3. The dogmatico-moral traditions finally, on which most

3. The dogmatico-moral traditions finally, on which most

The Principle of Protestantism Gerhard's* celebrated system of theology. The religious life rests on the deepest feeling of communion. It may be safely affirmed, moreover, that for every peculiar exposition of the Reformers, at least an analogy may be found in the ancient church, particularly with Augustine. But still the Reformers by no means allow a normative authority to the fathers. Respect for them is not suffered to shackle the further progress of exegesis, as in the Church of Rome.* The fathers, in their interpretation, proceeded in part on wholly unsound principles, as those of Alexandria for instance with their extravagant allegory; and of a full agreement, except only in the most essential particulars, it is idle to speak.

The scripture expositions of the Reformers show not only far more agreement, but also sounder sense and tact, and saving the single case of Augustine, who however like all philosophical thinkers is a better theologian than interpreter, are characterized by much greater acuteness and depth.

3. The dogmatico-moral traditions finally, on which most hangs, may be taken first in the material view; comprehending thus, in the Romish system, all doctrines that are referred to Christ or the apostles, without being found in the Scriptures.

These we might look for most naturally, in the apostolical fathers and the ecclesiastical writers of the second and third centuries.

But we find here no utterances of Christ and the apostles, that * Conf. Helv. II, Art. 2, p. 469: Proinde non aspernamur sanctorum patrum

Graecorum Latinorumque interpretationes neque reprobamus eorundem disputationes ac tractationes rerum sacrarum cum scripturis consentientes; a quibus tamen recedimus modeste, quando aliena a scripturis aut his contraria adferre deprehenduntur. Nec putamus illis ullam a nobis hac re injuriam irrogari, cum omnes uno ore nolint sua scripta aequari Canonicis.

. Eodem in ordine collocantur etiam Conciliorum definitiones vel Canones. With this agrees the whole practice of the orthodox Protestant interpreters and theologians.

+ This Moehler*! himself is constrained to allow, Symboltk, p. 390 (5th ed.):

"With the exception of the interpretation of a very few classic passages, a general agreement here is to be found only in this, that all educe from the holy Scriptures the same doctrinal and moral views" (even this however holds only in the case of the veriest essentials); "everyone, at the same time, in his own peculiar way; so that some as expositors are distinguished models for all times, others rise not above mediocrity, and others still are entitled to respect only for their good intention and their love to the Savior."

Philip Schaff

are not more clearly and fully presented to us in the New Testament. At times besides, something wholly unsuitable and absurd is attributed to them; as Papias for instance, in Irenaeus, puts an allegorical saying into the mouth of Christ, which he could never have uttered. It becomes necessary accordingly to proceed here with the utmost critical caution, and there remains no rule by which to discriminate the true from the false but the Scriptures.

Our Romish opponents however set more store by the dogmatic traditions of the Middle Ages; which are referred at once to a divine origin, on the grievously arbitrary principle of Peter a Soto*: quarum observationum initium, auctor et origo ignoratur vel invenivi no potest, illas extra omnem dubitationem ab apostolis traditas esse. All these doctrines, however, which not only have no foundation in the Bible, but for the most part contradict it outright, such as the worship of the virgin Mary and the saints, the scholastic theory of justification, purgatory, satisfactions, and indulgences, are with full right rejected by Protestantism; under the authority of the apostle's word: ""Though an angel from heaven should preach unto you any other gospel than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed." For how can the Spirit of Christ contradict itself? And where do we find it written that the church has the power at pleasure to create or sanction new doctrines? These then are no apostolical but, in their later

Romish form at least, altogether human, arbitrary traditions; like the self-made Jewish ordinances of the Pharisees and Sadducees, and the false doctrines against which we are expressly warned by Christ and his apostles (Matthew 15:2; Mark 7:3, 5,

13; Galatians 1:14; Colossians 2:8).

Quite different, however, in the second place, is the case of the formal dogmatic tradition. This is such as has not for its contents something different from what is contained in the Bible, but forms the channel by which these contents are conducted forward in history; the onward development thus of church doctrine and church life, as comprehended first dogmatically in the socalled rules of faith, above all in the Apostles' Creed, and then in the ecumenical creeds—the Nicene and Athanasian—and still further as orally carried forward, apart from all written statement, through the entire course of church history, so that every-

The Principle of Protestantism one, before he wakes even to self-consciousness, is made involuntarily to feel its power. Tradition in this sense is absolutely indispensable. By its means we come first to the contents of the Bible; and from it these draw their life for us, perpetually fresh and new; in such way that Christ and his apostles are made present, and speak to us directly, in the Spirit which breathes in the Bible, and flows through the church as her life's blood. This tradition therefore is not a part of the divine word separately from that which is written, but the contents of scripture itself as apprehended and settled by the church against heresies past and always new appearing; not an independent source of revelation, but the one fountain of the written word, only rolling itself forward in the stream of church consciousness. Much to the same purpose, Martin Chemnitz says: "Haec est vera et vetus apostolorum traditio, quae nihil tradit extra et praeter scripturam, sed complectitur summam totius scripturae."*

This tradition Protestantism can and must allow without a surrender of its principle. For the Reformers in their great controversy had always in their eye, not this conception, but the material tradition only, as a fountain of knowledge independent of the Scriptures, and having different contents. Many Protestants are to be found, to be sure, in our own time particularly, who entirely overlook the importance of this point; which makes it so much the more necessary to give it emphasis. But we can appeal boldly to history for its support.

In the first place, an argument for holding fast to tradition in this form is found in the whole historical connection of the Reformation itself with the period going before, as this has been already brought into view. Then we have it expressly declared by the leaders of this vast movement that men can be saved only in connection with the true Christian Church, as it has stood from the beginning, against which the gates of hell cannot prevail; and that all reformation therefore, and further development of doctrine and life, must maintain essential unity with the collective consciousness of the Christian Church.} Lastly, our affirma- * Examen Conc. Trident., Part I, p. 120, ed. Francof.

+ Particularly worthy of note in this view is a passage found in a letter of Luther to Duke Albert of Prussia, in the year 1532.47 He is speaking of the

Philip Schaff U7 tion is confirmed by the practice of the Reformed and Lutheran Churches.

For these have appropriated to themselves unhesitatingly the ecumenical symbols, as true expressions of this church consciousness, that is as agreeing with the Scriptures; to which they refer still as the unerring fountain and norm of religious real presence of the Lord in the Eucharist—a doctrine denied it is true by Zwingli, but firmly held by Calvin, as he expressly declares particularly in his defensto ad Westphalum, and also in his Instit. "This article moreover," the letter proceeds, "has been clearly believed and held from the beginning of the Christian Church to this hour—a testimony of the entire holy Christian

Church, which, if we had nothing besides, should be sufficient for us. For tt is dangerous and terrible to hear or believe anything against the united testimony, faith and doctrine, of the entire holy Christian Church, as this hath been held now 1,500 years, from the beginning, unanimously in all the world.

Whoso now doubted thereon, it is even the same as though he believed in no Christian Church, and he condemneth thus not only the entire holy Christian

Church as a damnable heresy, but also Christ himself and all the apostles and prophets, who have established and powerfully attested this article, where we say, 'I believe in a holy Christian Church'; Christ namely, Matthew

28:20: 'Lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the world'; and Paul, 1 Timothy 3:15: "The Church of God, which is the pillar and ground of the tLUGh een COnp Lele Linwc, ali. p503: Communionem vero cum ecclesia Christi vera tanti facimus, ut negemus eos coram Deo vivere posse, qui cum vera Det ecclesia non communicant, sed ab ea se separant. Nam ut extra arcam

Noé non erat ulla salus, pereunte mundo in diluvio, ita credimus extra Christum, qui se electis in ecclesia fruendum praebet, nullam esse salutem certam: et proinde docemus, vivere volentes non oportere separari a vera

Christi ecclesia. The idea of the church is developed in a masterly style by Calvin, Instit. Chr. Rel., 1V, c. 1, § 1 ff He who has God for his Father, he tells us, has the church also for his mother; and this not simply under the law, but after the coming of Christ likewise, who will have us to be children of the new and heavenly Jerusalem (Galatians 4:26). He then goes on to say,

§ 4: Verum quia nunc de visibili ecclesia disserere propositum est, discamus vel uno Matris elogio, quam utilis sit nobis ejus cognitio, imo necessaria: quando non alius est in vitam ingressus, nisi nos ipsa concipiat in utero, nisi pariat, nisi nos alat suis uberibus, denique sub custodia et gubernatione sua nos tueatur, donec exuti carne mortali similes erimus angelis. Neque enim patitur nostra infirmitas a schola nos dimitti, donec toto vitae cursu discipuli fuerimus. Adde quod extra ejus gremium nulla est speranda peccatorum remissio, nec ulla salus, teste Iesaja (37:32) et Joele (2:32). With the greatest severity he then reproves all those who without imperious necessity of conscience separate themselves from the reigning church. This whole section in fact sounds so strongly Catholic that Moehler (Symbolik, pp. 443 f.) accuses

Calvin of being in perfect contradiction here with himself, in leaving the Catholic Church. But this reproach is fully answered by the second chapter of the same book, where Calvin, with that overwhelming moral earnestness

The Principle of Protestantism knowledge.* Then again, they formed in their own bosom a peculiar Reformed and Lutheran tradition, carrying forward thus the stream of church consciousness in themselves, and giving it representation in their symbolical books. This too is in no respect contrary to their Bible principle. For the Protestant symbols are likewise formal dogmatic traditions, which contain nothing different from the Scriptures, but simply express the faith of Protestantism in the Scriptures themselves, and its apprehension of their contents. They are the evangelical answer to the interrogation of the divine Word+; which founded the church at first, and by which it must be continually set free from remaining alloy, and carried forward from one degree of light and power to another, till at last the word itself shall be fully corporealized in its life, and the written letter thus will be no more needed in the plenitude of the spirit.

With this view firmly secured in our minds, we escape the insuperable difficulties, which do in fact encumber the Protestant position as held by many—particularly in our own time—who invest the Bible with the most abstract, isolated character, interposing a lifeless void of eighteen centuries between its completion and the present time, while yet, in spite of their own theory, which is peculiar to him, exhibits the papacy as a false church, because by its ordinances it directly contradicted the word of God. He estimates thus the worth of a church by its agreement with this unerring standard, the charter of the covenant, and the depository of all truth. Till the papists can show what has not yet been done, that their church agrees with the word of God,

Calvin stands fully justified. For the sake of his connection with the true Catholic Church, he was compelled to separate from a communion, which in its spiritual insolence claims to be the only true church, without being able to bring anything more than its own assertion in proof of the pretension. The true church, before the Reformation, existed no doubt in the dominion of the pope; but the papacy must by no means be identified, for this reason, with the true church; as little as Christianity in the beginning was to be considered one with Judaism, because Christ and his apostles stood in this system, visited the temple, and took part in its service.

*Conf. Gallic., Art. 5, p. 330: Quamobrem etiam tria illa Symbola, nempe Apostolicum, Nicaenum et Athanasianum, idcirco approbamus, quod sint illi verbo Dei scripto consentanea.

+ Hence the known expression, symbola non imprimunt credenda, sed exprimunt credita. They are not norma fidei, but norma doctrinae, according to which the Scriptures are to be taught,

Philip Schaff

they do themselves in fact hold it only through the medium of tradition, and see and understand it too only as mirrored in the present consciousness of the particular church to which they belong. A gross inconsequence truly, and glaring contradiction, of which the Romish theologians are well pleased to take advantage.

Before closing this part of our discussion, and passing over to the consideration of the present posture of Protestantism, we have still to notice the principal Roman Catholic objections to the scripture principle, and then to make clear, in a comprehensive view, its relation to the material principle.

Some of the most frequent objections are:

1. "The church is older than the holy Scriptures; these proceed from her; this relation between them ought not then to be reversed, as it is with Protestantism.' True, the church was in being before any book of the New Testament existed; but not before the unwritten word of Christ and the apostles, which rather was the foundation of the church, and in substance is the same with the written.* Now however this originally oral communication is fixed and secured against corruption by the Scriptures. Why then should we have recourse besides to unwritten tradition, as though these were not sufficient? As long as the apostles lived, the inspired bearers of the divine word, such tradition was sufficiently safe. In case of corruption or perversion, the apostles might apply the necessary correction. But the case must be wholly different, after the death of these unerring witnesses. If the gospel was to be perpetuated in its purity, it became indispensable that it should be committed to writing; since all merely oral tradition, in proportion as it becomes removed from its source, is found to grow more and more turbid through the accession of foreign matter, till in the end it is no longer possible, without the intervention of a new revelation, to make any sure distinction between the truth and the error. Against such disaster God has provided under the new dispensation, as before * Quenstedt'® replies to the objection in hand: Quando Pontificii argumentantur in hunc modum: Ecclesia est antiquior scriptura, ergo majorem habet auctoritatem, etc., respondeo: Distinguendum inter verbum Dei in scripturis propositum et ipsum scribendi actum, sive inter scripturae substantiam, quae est verbum Dei, et hujus accidens, quod est scriptio. Syst. Theolog., 1702, p. 93.

The Principle of Protestantism under the old, by causing his word to be committed to writing, and wonderfully preserving it in this form from age to age. Allowing then, as all reasonable Protestants will be ready to do, that the written word was not necessary for the rise of the church, it must still be considered indispensable for its continuance as the perpetual, pure fountain, and only certain measure of saving truth.* 2. "It is through tradition only we have the Scriptures themselves, and are assured of their authenticity, integrity, and divine character. So likewise we are referred to the church for the de- * We can appeal here even to the testimony of the most important Roman

Catholic theologian of the present age. Moehler, in his spirited work Ueber die Einheit der Kirche (Tubingen, 1825), p. 60, says: "Without the holy Scriptures, in which the gospel was first embodied, the Christian doctrine would not have been preserved in its purity and simplicity; and it is certainly a great want of right feeling toward God, to speak of them as accidental'

(which however is just what many Romish theologians, in opposing Protestants, have done, and are doing still) "because they may seem to have sprung from merely accidental occasions. What a conception of the regency of the Holy Spirit in the church! Without the Scriptures, moreover, the first link of the church would be wanting, leaving it thus without any proper beginning, and for this reason unmeaning, confused, and chaotic. But without a continuous tradition, all higher sense for the Scriptures would fail us too, since without intermediate links we could be conscious of no connection. Without the Scriptures we could form no complete image of the Redeemer, as trustworthy material would be wanting, and all must be made uncertain through fables; without a continuous tradition the spirit and interest would be wanting to form for ourselves any such image, and the material again likewise, for without tradition we should have no scripture. Without the Scriptures the peculiar form of the discourses of Jesus would be withheld from us; we should not know how the God-man spoke, etc." What is here said, with as much beauty as truth, of tradition, impairs not at all the force of the passage in favor of Protestantism. For tradition is not taken here in the true Roman Catholic sense, as we have before noticed in the case of Moehler, but as the regenerated reason, the Christian consciousness of the church; which stands not beside the Scriptures as an independent fountain, but is simply the stream of their contents reaching to us through the life of the church, embracing always only what is contained in the Scriptures themselves; the same view accordingly that we freely and cheerfully admit on Protestant ground itself. The distinguished champion of popery says indeed explicitly that without the Scriptures we should be left without trustworthy matter, all being involved in fables; and this, of course applies with fair consequence also to tradition in the Romish sense, so far as it is made to hold contents of its own, not derived from the Scriptures. Comp. also Baur, Der Gegensaiz des Katholicismus und Protestantismus, 1834, pp. 348 f.

termination of the sacred canon, which fixes the limits of the written word. Now it is inconsistent when Protestants accept the canon thus handed down to them by the church, and yet in theory reject tradition." With regard to this, it has already been observed that these testimonies of the church on the genuineness, integrity, and number of the sacred writings, have no claim to infallible authority; but are primarily of mere historical character, subject fairly to critical trial, external and internal, and become fully valid to the individual Christian at last, only through the self-evidencing power of the Scriptures themselves to his spirit by the Holy Spirit. Properly too they utter nothing new, give no contents, are no voice beyond the Scriptures, but only upon the Scriptures. "The church," as Nitzsch* says, "has not made the Scriptures genuine by acknowledging them, but the Scriptures have demonstrated themselves to her, and now make the church genuine."* And in the same way, apart also from these patristic testimonies, they still demonstrate themselves as genuine and divine, to every earnest reader, by the Spirit of God speaking through them to his heart.

3. "By rejecting tradition, which imposes definite rules and limits on the interpretation of scripture, we throw open the door to lawless objectivity. This is shown by the actual state of the Protestant world, as rent into various conflicting parties, which without exception appeal to the Scriptures in support of the most opposite doctrines and principles." Here indeed a disadvantageous side of Protestantism is brought to view, which we are constrained to acknowledge with deep sorrow, as will appear hereafter. Still, however, while we readily allow that the curse of sects is to be ascribed, in large part, to the contempt of church authority and the abuses of Protestant liberty, we must decidedly reject the allegation that tradition alone, and that in the Romish sense as an infallible judge of scripture, forms a sufficient remedy for the cure of this disease. 'The prescription at best leaves us where we were before, if it bring us not into a plight still worse. For tradition itself is capable also of various interpretations, and to a greater extent indeed than the Bible, in proportion as the writ- * System der christlichen Lehre, 4th ed., p. 93.

The Principle of Protestantism ings in which it is to be found are of greater compass. It is prodigious injustice to ascribe all clearness to man's word, and all darkness to the word of God. The history of the church besides informs us plainly that different sects have stayed themselves on tradition as well as upon the holy Scriptures. This was done, for instance, by the Gnostics, and again by the Arians at the Council of Antioch*; also by the Artemonites,"" who according to Eusebiust affirmed that their error with regard to the person of Christ had been held by the apostles and the whole church down to the time of the Roman bishop Victor, and was first exchanged for a different view under his successor Zephyrinus. It is known too that different views still prevail in the Church of Rome, without loss of orthodoxy, on several by no means unimportant articles of the Tridentine system; and it is owing only to the outward force she employs to restrain all tendencies of the more free sort, as in the case of Jansenism and Hermesianism," that these differences come not to more open contradiction and collision. In this way, however, the disease is not cured, but only covered over; to break forth the more dangerously again, in its own time. Such tyranny over the conscience and against free inquiry, is contrary in the view of our church to the free nature and spiritual constitution of the gospel. As little as the present so sadly divided condition of the Evangelical Church may be considered her proper, normal, and perfect state, it still forms an advance as compared with the posture of the Church of Rome, to which the crisis is still future. What vital energy must not Protestantism possess to endure so long and renew its youth continually, in spite of such distraction!

In directing our view now to the relation of the two principles to each other mutually, it may be observed that they are inseparably joined as contents and form, will and knowledge, and strictly taken constitute but two sides of one and the same principle, which resolves itself into the maxim: Christ all in all. All sects accordingly, which either deny justification by faith alone, as the Socinians, Unitarians, and Swedenborgians, or reject the written word, as the Schwenkfeldians and Quakers, are to be ex- * Socrates, Hist. Eccles., 11, 10.

TELLUS tem COLES EEO

Philip Schaff

cluded from the territory of orthodox Protestantism, however they may claim to belong to it and seem to stand in its connection.

