Accordingly the development of the faith originates in the Church’s teaching authority, not only as regards that deepening which it receives at the hands of the theologians, but also as regards that extension in the dimensions of length and breadth which it receives from the compact living fellowship of the faithful. There is therefore no piece of dogmatic knowledge which is the knowledge of individuals and not at the same time an experience and love of the many in the Holy Ghost. In this sense every new dogma is the child not only of authority, but of love, of the love of the fellowship of the faith, of the heart of the praying Church. Every dogma is consecrated by the reverence and earnestness, by the conscientiousness and loyalty, by the inwardness and devotion, with which the fellowship of the members of Christ “rooted and grounded in love” (Eph. iii, 17) “confirms the testimony of Christ in itself” (cf. 1 Cor. i, 6). As a rule the “lex orandi,” the unwritten law of prayerful, lived faith, precedes the “lex credendi,” the authoritative formulization of a truth as a dogma. Whenever any dogma has been attacked in the name of historical criticism, its impugners have overlooked this vital power of the living fellowship and its function in the formation of dogma. When Dollinger (28 March 1871) wrote to Archbishop Scherr of Munchen-Freising: “We have to do, in the present distracted state of the Church, with a purely historical question, which, therefore, must be handled and decided by means only of those resources which are at our command, and according to the rules which govern every historical inquiry, every manipulation of things in the past,”[6] he overlooked the fact that the Church is not a dead, but a living organism; and he failed to recognize that vigorous life of faith which pulsates in the Church and which as a living thing cannot be found in dead documents but only in the hearts of the faithful, in the compact fellowship of the faith united with pope and bishops. Such was the tragedy of his intellectual development: he could not see the surging life of the present he saw only the petrified life of history.