expressed, recommended, and insisted upon in papal allocutions or encyclical letters but not distinctly defined, may create the obligation of strict obedience and undoubting assent, or may exact merely external submission and approval. Thus in the Rule of Faith we distinguish three degrees: (1) the Rule of Faith in matters directly revealed, exacting the obedience of Faith; (2) the Rule of Faith in matters theologically connected with Revelation, exacting respect and external submission, and, indirectly, internal assent of a certain grade; (3) the Rule of Faith in matters of discipline, exacting submission and reverence.
The difference between the rules of theological knowledge and the disciplinary measures is important. The former demand universal and unconditional obedience, the latter only respect and reverence. Moderate Liberalism, represented in the seventeenth century by Holden (Analysis Fidei), in the eighteenth century by Muratori (De Ingeniorum Moderatione) and Chrismann (Regula Fidei), is an attempt to conciliate Extreme Liberalism by giving up these various distinctions, and reducing all decisions either to formal definitions of Faith or to mere police regulations.
SECT. 29.—DOGMAS AND MATTERS OF OPINION
I. Everything revealed by God, or Christ, or the Holy Ghost is by that very fact a Divine or Christian Dogma; when authoritatively proposed by the Apostles it became an Apostolic Dogma; when fully promulgated by the Church, Ecclesiastical Dogma. In the Church’s language a dogma pure and simple is at the same time ecclesiastical, apostolic, and Divine. But a merely Divine Dogma—that is, revealed by God but not yet explicitly proposed by the Church—is called a Material (as opposed to Formal) Dogma.
1. Dogmas may be classified according to (a) their various subject-matters, (b) their promulgation, and (c) the different kinds of moral obligation to know them.
(a) Dogmas may be divided in the same way as the contents of Revelation (§ 5) except that matters revealed per accidens are not properly dogmas. It is, however, a dogma that Holy Scripture, in the genuine text, contains undoubted
