old painted idol, yet could not say his prayers to God without it. Association kept him in the old paths.

But is a great cause to be ruined because some men must be sacrificed? There must be suffering—suffering of those who cannot be reformed as well as suffering of martyrdom by the Reformers. Is not sacrifice the mysterious law of existence as well as of all progress? When you see one brave soldier after another mounting the breach and being laid low whilst others pass over the piled-up bodies into the citadel, do you say, 'We will not have this victory-we will sacrifice nought for Freedom or for Faith?' No true soldier of liberty says that, no soldier of the Cross of Christ grudges the pain and ills which come either to himself or to his fellowcreatures in the righteous onward march of progress and of truth.

The difficulties, then, which come from old associations, as well as the other above-mentioned difficulties, deserve our sympathy, but not our acceptance. I know there are fears - sometimes well-founded fears-expressed, that when we seek to get rid of something once taken to be truth, now seen to be untruth, we should in fact be plucking up the wheat along with the tares; and people are apt to turn round and say, when we unsettle some received opinion, 'You are unsettling all truth when you thus sweep away the dogmas of the past.' Therefore, on the threshold, it is most important for us, if we are to proceed with any safety, to try and distinguish between dogma and truth. That distinction will

enable us to see what is chaff and what is wheat in past forms of religion; that distinction will help us above all others to illustrate the theological principles of the Liberal Clergy.

2. I have said in this pulpit some hard things against dogma; but don't think that I am ungrateful for dogma. Do not think that I am blind to what dogma has done for the world. Why, without dogma we could hardly get on at all. It is not dogma I quarrel with, but fixed dogma. It is not forms I quarrel with, but it is the setting up of certain forms which are supposed to be true for all times and ages. It is not theology I quarrel with, but that petrified form of theology which never alters, and which ignores the fact that although truth may be fixed and absolute, our appreciation of truth must be relative and progressive. That is what I object to; therefore distinguish in your minds between dogma and truth. There must be dogma. What is dogma? Why, it is doctrine crystallised. And what is doctrine? Simply the clearest statement of what you believe-that is your doctrine. The world has certain convictions from age to age, and it puts them into an almost legal clearness and amplitude of expression-that is doctrine. In the next age we may have to call the very same form of words or expression of doctrine by the ill-omened name of dogma. Yet in every department the world's progress has been carried on by that clear expression of doctrine ever becoming dogma-what is dogma now, is merely so much. of truth as was clearly visible to a past age-but as time

goes on it becomes apparent that we have only expressed part of the truth, and perhaps that part has not been expressed rightly. Look, for instance, at the scientific dogma that the sun goes round the earth. That dogma expressed part of a visible fact-but it expressed even that wrongly. Something moved,' that was the truth. The sun moved round the earth,' that was the dogma; but when the nearer approach to the truth was made by the great astronomer, because he opposed the dogma his doctrine was rejected, and he was persecuted. And that has been the fate of all the great reformers-no sooner have they opposed a received form of truth in political, social, scientific, or religious matters than they have been anathematised or put to death.

Let me give you one more illustration of the difference between dogma and truth, which will bring out the folly of choosing dogma when you can get truth. Outside my garden there runs a rushing stream, and I tell my child, 'It is wrong for you to go outside the garden gate unattended; it is absolutely wrong for you to do so.' The dogma I place before my child is the dangerousness of the river. By-and-bye my child grows up, and people notice that he never goes outside the garden gate. When he is about twenty people say to him, 'You are a young man, why don't you, go and see the world?' His answer is ever this—'Oh, because my father said I must not go outside the garden gate unattended; but if some one will go with me I will go.' The dogma was true for the child; the stream was dangerous to the child; but what would you say if a man were to carry

into advanced manhood his belief in such a partial expression of the truth? You would say that he was either a fool or a lunatic, and you would not be far wrong.

Now, brethren, there are dogmas ecclesiastical in the same way. There was the dogma of the supremacy of the Church of Rome. It has been often and truly said that, between 400 and 1200, the Roman Catholic Church was almost an unmixed blessing to the world, and the great thing which made it an unmixed blessing was just that bold belief and assertion that it had the best truth that man could possibly get; that it was practically infallible; that men walked in darkness without its counsel; that the priest ought to have the rule and direction of life. That was what gave the Roman Church power, and it insisted upon it; and it was quite right, because at that time the priests were the most educated portion of society,—as a class, the wisest and the best. As such they claimed to govern the people, and they did govern them. But when the Church found that the world was getting as wise as itself, and as religious as itself, it asserted that to be more true, which was daily becoming less true; the once true doctrine of ecclesiastical supremacy became an untrue dogma; it stiffened into an impudent and unfounded claim; and from that time forward the Roman Church began to lose power, because it had lost truth.

I will take another dogma. This time it shall be a Protestant dogma. At the time of the Reformation we were told that the Bible was infallible. In those days