In fact, any living Christian experience is always in process of adjustment.  Those who conceive a dogmatic religion as an immovable religion, as a collection of cut and dried formulae which each generation is expected to learn and repeat and to which it has no other relation, are quite right in condemning that conception, only that is not, in fact, what the Christian Religion is.  The content of the Christian dogmas is so full and so complex that there is never any danger of intellectual sterility in those who are called to deal with them; and their application to life is so rich and so manifold that there is not the least danger that those who set out to apply them to the problems of daily existence will become mere formalists.  The attempt to live a truly Christian life is a never-ending, inexhaustible adventure.  Only those can miss this fact who have utterly misconceived Christianity as a barren set of prohibitions, warning its devotees off the field of great sections of human experience.  There are those who appear to imagine that the primary business of Christianity is to deal with sin, and that in order to keep itself occupied it has to invent a large number of unreal sins.  Unfortunately sin, as the deliberate rejection of the known will of God, exists; and, fortunately, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ Who came into the world to save sinners also exists.  We can be unendingly thankful for that.  But it is also true that the action of Christianity is not exhausted in the negative work of dealing with sin.  Christianity is primarily a positive action for the bringing about and development of the relation of the soul with God in the state of union.  We may say that Christianity has to turn aside from this its proper business of developing the spiritual life to the preliminary work of dealing with sin which kills spirituality and hinders its development.  But it is not necessary to make the blunder of assuming that this dealing with sin is the essential work of Christianity because it has so continually to be at it, any more than it is necessary to assume that the essential work of a farmer is the digging up of weeds.  Surely it would be no adequate treatise on agriculture which would confine itself to description of the nature of weeds and of methods of dealing with them.  There is a branch of theology which deals with sin, the methods of its treatment and its cure; but there are also other branches of theology:  and the direction of the Holy Scripture is not to get rid of sin and stop; but having done that, to go on to perfection.

Christian experience is a constant process of adjustment, a constantly growing experience.  By the study of the Christian revelation it is always finding new meanings in old truths, new modes of application of familiar practices.  This simply means that the Christian is alive and not a fossil.  It means that his relation to our Lord is such that it opens to him inexhaustible depths of experience.  It