Wherever either element comes to be held in a one-sided way, a deviation has already taken place from the original character of the Reformation. Christ, or in an immediate view of his Spirit, is ever in the word and with the word; never without or beyond the word, written or preached; yea, he is himself the living, personal word. The word again can be understood only by faith, in union with the Spirit of Christ speaking to us through the letter.

By the word the objective Spirit bears witness to the subjective spirit that it is born of God.* The material element without the objective basis of the formal becomes swarming inwardism, and in the end sheer subjectivity. The formal element without the material, however, conducts to stiff, lifeless, and soulless externalism, the idolatry of the letter; and comes besides to no right understanding of the Scriptures, to which the key is found only in justifying faith as produced by the Spirit of God. We have a like result in philosophy, where idealism and realism come not to a living interpenetration. The first sundered from the second becomes a barren, merely formal thought-thinking; the second without the first sinks into rough empiricism and materialism.

In thus breaking through the interposed obstruction of hierarchical authority, vindicating to Christ his exclusive and all-sufficient mediatorial rights, bringing man back from the dead works to God's grace, from vain traditions to God's word, and thus by means of both obtaining for him direct access to his Savior, and through him to his heavenly Father, Protestantism at the same time gave no countenance to loose and unrestrained willfulness in thought or practice. On the contrary, the freedom it has introduced is such as has solid contents, not excluding but including allegiance to law and order. It has bound the religious spirit

* The relation is happily exhibited by Calvin, Jnstit., I, c. 2, § 6: Principio admonendi sumus, perpetuam esse fidei relationem cum verbo, nec magis ab eo posse divelli, quam radios a sole, unde oriuntur.—Quare si ab hoc scopo, in quem collimare debet, vel minimum deflectit fides, naturam suam non retinet, sed incerta est credulitas et vagus mentis error. Idem verbum basis est, qua fulcitur et sustinetur, unde si declinat, corruit. Tolle igitur verbum, et nulla jam restabit fides—Unde et fidem definit Paulus obedientiam, quae praestatur, evangelio (Romans ID).

The Principle of Protestantism indissolubly to God's grace and God's word, and by so doing set it free from all human ordinances running counter to the same.

The positive element is accordingly the first. Our church 1s primarily evangelical. Protestation is its second character, and has respect only to that which invades destructively the objective eround of the gospel. Positively evangelical, it becomes at the same time negatively protestant toward all opposing error. In short, its freedom is the blessed liberty of the children of God, which stands in unconditional obedience to the Lord and to his word, and is identical thus with moral necessity.*

* Excellent instruction on this point is to be found in the truly masterly sermon of Luther, the Liberty of a Christian Man; where he handles the seemingly contradictory propositions: "A Christian man is a free lord over all things," and "A Christian man is a bound servant of all things, and subject to every man in Christ."

PART TWO The Principle of Protestantism in Its Relation to the Later Development and Present State of the Protestant Church THE NEW RELIGIOUS VIEWS comprehended in Protestantism accomplished a remodification of the entire world, in government, science, art, and social life. Modern history is an inexplicable riddle without the Reformation. We are not called however to quit the strictly theological sphere. Rather, having now completed the historico-doctrinal part of our subject, we must pass on to consider the relation of the Protestant principle to the posture and wants of the church in our own age.

It must be acknowledged something remarkable always, that the last days of Luther and Melanchthon, who had attained to such a full measure of evangelical liberty and joy, should have been characterized nevertheless by a deep melancholy. Only ill will can attribute this to their personal character, and only the most superficial reflection reckon it the discredit of their work.*

* The distinguished critic and historian 'Thomas Carlyle, who has well apprehended and described the character of Luther, at least in its human greatness and historical significance, observes of his melancholy very beautifully

(Heroes and Hero Worship, p. 164): "The basis of his life was sadness, earnestness. In his latter days, after all triumphs and victories, he expresses him-

The Principle of Protestantism They were sad, not on their own account, but on account of the church, which lay immeasurably nearer to their hearts than all personal prosperity. And the men were not imposed upon by their own imagination; their sad forebodings, in view of the perils outward and inward to which Protestantism stood exposed, after its glorious pentecostal period, had in fact a prophetical character. The great rent, from which Christendom still continues to bleed, had now taken place; the church hitherto one was divided; individuals and whole nations were set loose from the bonds of hierarchical discipline. The Reformers had not sought the separation; it was however unavoidable. They must themselves set their seal to it, after the pope had uttered his damnatory sentence, if they would obey God and their own conscience rather than men, and honor Christ's crown of thorns above the triple crown of gold with its arbitrary decrees.

It was simply the objective course of history itself, and with this, one would think, they might have set their hearts at rest.

But history, since the presence of sin, unfolds itself only through extremes in the way of action and reaction. A religious principle, once uttered, becomes the property of the whole world, communicates itself like fire to all other departments of life, rushes onward restless and one-sided to its extreme consequences; and then, by inherent dialectic process, strikes over into its opposite.

Dislodge a heavy rock from its place on the summit of a mountain, and it rests not till it finds the bottom of the valley below, and there breaks into a thousand pieces. All flesh is as grass; only the word of God abideth forever. This was well understood by self heartily weary of living; he considers that God alone can and will regulate the course things are taking, and that perhaps the day of judgment is not far. As for him, he longs for one thing: that God would release him from his labor, and let him depart and be at rest. They understand little of the man, who cite this in discredit of him!

[I will call this Luther a truly great man; great in intellect, in courage, affection and integrity; one of our most lovable and precious men. Great, not as a hewn obelisk, but as an alpine mountain—so simple, honest, spontaneous, not setting up to be great at all; there for quite another purpose than being great! Ah, yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the heavens; yet in the clefts of it, fountains, green beautiful valleys with flowers! A right spiritual hero and prophet; once more a true son of nature and fact, for whom these centuries, and many that are yet to come, will be thankful to heaven."

Philip Schaff Dy the great men of whom we speak. Already indeed they had been compelled to witness with their own eyes much fleshly misunderstanding of their pure work, false consequences drawn from it, confusion and division by its means, though not by its fault. In all this, they saw now the slender beginnings of greater distraction to come and were made sorrowful by the prospect. Time has since verified their fears. What they thus despondingly anticipated, lies painfully disclosed before our eyes.

Protestantism has now a history of three hundred years behind it—a short, but most stirring and active life. 'True, it has built no Gothic domes, painted no Raphaelian madonnas, founded no monastic orders; in such spheres its laurels are not found. But it possesses a scholasticism, less philosophically deep perhaps, but quite as acute, as that of the Middle Ages, and at the same time much more biblically sound and solid. It carries in its bosom a mysticism, not less inward and full of feeling, speculative and practical, than that which preceded it in the Roman Church. Its hymns and chorales, in Germany at least, may stand comparison with the richest creations of church art in earlier times. From the snows of Greenland to the islands of the South Sea, from the sundered walls of the mammoth Asiatic State to the western shores of America, its missionaries are scattered among the heathen, vying in devoted and untiring zeal with those of the ancient church. It calls a literature its own, which is truly a literature for the world, and the power of which continues to be felt with boundless influence upon the civilization of the human race.

To it belongs, at all events again in Germany, a theology, to which, in point of mobility, learning, spirit, penetration, freedom from prejudice, and skillful delineation, nothing equal is to be found in the earlier history of the church. From it also has sprung the modern philosophy with its succession of systems, which in their kind are something no less bold and grand than the papacy itself and its dogmatic image, the metaphysics of the schools.

It has organized states and given them immunities, which our age for no price could commute again with the servitude of the ancient hierarchy. Compare Prussia with Italy, England with Spain, the Free States of North America with Brazil, and the truth of this declaration will be at once felt.

The Principle of Protestantism To Romanism itself, though serving on the one hand to fix it in its own principle, it imparted on the other a new impulse—calling into life the Jesuits, for its defense, purifying like a storm its moral atmosphere so that it could venture no more to nominate such a pope as Sixtus IV, Alexander VI, or Julius II. It stands indeed continually over against its powerful adversary still as a corrector and waker from sleep, and who will not admit that the greatest modern defenders of popery, a Moehler,' a Goerres,' for instance, are so formidable as they are simply because they have sharpened their weapons on the whetstone of Protestant science.

In short, without this influence the vast communion of Rome, like the Greek Church (at least in great part), must have passed over into a state of putrefaction, so as to present at best only the spectacle of a praying corpse.

Traverse the lands in which Protestantism has established its seat, from the northern boundary of Sweden to the Sandwich

Islands, from the southern declivities of the Himalayas to the banks of the Mississippi; almost everywhere you may find theologians victoriously contending against infidelity and superstition; preachers, who like Paul are not ashamed of the gospel of Christ crucified, but hold all the glory of the world in contempt for its sake; a strict moral order; a blooming domestic life; an acquaintance with the Bible; a freedom and joy of faith in the inward man; such as you may seek in vain in the central seat itself of the Church of Rome. There is still sufficient salt in the system with all its diseases to save it from corruption; full as much certainly as belonged to the Catholic Church toward the close of the Middle Ages; material enough therefore for a new Reformation. High and low, learned and unlearned, die happily within its bosom every day with nothing but the Bible in their hands and faith in the free unmerited grace of God in their hearts.

Only blindness itself can deny that Protestantism still continues the great moving force of the time, holding the helm of the world's political and spiritual history; while every other form of action comes to have deep significance, only as standing with it in hostile or friendly relation.

a The Diseases of Protestantism WE MaAy NOT HOWEVER, and will not, for this reason, close our eyes to the shadow that falls from this gigantic system, on the other side. In its inmost center there is lodged, as in the heart of the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation, a dangerous disease; and woe to us, if we look not round betimes for a remedy. This must be sought, not beyond the system itself, but only again within its own bosom, in that same apostolic circle into which the Judas has crept, as was the case also, according to our previous showing, with the Reformation itself. Along with the bright aspects just noticed, Protestantism has also its revolutions, its rationalism, its sects, which are all the more dangerous as foes inasmuch as they all claim to be its truest and most legitimate offspring.

With the first, the spirit of political revolution, we have here no concern. It falls not within the theological territory. 'To the other two however our attention must now be directed, then to the reaction of Puseyism, and finally to the true remedy for these diseases in its most essential points.

The Principle of Protestantism

RATIONALISM:

OR ONE-SIDED THEORETIC SUBJECTIVISM

Rationalism has developed itself mainly in the Lutheran Church upon what may be styled its classic soil. Germany is the proper home, not only of the Reformation, but of all the deeper spiritual movements which have been called forth by this during the last three hundred years. Thither then we must first direct our view. To the creative period of the Lutheran Church, which came to a close with the Formula of Concord, succeeded immediately that of logical comprehension; as in the Catholic Church the patristic, dogma-producing time was followed by the scholastic. This Protestant school learning was accompanied indeed, like that which preceded it in the Church of Rome, with mystical tendencies of various sorts*; but still it gave tone to the age. Its ereat effort accordingly was to reduce to system the theological acquisitions of the period of the Reformation, with a demonstration, in part dialectic and in part biblical, extending to the smallest separate particulars. Our business here, is not to bring into view the many merits of this period, in which such men as Johann

Gerhard, Hutter, Quenstedt, Calovius,' rise before our vision, but only to show in what respect it tended necessarily to call forth opposition. Shutting itself up from the start within the narrow circle of the Formula of Concord, it stood in a perfectly exclusive relation, not only toward the Reformed system of doctrine, but also toward the diverging peculiarities of the Melanchthonian school'; and thus gradually degenerated, like the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages, into dry dogmatism and stiffened orthodoxy, in which religion was made to consist in sound knowledge, and its practical nature thrust wholly out of sight. Justification was separated abstractly from holiness; while as it regarded the formal principle, the theory of inspiration, contrary to the freer view of the Reformers, became so overstrained that the Scriptures were made to assume a magical character in which their human, natural side was not allowed at all to appear. All this opened the way for an opposite movement.

The reaction showed itself first in the sphere of the material principle, under the form of Spenerian Pietism*; which in Opposition to such forms of outward intellect successfully asserted the

Philip Schaff

vast importance of holiness and the verification of faith in practice. This mission it fulfilled with great earnestness; but not without a certain one-sidedness, particularly in its later character, which gave its orthodox adversaries, with their superior science, the advantage of right in many points. Pietism contributed much—along with its kindred spirit among the United Brethren,' by whom all confessional distinctions were undervalued—to disseminate a religion of sickly sentiment and_ sighs, aversion to clear definite conceptions, and to a regularly digested system of theology, and since the confession of the truth is the ground of the church, along with all this a want of true church feeling.

This was the first step, we may say, toward rationalism; the nature of which holds in this, that it allows the idea of religion to resolve itself into simple morality, or in the end into mere good citizenship—a result fully as one-sided as the error of identifying it with theoretic orthodoxy. Men who could acknowledge the truth belonging to Pietism, while they still continued to stand firm on the solid ground of the old church faith, such as the great

J. A. Bengel,* who stands out to view as the religious ornament of the eighteenth century and of his native Wiirttemberg in particular, were not common; and their number erew always smaller as the century advanced toward its close. 'The chord once struck found every day a clearer response. The undervaluation of the church and her symbols led gradually to the undervaluation of the apostles and their writings, and terminated finally in a denial of the divinity of Christ himself. The transition of the pietistic tendency over into the rationalistic, is strikingly exhibited in the case of the celebrated professor of Halle, Semler'; who was brought up in the pietistic school, and continued to adhere to it all his life also, in the way of what he called "private piety," but became nevertheless, through his special dislike to doctrine, and his bold critical and historical investigations, the proper father of the German neology, and contributed beyond all others to unsettle the received views, with regard to the canon and the subject of inspiration. Other elements, in part foreign—the English deism, the French infidelity—whose leaders found unfortunately so powerful a protector in Frederick the Great, and lastly the

The Principle of Protestantism immeasurably flat philosophy of Wolff," making all in heaven and on earth clear by making all shallow, came in to support this fatal tendency; so that toward the close of the revolutionary century it had almost universal possession of the pulpit and the professor's chair, and was fairly and fully at home with the visible rulers of the church, the general superintendents and counselors of consistory.

Rationalism again, however, has its own historical development. In its first stage it appeared as a shallow, popular aufklaerung, by which religion and the church were both cleared of all deeper meaning. Afterward, by means of the philosophy of Kant, which had in the meantime taken hold on the consciousness of the age, it assumed a more scientific form. The familiar, everyday style of thinking was made to give place to intellectual, philosophically cultivated reflection. Finally, it culminated in the destructive speculative theology, or wntheology rather, which within a short period past has burst, like a wild monster, with terrific desolation, from the camp of the negative criticism and Hegelan logic. Compared with this, the old common rationalism is only a harmless child. The critical and doctrinal writings of Strauss,

Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer,"' and their associates, may be regarded as a complete concentration, full of spirit and keen penetration, of all assaults heretofore made upon Christianity; so that if they should be fully overcome, apologetic divinity might hold a true triumph and allow her armor to hang long without use. Rationalism, it is true, even in its first stage, had exchanged the Protestant doctrine of justification for Pelagianism, and put the holy

Scriptures into the same class with mere human books. It still left standing however some fundamental religious truth, as the being of God, his providence, the freedom and immortality of man, and paid great respect particularly to the morality of Christianity. It is not to be denied that Kant's Critique of the Practical

Reason is animated with great moral earnestness, and may have served as a schoolmaster to bring some to Christ. Being separated however in itself from the personal ideal of morality, Jesus Christ, the absolute God-man, it was pervaded with the poison of stoic self-righteousness, and could make no stand therefore against the evergrowing stream of the negative movement.

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The speculative rationalism has now fully demolished the brittle structure, and thus realized in the world of thought, what the French Revolution under Robespierre accomplished in actual life. The entire sacred history of our Savior is resolved into a collection of myths, unconsciously produced by the imagination of the infant church, and forming a tissue of inward and outward contradictions. One church dogma after another is given to the winds as an imperfect conception, self-annihilated gradually by the onward course of scientific criticism. Yea, the whole supernatural world is drawn over into the present life as a mere product of the religious fancy without all objective reality, and the infinite

Godhead itself must shrink into the finite spirit of man. This is pantheism in the most scientifically complete and perilous form the world has ever yet seen, exalting the general idea of humanity to the throne of the universe, and proclaiming it the creator, preserver, and redeemer of all things. No further progress seems possible in this direction, unless it be to reduce the theory to practice by building temples for the worship of genius, as has been already proposed, and in some parts of the New World actually carried into effect; and by composing liturgical forms, in which the human spirit may offer prayers and sing speculative hallelujahs, in measured logico-dialectic process, to the honor and glory of itself.

It would be an error, however, to suppose that the representatives of this tendency are agreed among themselves. 'They stand to one another, in part at least, in the most contradictory relation; so that the negative theological literature of Germany, at the present time, appears a tumultuating chaos of systems and theories, whose affinity often is such as holds between fire and water. In the nature of the case, when the human understanding is raised to the highest tribunal, full scope is given to the willfulness of private judgment at the same time.

This extreme climax of unbelief proclaims itself to be the ultimate necessary result of Protestantism. 'To this we answer however, in the words of the apostle John, concerning the anti-Christian errorists of his own day: They went out from us (in the way of outward, historical derivation), bul they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with

The Principle of Protestantism us (1 John 2:19). It belongs to the very nature of the Reformation, as we have seen, that it makes the clearest distinction between sinful man and a holy God, prostrates utterly the imagination that the human will may redeem itself, or the natural understanding know the truth by its own power, and requires an unconditional submission on the part of the sinner to God's grace and God's word. Here, on the contrary, the divine grace is taken to be a mere objective reflex of the power belonging to man himself, and the subjective reason, or understanding rather,* is made the fountain and norm of knowledge. If there was ever a radical confusion of things totally heterogeneous, we have it in the pretension just mentioned. 'The tendency in question deserves to be regarded only as a Christianly refined paganism, whose very character stands in a deification of the universe, and the worship of the forces, either physical or spiritual, in which it has its constitution. It might be shown that all the heathen mythologies find their image in this modern infidel cultivation.

From this it may now be seen clearly that the standpoint of our time is wholly different from that of the Reformers. 'The most dangerous enemy with which we are threatened on theoretic ground is not the Catholicism of Rome, but the foe within our own borders; not the hierarchic papacy of the Vatican, but the worldly papacy of the subjective understanding, and Protestant infidelity; not the Council of Trent, but the theology of unbelief, as proclaimed by a Roehr," a Wegscheider," a Strauss, a Feuerbach, and others of the same stamp. Must not all serious believing

Protestants feel themselves more closely related in spirit to a Bellarmine or a Moehler,"' who agree with them in acknowledging the Trinity, the deity of Christ, atonement by his blood, and the * Rationalism arrogates to itself the title of rationality or reason as specially its own. In truth, however, it moves not at all in the sphere of reason, but only in that of the abstract understanding, the region of mere finite thinking, entangled in contradictions and external appearances, the standpoint of reflection. Reason, on the contrary, is the power of perceiving the supernatural, the infinite, the harmonious unity, the essence of things, the primal idea of the absolute. It is the longing of the spirit after its true country, its home-drawing toward God and the revelation he has made of himself in Christ; just as conscience is the point of contact between the human will and the ground of all will in God. Reason, then, in its inmost nature, is a receptive faculty that must go beyond itself for its contents.

