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counting for the whole of reality and arrived in each case at very
different conclusions. Similarly, even if they are all false, one can–
not lump all the supernatural religions together. Thus in the rest of
this article I shall substitute for the word religion as used by the
editors the word Christianity, i.e. I shall not be thinking of Mohame–
danism or Confucianism or Buddhism or even Quakers or Unitarians,
but people who believe the dogmas expressed in the Apostles' creed,
the Nicene creed and the Athanasian creed and who are members of
an organized church with an ordained ministry which preaches the
gospel and administers the sacraments.
II.
The credibility of certain mysteries like the Incarnation and the
Trinity would certainly not seem to be changed by any new
data) scientific or otherwise)' but there may be other parts of
religion whose general credibility is changed by fundamental
changes in the climate of opinion.
It is precisely because such a climate is perpetually changing
that carefully formulated creeds are necessary for heresy, as distinct
from unbelief, is nearly always an over-emphasis of one part of the
truth at the expense of the whole, and every age has its typical
heresies. At any given historical moment, some article seems harder
to accept than others because it runs completely counter to the
prevailing ideology to which all, Christians and non-Christians alike,
are at that moment exposed.
Thus in the second century when the prevailing tendency was to
think of matter as more evil than mind, the Incarnation was the
stumbling block; that the Logos should become real flesh seemed
too infradig to be credible and too easy to confuse with those poly–
theistic myths in which some god appears in the simulacrum of a
man or an animal. In the twelfth century the obstacle had become
the doctrine of the divine creation of the world, so that even St.
Thomas Aquinas was forced to admit that to his natural reason the
Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world seemed more prob–
able. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the object had
become the Doctrine of the Trinity, for the Newtonian cosmology
with its notion of imposed law and its lack of any concept of process
seemed to require, to quote an epigram of Whitehead's, "at most one
God."
