d Wisdom, and Love is
simply the essence of Christian Theism--not the less true because few
Unitarians would repudiate it.

(7) Once more let me briefly remind you that any claim for finality in
the Christian Religion must be based on its power of perpetual
development. {186} Belief in the continued work of the Holy Spirit in
the Church is an essential element of the Catholic Faith. We need not,
with the Ritschlian, contemptuously condemn the whole structure of
Christian doctrine because undoubtedly it is a development of what was
taught by Christ himself. Only, if we are to justify the development
of the past, we must go on to assert the same right and duty of
development in Ethics and in Theology for the Church of the future. In
the pregnant phrase of Loisy, the development which the Church is most
in need of at the present moment is precisely a development in the idea
of development itself.

But how can we tell (it may be asked), if we once admit that the
development of Religion does not end with the teaching of Christ, where
the development will stop? If we are to admit an indefinite
possibility of growth and change, how do we know that Christianity
itself will not one day be outgrown? If we once admit that the final
appeal is to the religious consciousness of the present, we must
acknowledge that it is not possible to demonstrate _a priori_ that the
Christian Religion is the final, universal, or absolute Religion. All
we can say is that we have no difficulty in recognizing that the
development which has so far taken place, in so far as it is a
development which we can approve and accept, seems to us a development
which leaves the {187} Religion still essentially the Religion of
Christ. In the whole structure of the modern Christian's religious
belief, that which was contributed by Christ himself is incomparably
the most important part--the basis of the whole structure. The
essentials of Religion and Morality still seem to us to be contained in
his teaching as they are contained nowhere else. All the rest that is
included in an enlightened modern Christian's religious creed is either
a direct working out of the principles already contained there, or (if
it has come from other sources) it has been transformed in the process
of adaptation. Nothing has been discovered in Religion and Morality
which tends in any way to diminish the unique reverence which we feel
for the person of Christ, the perfect suffici