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divine inspiration and infallibility of the Scriptures, than they are to Strauss and Bruno Bauer, by whom all these articles are rejected? I will by no means deny indeed that a certain affinity also may be traced, in another view, between Protestant rationalism and the Catholicism of Rome; in the fact that the tradition principle of the one corresponds with the reason principle of the other, while both rest upon a Pelagian basis in which all right apprehension of the deep corruption of sin is wanting.*

Even the pantheistic character of the latest rationalism is not without its analogies in the absolute infallibility and supremacy in church and state claimed by the papacy, and in the doctrine of transubstantiation, according to which the priest by his consecrating act produces the body of the Lord—the creature, the Creator—and sensible elements are taken to be the immediate contents of the Savior's flesh and blood. But a great difference holds

* This is allowed by the more discerning and honorable Roman theologians.

Thus the powerful Moehler, in the preface to the first edition of his Symbolik, from which all the recent apologists of popery, who are of any account, draw their material (p. xi): "The Catholic has this advantage moreover, that his system includes, as well what the rationalists honor one-sidedly or exclusively in Christianity, as what is made prominent in the same Christianity just as one-sidedly or exclusively by the orthodox Protestantism. These two extremes are in fact, in his faith, balanced and fully reconciled. It holds as much affinity with the one as with the other; and the Catholic accordingly can comprehend both since his system is the unity of both. The naturalistic Protestants are indebted to Luther directly only for this, that he has procured for them the freedom of daring to profess what is directly opposite to him and to the religious communion which he established; and the orthodox Protestants are bound with them by nothing but the oppressive feeling that Luther has founded a church, whose conception constrains them to tolerate patiently such opposers in their midst, as a case admitting no help. The Catholic on the contrary has an inward affinity on the ground of his faith with both, and thus stands higher than both and overlooks both. He has what belongs to both, only without their one-sided defects.'"" Compare the description which Melanchthon gives of the rationalistic and Pelagianistic theology of his time in the Apol. Conf. and his Loc. Theol. We may refer also to the fact that the more free investigations which gradually led to rationalism had their origin in part in the Catholic Church, as we may see in the case of Petavius! in dogmatic history, and Rich. Simon! in the criticism and history of the Bible.

The Jesuits first proclaimed the principle of the sovereignty of the people, which produced the French Revolution, and by their casuistry opened the way for the formal overthrow of all morality, with which all religious faith also must necessarily fall at the same time.

The Principle of Protestantism notwithstanding between the two systems, of which we must not lose sight, if we would be equal to the questions of the time.

For Romanism, in the first place, is in this respect at most only half Pelagian and half rationalistic, that it makes the grace of God and the sacred Scriptures coordinate with works and tradition, and equally necessary as the ground and fountain of salvation; while rationalism, in true stoic style, dreams of being able to do all by its own strength, and to know all by reason simply, separated from its proper divine contents and contradicting thus its own design; on which account the idea of a supernatural revelation is rejected, and Christ himself is degraded to a natural hero of virtue, a second Socrates, a mere man accordingly, however ideally apprehended. A further difference consists in this, that Romanism in making works necessary to justification and salvation looks to the deeds of the whole church, and by tradition, as a fountain of knowledge and rule of faith supplementary to the Bible, intends properly the reason of all Christian history, showing itself thus in the character of objective, churchly semi-Pelagianism and semirationalism; while Protestant rationalism holds the tsolated will and reason of the individual sufficient for the purposes of salvation, and in this way is altogether subjective and unchurchly in its nature.

This then, as already said, stands in vastly more direct opposition to the essence of Christianity and orthodox Protestantism than the enemy which the Reformers were called to combat.

Luther and Calvin, if they should make their appearance now, would act very differently, in the altered state of things, from what they did three hundred years ago. Their main zeal would be directed no doubt against such purely negative pseudo-Protestantism, as something altogether worse than popery itself.

We need to bear this in mind, in our activity for religion and the church at the present time, that we may not lose sight of our true character and calling as Protestants, in view of the false pretensions with which we are surrounded on the part of the unbelieving and ungodly, who profess to stand upon the same ground and to glory in the same name, and who show themselves loudest possibly in their cry against popery and Jesuitism, only to cover their hostility to all faith and righteousness. Such have a nominal

Philip Schaff ai) title only, but none that is historical, to appear in the Protestant character. 'That caution is needed here in a high degree, in our present circumstances, is not to be doubted. By making common cause with such destructive Protestants in their opposition to Catholicism, whether the immediate object be political or religious, we must render the most efficient support and aid to this interest itself; which has already indeed, with serpent wisdom, contrived to draw immense advantage from such anti-Protestant connections between Christ and Belial. The attack intended to overwhelm the enemy, recoils in this case necessarily, in the way of self-annihilation, upon its source. Rather let us never forget the much that we hold in common with the Roman Church, the bond of union by which she is joined with us in opposition to absolute unbelief, whose wild ravages are displayed also in her own bosom, particularly in France.

Let us first with united strength expel the devil from our own temple, into which he has stolen under the passport of our excessive toleration, before we proceed to exorcise and cleanse the dome of St. Peter. At least, let this be our main business.

It may be said however perhaps that rationalism, at least in the philosophical form now described, has for our own country no danger. But it should be remembered that the evil does not hold simply in the form. The main thing is the principle from which it grows; the general standpoint of a cold, abstract intellection, to which all that is mystical or supernatural in Christianity is found displeasing. In this view, we may discover affinities with the German rationalism, not only in the Unitarian and Universalist heresies of this country, but in much also that passes for orthodoxy. That unbelief has not yet acquired here the same giant force, is not owing so much to the greater prevalence of personal piety, or to the moral earnestness of the English character, as to the one-sided practical tendency and want of scientific spirit generally predominant. Where a man does not think, it requires no great skill to be orthodox. But the orthodoxy that includes no thought, is not worth a farthing. In countries where scientific feeling has prevailed, though with less force, as Holland and France, results have appeared quite analogous with the course of things in Germany. In Holland particularly the old established

The Principle of Protestantism orthodoxy, having degenerated in great part into dry and lifeless forms, found itself assailed by Arminianism, which itself again ran out finally into formal Pelagianism and rationalism.

In the case before us, it may be expected that the disposition to explore a given principle, and carry it out to its proper consequences, will continually gain ground; and with this change, if no scientific counterpoise be provided in season, rationalism must assume among us a more dangerous form. Why should it not find its way into England and America, even as the deism of the first country, from which it is descended, wandered formerly over into Germany, to complete there its university training? Time and space are continually becoming more compressed; the intercourse of the nations more active and free. Emigration from the Old

World is on the increase. Acquaintance with German literature is extending daily; and it would not be difficult to show that many respectable divines of this country, who employ themselves with it only under its abstract intellectual form, have without their own knowledge or will admitted the rationalistic principle, which needs only to be cultivated as a germ in the earth, by those who may come after them without their piety, to grow upward in a short time into a mighty tree. Shall I say that even in the lturgies and hymnbooks of the German American Churches rationalistic elements are by no means rare, without being perceived by those who use them? In many cases, clergymen who were educated at the German universities in the palmy day of rationalism have been here improved indeed in their hearts under the salutary influence of practical piety, but have at the same time retained the poison, for which no scientific antidote was at hand, in their heads, and communicated it also involuntarily to others.

I will simply notice the fact besides, as of a kind to justify anxiety, that so many of the German periodicals of the country, particularly in the West, are lending themselves, as organs more or less expert, to the service of infidelity, with the worst influence on the more common class especially of our immigrant population. True, these sheets, so far as they are known to me, are mostly both in matter and style beyond description miserable; such as dare not show themselves in Germany at all, unless in the lowest alehouses. The great body of their readers however, of

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course, are not aware that all this style of pretended light and liberality has been fairly exterminated by German science in its most recent form, or we may say even by the romantic school itself; and then, practically, it comes to much the same, whether infidelity goes about in the antiquated coat and cue style of a Bahrdt" and Edelmann,!8 or in the modern philosophical cloak of a Strauss or Feuerbach. We have good reason therefore to stand on our guard in this quarter also, and to prepare ourselves beforehand for the crisis that may come.*

* As many of my readers probably never see the publications referred to, while at the same time it is important that they should know something of the infernal spirit, which is at work to undermine the faith of the German population in America, I will submit here to the by no means pleasant task of furnishing a sample of its character; selecting for the purpose a few striking passages only from the collection of various papers I have received, on account of attacks they have contained against me for my ordination sermon, as mentioned in my introduction. I might bring forward quite a body of political sheets, published only by immigrant Germans; but it may be better to limit myself to two of religious, or much better antireligious, pretension which appear in wholly opposite sections of the union.

The Licht-Freund,!® published by Muehl and Strehly in Hermann, Missouri, contains in No. 6. of its 5th year, along with other products of the most superficial, spiritless, and jejune form of rationalism, an essay on baptism; in which it is represented as an old usage of pagan and Jewish origin, which "Rabbi Jesus" was pleased to retain in his system, but that has now become wholly unmeaning, or rather "irrational" and "grossly superstitious." —"Of a trine immersion or sprinkling with water,' we are told, "nothing was known in the beginning; but this was introduced only after the introduction, at a later period, of the nonsensical doctrine of one God consisting of three persons; of which, as we have shown on a different occasion, no trace is to be found in connection with early Christianity."—"Have children sins then," sneeringly inquires this apostle of infidelity, this jack-o'-lantern philosopher,

"that call for forgiveness? On the topic of original sin, as discussed by us in our preceding year, we have handled this point at large and exposed the ridiculousness of the church doctrine.'—'TIt is said of baptism further

(the reference is to Luther's Catechism) that it redeems us from death and the devil. But this is still more false, since baptized and unbaptized alike die; and as for the devil, it is well understood that this is an invention simply of diseased imagination, that carries us back to the times of the most gross superstition and rudeness. The devil, who plays specter in the doctrine of the church, is long since killed dead and no longer creates fear; though it cannot be denied that there is still devil enough in the world, and particularly in America." This last remark has certainly much truth, of which the writer himself may be taken as good practical proof.—In the same number we read:

"This bugbear (of the orthodox Lutheran and Reformed Churches) is the

The Principle of Protestantism

SECTARISM: OR ONE-SIDED PRACTICAL SUBJECTIVISM

We turn now to the other grand disease which has fastened itself upon the heart of Protestantism, and which must be considered only the more dangerous, because it appears ordinarily in the imposing garb of piety, Satan transformed into an angel of light.

This is the sect system, which reigns especially in our own land, favored by its free institutions and the separation of the church old theology which has long since outlived itself. For who in our time can still believe in three Gods, a propitiation of God by blood, a descent into hell, and other devil's play, as expounded here to a hair in the largest style —

Let no one say however that people do not play with puppets when they grow large and old. This history of religion, ancient and modern, teaches us that men continue to be children, however old they may be." The religious history of Hermann in Missouri appears however to form a special exception; and the most learned Messrs. Muehl, Strehly, and company, are to be regarded, we presume, as the only truly rational men the world has yet seen.

What a pity no one should think of making them professors of theology and philosophy! It is enough to drive one mad, such a perverse world, with its childish religious history—In No. 10 of the same year a characteristic article is found abusing the Pennsylvania synods, which however is too long to be presented here; also a report on the rationalist associations in Hermann and Augusta, exhibiting in the case of the first, among others, the following spirited resolution: "That we hold all and every title, assumed by the clerical tribe, such as Reverend, Ehrwuerdig, Hochwuerdig, etc., for a ridiculous, aristocratic pretension, repugnant to free, republican feeling, which every free man should reject with scorn." 'That these honest heroes of liberty should abolish such titles among themselves, must be approved as altogether rational and natural; though we should think it hardly necessary; for none surely who care for decency or truth are likely to burden them with any titles of the sort.

The Licht-Freund however sheds but the pale glimmer of a elowworm, as compared with the full blazing brightness of another periodical, which makes its appearance at New York, edited by Samuel Ludvigh, under the blinding title Die Fackel?®; with the motto: "Out of the ruins of Judaism and Christianity, rationalism will raise its head; out of the rubbish of temples and churches will rise halls of science." Here we read, in No. 4 of the 2nd year

(14, Dec., 1844) among other things, such blasphemies as we find it almost too much to copy: "Dass nach der Lehre des Herrn V. die Asteroiden Bruechstuecke eines grossen Planeten seien, ist in meinen Augen ebenso richtig, als der heilige Geist einen Gottessohn machen koenne. Wenn Planeten Junge machen koennen, so bleibe man doch ja fein im Glauben des alten Gottes, und lasse ihn durch seinen heiligen Geist hier auf Erden noch andere goettliche Jungfern-Kinder erzeugen. Wie aber seine keuschen Marien in jenen

Planeten aussehen muessen, das begreift mein Hirnkasten nicht!'' The same writer presents his confession of faith, or no faith rather, which is pronounced by Herr Ludvigh, "the quintessence of the highest human spirit." [He has it on display, engraved on glass, at his home], and all "whose means allow them

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from the state, and is entitled accordingly to our particular attention. While rationalism has been nurtured mainly in the bosom of the Lutheran Church, the poisonous plant of sectarianism has flourished most on Reformed ground, and with the practical nations, England, and her now full-grown, emancipated daughter

America. to honor such a pearl" can be furnished with it there for five dollars. It is of such sort, as to throw Feuerbach himself into the shade, whose Wesen des

Christenthums is diligently turned to account by the Fackel. "I believe (thus speaks this 'very distinguished scholar' of Boston) in an inexplicable, exalted eternal existence, whose name no tongue has ever yet uttered, which was, is, and shall be, past, present, and future, in all three externally without change; which was, is, and shall be, one and the same in endless union with itself and the majestical whole; whose power comprehends itself and all, from eternity—that I also have sprung from its bosom, and as a shoot of its eternal endure forever—that my eternal deposited in my mother as seed, impregnated into a germ and brought into the world, formed my present—that I have here heaven and hell, joy and sorrow alike—that when my present shall here dissolve, its elements will be reduced again to the mass out of which I was taken by my birth—that no miracle can occur in the course of the whole

—that man and spirit are but spokes in the eternal wheel, no one of more account than another to its movement—that no dead shall or can come ever again—that the judgment of the living must have place here as the consequence of their actions, and that for the dead none is needed—that the most glorious temple is nature under the vault of heaven, and that a God among the stars, crowned with suns, must blind us to the pomp and splendor of churches, and is too high for human worship—that what the priests teach. is only falsehood and delusion, and the hope of a life to come a mere contrivance for gain—that the consciousness of praiseworthy actions is a true paradise and a state of divine peace—that an affectionate, faithful wife, and loving children, are the true heavenly angels, and in the opposite case also they are the hateful devils—that man needs a wise teacher, for his own welfare and that of others—that I must respect myself, before I can deserve to be respected by others—that I must do right, before I exact right—that the noble man is a god of the earth; but a rough, unprincipled one, the most hateful of all venomous monsters—that when I have lived as a man, and loved my fellowmen, I can peacefully resign my ashes to corruption in the urn of oblivion, and finally that something from my eternal thus laid down shall be my resurrection." What this residuum shall consist in, we are informed by the great dogmatist himself. Moscowy leather for boot soles! And this nauseous filth of a demented brain is offered for five dollars!

Utilitarianism, in such a case, may well be indulged with its Cu: bono. The Bostonian philosopher seems himself to have but small hope of replenishing his hungry purse from the profits of his system. He confesses to his friend Ludvigh: "A real dog's life among men, who are like asses and tigers! I have had much, and still have much to bear; my old skin is tanned to moscowy leather. Whoever shall work it into boot soles hereafter, he will have soles that may be expected to last."

The Principle of Protestantism This difference has its ground in the national character of the Germans and the English, who stand in a relation to each other similar to that of the ancient Greeks and Romans. For the better understanding then of this part of our subject, a short ethnoeraphic digression may not be out of place.

The German, when true to his better nature, is distinguished by inwardness, heartiness, and a tendency to contemplation and deep thought. His favorite home is the ideal region of truth and beauty. He possesses at the same time inexhaustible energy and endurance. He can devote his whole life to the development of a philosophical thought or some learned investigation, and feel himself happy while so doing under the most unfavorable circumstances, even sitting on a shoemaker's bench, like Jakob Boehme,"! or suffering hunger with Kepler." He reckons among his countrymen the greatest philosophers and artists. An idealist by profession, he has but little tact for practical life. Readily and easily he adapts himself to all outward relations, foreign countries, and new tongues, not setting himself to remold them to his own taste, if only he may be left free to follow his inward theoretic bent. He seeks his highest crown in the Gemuetlichkeit that forms especially the ornament of the German woman, and in science, the pride and joy of the man. Hence accordingly almost all movements in the German Church have turned upon doctrine. She produced all the leading ideas of the Reformation, but left to other nations the business of outward organization. She presents at this time in particular a mixed mass of systems and schools, a pattern chart of all possible views and tendencies. But they all continue notwithstanding in one church connection, only in rare instances run into separation, schism, sectdom. In Germany one may often meet with disputations among the younger class, where different persons contend, amid clouds of tobacco smoke, with the greatest keenness and most thorough learning, bringing out the inmost principles of their subject, making them stand forth like day and night, and not resting till they are pushed to their most extreme consequences. But at last, their strength exhausted, they join in a friendly glass and song, and exchange a general kiss, as though nothing had occurred. When however it does come to separation, a case exemplified too often among Germans in this

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country, we find this usually in an eccentric style. For the German cannot well observe moderation. He has a decided tendency to extremes, both in politics and religion. As he can rise very high, so he can fall very low.

Quite different is the Englishman, and the American resting on the same basis. True, he shares with his kindred Germanic race the same ethical force, which no storms can overcome. But since the time of William the Conqueror, a strong Romanic element has been found associated with his nature. The energy of his will accordingly takes a different direction, one which is outward namely, into practical life. A born realist, he possesses the greatest talent for organization; shrinks from no difficulty, where the call is for order and form; his character is marked and strong. For philosophy and art in their higher forms he cares but little; single praiseworthy examples excepted, as among later writers, particularly Coleridge and Carlyle. Such studies are for him not sufficiently practical, useful, tangible. He laughs at the speculations of the modern German philosophers, as unfruitful, baseless, fantastic visions, and still continues to cherish a truly superstitious veneration for the empiricism of Locke. The German Gemuetlichkett, with its expression of full, warm, heartfelt tenderness, he regards with distrust as effeminate weakness, or sickly sentimentality. So far is he from making himself at home, with passive self-renunciation, in foreign relations; he seeks rather everywhere to bend and cut them to his own nature. Go where he may, he remains always an Englishman. Even when he travels into other lands, he expects more accommodation to his national peculiarities on the part of the people, than he is prepared to yield to theirs. So in this country, his will, language, manners, and customs are made the measure to which Spaniards, Swedes, Hollanders, and French must adjust themselves as they best can; and it is quite possible that the German nationality also, as it now holds among us under a distinct form, both in language and life, may gradually be swallowed up at last in the same Anglican ocean. A result however that must be considered calamitous, and which all Germans should endeavor with all their might to avert. In conformity with this character, the controversies belonging to the history of the English and North American churches turn not so much on doc-

The Principle of Protestantism trine, as on the constitution and forms of the church. In place of schools and systems we have parties and sects, which in many cases appear in full inexorable opposition, even while occupying the platform of the very same confession. The mere question of patronage has produced in Scotland, during the last century and in our own time, very important secessions; though the freedom of the Established Church in that country is of a high order, as compared with the condition of the German Church; which nevertheless has no thought of a separation from the state on this account; content if she may be internally free, in the midst of the deductions of philosophy and the creations of art.

