as I say, for the moment, that these articles of belief are erroneous
and contrary to fact and evidence. Ah, but, we are told, the people make
no explicit affirmation of dogma; that does nothing for them; they are
indifferent to it. A great variety of things might be said to this
statement. We might ask, for instance, whether the people ever made an
explicit affirmation of dogma in the past, or whether it was always the
hazy indifferent matter which it is supposed to be now. If so, whether
we shall not have to re-cast our most fundamental notions of the way in
which Christian civilisation has been evolved. If not, and if people did
once explicitly affirm dogma, when exactly was it that they ceased to do
so?

The answers to these questions would all go to show that at the time
when religion was the great controlling and organising force in conduct,
the prime elemental dogmas were accepted with the most vivid conviction
of reality. I do not pretend that the common people followed all the
inferences which the intellectual subtlety of the master-spirits of
theology drew so industriously from the simple premisses of scripture
and tradition. But assuredly dogma was at the foundation of the whole
structure. When did it cease to be so? How was the structure supported,
after you had altered this condition of things?

Apart from this historic issue, the main question one would like to put
to the upholder of duality of religion on this plea, is the simple one,
whether the power of the ceremonial which charms him so much is not
actually at this moment drawn wholly from dogma and the tradition of
dogma; whether its truth is not explicitly affirmed to the unlettered
man, and whether the inseparable connection between the dogma and the
ceremonial is not constantly impressed upon him by the spiritual
teachers to whom the dual system hands him and his order over for all