282 HUMANISM xv 



Here again, however, it might be argued that the 

 apparent loss would be a real gain. For the making 

 of dogma is always a perilous business. In making 

 dogmas it is hard to avoid making heretics. And the 

 more heretics a Church makes the less catholic does 

 it become. It is extraordinary what losses the Roman 

 Church has incurred by her indulgence in the dogma- 

 making instinct. Was a disagreement about the cal 

 culating of that most inconveniently migratory festival, 

 Easter, worth the bisection and permanent weakening 

 of Christendom ? Was the defining of the Trinity and 

 the Incarnation in terms which however satisfactory 

 they seemed to the orthodoxy of the time have long 

 changed their meaning so as to have become unintelligible 

 worth the loss of Africa and Asia to Mohammedanism, 

 and the destruction of the best of the Northerners, the 

 Arian Goths ? The world in all probability would long 

 ago have been Christian, the Roman Church would have 

 been truly catholic, but for the disastrous practice of 

 defining dogmas, and the intolerance of which this was 

 the cause and the effect. Will history repeat itself? 

 Will dogma be made though the angels weep ? Will 

 Rome decide in accordance with her past traditions, yfotf 

 dogma, ruat coelum ? It will be immensely hard to break 

 with them, and the traditional policy will necessarily 

 have immense strength. But who can say? Not even 

 Pius X. But the situation is very interesting, though 

 decidedly more comfortable for those who can watch from 

 without the distractions of an embarrassed Church. 