Sects, it is true, do not owe their origin to the Reformation.

They have root in the general nature of man, its sinful ambition and pride. The apostles were called-to oppose the evil in the very infancy of the church, as we may learn from | Corinthians 1:10 f£., as well as from other passages. The first centuries exhibit a vast number of sects, and they extend through all of the Middle Ages.

The Catholic Church however has gradually overwhelmed them, partly by spiritual superiority and partly by outward force.

Through the emancipation of a large portion of Christendom from the Roman yoke, in the sixteenth century, much more ample scope was secured for the action of subjective freedom, so that it became possible for such separations to acquire independent strength and clothe themselves with a regular constitution.

Still they were held back, at the beginning, by the thunder of Luther's voice, and the colossal weight of his person. Calvin too had such a religious horror of heresies and sects that he hewed to pieces without mercy the unprincipled Libertines of Geneva with the sword of his spirit, and even suffered the distinguished Spanish physician, Michael Servetus, to be burned for denying the doctrine of the Trinity.

In England the energetic government of Elizabeth was enabled to unite the conflicting tendencies of Protestantism, though not indeed without violence toward the most stubborn opposers, under a common head, in the form of a complete state-church organization. But under her successors this degenerated continually more and more into mere external formalism. The consequence was the Puritan revolution, by means of which under

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Cromwell the more free Protestant element gained the ascendancy, though only for a short time. [With his own life], Laud atoned for the hierarchical Charles I and for the political sins of the new Protestant popedom. The deep moral earnestness, the stern self-discipline, the unbending force of character, exhibited in Puritanism, must fill the unprejudiced historian with high admiration. There was reason in its war against the tyranny of false forms. When it is beheld, with inexorable zeal for the first and second commandments, storming the altars and turning St.

Paul's Cathedral into a stall for horses, it strikes us as a divine judgment, the scorn of the Most High himself, directed against the proud creations of men, and one is reminded of the conduct of Moses, when with indignation at the calf-worship of the Israelites, he dashed the Tables of the Law to pieces.

But here precisely lies the weakness also of this tendency. Puritanism has a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. Inflamed against the deposition of bad forms and the abuse of such as are good, it makes war upon form in every shape and insists on stripping the spirit of all covering whatever, as though the body were a work of the devil. If the choice were simply between a bodiless spirit and a spiritless body, the first of course must be at once preferred. But there is still a third condition, that of a sound spirit in a sound body; and this is the best of all, alone answering to the will and order of God. For the body is the divinely formed, natural habitation of the spirit, without which it wanders about ghostlike, exposed to all inclement powers, and must in the end perish with cold. It is worthy of notice that a large part of the Puritan or Presbyterian congregations in England, and also a considerable section of the Congregational interest in North

America, in the beginning of the last century, fell over to Unttarianism. The failure of life was a failure of orthodoxy at the same time. Whereas in the case of organizations better secured by forms, the orthodoxy in the same circumstances has still maintained itself at least with statute force, so that when life has returned again, after a period of collapse (against which no constitution as such can make the church secure), it has found at once its established church channels, by which to flow forth among the people.

The Principle of Protestantism With this rugged, abstract spiritualism stands closely connected the unhistorical, revolutionary tendency of Puritanism. It has no respect whatever for history. It would restore pure, primitive

Christianity, with entire disregard to the many centuries of development that lie between, as though all had been labor in vain, and the Lord had not kept his own promise to be with the church always to the end of the world. It is not surprising, on this account, that Cromwell, who overturned in such stormful style the ecclesiastical creations of an older time and even stained himself with the blood of a king and an archbishop, should hardly be named without horror in the bosom of the Episcopal Church, and that the great and lofty qualities which undoubtedly belonged to his character should be so generally overlooked, or regarded without respect.* He that tramples father and mother underfoot has no reason to find fault with his children, when they treat him in the same way, and prove the instruments of a divine Nemesis to bring him to a sense of his own wrong committed against history.

With vastly more wisdom, prudence, and moderation, did the founders of Methodism commence and carry forward their work of reformation. Whitefield and the two Wesleys never laid aside their respect for the mother church, but notwithstanding its degeneracy labored in its communion and died within its bosom.

The Wesleyan movement, it is true, included a secessional element from the beginning, which the force of circumstances soon rendered too strong to be restrained; and the result was the establishment of a separate church. The divorce however was unnatural and wrong; and the form into which Methodism has since run, in this country particularly (the fair evolution of its original one-sided subjectivity), is not suited certainly to unsettle this judgment. In the nature of the case, the contemporaneous secession from the Church of Scotland, notwithstanding the eminent piety of the principal actors in it, must fall under the same con- * An attempt indeed to do him justice has been made recently by Thomas

Carlyle, in his book Heroes and Hero Worship, Sect. VI: "The Hero as a King." Carlyle however is constitutionally no Episcopalian, but a Scottish Presbtyerian.

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demnation. The results of it as transplanted again to American soil furnish a painfully ridiculous commentary on the false tendency involved in it from the start.

Puritan Protestantism forms properly the main basis of our North American church. Viewed as a whole, she owes her general characteristic features, her distinctive image, neither to the German or Continental Reformed, nor to the German Lutheran, nor to the English Episcopal communion, but to that band of Independents, who for the sake of their faith and a good conscience forsook their native land before the time of Cromwell, sought refuge first in Holland, and finally landed with prayers and tears on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. To this New England influence must be added indeed the no less important weight of Presbyterianism, as derived subsequently from Scotland and Ireland. But this may be regarded as in all essential respects the same life. The reigning theology of this country is neither that of the Heidelberg Catechism, nor that of the Augsburg Confession, nor that of the Thirty-nine Articles. It is the theology of the Westminster Confession.

We may never ungratefully forget that it was this generation of godly Pilgrims which once for all stamped upon our country that character of deep moral earnestness, that spirit of strong intrepid determination, that peculiar zeal for the sabbath and the Bible, which have raised it to so high a place in the history of the Christian Church, and enable it now to compare so favorably with the countries of the Old World. For our German emigration in particular it must be counted a high privilege that it is here brought into contact with the practical piety of the English community, and by degrees also imbued more or less with its power; though with the loss, to be regretted on the other side, of many German peculiarities. Thousands of souls, that might have died in vanity and unbelief in their native land, have been thus rescued, we may trust, from eternal perdition.

But while we thankfully and joyfully acknowledge this, we have no right still to overlook the fact that along with the same tendency an unhistorical and unchurchly character has inserted itself also into the inmost joints of our religious life. The Scriptures are the only source and norm of saving truth, but tradition

The Principle of Protestantism is the channel by which it is carried forward in history.* 'The letter of revelation transforms itself continuously into life and action, and this not simply in the individual believer as such, but in the Christian Church as a whole, to which, as his mother, the individual must hold himself subordinate as indeed it is only through her he receives the Scriptures themselves. The plan of redemption, moreover, calls for more than the rescue simply of individual souls. God's will is that the body of the redeemed should exhibit an organic communion, that may be the image of the union that holds between himself and the only-begotten

Son. This conception of the communion of the church, however, as the Body of Christ, few here seem to have reached, in its depth and glory.

The principle of Congregationalism, which has exercised such vast influence upon the entire conformation of our religious views and relations, leads legitimately to full atomism. The Bible principle, in its abstract separation from tradition or church development, furnishes no security against sects. 'They make their appeal collectively to the sacred volume; the devil himself does so, when it suits his purpose. Strongly also as Puritanism and Congregationalism, in their theocratic, state-church period, endeavored to secure a religious and civil union of their members, a subordination of the individual to the general, the system is clearly impotent in this direction. It includes no limitation for the principle of sects. In its own nature it is unhistorical and onesidedly spiritualistic, and has no reason on this account to require or expect that its children should be bound by its authority, more than it has itself been bound by the authority of its own spiritual ancestry.

'The theocratic period accordingly soon ran its course.

With the Revolution, the separation of church and state became general and fixed. As there was now no hierarchic bond on the * When we speak here, and afterward occasionally, in favor of tradition, the reader is requested to bear always in mind what we have already said of the different kinds of tradition. We plead for it, not of course in the Romish sense, which makes it a source of knowledge independent of the Bible, and coordinate with it in rank, but as exhibiting the consciousness the church has of the contents of the Bible, the Christian reason in the form of history, the living word of God in the church as it flows forth from the written word.

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one hand, as in the Church of Rome, so neither was there any civil supremacy on the other, as in Germany, the Episcopal Church of England, and the Greek Church of Russia, by which the single elements might be held together. The emigration from the Old

World increased meanwhile with every year, transporting with it the germs of sectarian distinction and material for new religious formations. Tendencies, which had found no political room to unfold themselves in other lands, wrought here without restraint.

All the circumstances of the country, in one word, have contributed to precipitate the church into those evils precisely with which she was least qualified in her original character successfully to contend.

Thus we have come gradually to have a host of sects, which it is no longer easy to number, and that still continues to swell from year to year.* Where the process of separation is destined to end, no human calculation can foretell. Anyone who has, or fancies that he has, some inward experience and a ready tongue, may persuade himself that he is called to be a reformer; and so proceed at once, in his spiritual vanity and pride, to a revolutionary rupture with the historical life of the church, to which he holds himself immeasurably superior. He builds himself of a night accordingly a new chapel, in which now for the first time since the age of the apostles a pure congregation is to be formed; baptizes his followers with his own name, to which he thus secures an immortality, unenviable it is true, but such as is always flattering to the natural heart; rails and screams with full throat against all that refuses to do homage to his standard; and with all this though utterly unprepared to understand a single book, is not ashamed to appeal continually to the Scriptures, as having been sealed entirely, or in large part, to the understanding of eighteen centuries, and even to the view of our Reformers themselves, till now at last God has been pleased to kindle the true light in an obscure corner of the New World! Thus the deceived multitude, having no power to discern spirits, is converted not * The latest work on the American church, An Original History of the Religious Denominations at Present Existing in the United States, Etc. by I. D. Rupp (Philadelphia, 1844), gives an account of not less than forty-one

Protestant sects, but is notwithstanding by no means complete.

The Principle of Protestantism to Christ and his truth, but to the arbitrary fancies and baseless opinions of an individual, who is only of yesterday. Such conversion is of a truth only perversion; such theology, neology; such exposition of the Bible, wretched imposition. What is built is no church, but a chapel, to whose erection Satan himself has made the most liberal contribution.

Such is the aspect of our land. A variegated sampler of all conceivable religious chimeras and dreams, in connection with more sober systems of sectarian faith! Every theological vagabond and peddler may drive here his bungling trade, without passport or license, and sell his false ware at pleasure. What is to come of such confusion is not now to be seen.

Nor is it enough that all these poisonous weeds shoot up thus wild and luxuriant in our Protestant garden. Even those divisions of the church that are essentially rooted in the same evangelical soil, and that cannot well be included in the category of sects, stand for the most part in such hostile relation to one another, and show so little inclination or impulse toward an inward and outward union in the Lord, that one might weep to think of it. There are indeed single cases of honorable exception, which I know how to value. Without them we might wellnigh despair. In a broad general view of the case, however, particularly as it is exhibited in the periodical organs of the different denominations, the evidences of a wrong spirit are sufficiently clear. Jealousy and contention, and malicious disposition in various forms, are painfully common. We see but little of that charity, which suffereth long and is kind, envieth not, vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, and thinketh no evil: that rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth, wherever it may be found; that beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. No, alas; with shame and humiliation be it confessed, the different sections of our orthodox

Protestantism also are severally bent on securing absolute dominion, take satisfaction too often in each other's damage, undervalue and disparage each other's merits, regard more their separate private interest than the general interest of the kingdom of God, and show themselves stiff-willed and obstinately selfish wherever it

Philip Schaff

comes to the relinquishment, or postponement even, of subordinate differences for the sake of a great common object.

'To the man who has any right idea of the church, as the communion of saints, this state of things must be a source of deep distress. The loss of all his earthly possessions, the death of his dearest friend, however severely felt, would be as nothing to him, compared with the grief he feels for such division and distraction of the Church of God, the Body of Jesus Christ. Not for the price of the whole world, with all its treasures, could he be induced to appear as the founder of a new sect. A sorrowful distinction that, in any view; and one besides that calls for small spiritual capital indeed in these United States.

I am well aware that many respectable Christians satisfy their minds on the subject of sectism, by looking at it as the natural fruit of evangelical liberty. In the main matter, the leading orthodox Protestant parties, they tell us—Episcopalian, Presbyterian,

Methodist, Lutheran, and Reformed—are all one; their differences have respect almost altogether to government and worship only, that is, to the outward conformation of the church, in the case of which the Lord has allowed large freedom; and so far as they may have a doctrinal character, they may be said to regard not so much the substance of the truth itself, as the theological form simply under which it is apprehended. The separation of these churches, in the meantime, is attended, we are told, with this great advantage, that it serves to stimulate their zeal and activity, and to extend in this way the interest of religion. 'This last point we shall not pretend here to dispute; but the advantage, so far as it may exist, is to be ascribed, not to the divisions in question as such, but only to God, who in his wisdom can bring good out of all evil. In the balance of the Last Judgment, moreover, good works that proceed from ambition and emulation only will be found to carry but little if any weight.

From those however who undertake to justify the sect system as a whole, the apologists of religious fanaticism and faction, I would fain require some biblical ground in favor of what is thus upheld. Not a solitary passage of the Bible is on their side. Its whole spirit is against them. The Lord is come to make of twain one; to gather the dispersed children of God, throughout the

The Principle of Protestantism whole world, into one fold, under one Shepherd. His last command to his disciples was that they should love one another, and serve one another, as he had loved and served them. His last prayer, before his bitter passion, was that all his followers might be made perfect in one, as he was in the Father and the Father in him. Of the first Christians we read, in the Acts of the Apostles, that they were of one heart and one mind, and continued steadfast in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in the breaking of bread and prayer. Paul exhorts the Corinthians in the name of Jesus Christ that they should all speak the same thing and that there should be no divisions among them, but that they should be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. 'They must not call themselves after Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or Christ in the way of party or sect. For Christ was not divided; and Paul had not been crucified for them; and no one had been baptized into the name of Paul, but all into the name of Christ. 'The entire view taken by this apostle of the nature of the church, as the one Body of Christ, whose members all partake of the same lifeblood and are set for mutual assistance; having one hope of their calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all; endeavoring to keep the unity of the one body and one spirit in the bond of peace; this view, I say, inflicts a death blow, with one stroke, on the whole sectarian and denominational system. Peter describes the church as a single spiritual temple, built up with living stones on the same living foundation, Jesus Christ. John places one great mark of Christianity in love to the brethren; and when in his old age he was carried to the church, having no strength more for any long address, he would still repeat that one exhortation, as comprehending all besides: Children, love one another.

Perhaps however the sect system must still be regarded as at all events the last necessary consequence and unavoidable fruit of Protestantism. So many Protestants even, and of course all papists, affirm. If such were the fact, the Reformation must stand in direct contradiction to the holy Scriptures, and be adjudged by its own umpire to condemnation, as a sinful work of man. But,

God be praised, the case is not thus bad. The reproach is of the same order with that other, which as we have already seen would

Philip Schaff

shove us into the arms of rationalism and pantheism, as our only legitimate resting-place.

As in that case, so in this we repel the alliance as unnatural and false. The sect system, like rationalism, is a prostitution and caricature of true Protestantism, and nothing else. We have shown, in the first part of this tract, that the Reformation was no arbitrary novelty, but the fruit of all the better tendencies of the Catholic Church itself; that the Reformers aimed at no separation from the reigning church, but that this was wholly the work of the pope. Had they been permitted to preach the pure word of God with freedom, and to administer the sacraments according to Christ's appointment, they would have remained in their original communion. But in what orthodox Protestant party of our day is this forbidden? No man is in danger with us of being burned or deposed for preaching the gospel. Both in the Reformed Church and in the Lutheran, thank God, the word may be proclaimed in its purity; in both the conversion of souls may go forward without hindrance. In this view therefore our position is wholly different, so that modern sectaries have no good reason whatever for breaking communion with the church. True, there are defects and faults enough in each of these churches. But these may and should be reproved within the communion itself, that so if possible the whole body may be healed. When, moreover, the Reformers, for conscience' sake, and because they would obey God and his word rather than men and their ordinances, proceeded to form a communion of their own, nothing could be further from their intention in doing so than to throw open the door for the system of sects. Their object was not to upset the church, and break the regular course of its historical life; but only to restore to it once more the clear light and sure rule of God's word; not to emancipate the individual to uncontrolled freedom, but to bind him to the definite objective authority of God's truth and grace. Luther exhibited the doctrine of justification as precisely the true eround of Christian union, and fought with all the strength of his gigantic spirit against the fanatical and factious tendencies of his time. His last wish, as that of Melanchthon also, [was concerned] for the unity of the church,

His most depressing fear was still: "After our death, there will

The Principle of Protestantism rise many harsh and terrible sects. God help us!" Calvin utters himself against sectaries, with his own peculiar cutting severity,* and repulses the reproach that Protestantism itself was a sect, in the strongest terms.* From all this it appears that in this practical respect also, as well as in its theoretic relations as before considered, the posture of the Protestant principle is different now from what it was at the time of the Reformation. The most dangerous foe with which we are called to contend, is again not the Church of Rome but the sect plague in our own midst; not the single pope of the city of seven hills, but the numberless popes—German, English, and American

—who would fain enslave Protestants once more to human authority, not as embodied in the church indeed, but as holding in the form of mere private judgment and private will. What we need to oppose to these, is not our formal principle; for they all appeal themselves to the Bible, though without right; but the power of history, and the idea of the church, as the pillar and eround of the truth, the mother of all believers, with due subordination always to the written word. In this controversy we may be said rather to have the Roman Church, in a certain sense, on our side; though we may never employ against sects the same carnal weapons, and propose not for ourselves such unity as is offered to us from her hand. For this in the end is an outward sameness only, in which the divinely ordained prerogatives of GDS tlog NIN, Ce Ike + Ibid., IV, c. 2, § 5. Jam vero quod reos schismatis et haereseos nos agunt

(Romanenses), quia et dissimilem praedicemus doctrinam, et suis legibus non pareamus, et seorsum conventus ad preces, ad baptismum, ad coenae administrationem aliasque sacras actiones habeamus: gravissima quidem est accusatio, sed quae nequaquam longa aut laboriosa defensione opus habet. Haeretici et schismatici vocantur, qui dissidio facto ecclesiae communionem dirimunt. This communion however with the true church and her only head Christ, he goes on to say, the Protestants have maintained, and for this reason have been thrust out from the false church, as the apostles formerly, who had the true spirit of the Old Testament, were expelled from the Jewish synagogues. Eant nunc (§ 6) et clamitent haereticos nos esse, qui ab ipsorum ecclesia recesserimus, quum nulla alienationis causa fuerit, nisi haec una, quod puram veritatis professtonem nullo modo ferre possunt. Taceo autem, quod anathematibus et diris nos expulerunt. Quod tamen ipsum satis superque nos absolvit, nisi apostolos quoque schismatis damnare velint, quibuscum similem habemus causam.

