For dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind. Dogma does not
mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought. It was a revolt
against the Victorian spirit in one particular aspect of it; which may
roughly be called (in a cosy and domestic Victorian metaphor) having
your cake and eating it too. It saw that the solid and serious
Victorians were fundamentally frivolous--because they were
fundamentally inconsistent.
A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent
talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So
long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a
shape. Mahomet created, when he forbade wine but allowed five wives: he
created a very big thing, which we have still to deal with. The first
French Republic created, when it affirmed property and abolished
peerages; France still stands like a square, four-sided building which
Europe has besieged in vain. The men of the Oxford Movement would have
been horrified at being compared either with Moslems or Jacobins. But
their sub-conscious thirst was for something that Moslems and Jacobins
had and ordinary Anglicans had not: the exalted excitement of
consistency.
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