disapprove of. If a
man wishes to build a house, does it fetter him to know square measure,
cubic contents, geometry, mensuration, and mechanical laws? Yet when he
builds his house, he builds it in his own individual way; he stamps it
with his own personality and ideas. While building it, perchance, he
discovers some new relation or geometric law.

Doctrine does not save from hell, but it does save from many a snare
that besets the feet of man. It is a steadier of life, a strengthener of
hope, a stalwart aid to a practical, devout, and duty-doing life. A
catechism is a system of doctrine expressed in its simplest form.
Therefore, for the intellectual and moral training of the Church, let us
have sound doctrine in the pulpit, and the catechism in the home and
Sabbath-school.

It is objected that doctrinal terminology is too hard for a child to
understand. Is this not absurd, when the same child can come home from
school and talk glibly of a parallelepipedon, a rhombus, rhomboid,
polyhedral angle, archipelago, law of primogeniture, the binomial
theorem, and of a dicotyledon! He also learns French, German, Latin,
Greek, and the _argot_ of the public school!

The theological leader of to-day cannot be a creed-monger: he must be a
creed-maker. Side by side with the executive officers who will
reorganize the Christian forces, there will stand great creed-makers,
giant theologians, firm, logical, scientific, and convincing, who, out
of the vast array of new facts brought forth by modern science, will
produce new creeds, a new catechism, a new dogmatic series. It is worth
while to live in these days--to know the possibility of such monumental
constructive work in one's own lifetime. The creed-makers must have a
thorough literary training; no mere vocabulary of philosophy will
answer. Like the Elizabethan divines, they must rule the living word,
which shall echo for a century yet to come.

As the great Ecumenical Council was convened for missionary progress, so
the times are now ripe for the assembling of a historic Theological
Council, to revise and restate, not one denominational catechism, but
the creed of Christendom; to provide a new literary expression of the
Christian faith. Together we are working in God's world, and for
His kingdom.

If doctrine be the crystallized thought and belief of godly men, what is
heresy? What is schism? Who is dictator of doctrine? How far are the
limits of authority to be pressed? What