and studious minds, like those of the leading modernists, by their own
religious experience. They understand in what they are taught more,
perhaps, than their teachers intend. They understand how those ideas
originated, they can trace a similar revelation in their own lives.
This (which a cynic might expect would be the beginning of
disillusion) only deepens their religious faith and gives it a wider
basis; report and experience seem to conspire. But trouble is brewing
here; for a report that can be confirmed by experience can also be
enlarged by it, and it is easy to see in traditional revelation itself
many diverse sources; different temperaments and different types of
thought have left their impress upon it. Yet other temperaments and
other types of thought might continue the task. Revelation seems to be
progressive; a part may fall to us also to furnish.

This insight, for a Christian, has its dangers. No doubt it gives him
a key to the understanding and therefore, in one sense, to the
acceptance of many a dogma. Christian dogmas were not pieces of wanton
information fallen from heaven; they were imaginative views,
expressing now some primordial instinct in all men, now the national
hopes and struggles of Israel, now the moral or dialectical philosophy
of the later Jews and Greeks. Such a derivation does not, of itself,
render these dogmas necessarily mythical. They might be ideal
expressions of human experience and yet be literally true as well,
provided we assume (what is assumed throughout in Christianity) that
the world is made for man, and that even God is just such a God as man
would have wished him to be, the existent ideal of human nature and
the foregone solution to all human problems. Nevertheless, Christian
dogmas are definite,[2] while human inspirations are potentially
limitless; and if the object of the two is identical either the dogmas
must be stretched and ultimately abandoned, or inspiration which does