Doctrine is an intellectual necessity.  Christ is not sporadic, either in history or philosophy.  To teach Christ, as the unlettered savage may who has just learned of Christ the Saviour and turns to teach his fellow-savages, might do good or save a soul from death.  But in order to command the intellectual respect of the race, there must be another form of teaching yet than this, a teaching which presents Christ in the historic and philosophic setting:  the central Figure in a great body of associated spiritual truth; Christ as the fulfilment of prophecy, the means of social adjustment and regeneration; the Finisher of our Faith, and the Source of eternal joy.  We must be, not less spiritual Christians, but increasingly intellectual ones, as time rolls on.

Who are the men who have built up doctrine?  Men speak as if doctrine were an ecclesiastical toy—­to be shaken by priest or prelate, as one shakes a rattle, for noise, for play!  A doctrine is not a toy; it is the crystallized belief of earnest, thoughtful, and godly men—­belief which has passed into a church tradition, and is now received as an act of faith.

Shall doctrine be taught a child?  Yes!  To have a specific doctrine clearly in mind does not fetter the young soul, any more than to be taught the apparent facts of geography and history, which may change either in reality or in his own interpretation as his mind matures.  A doctrine is a practical and definite thing to work with; in later life to believe, and to approve of, or disbelieve, and disapprove of.  If a man wishes to build a house, does it fetter him to know square measure, cubic contents, geometry, mensuration, and mechanical laws?  Yet when he builds his house, he builds it in his own individual way; he stamps it with his own personality and ideas.  While building it, perchance, he discovers some new relation or geometric law.

Doctrine does not save from hell, but it does save from many a snare that besets the feet of man.  It is a steadier of life, a strengthener of hope, a stalwart aid to a practical, devout, and duty-doing life.  A catechism is a system of doctrine expressed in its simplest form.  Therefore, for the intellectual and moral training of the Church, let us have sound doctrine in the pulpit, and the catechism in the home and Sabbath-school.

It is objected that doctrinal terminology is too hard for a child to understand.  Is this not absurd, when the same child can come home from school and talk glibly of a parallelepipedon, a rhombus, rhomboid, polyhedral angle, archipelago, law of primogeniture, the binomial theorem, and of a dicotyledon!  He also learns French, German, Latin, Greek, and the argot of the public school!