I. The development of religious institutions and beliefs may be logical or real.

1. Logical development is the explication of the content of a notion. Nothing new is added; it is like the opening of a closed hand. Such a development is consistent with the static, or mediæval, conception of the world, and is not unknown to the older theologians. In this sense of the word many of them would admit a development—e.g. of the Papacy, of Transubstantiation, of Sacramental Confession, of the devotion to the Blessed Virgin—from the less formally complete teaching and practice of an earlier age. But there is no process, they would maintain, in the notion; the change is not in the notion but in us. This proviso is essential. The full powers of the modern Papacy, we are taught, were conferred by Christ on Peter; and the Syllabus of 1907, in condemning the proposition that the apostle was ignorant that this was so, appears to reject the principle even of logical development—of which it would be truer to say that it is tolerated than that it is approved of, by the official Church. Pius X carried this identity of dogma back into the legendary age of the Old Testament, attributing a knowledge of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin—defined in 1854—to the Hebrew patriarchs. Noah, he says, contemplates this mystery in the ark; Moses meditated upon it before the bush that burned in Horeb; David when he danced before the ark of the covenant. This is the language of a formal Encyclical (February, 1904), not the devout play of a pious imagination sporting over the sacred text.

It is sometimes said that what matters in history is not so much the fact as what people think is the fact. This is perhaps especially true of those commanding personalities whose names are household words. Popular ideas of them are usually only roughly correct. The names become symbols to denote qualities dear to a succeeding age but often foreign to the persons they designate. To every generation Christ has become something different, this or that side of his character being emphasized to fill the ever changing need of living men. How many philosophies and passions have been read into Shakespeare's plays! So to every generation Luther has meant something different; in each succeeding century he has been both loved and hated, but for different reasons. No country save his own has given him such attention as England. It is the aim of the present paper to give a very broad idea of the general trend of British opinion throughout four hundred years.

The thought of Augustine on the two ethical categories of sin and grace is of great importance in the history of Christian theology. His system of grace and predestination prevailed for many centuries, although not without strong opposition, and underwent, through scholastic elaboration, substantial changes in order to save the freedom of the will; and finally it reappeared in the conception of the spiritual life shaped by Luther and the other teachers of the Reformation. It is on account of his doctrine about grace and predestination that Protestant theologians like to call Augustine “der Paulus nach Paulus und der Luther vor Luther.” Whatever may be the exactness of this genealogy, it shows at least the value and efficacy of the Augustinian conception of the natural and supernatural life on the development of the European spirit. In the Catholic tradition this thought of Augustine is at the very basis of the ethical, ecclesiological, and sacramental systems; in the Christian but non-Catholic movements this doctrine, interpreted in a rather paradoxical way, gave a starting-point to the Reformation.

It is not with the details of homiletics that this paper will occupy itself—how to write a sermon or how to behave in church. These profitable lessons it will dismiss to the class-room or the Sunday School, and will then hold itself free to expand in joyous exaltation of the magnitude and dignity of the training requisite for the fit discharge of the highest duties of the ministry. Every ability which one brings to it may help—those of the carpenter and the goldsmith, of him that smootheth with the hammer and him that smiteth the anvil. But all powers and all training will adjust themselves to its main purpose, the curve of which is determined by its two foci—for every great process is not circular but elliptical—the foci of preaching and worship. Around these the details of a theological curriculum will revolve. The Pentateuch and the Synoptic Problem, the Nicene Council and the Social Settlement House, the Anselmic theory of the Atonement and the Malthusian theory of population, all will have in view their ultimate end of preaching and worship, and all will come bringing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.