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the individual subject are disregarded and trampled underfoot, and all opposition as it rises from time to time, is either covered with a hypocritical mask, or kept down by the strong hand of power. Hence accordingly when it comes to full strength, and can no longer be repressed, its violence proves vastly more destructive than it would be in connection with Protestantism; as we see strikingly illustrated in the case of the French Revolution.

We ought never to forget, however, that Romanism has already drawn, and continues to draw still, its principal advantage from the pseudo-Protestant sect system, as well as from rationalism. Its recent show of new life and power finds here precisely its proper explanation. Continually its laugh of malicious triumph is going up, in view of our cancerous affection. If then we would contend successfully with Romanism, we must first labor to put away from ourselves the occasions that now lay us open so broadly to its attacks. Away with human denominations, down with religious sects! Let our watchword be: One spirit and one body! One

Shepherd and one flock! All conventicles and chapels must perish, that from their ashes may rise the One Church of God, phoenixlike and resplendent with glory, as a bride adorned for her bridegroom.

Rationalism and sectarism then are the most dangerous enemies of our church at the present time. They are both but different sides of one and the same principle—a one-sided false subjectivity, sundered from the authority of the objective. Rationalism ts theoretic sectarism; sectarism is practical rationalism.

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ste As Puseyism, the Reaction to These Diseases, but Not Their Remedy WHO NOW WILL GUIDE the vessel of orthodox Protestantism safely between these rocks? In such peril, the helmsman looks anxiously around for help, come whence it may. Possibly the reefs draw still closer together, so that the ship proceeding in the same course must at last inevitably founder. Were it not best then that it should tack about, and seek again the old haven from which it started?

So think the Puseyites, so named from their leader, or the 'Tractarians, as they are styled from their principal organ, the "Tracts for the Times," or the Anglo-Catholics,¥ as they choose to be called themselves. Let us see whether they have found the true remedy for the complaints of the Protestant Church.

It is scarcely more than ten years since the tendency in question appeared in the ancient metropolis of English theology, in the midst of the venerable remains of church antiquity, and upon the same seats of instruction, where once along with schoolmen and papists the voice of Wickliffe sounded, and where the Jnstitutes of Calvin were afterward for a long time honored as the highest dogmatic authority. Within this short period it has spread throughout the Old and New Worlds. Sympathies long prepared for its reception have been met by it in every direction; particIb]

The Principle of Protestantism ularly in the old antiunion Lutheranism of Germany, which has been transplanted also to this side of the Atlantic. It has brought into clear consciousness, on all sides, spiritual tendencies and wants which were not previously understood. Already thus it appears clothed with a world-historical importance. I have myself hardly ever before had such an impression of the objective power of the "idea," as during the course of my late travel through Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, England, and North America; encountering as I did everywhere, in the persons of distinguished ministers and laymen, if not precisely Puseyism itself, at least aspirations and endeavors of a more or less kindred spirit. [Against such a life question, such a question of the age, what sense is there to the foolish cry of "Popery,' "Romanism" by our intellectual and anti-intellectual press?] Grapple with the subject in earnest.

Bring the fire engines. Extinguish the flame. If you do but idly stare at it, or stand before it lamenting and railing with folded hands, assuredly it will soon burst triumphantly through the roof, and leave you at last houseless and bare. Nothing can well be more shallow and miserable, and full of senseless pretension withal, than the style in which the controversy with popery and Puseyism is to a great extent conducted in our religious periodicals. It may be said to be for the most part ammunition expended in vain, time and labor lost for writer and reader alike. If the tendencies in question encounter nothing more solid than such ephemeral opposition, their victory may be counted sure.

I look upon Puseyism as an entirely legitimate and necessary reaction against rationalistic and sectaristic pseudo-Protestantism, as well as the religious subjectivism of the so-called Low Church

Party; with which the significance of the church has been forgotten, or at least practically undervalued, in favor of personal individual piety; the sacraments, in favor of faith; sanctification, in favor of justification; and tradition in its right sense, in favor of the holy Scriptures.

I make indeed no question, but that with many who belong to this neo-Catholic school a feeling of poetical romance is more prevalent than true religious conviction; that others again, among the clergy especially, are swayed more or less by hierarchic interest; and that still a third class, largest of all perhaps, are carried along with the alluring move-

Philip Schaff

ment by the current of mere fashion. But with all these allowances, when we take the movement in its whole compass as exhibited in its authors and leaders in England, we must admit that it rests upon decidedly religious and true church ground, and springs from grief on the one hand over the disjointed, discinctured character of the age, and an endeavor after Christian catholicity and unity on the other. Hence we find it characterized by deep moral earnestness, reverential solemnity, and a certain spiritual dignity of tone and manner even in controversy itself.

It has a proper feeling of respect for history, looks reverently after the remains of the religious life of other days, cherishes a filial homage toward the Christian past. It exalts the authority of the general over all that is simply single, and makes the reason of the church to be more than that of the individual, counteracting thus the rage for independence that rules the time. It holds fast to the importance of the sacraments as objective institutions of the Lord, that hang not on the precarious state of the subject, but include an actual living presence of Christ for the purposes they are intended to secure, as real as that by which he stood among his disciples in the days of his flesh. It restores the week services, the church festivals, and frequent communions after the example of the first ages; lays stress on religious discipline for the whole man, outward as well as inward; seeks to revive the sense of sacrificial consecration to God; has an open eye for church art, and takes pleasure in beautifying sanctuaries and altars; on the principle that what is best should belong to the Lord, and that such decoration is only the natural expression of childlike love, as it might be expected to show itself even toward a human friend, being well suited at the same time to assist devotion in the way of support and elevation through the senses. With all this it designs not at all to fall back to Romanism, but only to revive once more the fair usages, lost and forgotten, of the undivided, universal primitive church, as nearest to the age of the apostles and so to the fountain of Christianity; and thus also to hold within the Protestant communion such as feel themselves urged to forsake it, through dissatisfaction with the usual nakedness and barrenness of its worship.

In all this, considered by itself, I find nothing that is absolutely

The Principle of Protestantism wrong. Rather it is my firm conviction that we must ourselves appropriate fully some of the more general views lying at the ground of Puseyism, to be secure against its advances, and to prevent its errors from spreading continually more and more along with its truth. We too must take a wider range, and our faith in the one universal Christian Church must show itself to be, not merely a confession of the mouth, but power and truth, life and act. We too may not seek the perfection of our own communion, apart from the perfection of the entire Christian Church. We too must be like the good householder who gathers up even the fragments, appropriating to ourselves from the stores of early Christian history in particular, what has sprung from God and proved a blessing to thousands and millions. We too must bear in mind that the single can hold with advantage only in due subordination to the general, and that there can be no true freedom save in the form of subjection to the authority of God.

So far we go hand in hand with young Oxford, even at the hazard of being called reformed Catholic, or catholic Protestant.

So soon however as it comes to the choice of the means, by which the object in view is to be reached, we are constrained to part with it as unsound and unsafe. Its "tracts for the times' are not just "tracts for eternity." Its grand defect, forming an impassable gulf between it and our position, is its utter misapprehension of — the divine significance of the Reformation, with its consequent development, that is, of the entire Protestant period of the church.

As to Romanism, so to Puseyism also, there is wanting the true idea of development altogether. It regards the church as a system handed down under a given and complete form, that must remain perpetually the same. It confounds with Christianity itself, which we may never and can never transcend, and which is always equally perfect, the measure of its apprehension on the part of mankind, or its appropriation into the consciousness of the church, which like the life of the spirit universally, from first to last, has the character of a genesis or process, and passes through different stages of growth. With all their historical feeling, the Puseyites show themselves absolutely unhistorical with regard to the Reformation. They wish to shut out of view the progress of the last three centuries entirely; to treat the whole as a negation, if pos-

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sible; and by one vast leap to carry the church back to the point where it stood before the separation of the Oriental and Western communions, when however the tendencies were already at work which led with historical necessity afterward to the popish system in its worst form. Turn and twist as they may, with their external, mechanical conception of the church and episcopacy, the Reformation can be to them properly an apostasy only from the true church, and they must unchurch entirely all those Protestant bodies that have parted with the episcopal constitution.

Their doctrine of episcopal succession, with its denial of the universal priesthood of all believers, the episcopal and apostolical character of every inwardly and outwardly called minister of Christ, involving the papistical idea of a clerical mediatorship between God and man—this is the old leaven of the Pharisees, which has never been thoroughly purged out of the Anglican

Church, and that may be said now to offend Protestant feeling in the writings of the Oxford school in particular, from beginning to end. If this succession were taken as one simply of doctrine and ministry, successio Spiritus Det, doctrinae evangelui and ministerit divini, it would carry a perfectly rational meaning, necessarily included in the conception of the church, as the abiding and indissoluble communion of believers in Christ; and in this view it might be confidently claimed by the whole orthodox

Protestant interest, with which both word and sacrament, ministry and ordination, are continued, and the founders of which derived their own ordination regularly from the Catholic Church.

But instead of this, the idea is limited to the order of the bishops, unscripturally sundered from the laity and lower clergy, as though they were specifically different in their nature, and were alone competent to transmit ministerial power. All ends in a personal, outward, mechanical succession. 'The Spirit of God, whose very nature it is to be free, is thus bound to a particular ecclesiastical structure, for which no sure authority can be found in the New

Testament; and the apostolical legitimacy of a church is made to turn upon a question of history, in the case of which besides by reason of the darkness that hangs over certain periods, during the earlier part especially of the Middle Ages no satisfactory result is possible. Altogether a most crazy foundation, on which to build

The Principle of Protestantism so momentous an interest. According to this theory, Paul was illegitimate fully, because he had his ordination neither from the Lord nor from an apostle, but from a simple presbyter in Damascus. His judaizing adversaries, who had already in substance the Puseyite view, were right then in divesting him at once of all apostolical credit. How monstrous again is the position, necessarily involved in the same theory, that the dead Armenian and Greek denominations, because they have bishops, belong regularly to the Holy Church Catholic, while the German Reformed, Lutheran, and Presbyterian bodies, with all their religious life, are flatly denied any such character, and even their most godly and successful ministers are branded as ecclesiastical bastards, or mere hirelings privily smuggled into the sanctuary. God be praised for that word of the Lord, "By their fruzts ye shall know them," and that love is made, in another place, the criterion of discipleship.

Let it be allowed that the Tractarians are right, and all unbishoped churches are left without hope, till their clergy submit to have their character made valid by the hands of his Grace of Canterbury, or some diocesan Onderdonk™ on this side of the Atlantic; unless indeed they should prefer to have recourse at once to the holy father at Rome, or the patriarch no less holy of Constantinople. Preposterous imagination! Can the church be renovated by putting on a new coat? I have all respect for the episcopal system. It possesses in fact many undeniable advantages and by its antiquity besides must command the veneration of all who have any right historical feeling. But the thought must be utterly rejected, that it carries in its constitution as such the proper and only remedy for the existing wounds of Protestantism. Does it offer any sure guaranty for union? The contests with which the English Episcopal Church has been torn, especially for the last ten years (to say nothing of the posture of our American Episcopacy at this moment), sufficiently show the contrary. Or does it furnish more efficient means for the promotion of true inward piety? Let the state of the Greek Church, always true to the episcopal succession, be taken in reply; or the Roman Church as it stood toward the close of the Middle Ages, and as it stands still in entire countries; or the Church of England itself, as it appeared

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under the last Stuarts and during the eighteenth century. No, we need something higher and better than anointed lords and consecrated gentlemen. Such aristocratic hierarchs and proud bearers of the apostolic succession precisely, like the Pharisees and high priests of Judaism, have themselves again and again secularized the church, rocking it into the sleep of lifeless formalism or religious indifference. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. Little children, keep yourselves from idols, be afraid of false gods even under episcopal attire! It is the spirit that maketh alive; the letter killeth.

As the Puseyites, in this question of government and order, which they invest with undue religious importance both doctrinal and practical, stand upon essentially Roman Catholic eround,* it is quite natural that they should surrender in its behalf also what has been gained in point of doctrine by the Reformation.

The points in which they still declare their system to be different from popery, are comparatively subordinate and unimportant.

Of the true Protestant principle they have no conception, or else seek to cover it over, as Newman in tract No. 90 on the Thirtynine Articles, with Jesuitical interpretation. The sola fide on which the Reformers lived and died, they have never had experience of probably in themselves, and accordingly they let it go for a small price. The sanctity on which they insist appears thus on * The papists, at the time of the Reformation, appealed in just the same style to the perpetua episcoporum successto. Calvin

(Instit., IV, c. 2, § 2) answers well: Primum ab illis quaero, cur non Africam citent et Aegyptum et totam Asiam. Nempe quia in omnibus illis regionibus desiit sacra haec episcoporum successio, cujus beneficio se ecclesias retinuisse gloriantur. Eo igitur recidunt, se ideo veram habere ecclesiam, quia ex quo esse coepit, non fuerit episcopis destituta, perpetua enim serie alios aliis successisse. Sed quid si Graeciam illis regeram? Quaero igitur iterum ab ipsis, cur apud Graecos_ periisse ecclesiam dicant, apud quos numquam interrupta fuit illa episcoporum successio, unica, eorum opinione, ecclesiae custos et conservatrix. Graecos faciunt schismaticos. Quo jure? quia a sede apostolica desciscendo privilegium perdiderunt. Quid? annon multo magis perdere merentur qui a Christo ipso deficiunt? Sequitur ergo evanidum esse praetextum successionis, nisi Christi veritatem quam a patribus per manum acceperint, salvam et incorruptam posteri retineant ac in ea permaneant. Comp. § 3 where he refers to the relation of the prophets to the bearers of the Jewish hierarchy, who in the same way laid claim to temple, ceremonies, and succession, as all their own, and bitterly persecuted these divine messengers, the bearers of the Holy Spirit, and so the true succession.

The Principle of Protestantism closer examination to carry rather the character of an outward legalism, an unfree, anxious piety, reminding us of monkhood, with undue stress laid upon the observance of particular church forms, fasts, and self-imposed discipline. In the Lives of the Saints, as brought forward under the direction of Mr. Newman, the old

Jewish work-righteousness presents itself again in its full arrogant parade.

With the scripture principle it fares no better in the hands of these gentlemen. It has been abandoned, almost from the start, for the Roman dogma of tradition. They wish to bind upon our necks all that has come down to us from the fathers, without any critical sifting by means of science or God's word, even the extravagant and utterly unsound, though often ingenious allegorical interpretations of the Alexandrian school. Quite a compliment to us certainly, not simply as Protestants in general, but as the friends also of a sound grammatico-historical scripture exegesis!

So, very recently the organ of Puseyism in this country, the New York Churchman, has gone so far as to defend in many respects the last bull of his Holiness of Rome against Bible Societies. The case of Mr. Carey," too, is well known, who was ordained by Bishop Onderdonk, though he had distinctly declared that he could subscribe to the decrees of the Council of 'Trent.*

Altogether Puseyism shows itself, in this way, to be no safe guide in the present great need of the church. Its mission must be regarded as preparatory only to that more full and perfect dispensation, by which in the end the captivity of Jacob is to be restored. It has done much, and may do still more, to bring the ereat problem of the age home to the consciousness of the Protestant world. But for the solution of the problem itself, it is found to be utterly incompetent. It were to be wished now indeed that the whole question might be wrested out of such unskillful hands, since the truth which lies at the ground of the movement is in danger of being brought into general discredit, at least for a time, by the false style in which it is here presented.

* According to the representation of Smith and Anthon, in their Statement of Facts in Relation to the Recent Ordination in St. Stephen's Church, New

York, 1843.26

The True Standpoint:

Protestant Catholicism or Historical Progress PusrEyisM then looks backward; we look forward. It tends toward

Rome, and is there in spirit already, even though it should never outwardly complete the transition. We move toward Jerusalem, the new, the heavenly, the eternal. Its way is turned toward the fleshpots of Egypt, the old ignominious servitude of the house of bondage. Ours is onward to the land of promise that flows with milk and honey. Possibly when it shall have reached the last consequences of its principle, and stands confronted with the tyrannic scepter beyond the Red Sea, the better part of it at least may penttently smite upon its breast, and turn back again upon its own way; even at the hazard of being doomed to wander yet forty years in the Protestant wilderness. There are still to be found in this refreshing encampment, shady groves of palm and fruitful oases, heavenly manna and quails in abundance. Before us still moves the fiery, cloudy pillar of Israel; at our side, fresh water flows from the rock at the bidding of God; and full in view is the lifted brazen serpent, the symbol of the promised Messiah, to which every sin-wounded soul may look and be healed. Patience only, under the weight of our weary way! Canaan must be reached

The Principle of Protestantism at last. No premature catholicity and unity factitiously produced, that must prove after all only a transient mask! The Lord himself will help his people, and complete the work of the Reformation, in due time, by a new and more glorious creation; or conduct it rather to its own true and triumphant result. The less we presume to take the matter willfully into our own hands, the more we wait humbly on the leadings of the divine will, following step by step along the quiet, true historical way, the nearer and more sure is the hour, when he shall appear to gather the disjecta membra ecclesiae once more together, and form them into a more glorious body than the world has ever yet beheld.

Let us never forget that fidelity to her inherited patrimony, on the part of the church, is indispensable to her further prosperity.

We must declare against Puseyism on the historical or catholic principle itself. For genuine catholicism holds in organic union with the pure history of the church, and through this with the apostles, through them with Christ, and through him finally with the eternal Father himself, whose thoughts of love and peace are unfolded in larger and more glorious measure always with the flow of time. We are faithless apostates, if we allow ourselves with overweening presumption to trample underfoot the work of the Reformers. Puseyism occupies extreme ground here, on two sides.

Toward the church fathers it is slavishly true, taking upon itself the yoke of human bondage; toward the Reformers it is to the point of perfidy ungrateful. Luther and Melanchthon, Calvin and Beza, were indeed sinful and fallible men like ourselves. Of this they had the fullest consciousness themselves, and have declared us free accordingly from all bondage to men. We will not then fall into the error, which they have themselves most sharply reproved. We readily allow that in their zeal for the purification of the church, they threw away more than was necessary or wholesome. But we cannot consent to give up anything material of their positive conquest particularly in the form of doctrine. Assuredly they need not shun a comparison here with the deepest, most intellectual, and most pious, among the church fathers and schoolmen. They sought not their own, but the honor of God. No human doctrine, but God's word only, would they exalt to absolute supremacy. This they preached with unshaken boldness and

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the noblest disinterestedness; and so when their hard day's work was done died happily in the faith of Jesus Christ Crucified, as their righteousness and salvation. The Lord has spoken his yea and amen upon their work; and the church which sprang from it still stands fast in its strength, in spite of the numberless storms that have passed over it from without, in spite of the deadly foes to which it is still exposed within its own bosom.

