the truths of Christianity, by adapting them to its historical and psychological habit of mind, as formerly they were adapted to a metaphysical habit of mind.
All this, Holy Father, does not mean that we are imagining the evolution of dogma in order to return to the pure Gospel, or to a Gospel, let it be, "stripped of the explanations of theology, of the definitions of Councils, of the maxims of asceticism," or that for us "the authority of the Fathers and the Saints is reduced to nothingness."
The evolution of dogma, we have insisted, is an evident historical fact which corresponds with the laws of the evolution of the human mind. No one knows the necessity of dogmas better than we who are devoting all our powers to the perpetuation of their life. As for theology, we affirm that there always has been a theology, and always will be; and, moreover, we also are engaged in making a theology.
