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wild conglomeration of Oriental mythology that Gnosticism was, and we
would have shouted the creed as a war cry against the Gnostics. That is
what the so-called Apostles' Creed was--the first Christian battle chant,
a militant proclamation of the historic faith against the heretics; and
every one of its declarations met with a head-on collision some claim of
Gnosticism. Then, too, the early Christians drew up rituals; they had
to. We cannot keep any spiritual thing in human life, even the spirit of
courtesy, as a disembodied wraith. We ritualize it--we bow, we take off
our hats, we shake hands, we rise when a lady enters. We have
innumerable ways of expressing politeness in a ritual. Neither could
they have kept so deep and beautiful a thing as the Christian life
without such expression.

So historic Christianity grew, organized, creedalized, ritualized. And
ever as it grew, a peril grew with it, for there were multitudes of
people who joined these organizations, recited these creeds, observed
these rituals, took all the secondary and derived elements of
Christianity, but often forgot that vital thing which all this was meant
in the first place to express: a first-hand, personal experience of God
in Christ. That alone is vital in Christianity; all the rest is once or
twice or thrice removed from life. For Christianity is not a creed, nor
an organization, nor a ritual. These are important but they are
secondary. They are the leaves, not the roots; they are the wires, not
the message. Christianity itself is a life.

If, however, Christianity is thus a life, we cannot stereotype its
expressions in set and final forms. If it is a life in fellowship with
the living God, it will think new thoughts, build new organizations,
expand into new symbolic expressions. We cannot at any given time write
"finis" after its development. We can no more "keep the faith" by
stopping its growth than we can keep a son by insisting on his being
forever a child. The progressiveness of Christianity is not simply its
response to a progressive age; the progressiveness of Christianity
springs from its own inherent vitality. So far is this from being
regrettable, that a modern Christian rejoices in it and gladly recognizes
not only that he is thinking thoughts and undertaking enterprises which
his fathers would not have understood, but also that his children after
him will differ quite as much in teaching and practice from the mod