But we must go still further. As the Puseyites in contradiction to the Reformation affect to be catholic

(in the Roman sense; catholic in show, particularistic in fact), so as a matter of course they are unprepared altogether to understand or appreciate the subsequent development of the Protestant principle. In the history of the Protestant Church they can see only progressive falling away; in rationalism and sectarism, a work purely of the devil.

This is a second point on which we differ from them; and where we come into collision also with the stiff confessionists, the hyperorthodox Lutherans of the old stamp, the sons of Abraham Calovius" and Valentin Ernst Loescher.** These indeed acknowledge the divine character of the Reformation, at least in its Lutheran form, and in this respect we stand on common ground with them, against English and American Puseyism. But they will not allow the development of the church to extend beyond this point. Whatever progress may have had place before, all must be considered complete with the orthodoxy of the sixteenth century; circumscribed and made fast in the narrow bounds of the Formula of Concord. With blind misestimation of the rights and prerogatives of the Reformed Church, and of the special wants precisely of our time, they make Lutheranism to be the same thing with the ideal or absolute church itself, and fall thus into an error as bad as that of Rome, to whose view all that lies beyond its own borders is but damnable heresy and schism. This form of thinking bears, it is true, the name of Luther; but with his boundlessly free spirit it stands in no affinity whatever; just as little, we may say, as another section of the same nominal interest in this country, which has long since sacrificed the original spirit of the Lutheran Church, along with the German language itself, to the totally different genius of Methodism.

It is the presentiment and earnest hope of the greatest German

The Principle of Protestantism theologians that we stand at this time on the eve of a more comprehensive reformation than that which is past, which is to crown and complete the work of our fathers, bind together again what has been separated, and actualize the last absorbing wish of Luther and Melanchthon, of which notice has already been taken.

Of course the Formula of Concord, worthy as it is in itself of all respect, can never bring us to any such result as this. As little at the same time however can we be helped toward it, by methodistical "New Measures," the anxious bench and other such like quack appliances and medicaments that work upon the nerves far more than the soul. The old measures employed by Christ and the apostles, which have stood the test of historical experiment from the beginning, are vastly more to be relied upon. Eighteen centuries of use have not worn away their edge or force; rather it is their invaluable quality that they become always more keen and effective the more frequently they are applied. With such methods moreover we reach results that are solid and radical, instead of deceptive appearances only that soon pass away and leave the case worse too often than it was before.

We condemn, without qualification, both rationalism and sectarism. Still our historical sense itself will not allow us to look upon them as the work of Satan only. God, who brings good out of evil, has been wisely active also in the immense system of destruction that has been going forward in the Christian world in these forms since the beginning of the last century. "God writes on a crooked line," says an old Portuguese proverb. 'Through the heathenish larva of rationalist, pantheist, sectarian, and factious irreligion, with which the age is marred, we discern the regenerated psyche; in the process of corruption, the still-living germ that may be expected to burst its decaying shell, and leave the earth behind, and grow upward into a tree beneath whose shadow the world may rest. Like the development of the papacy during the Middle Ages, the rationalism and sectarism of the modern

Protestant Church also has its conditional historical necessity, and along with this a certain justification, an element of truth, that needs to be incorporated into the process with which theology and the church are to be still further developed. Let us illustrate this, in the way of hint at least, by two or three general observa-

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tions; though of a kind, it is true, to be fully intelligible only to such as are thoroughly acquainted with church history. The details of the subject and its application to particulars may then be carried out by the intelligent for themselves.

As Catholicism toward the close of the Middle Ages settled into a character of hard, stiff objectivity, incompatible with the proper freedom of the individual subject, now ripening into spiritual manhood; so Protestantism has been carried aside, in later times, into the opposite error of a loose subjectivity, which threatens to subvert all regard for church authority. These extremes as such are both equally false. Both however involve a principle that is true and divine; the falsehood results from the one-sided way in which this is held in each case. Necessity and freedom, dependence and independence, generality and singularity, are the two poles, around which human existence and all history revolve. The perfection of both is the union of both. The highest freedom stands in the service of God. The divine law is at the same time the true expression of particular will, the only form of free inward power.

Genuine obedience toward the church coincides with the highest degree of personal piety. The life of the single member in the body and for the body as a whole, constitutes also its own most healthy and vigorous state. Separated from the body, it is given over at once to a process of dissolution.

Rationalism and sectarism then are false and hateful, not simply as they are subjective and appertain to the sphere of the individual, but as they are one-sidedly subjective, in opposition to the general, and with contempt of the principle of authority, as embodied in the church. So far accordingly as the just claims of the subjective reach, both may be said to have their vindication as necessary and important in church history. In what this right, this element of truth consists, is now to be shown.

Rationalism shows its bright and dark sides in this, that it fixes its view one-sidedly on the human in Christ, in Christianity and in the church, the earthly body only of their incarnate divinity, and is so carried away toward what is natural and visible merely, as to have no sense or perception of the supernatural, eternal, and divine. Its principle is the abstract understanding, which walks the treadmill of mere finite categories and contradictions, without

The Principle of Protestantism coming ever to the last ground and inmost unity of its subject.

So far however as Christianity and the church fall within the finite, earthly sphere of man's existence, rationalism also must be considered in place, and not without its merits. It has served to overthrow many false prejudices and has made many contributions of permanent worth to history and criticism. But besides this, its influence has been salutary, in a certain sense, on the whole tone and spirit of the later evangelical German theology. Only ignorance or prejudice can deny that the older orthodoxy, including its first Protestant form also, made too little account of the conditions under which only the revelation of our religion in the way of history could take place. Hence, for instance, its resort to unsound and extravagant allegory, and its fairly magical conception of inspiration, overlooking entirely the human individuality of the sacred writers, which notwithstanding stares us in the face in every single book.

In this respect, the scientific rationalism of Germany, by bringing in a severe criticism and grammatico-historical exegesis, which form the natural ground and necessary condition of all theological knowledge of the Bible, has wrought clearly with purifying power in the church, the traces of which are not to be mistaken in the most orthodox works of the modern evangelical school. The old faith has sustained in this way no loss. It remains essentially the same. It has come forth from this critical fire, improved only in its form and argument, and cleared of all sorts of dross. It has lost nothing in living power, inwardness, and depth, while it has gained in freedom and solid scientific strength. We must not refer rationalism to sheer ungodliness as its source, but are bound to acknowledge in it also a scientific conscience which the old orthodoxy, though with the best intention, too often wounded in the most sensible manner. 'The latest speculative rationalism has this merit besides, that it has helped to destroy the common rationalism with which it was preceded; as Strauss, for instance, in his

Life of Jesus, has exposed with great acuteness the unnaturalness of the so-called natural explanation of miracles, as conducted by Paulus" of Heidelberg; and the former style of attack also against the doctrine of the Trinity and the divine incarnation, has long since been shorn of its force by the Hegelian speculation. It must

Philip Schaff WA be admitted, however, that the most recent productions of this speculative rationalism fall back again rather to the old trivial and popular, scientifically surmounted standpoint, so that the system is involved thus in self-condemnation.

But readily as we allow that we are indebted to this transition phase of theology generally considered, for an understanding in part of history and the natural side of Christianity, we must still maintain that this understanding can become true and complete only where with the good side of the tendency in question, there is found united the determined faith of the old orthodoxy. For the body is the product of the soul, which it forms as an organ for its own use. It is the eternal Word, which has become flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, in the sacred Scriptures, and in the church. He then who has the flesh only without the word, the body without the spirit, has in the end no more than a corpse.

As regards sectarism, in the second place, it must also be allowed that it almost always has its ground in certain practical defects of the church, as that of rationalism holds in the flaws and infirmities of the orthodox theology, and in this direction is not without right. Thus Quakerism appeared in opposition to the outward mechanism and dead formality that had taken possession of the Church of England in the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Anabaptism finds its apology in the melancholy fact that many baptized persons in the church live like heathen, the consequence in a great measure of the want of proper Christian education. Modern Methodism in its various forms has its well-grounded complaints to present against a dead church orthodoxy, which is found too often along with unsound life, rejecting all life; along with protracted prayer meetings, all serious prayer; and along with wild fanatical awakenings, conversion in every form—making thus no distinction in its zeal. In almost every sect we may find some particular side of the Christian life clearly and strongly marked; where as in a mirror the church should see her own defects, the wrinkles or spots that mar her visage, so as to do penance for her unfaithfulness, by which so many of her best members have been led to forsake her communion. The divine significance of sects then, their value in the history of the church, consists in this, that they are a disciplinary scourge, a voice of awakening and admoni-

The Principle of Protestantism tion by which the church is urged to new life and a more conscientious discharge of her duties. The system has a favorable operation further, as it tends to spread religious interest and stimulate

Christian zeal. In this country perhaps, if there were no sects, we should not have half as many congregations and houses of worship as we have now, and many sections in the West particularly would be destitute of the blessings of the gospel altogether.

But while this is thankfully admitted, two things still need to be kept in view. A sect, in the first place, loses its right to exist, in the same degree in which the body from which it is a secession, has corrected the faults that led to it. If it persists in its separation notwithstanding, it is either carried into full unbelief, or sinks into a slavish observance of particular lifeless forms, preparing in this way its own grave, as is strikingly illustrated by many cases in church history. Then again, a sect as such, can never, in its subjective isolation, provide successfully even for the particular interest to which it is pedantically devoted; since every single religious truth belongs to a great organically constituted whole, and can become complete accordingly only in connection with this as the source of all its life. Christianity is an indivisible unity; its truths are links only of an indissoluble chain returning into itself.

Here exactly we may see the spiritual pride and narrow-mindedness of sectarism, that it fancies it can prosper and reach perfection, standing on its own frail feet, in abstract separation from the general life of the church. Break a branch from the vine, and it must soon wither. Separate a ray from the sun, and it is extinguished. Remove a child from the care of parents and guardians, and it will grow wild. Cut a hand from the body, and it will fall into decay. If sects then would be true to themselves, they must as soon as they have fulfilled their commission unite themselves again with the general life of the church, that they may thus as organic members of the body acquire new vital energy; and the church, on her side, should make special efforts to gather once more under her motherly protection and care, the children that have forsaken her and are now estranged from her bosom. To this duty the Reformed Church is specially called, as the largest part of these modern separatistic movements have sprung from her communion.

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We must now quit for a moment the field of theology and the church, in the narrower sense, and cast a glance on the development of Protestantism, in its relation as a vast whole to the general course of the world's history; that we may discover how far there is included in it in this view also, the promise of a new, glorious future. We shall then be prepared to bring all together in a general image.

To the Lord and his kingdom belongs the whole world, with all that lives and moves in it. All is yours, says the apostle. Religion is not a single, separate sphere of human life, but the divine principle by which the entire man is to be pervaded, refined, and made complete. It takes hold of him in his undivided totality, in the center of his personal being; to carry light into his understanding, holiness into his will, and heaven into his heart; and to shed thus the sacred consecration of the new birth, and of the glorious liberty of the children of God, over his whole inward and outward life. No form of existence can withstand the renovating power of God's Spirit. There is no rational element that may not be sanctified; no sphere of natural life that may not be glorified.

The creature, in the widest extent of the word, is earnestly waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God, and sighing after the same glorious deliverance. The whole creation aims toward redemption; and Christ is the second Adam, the new universal man, not simply in a religious but also in an absolute sense. The view entertained by Romish monasticism and Protestant pietism, by which Christianity is made to consist in an abstract opposition to the natural life, or in flight from the world, is quite contrary to the spirit and power of the gospel, as well as false to its design.

Christianity is the redemption and renovation of the world. It must make all things new.

Such morbid views are powerfully counteracted in this country by the sound practical feeling which so generally prevails. A different mistake however, nearly as false, is widely established according to which science, art, and politics are placed in a relation, not of absolute hostility indeed, but of entire indifference to religion, that is, properly in no relation to it at all. The idea seems to be that a man's piety is deposited in one corner of his spirit; his politics, in another; and his learning in a third. All good and

The Principle of Protestantism necessary in their place, but having nothing whatever to do with one another! According to this view, it might seem to be expected further that religion should never come into any closer union with the common secular departments of life. It must be counted pernicious if the church should be drawn into nearer contact with the state, or art be made more extensively subservient to divine worship, if Christian morality should seek to occupy all social relations, or Christian theology presume to incorporate with itself the results of worldly science, philosophy in particular.

It were a vast object gained for the interests of American Protestantism, if this radically false and miserably narrow prejudice, opposed as it is to all true and proper progress on the part of the church, could be effectually subverted. The theme is indeed one of the very highest consequence.

It enters into the inmost life of the time, and includes in itself the most momentous questions with which the time is concerned. The following historical hints, which we are not permitted here further to pursue, may serve possibly, in some measure at least, to direct attention to the subject:

We set out then with the assumption that Christianity stands in an absolutely negative, hostile relation only to sin and death, while all that is properly human, the world with its several spheres

—government, science, art, and social life—is regarded by it as of divine institution and force; which religion is required accordingly neither to annihilate nor yet to overlook as foreign to its nature, but on the contrary to occupy and fill with its own heavenly spirit. This itself serves to show the universal character of the gospel, and the catholicity of the church. It follows, of course, that no one of these spheres of natural life can reach its highest stage, its true perfection, until it has come to be thoroughly transfused with the leaven of Christianity. In the absolute view of the case, therefore, there can be no perfect scholar or philosopher; no perfect ideal artist, whether architect, or sculptor, or painter, or musician, or poet; no perfect statesman; and finally no truly moral man, who is not at the same time animated throughout with the living power of faith. It follows again with equal necessity from the same view, that the church cannot be said to have completed its career, till the whole world shall appear transfigured with its

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divine spirit, and states, and sciences, and arts, with all their glory, shall fall down before the altar of the Most High in full, free worship.

Let us now apply this standard to history for the purpose of determining according to it the relation between Catholicism and Protestantism, in the direction here noticed, and also the proper wants of our own time so far as the same view is concerned.

Catholicism, particularly in its medieval Romano-Germanic period, carried with it, if we put out of view its monastic institutions, a very distinct sense of the nihil humani a me alienum puto as just described. It is this precisely which renders the Middle

Ages so grand and venerable, that religion in this period appears the all-moving, all-ruling force—the center around which all moral struggles and triumphs, all thought, poetry, and action are found to revolve. All sciences, and philosophy itself—the science of the sciences—were handmaids to theology, which based itself on the principle of Augustine: Fides praecedit intellectum. Before the pope, as the head and representative of Christendom, all states bowed themselves with reverent homage; and even the German emperor himself could not feel secure in his place, save as formally acknowledged by the chief bishop of the church. Princes and people arose at his bidding, forsook country and friends, submitted to the most severe privations, to kneel at the Savior's tomb and water it with thankful tears. According to the reigning idea, the state stood related to the church like the moon to the sun, from which it borrows all its light. All forms of life, all national manners, were suffused with magic interest from the unseen world.

The holy sacraments ran like threads of gold through the whole texture of life, in all its relations, from infancy to old age. The different arts vied with each other in the service of the church.

The most magnificent and beautiful buildings of the period are the cathedrals—those giant stone flowers with their countless turrets, storming the heavens and bearing the soul on high, and their mysterious devotional gloom, visited never by the light of the natural day, but only by mystic irradiations poured through stained glass; domes, the authors of which stood so completely in the general life of the church, and were so occupied only with the honor of God in their work, that with a divine carelessness they

The Principle of Protestantism have left even their own names to. perish in oblivion. The maxim was: Let the best house belong to the Lord. The richest paintings were madonnas and images of the saints, as produced by a Fra

Beato Angelico da Fiesole,*® a Fra Bartolomeo," a Leonardo da Vinci, a Perugino," a Raphael, and a Michelangelo. It was felt that the fairest among the sons of men, and the connections in which he stood, must furnish the most worthy material for the pencil. The most lofty and impressive music, according to Old

Testament example, resounded in the public worship of God.

Poetry sang her deepest and tenderest strains to the Lord and his bride; and the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, Dante, has left behind him in his Divine Comedy an image simply of the religious spirit and theological wisdom of the age, as occupied with eternity itself and all its dread realities. Truly a great time, and for one who is prepared to understand it, fraught with the richest spiritual interest. He that has no heart for the excellencies of this period, the beauty that belongs to the Middle Ages, must be wanting in genuine culture, or at least in all right historical feeling.

The true church historian leaves to every age its own peculiar advantages, without concern. He presumes not with narrow prejudice to reduce all to one measure, but recognizes with joyful satisfaction, under the most different forms wherever found, the footsteps of the Lord, the presence of his Spirit, as secured to the church by his own promise through all ages. He does not construct history, after the measure of some poor conceptions of his own; he does not correct it by the standard of the time in which he himself lives; but he takes it up and reproduces it, as God has allowed it to occur in the progressive explication of his plan of redemption, which apparent obstructions even, yea the rage of diabolic passion itself, must only help forward in the end. However firmly settled he may be for himself in a particular standpoint, he thinks not of circumscribing the boundless fullness of the divine life by the narrow horizon of his own view. With all his respect for the Reformation as a true work of God, he is not rendered insensible by it to what was excellent and beautiful in earlier times, in which also men of immortal name lived and worked and suffered, and when also God made his presence glori-

Philip Schaff TG, ously felt, and kept watch over the church continually with the eye of his love.

That must be regarded certainly as a most unwise policy, by which Protestants for a long time allowed themselves to renounce all interest in this period, and resign its treasures wholly to the Church of Rome, as though nothing but darkness and barbarism belonged to its history. The error indeed is still widely prevalent in this country—for the most part, however, a sin of profound ignorance—so that the stereotype title for that period is simply the Dark Ages! O thou light of the nineteenth century! How hast thou tarried with thy rising, hiding thyself for a thousand years behind the clouds, in cowardly fear of those dying men, the popes!

Come now, ye poor unfortunate children of darkness—ye Leos and Gregorys, ye Emperors of the house of Saxony and the Hohenstaufen, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, and Bernard of Clairvaux, Dante Alighieri and Petrarch, Erwin of Steinbach® and Bramante,** Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, Francis of Assisi and Thomas a Kempis—come forth from your graves and be illuminated by the light that now reigns; learn how to govern church and state from our synods, consistories, and advocates; study philosophy and theology at Andover and New Haven; practice poetry, church building, and painting, amid the encouragement that is given to the arts in practical, money-loving America; and take lessons of piety from the "camp meetings" of the Albright Brethren and sects of the same spirit. But they have no desire to come back, the mighty dead! With a compassionate smile, they point our dwarfish race to their own imperishable giant works and exclaim, "Be humble, and learn that nothing becomes you so well."

In Germany this foolish prejudice, God be praised, has been happily surmounted, since through Herder and Wieland, and still more by the romantic school, particularly Tieck, Novalis, and the two Schlegels,®* the poetic wealth of the Middle Ages has been brought to view; their significance in the general history of the world, by Moeser, Johann von Mueller, and Leo*; their universal human interest, by Goethe in his Faust and Goetz von Berlichingen; and finally their ecclesiastical magnificence and theological depth, scholastic as well as mystical, by the later works on church history and the development of doctrines,

The Principle of Protestantism and in particular also by various monographs on Innocent III,

Hugo of St. Victor, Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Henry Suso, Tauler, Savonarola, John Wessel, and others.

