taught and prayed; who have preserved our social institutions of
spiritual import, and have been a mighty and continuous force working
for righteousness and peace.

Missions are a higher form of politics. To further missions is to
further government, international comity, world-peace.

4. His rule is over creed. He is inevitably a teacher of doctrine.

What is doctrine? Doctrine is spiritual truth, formulated in a
systematic way. It is also, in church matters, a system of truth which
has been believed in, and clung to, by a body of believers constituting
some branch of the catholic Church.

It is a noble and serious office to hand down from generation to
generation the faith and traditions of the Church of God. But this
handing-down must be upright. "You must bind nothing upon your charges,"
says Jeremy Taylor, "but what God hath bound upon you." Conviction is at
the root of the lasting traditions of the Church. Only this--his
conviction--can one man really teach another. If he try to speak
otherwise, he shall have a lolling and unsteady tongue.

No soul is finally held by the indefinite, or the namby-pamby. It begins
to question, Upon what foundation does this phrase, this fine sentiment,
rest? It must stand upon a proposition. This proposition rests either
upon a scientific fact, or upon that which, for want of a more definite
term, we call the religious instinct of man. But a proposition cannot
standalone. It is connected with other propositions, arguments,
conclusions. Hence a system of logic, of philosophy, of expressed
belief, of doctrine, inevitably grows up in a thinking community, a