it is quite possible that I may be
wholly wrong, and that I am hindered by pride from reversing my
attitude?" For there is a certain pride which operates in these matters
of belief and practice as well as elsewhere. We are quite apt to pride
ourselves on our consistency and think it an unworthy thing to change
our minds. That is rather a foolish attitude; changing one's mind is
commonly not a mark of fickleness but of intellectual advance. It means
oftentimes the abandonment of prejudice or the giving up of an opinion
which we have discovered to have no foundation. This is rather a large
universe in which we live, and it is improbable that any man's thought
of it at any time should be adequate. Intellectual progress means the
assimilation of new truths. The Christian Religion is a large and
complex phenomenon, and any individual's thought of it at any time must
be, in the nature of things, an inadequate thought. Progress in religion
means the constant assimilation of new truths--new, that is, to us.
Surely it is a very peculiar attitude to be proud of never learning
anything, making it a virtue to have precisely the same opinions this
year as last! I should be very much ashamed of myself if a year were to
pass in which I had learned nothing, had changed my mind about nothing.
In religion, one knows that the articles of the Faith are expressed in
the dogmatic definitions of the Church; but one will never know, seek as
one will, all that these mean in detail, all that they demand in
practice. And our only tolerable attitude is that of learners constantly
seeking to fill up the _lacunae_ in our beliefs and practice.

In fact, any living Christian experience is always in process of
adjustment. Those who conceive a dogmatic religion as an immovable
religion, as a collection of cut and dried formulae which each
generation is expected to learn and repeat and to which it has no other
relation, are quite right in condemning that conception, only that is
not, in fact, what the Christian Religion is. The content of the
Christian dogmas is so full and so complex that there is never any
danger of intellectual sterility in those who are called to deal with
them; and their application to life is so rich and so manifold that
there is not the least danger that those who set out to apply them to
the problems of daily existence will become mere formalists. The attempt
to live a truly Christian life is a never-ending, inexhaustible
adventu