It should be borne in mind that the Middle Ages after all are the cradle of the Reformation. They exhibit to us, not simply the Roman, but the Romano-Germanic Catholicism, in whose arms the Reformation is borne like the infant Christ by the madonnas of Raphael. True, the madonna appears in the foreground, after the Romish style. But still the highest beauty of the virgin mother, surrounding her with the loveliness of heaven itself, flows mainly from the adoring, blissful gaze with which she is absorbed in the divine child, that smiles and plays upon her bosom, and yet bears the world upon his hand. So too the Middle Ages have their richest charm, in the longing and earnest expectation with which they look forward to the Reformation as the ripe fruit of the previous struggles of the church, the strong and joyous child of her deep birth pangs endured for long centuries before.

Even now the Roman Catholic Church, which since the sixteenth century lives almost entirely on her past greatness, retains much of the character under consideration, though no longer the mistress of the world. She embraces all spheres of human life, attends it through all its stations from the cradle to the grave, pervades all conditions with her spirit, anoints all occupations with her consecrating oil, and in this way exercises a much greater power than Protestantism over the consciences and spirits of those who stand in her communion. In the midst of the visible world, remembrancers of the world unseen meet us on all sides, in crosses, churches, images of saints, relics, and expressive symbols of every kind. 'True we encounter in the same quarter also all sorts of superstition, error, and abuse. These it is an easy thing to assault with rude hand, and anathematize incontinently as the work of the devil. Instead of this however it might be well if more pains were taken to fathom and bring home to ourselves (as could be done with great profit and no great difficulty, where proper knowledge and feeling were combined in the inquiry) the original truth, and the deep religious want, that lie at the ground of almost every abuse and error, and impart to it its tough life.

"Prove all things, and hold fast that which is good."

Philip Schaff a) Notwithstanding all now said however, one radical fault characterizes the relation of the Roman Church to the world. She does not sufficiently respect the world in its own divine rights, and seeks to subject it to herself in a violent, unnatural, premature way, without regard to the measure of her own development. Instead of waiting humbly, and following the course of tribulation prescribed by Christ, she would anticipate in a fleshly way the ideal state, when '"'the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High; whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom" (Dan. 7:27), and when it shall be said that "salvation and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ is come'

(Rev. 12:10). Thus the heathen mythologies also were a fleshly prolepsis of the mystery of the incarnation.* The papacy in the Middle Ages conducted itself tyrannically toward the state and trampled on the rights of the nations; it did not permit science and inquiry to take their own course in a free way; it surrounded the arts with arbitrary bounds; in a word, it affected to swallow up the world at once in a wholesale way. The world, however, thus overwhelmed but not assimilated to the true life of the church, has reasserted its rights in the bosom of the church itself, and taken revenge upon it by impressing this with its own character, especially at the papal court.

Romanism forms accordingly a secular state, at the expense of the free, quietly advancing, inward character of Christianity. Its worship has an outwardly pompous complexion; filling the senses; half heathenish. Even in doctrine, this remarkable dialectic process may be seen; particularly in the dogma of transubstantiation;

* A similar thought is uttered by J. P. Lange (Vermischte Schriften, Vol.

IV, p. 84), when he says in his striking way: "The characteristic fault of the papacy is the show it makes of a perfect Christianity. In popery the Christian world renovation is exhibited in a premature, hypocritical, violent way—exhibited a tout prix. All that is human is sacrificed, all truth, all reality, development itself, to secure this dazzling show of Christian perfection. Popery is thus the impatience of shallow, unsound Christian feeling that cannot wait quietly for the end of the world, and so will have it before its time; through impatience settled, and by its settled character again impatient. All is forced; that which is a process must appear throughout an issue (das Werden ein Gewordenes), though the truth itself even should be lost, yea openly resisted, to secure the point.

The Principle of Protestantism according to which, on the one hand, the divine is revealed only through the annihilation of the natural substances, bread and wine, here representing the world, and this in virtue of the consecration of the priest, of course the act of a mere creature; while however, on the other hand, these transmuted elements, retaining still in fact their natural character, are made the object of divine worship, by which means a paganizing creature deification comes to prevail. Thus we find explained the seemingly inexplicable contradiction of the system, its contempt for the world in one direction and its undue regard for it in another. Monkish austerity and Pelagian secularity dwell harmoniously together in the same cell.

The powers of the world, under the legal discipline of the Middle Ages, became gradually mature. The church however, refusing to distinguish between different periods of life, and unwilling to put away the rod at the proper time, paid no respect to the change. The world then avenged itself on a large scale, by breaking away from the church entirely, and entering upon a new course of development for itself. This took place with the Reformation.

It is accordingly in this respect also a process of emancipation, but as such here too not yet complete, requiring still a closing act to unite once more what has been disjoined.

The world since the sixteenth century has reached a measure of cultivation, such as it never possessed before. The Protestant states are incomparably superior to those which have been or are now under the staff of the Roman bishop; showing altogether more order, obedience, and contentment; whereas the pope has often enough preached insurrection against the temporal powers, released subjects from their oath of allegiance, and favored and sanctioned state conspiracy and the murder of kings. In place however of the former slavish dependence on the church, the opposite extreme has come to prevail. The Protestant states have either separated themselves entirely from the church

(at least this is the case with our own), or in contradiction to the principles of the Reformation have subjected it more or less to their dominion, as in Germany, England, and Switzerland, so that out of church states have arisen state churches. For in these countries the governments have taken the supreme administration of

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the church into their own hands, and thus in practice at least make Caesar to be pope, which is no whit better than making the pope to be Caesar. It is true indeed that in a number of states the freedom of the Romish Church too is restrained by the secular authority, as in Austria, and still more recently in Russia, Spain, and Portugal. With inflexible consistency, however, she steadily protests against every such invasion, and always contrives in the end to make good again her pretensions; as is strikingly shown by the noted affair of Cologne, and recent events in Spain, as well as by the controversy on the subject of church instruction in France.

Protestant science, philosophy in particular, is so far from being the mere handmaid of theology and the church, that it appears just as often at least arrayed against them. Above all in Germany, philosophy is regarded commonly as the all-comprehending, absolute science of reason itself, of which theology is only a single branch. We cannot hesitate a moment to bestow the title Christian on the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages, an Anselm, a Peter Lombard, or a Thomas Aquinas; but there is no room for this, in the strict sense, in the case of Locke, Hume,

Wolff, Kant, Fichte, and others, if for no other reason, for this alone that they show themselves destitute of humility and penitence, which are the ground of all piety. However, considered in the way of pure science only, the modern systems, internally united like the links of a chain from Leibnitz (a view to be sure but dimly apparent in this country, where the empiricism of Locke still sways its despotic scepter over the most republican spirits), exhibit a vastness, depth, and comprehensive variety that find no parallel in the Church of Rome, whose only approved philosophy, indeed may be said to be the scholastic Aristotelian.

The advantage of all this to the Protestant theology is at least so much, that it has become more scientific.

A like aspect of things is presented to us in the sphere of the arts and polite literature. These too, since the Reformation, have emancipated themselves more or less from the church. If we except our sacred hymns and chorales, in the case of which certainly a wonderful productivity has appeared in the German Church, the Lutheran especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth

The Principle of Protestantism centuries, we possess almost no works of church art that are fairly entitled to the name. All artistic ornament has been banished from the churches on principle; and our modern structures often bear more resemblance to a theater or a Grecian temple than to the true idea of a Christian house of worship.

Thorwaldsen* has indeed formed statues of Christ and the apostles; but they are by no means equal to his mythological representations. The painters since the Reformation

(until very recently the Dusseldorf school—Overbeck,*8 Cornelius,®? Kaulbach" in his "Destruction of Jerusalem"—and other masters, partly Catholic and partly Protestant, began to bring in a change again) have had recourse to the kingdom of nature and to profane history for their subjects, rather than to the Bible and the church. So with the Dutch painters in particular. The greatest modern composers, even such as are Catholic, as Mozart, Beethoven, and the Italian school, are not certainly to be counted church artists in the strict sense. The prayers and priest choirs of the Magic Flute and the Nemesis in Don Juan, as well as the Requiem, show only that the modern world is impregnated with Christian ideas and feelings, without surrendering still its natural character; and of Beethoven's incomparable symphonies it has been strikingly observed by one fully at home in the subject, that they are so many monologues of the absolute me of the present age, that with desperate struggle to stand upon itself, sinks into immeasurable grief and braves it again with saucy humor, bringing as it were all its resources together to sustain itself in the arduous task. Our poets of the first rank (among whom we cannot reckon the pious but tedious singers Milton and Klopstock), take them altogether, are forms that spring from nature only. Shakespeare belongs rather properly to the Middle Period, whose traditions have supplied him with almost all his poetic material. He is in a certain sense the completion of Dante, in whom is mirrored the religious glory of that time. Goethe has his bright and dark sides both in this, that he is all nature, in the largest and most comprehensive sense of the word. Where he introduces Christianity, it is exhibited (except perhaps in Faust, which however moves rather in the medieval elements) not at all as the universal life power by which the whole world is to be pervaded and renewed, but as being itself

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simply a remarkable object in nature, one only among the countless phenomena in which the universal genius is required to feel the same interest. Characteristic in this view is the episode style, in which the confessions of a virtuous soul are presented in the midst of gay actresses and amiable coquettes. Schiller's ideal is abstract, moral nature; the gigantically struggling, stoic will.

The religious element with him, where it appears in objective dramatic form, is Catholic, as in the Maid of Orleans, in Maria

Stuart, and in Wallenstein; and where it proceeds from his own breast, a mere homesickness, an unsatisfied longing, as it flows sorrowfully upon us, for instance, in the poem "Ach aus dieses

Thales Gruenden." Byron shows himself a stranger in full to the peace-whispering accents of the gospel, and to all true humility.

His home is the howling storm of all wild passions. He is the demoniacally inspired poet of despair.

Still who may refuse his admiration to the vast poetical powers and resources, the natural greatness simply of these extraordinary men; who persuade himself that God has introduced such colossal figures into our modern world without purpose, and allowed them to exert so measureless an influence on the culture of millions for no end whatever? No, such a mass of thought and beauty cannot possibly be lost for the kingdom of God. Rather it challenges the church to the high and solemn task of subduing this gigantic life to the power of her own spirit, that so she may rise above it, and attain thus to a higher position than any to which she has yet come.

As regards, finally, the order of common social life, we may say that Christianity no longer wears a distinguishing priestly dress, but the ordinary citizen's coat. The almost universal banishment of the gown from the pulpit itself, in this country, is characteristic in this view; a novelty at the same time which is by no means to be approved, as savoring of an unhistorical spiritualism and a want of proper respect for what is sacred. 'The abstract, extramundane character of religion has been laid aside, and the claims of the present life are more fully appreciated.

Marriage is no longer depressed [as a lower grade of sanctity in comparison to celibacy], but the minister is expected to let the light of his example shine before his congregation, as a husband

The Principle of Protestantism and a father. Monkery is abolished, and men are directed to exercise their virtue in the natural employments of life, and while standing and working in the world to keep themselves unspotted from it. True, at the same time, purely material interests, traffic and trade, industry and steam, and along with all this utilitarianism and selfism, have acquired an importance to which they are not entitled. For the spirit ought to reign over matter. But still, in the hand of God, even steamships and railroads must serve to extend more rapidly his kingdom.

This whole posture of the world toward the church carries both a discouraging and a cheering aspect, as has already been intimated in the notice of particulars. It is an unsound condition; since all divinely constituted forms and spheres of life should stand, and must in the end stand; in perfect harmony with one another. It serves to show the weakness of the church, that she has allowed these natural interests thus to overtop her in her erowth, instead of mastering them, and so directing them continually to the glorification of their Creator. It is crying ingratitude besides on the part of the world, that luxuriating now in her own prosperity, she affects to be independent of Christianity, yea, even presumes to oppose it broadly; while yet she is indebted to it for the best she has, and without an inward reconciliation to the church, a full return to the element of religion, can never fulfill her own highest destiny. For the end or scope of all history is this, that the world may resolve itself into the kingdom of God, reason into revelation, morality into religion, and earth into heaven. All sciences must be raised and refined into theosophy, all government into theocracy, all art into divine worship, and the whole of life into a joyful proclamation of the glory of God.

Since however this ultimate identification of the world with Christianity may be apprehended also as an absolute molding of the church into all the forms of the world, the full identification of Christianity with nature, we must recognize again on the other side an encouraging advance toward this end, in the present relation of the two systems. 'The Christian principle by means of it has become more naturalized, more at home in the world. It stands no longer in mere abstract opposition to the natural life; has the world no longer under itself as a foreign element; but is

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forming it into itself, much as this may be denied by the world in its present stage. The modern culture is not that of heathenism, but is carried throughout on the shoulders of Christianity, draws from this constantly its most substantial life, and must on this very account, however unwillingly, come into subjection to it in the end. In this respect also then, Protestantism is only an apparent regression; in truth it has carried the church materially forward. Roman Catholicism here has remained behind the time; and has either refused altogether, with willful bigotry, to admit the advance of modern cultivation; or has yielded to the force of it to a certain extent, only for the most part where it has stood in near contact with Protestantism, and always in consequence at feast Of its influence either direct or imdirect: The more recent

Catholic theology, for instance, springs from Germany, and is conditioned in its best productions by Protestant elements. Let anyone think only of Hug, Moehler, von Drey, Gehring, Hirscher,

Staudenmaier, Papst, and Guenther.*' The principal seats of Romanism—Italy, Spain, and Portugal—have done little or nothing in this sphere within the last centuries, and as regards the education of the people, are incredibly far back.

Thus in this case also our contemplations point us, not backward, but forward to a rich future for Protestantism, that will leave all the glory of the Catholic Church far in the rear. The better tendency of the time is indeed toward objectivity; not toward that of the Middle Ages however, that could be upheld only by violently crushing, or willfully restraining, the rights of the individual subject; but it seeks the objective rather in a higher form, in which it shall be enriched and spiritualized by all that has been gained on the part of the subjective, the good fruits of the development of Protestantism through a period of three hundred years. The day must come when all the forms of life which God has constituted in the world shall feel that they need a union with religion and the church to realize in full their own idea, and when they shall voluntarily return to the Lord, and lay their richest products upon his altar. That memorable word of Bacon,

Philosophia obiter libata abducit a Deo, penitus hausta reducit ad eundem, may be applied with just as much force to art, politics, and social order, and must be fulfilled sooner or later in all.

The Principle of Protestantism That our hope of a new life for Protestantism to be secured through its full reconciliation with the objective idea of the church is no empty dream, many appearances of the present time, in part still incomplete indeed and solitary, serve to show. 'These now demand our attention, which will be directed again first to Germany, and then to America.

Germany is still far from having completed her part in the world's history. Such as are acquainted with the present state of the country, as regards science, morals, and religion, and viewed in comparison with what it was during the last century and the beginning of this, will understand the force of this remark. What a melancholy time was that, when English deism, French frivolity, and superficial German popular philosophy, were joined in common conspiracy against the church. Pietism indeed had still its representatives, for the most part however spiritual cripples, who placed the substance of Christianity in a few poor forms, and turned the fresh air of life into an uncomfortable, gloomy chamber of death. The Moravian Brethren, it is true, were not without influence; but it was exerted, apart from theology, in the stillness only of retired practical life. True again, supranaturalism, technically so called, the last scientific stand on the part of orthodoxy, mustered, in men like Reinhard® and Storr,® learned and venerable theologians in opposition to the rationalists; but its position was one-sided, in the way particularly of a too abstract conception of the formal principle of Protestantism, and it treated with the enemy so far, that in the end it fairly fell over to his side, aS we see in the case of Schott,44 Ammon," and Bretschneider." Its whole standpoint was outward and empirical; of the Holy Spirit in the church it had no sense whatever, and could not possibly therefore keep its ground. So dry and waste had the German Church then become that minds of the deeper, more earnest order, such as Stolberg,*" Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel," were fain to take refuge in the bosom of Catholicism. And the revolutionary epoch was so shorn of all religious life and consciousness that Schleiermacher, in his masterly Discourses on Religion, of the year 1779, found it necessary to start from the beginning; taking his stand as it were in the court of the Gentiles, to teach his Wolffian, Kantian, and philanthropistic contemporaries

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the nature of religion first in general, that he might gain footing again for an intelligible representation of the Christian system.

And how does it now stand with German theology? [I am well aware indeed of the fearful episode that has broken in from the left side of the Hegelian philosophy upon the quiet course of its development, already ripening toward the best results—an episode like the storm of the July Revolution, which may be said to have brought up the rear of the political convulsions, through which France was carried with the close of the last century."] Taking however a broad, general view, and looking especially to the most recent movements, we may say with full confidence that the theology which now has the floor of the age is not rationalism, but orthodoxy resuscitated with a higher life from its ruins. With the decision, power, and fervor of the old church faith, it unites that scientific freedom, disentanglement from prejudice, and full roundness of method, which have become possible only through the modern development of rationalism and philosophy.

Look now where we may, either in the widely extended school of Schleiermacher, with its numerous derivations, the most independent of which are presented to us in Neander," Nitzsch® and J. Mueller"; or among those who are more or less ruled by the conservative elements of the Hegelian philosophy, in the writings especially of a Goeschel," Rothe," Dorner," Martensen,® Hoffmann," Hasse®; either to the productions of the orthodox Unionist tendency of a Hengstenberg" and his spiritual colleagues, or the New Lutheran theology of a Harless® and others; everywhere, it is true, we find much mixed disputation and hard conflict, the result however in part of mere misapprehension; but still everywhere also the spring-breath of a newly wakened faith, and the bursting germs of a new, bright, and fruitful era in theology.

This must be rich and full, in proportion as the boundless range of history has been brought more fully and clearly into view, by the untiring, most learned and profound researches, monumenta aere perenniora of German scholarship and German diligence combined. What is most animating however is the genial union of free scientific interest and true church feeling that is showing itself in some of the theologians who have been named, and in many more especially who are now coming forward. 'This

The Principle of Protestantism church feeling shows itself moreover in the formation continually more and more of ministerial associations, for conference on reigning defects and mutual encouragement in efforts after improvement; and particularly also in the concern now so general, which is felt to have the church service renewed and enriched, by thrusting aside all watery, rationalistic pretended improvements, and falling back in a proper way to the incomparable treasures of the old church songs and liturgies. Here again however the new which is at hand will not be a mere repetition, but an enlargement and rectification of the old; inasmuch as by means of the vast researches of science, in which rationalism itself has fulfilled an important part, the wealth of all centuries, as already intimated, is now rendered accessible to such an extent as never before. In short, the German Church and theology, in spite of all difficulties and dangers, may be said to have a fair wind, and it were disgraceful cowardice just now to draw in the sails, and stand despairingly inactive with hands folded upon the bosom.

It is the period emphatically for hope and action.

And from what quarter has this favorable change proceeded?

Not wholly from theology and the church themselves, but in large part, and indeed mainly, from the side of the secular life, involving thus to some extent already a verification of the idea that all natural relations are to be pervaded in a new way by the spirit of religion. This precisely is striking and peculiar in Germany, that the same foe, the same science in particular, which inflicted such deep wounds upon its orthodoxy, has again turned round of its own accord, and furnished the means for their cure.

