Ned Stonehouse quotes from one of Machen’s letters, “[Christianity] was certainly not a way of life as distinguished from a doctrine, or a way of life expressing itself in a doctrine, but it was a way of life founded upon a doctrine. It was founded more especially upon a proclamation of something that happened. The primitive Church proclaimed the happening after the first great act in it had occurred; Jesus proclaimed it by way of prophecy, but the primitive Church and Jesus were alike in proclaiming an event,” then providing this additional thought:- “He [Machen] had shown that the experience of men was not the foundational fact of the Christian gospel but what God had accomplished once for all in Christ, and that Christian experience is essentially the response which men through the Holy Spirit make to the proclamation of these glad tidings” (Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen – A Biographical Memoir, 349).