For this very reason, however, the cure must prove vastly more thorough than such soundness as may be maintained in other lands, where all the attacks of philosophy and secular culture against Christianity are repelled only with the rusty armor of the old apologetic methods or simple proofless appeals to pious feeling. It is justly remarked by Tholuck," in his learned and spirited work against the Leben Jesu of Strauss, that the shallow race of rationalistic illuminatists, at whose head Nicolai® of dull and tedious memory once stood, received its death blow first among the laity, by the powerful wingstroke of the romantic writers, Tieck,®

Schlegel, and Novalis; after which it was consumed to the bone

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by the lixivium of ingenious satire, and so remanded again to its original nothing. The romantic school indeed fixed its view not so much upon the holiness of religion as its beauty, making it an object of esthetic enjoyment, which the ironic me saw under itself; but it helped mightily nevertheless to put an end to the reign of the mere bald understanding. The abstract separation of Christianity and art has since that time disappeared more and more from the consciousness of the cultivated in Germany. Art itself, in many of its most important representatives, has again become religious—in particular, painting and music and poetry.

True, the poetry of despair and of sentimental world grief is still to be met with on all sides; but it has of late pronounced its own doom by plunging into politics and all sorts of projects for the world's amelioration, which contradict entirely the very idea of art.

A second powerful agent in the production of the change which has been mentioned is presented to us in the modern philosophy since the rise of Schelling. He freed German science, and with it theology also, from the bonds of Kant's standpoint of reflection and Fichte's subjective idealism, and led forth the spirit again into the objective world both of nature and history. Speak as men may against German transcendentalism, as the word passes here in a wholesale way, this at least no one acquainted with the subject can deny; that at the very time when the most celebrated theologians cast away the cardinal evangelical doctrine of the incarnation and atonement, as antiquated superstition, Schelling and Hegel stood forth in their defense, and claimed for them the character of the highest reason; and that while the reigning view saw in history only an aggregate of arbitrary opinions, a chaos of selfish passions, they taught the world to recognize in it the everopening sense of eternal thoughts, an always advancing rational development of the idea of humanity and its relations to God.

Such a view must gradually overthrow the abrupt revolutionary and negative spirit which characterized the last century, restoring respect for the church and its history, and making room for the genuine power of the positive.* It is true indeed that one sec- * Just after I had written this, the article of Professor Stowe, in the Bzb.

Repos., Jan. 1845, entitled "Teutonic Metaphysics or Modern 'Transcendentalism," came to my sight; and as it has been already welcomed in several papers

The Principle of Protestantism tion of the Hegelian school (the so-called left side) has produced the latest and most dangerous form of rationalism, in which the doctrine of myths and pantheistic hero worship are made to play so large a part. But this tendency is diametrically opposed to the historical, objective element that clearly rules the spirit if not always the letter of the great philosopher's writings, and cannot be regarded therefore at all events as a complete application of his system to theology. And then again it must be considered that the movement in question is rendered so dangerous just because it has received into itself, pantheistically caricatured to be sure, so many truths of Christianity for which the old rationalism had no organ whatever, and because it 1s conducted also with so much more spirit and depth; which itself again is to be referred to a general advance, that may be easily remarked also in the form as highly important and seasonable, I do not feel at liberty to pass it over in silence. I am truly sorry to find myself disappointed in Dr. Stowe.® In view only of his relations to my honored instructor and friend Dr. Dorner,®* now counselor of consistory and professor of theology at Kénigsberg, I held him capable of understanding and appreciating the German philosophy and theology, much beyond what he has shown in this unfortunate article. It is not in my mind at all to undertake a wholesale defense of any system of German philosophy as such, for I prize too much the liberty of thought to be bound by any philosophical school, and yield my reason to be led only by the Bible.

But men like Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who have devoted their whole life to the most laborious and profound inquiries, and who beyond all question belong to the greatest names in the history of the world, should be treated in different style by such a man as Stowe, in justice only to his own character. Instead of saying a word to us on the contents of the later positive system of Schelling, he informs us of his controversy with Dr. Paulus®? of Heidelberg, which has nothing in the world to do with the matter in hand; and even takes the part of this wretched rationalist, who closed his career as a writer with a literary theft, against the great philosopher—not dreaming at all, as it would seem, that it is precisely the acknowledged merit of this last, to have overcome the standpoint of the abstract understanding, from which the old common rationalism made war upon all the deeper truths of Christianity.

For this "common sense," entitled as it is to all respect in its own sphere, the region of the simply finite, will always hold the doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation for nonsense; since according to its shallow, empty way of reasoning, three cannot be one or one three, God cannot be man or man God. If then no higher principle be allowed to prevail in theology, it must be shorn of all its deeper import. Such a higher principle is the reason by which we apprehend the supersensuous, the infinite, the divine. But it is Schelling precisely who has successfully asserted the supremacy of this principle in science.

To be convinced of this, let Dr. Stowe read Schelling's Lectures on the Method of Academic Study, particularly the fifth and sixth. He will find there a

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of the later theology as more scientific than before. The very latest speculation besides, in the person of the still-living founder of the Identity System, Schelling himself, has taken a direction decidedly toward positive revelation; and it may be said now with good certainty at least that the bloom period of the pantheistic logic and purely negative antitheology is already over. Strauss and his colleagues, by reason of the much greater weight of religious and church feeling they have been called to encounter, have outlived themselves much sooner than their predecessors

Paulus, Wegscheider,®* and others. Bruno Bauer, the object now of almost universal aversion, has been formally deprived of his office—the sort of thing scarcely anybody would have dreamed twenty years ago. Such as are acquainted with the state of things in this quarter must allow that the latest critical and philosophical opposers of Christianity have in a great measure, by their own most masterly and powerful argument against the presumption of the mere understanding, in thrusting itself with its poor surface-skimming nature into the region of the higher sciences, which have to do with everlasting ideas— making all flat by trying to make all clear. Hegel's works, Prof. Stowe tells us, he has "waded through''—so long since however, or in such cursory style, that he can no longer recollect of how many volumes they consist, missing the mark entirely in his general guess (p. 86). No wonder that his memory should be found still more at fault, as regards the actual contents of this exceedingly difficult system. In fact he does not pretend to draw from the fountain itself, but only from the Conversations-Lexicon of Brockhaus; an ass's bridge notoriously for superficial and lazy thinkers, used by shopkeepers' clerks, but by no true German scholar, at least in so weighty a case. After giving us in this way a most lean skeleton, translated as he himself says not ad sensum, but only ad verbum, he informs us with all honesty that he cannot understand the philosopher at all. He cannot find out indeed "what the man means by anything he says in all his writings," so far as examined. Yet he adds, "Let no one say I have caricatured the system''—as if a translation of isolated fragments ad verbum only, could possibly in such a case be anything else than caricature!

What a man by his own confession does not comprehend, it might be as well perhaps that he should not undertake to explain. Especially so, where as in the present instance the explanation is expected to carry with it a sort of "official authority" for the general public. Hegel has errors and sins enough to answer for, no doubt. But this is no reason why he should be loaded with misrepresentation, and made to appear little better than a fool at the bar of the common understanding. It is always however sheer, gross misrepresentation, when his words or thoughts are violently sundered from their true historical life, and forced to stand by abstract translation in new connections and relations entirely, in which inevitably all their original sense is transmuted, for the popular mind especially, into bare nonsense.

G2 The Principle of Protestantism contradictions and extravagance, destroyed themselves. Thus the leaders of the orthodox theology, after a brief interregnum, are again at the helm of the vessel under most encouraging auspices.

In Germany philosophy, as the spirit of the age exalted to scientific consciousness, exerts a controlling influence over all departments of higher knowledge. From the school of Schelling accordingly, in such men as Eschenmayer," Steffens," Schubart," a decidedly religious tone has been imparted to investigations in the sphere of nature, by which this department has been effectually rescued from the hands of atheism and abstract deism. Steffens in particular has made it the great object of his life, in his scientific and poetic representations, to reconcile nature with religion, the cultivated world consciousness with the consciousness of Christianity. So also the greatest later historians, as Leo, Ranke, Haug," show a special interest in religion and the church, as forming the central force and life pulse properly of the world's history; and bring them continually into the view of their readers, unfettered by the old spiritless pragmatism, with living reproduction, and that freedom from prejudice and love of justice peculiar to the German mind, by which every age is allowed to enjoy its own proper greatness unimpaired. Philology itself, both Oriental and classical, has come by its inward development to stand in a new relation to the holy Scriptures. The earlier rationalism imposed its own arbitrary hypotheses and neological dreams on the Old and New Testaments by a fearful grammatical recklessness and truly wheel-breaking exegesis; and even the supranaturalism of the same period, as exhibited by Storr' and others, lies open to censure in the same view. But before the bar of the later philology, this is no longer possible.

Professor Winer" of Leipzig, whose grammatical authority as free from all theological bias is universally acknowledged, says unreservedly, "Our exegetical controversies have led back usually to that sense as correct, which the Protestant Church held in the beginning."* Such a man as K. Fr. Aug. Fritzsche,' who * Leipuger Literatur Zeitung, 1833. No. 44. Comp. the preface to the third edition of his Grammar of N.T. Idioms, p. iv ff., as well as the whole admirable work itself. A similar regeneration has been effected by Ewald and Hitzig'® in the department of the Old Testament.

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stands in no inward affinity with the spirit of the Bible, but who as it regards philological learning and accuracy

(at times even pushed to excess), is fairly rivaled among recent interpreters only by Harless'* and Bleek," finds himself constrained, from the grammatico-historical standpoint alone, to prefer in the most important cases the interpretations of a Chrysostom, Augustine,

Luther, Calvin, Beza, Bengel,® to those of the rationalistic school.

Strauss himself has rendered good service to the cause of truth, in his Leben Jesu, by the overwhelming force with which he has employed the reductio ad absurdum upon the violent exegetical processes, made use of by the older rationalism in carrying out its so-called natural explanation of miracles. Unbelief is thus forced to look in the future for help in some different direction; it can no longer cover its nakedness with a philological mantle. The scientific study of language itself, by its own inward development and without any regard to Christianity, has led to the immensely important result that the church, orthodox Protestantism in particular, has understood the Bible in substance correctly, and must be allowed therefore to have all right against rationalism at the bar of science, if only the assumption of the divine inspiration of the Scriptures be securely established.

Finally, the political circumstances of Germany have also contributed much to the new impulse which has been given to religion. In the war for freedom particularly against the French

Usurper, both princes and people were overpowered with an evermemorable, sacred enthusiasm, when the Lord of hosts, after long-continued, well-deserved oppression, interposed so powerfully by the thunder of battle, and revealed himself so clearly in the direction of events. Since that time, too, the state has begun to change its posture materially toward the church. Formerly this was treated too generally as the mere creature of Caesar, being regarded simply as one among the several institutions by which the state was expected to serve its own purposes. Now however it is coming to be understood and felt that the church has a life of its own, and that the state consults its own welfare best, when this life is respected as an independent interest, and suffered to develop itself freely from its own nature. If anyone will compare the administration of the present kings of Prussia and Wirttem-

The Principle of Protestantism berg with that of their predecessors, particularly Frederick the Great, he will at once admit the great change which has taken place in this respect.

From the state moreover, under Frederick William III, proceeded in the first instance that union of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches, which has since become almost universal in Germany, and must be regarded now as a great step gained toward the catholicity and unity necessarily involved in the idea of the church itself. It is not good either that Christ's bride should bear the name of a mere man, as Lutheran, and the like.* The title Evangelical is much more catholic and appropriate; though not in the sense to be sure which it is frequently made to carry in our western states, when used as a mere cloak for rationalism and indifferentism.*: The stiff, absolute Old-Lutheranism of Prussia and Bavaria may be considered indeed a salutary reaction against the indifference of many of the friends of the union to doctrines; and in this view, we are glad to find its representatives in this country also. But apart from this particular advantage, it is certainly a crying, stubborn misapprehension of the wants of our time, which reach far beyond its narrow horizon. It is truly ridiculous indeed, thus to fancy the Formula of Concord the absolute perfection of theology, and to require virtually that not only the Greek and Roman Churches, but the Reformed also with its

German, Low Dutch, French, English, Scotch, and American branches, should make it their great business to subscribe it and submit themselves to Lutheran baptism. The future belongs certainly to the union, and within its range precisely the most religious life is to be found at the present time. The most important

* The designations Presbyterian, Congregational, Protestant Episcopal are also unsatisfactory, as referring only to government; which however is clearly but a secondary element of the church, belonging not to its spirit but to its outward form. Our title Reformed, coupled only if need be with the national distinction, is plainly the best. For it implies no dependence whatever on any particular man, and includes the view besides that we are no new body, but the old Catholic Church itself, only regenerated and purified from human additions. As however this term has acquired in Germany a definite historical sense, in opposition to the idea of Lutheranism, it was altogether proper that the title Evangelical should be preferred. Names in so weighty a case are not mere smoke, but the impression of the idea; and it is known that Luther most decidedly disapproved the designation of his followers after his own name.

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and pious theologians of Germany, as Neander, Hengstenberg, Twesten, Marheinecke, Sartorius, Tholuck, Mueller, Hupfeld, Nitzsch, Sack, Bleek, Kling, Hasse, Hahn, Lange, Hoffmann, Luecke, Liebner, Ullmann, Rothe, Umbreit, Schmidt, Dorner,

Landerer, go with it fully; though for themselves a number of them prefer, in a doctrinal respect at least, the Lutheran standpoint. To be sure the union, in its present form, is to be viewed merely as a beginning; and the closer adjustment of it, especially in the symbolical direction, creates just at this time no small difhculty. Nor can it be denied that the measures of the government to promote church improvement in Prussia labor under the defect of more or less irresolution. Goodwill is present, but there is a lack of fixed principles and talent for practical organization; for which at all events, the German, whose spiritual universalism is always multiplying possibilities and doubts before him, has never been particularly distinguished. The case however is in its own nature immensely difficult, and becomes still more so by the manifold spiritual tendencies and peculiarly diversified forms of culture that enter into the constitution of the Prussian State, enough to confound the most thorough practical skill that is not prepared to violate all the rights of history. And then it must not be forgotten that the whole Evangelical Church is at present in an interimistic state, involved in a process of fermentation and transition, which brings along with it necessarily a measure of uncertainty and experiment. In any case, this is something better however than to repose lazily on pillows worn out by use, or to dream with unbounded self-complacency and pretension of being in a condition already complete.

Let us leave however the king of Prussia, with his spiritual and secular counselors, to work out as they best may, under the favor of heaven, the problem they are called to solve, and turn our attention once more upon our own land. What prospect is there here in the way of encouragement for the church? May we hope to see our Protestant Zion conducted safely out of the Babylonish captivity of sectarism and faction, without being carried to old

Rome or young Oxford?

We have no such deep scientific conflicts among us, as those we have just had in our view. The philosophical life questions

The Principle of Protestantism of Germany, the relation of the church to the arts and to the state, with which the greatest minds there are exercised in the severest way, bring no trouble whatever to the American. "Cut bono?" he is ready to exclaim, in view of every speculation of the sort; dubbing it perhaps with the convenient title transcendentalism or mysticism, to justify his contempt. What has it accomplished for the souls of men or their bodies? Can it fill an empty pocket or an empty stomach? Has it ever manufactured a steamboat or so much even as a pin? Such is the style, in substance if not in form, in which the interest of philosophical thinking is too often undervalued in this country, in favor of what is practical and useful. With such a spirit, of course, I can feel no sympathy. It is greatly to be lamented that the German churches of America in particular should be so sadly defective in theological and philosophical culture, and without a single literary institution after the pattern of the German gymnasia or universities. The result of this must be in the end that our congregations will lose themselves in the English denominations, with the sacrifice of their own proper character entirely, unless they can be brought betimes into spiritual communication with the mother church in Germany. On the other hand, if they might be led thus to participate with proper life in the later movements of German theology, they would take a position peculiar to themselves, and must exercise gradually an important influence also on their English sister churches. For these too need a vastly more thorough and vigorous theology to carry them prosperously forward, and make them superior to the foes that now threaten them from every side. Theology is no less necessary for the regeneration of Protestantism now than it was for the accomplishment of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. To prevent misunderstanding, it may be well to be a little more particular on the importance of theology in its relation to practical church life.

Some take ground on principle against all theological training as injurious to the interests of living, practical piety. Such are welcome to the illiterate declaimers in whom they choose to take delight, with all their rant and noise and animal excitement; men who trample underfoot the apostolic caution with regard to this point (James 3:1) and in their wretched spiritual pride

Philip Schaff

deal forth the stale conceits and fantastic soap bubbles of their own poor brain, for the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. Alas for the congregations whose want of discernment leads them to accept such husks for bread. Show us then, you opposers of knowl]edge, which the apostle makes the element of eternal life, where are the men whom a miraculous illumination of the Spirit has constituted theologians with a single stroke; and no one will be more ready to show them respect than ourselves. But you substitute your own fanatical feeling for the Holy Spirit. Pentecosts are not common days in history; and according to the general rule and order of God, which we are bound humbly to observe, even our spiritual bread is to be earned by the sweat of our brow. Our intellectual and moral faculties are given us, not to be buried or left to rust, but to be put to use and made productive. We are directed to search the Scriptures continually, and to grow in all wisdom and knowledge. If the apostles themselves, after an intercourse of three years with the Master of all masters, needed still an extraordinary furniture of divine gifts for their work, it must certainly be considered no small presumption, when a little religious experience merely—and this often in the most superficial form—together with some tolerable fluency of speech, is held—as with many in this country at the present time—a sufficient preparation for the most important and difficult of all offices. Let us hope that the age of such presumption may soon come to an end. For nothing is more adapted to bring the ministry into disrespect, to strip the pulpit of its true sacred dignity, and to make the church itself in the end an object of general indifference and derision.

Others pronounce theology useful at least, and regard this as quite a fine compliment paid to the science. These are your utilitarians and materialists, who measure the value of all things in heaven and upon earth by the interest they bring. While seeming to praise it, they sink the first of all sciences into the same category with a bushel of potatoes; and indeed lower, since these last may lay claim to a much more general and palpable utility.

Theology is neither useful nor harmful; it is raised immeasurably above the poor category of serviceableness; it is no means with which to procure something beyond itself, as we employ money

The Principle of Protestantism or a mechanical instrument; but an end in itself, and for anyone who will hold a prominent place in the church just as indispensable as the knowledge of law for a statesman or the knowledge of nature for a physician. It is absolutely necessary so that no well-ordered condition of the church is to be thought of where theology does not flourish.

The necessity for it does not spring from mere outward occasions, but from the inmost nature of the Christian faith itself.

Our religion is not simply for feeling or for the will separately taken, but full as much for the faculty of knowledge also, the understanding and reason; it seeks to penetrate and pervade harmoniously all the powers of man's nature, and thus to refine and perfect him in the undivided totality of his person. It belongs to the inmost nature of faith that it should raise itself continually to clearer consciousness, attain always to a more distinct and full knowledge of its object, that is, of God as revealed in Christ.

Pistis is in itself the fruitful germ of a true gnosis, and rests not till it becomes at last the vision of God face to face, which is at the same time also the conception of the full blessedness of heaven itself. If faith be true, it must allow this to be shown, so far as this may be possible in the present world. Christianity is not against reason, but only above reason.* Only superficial knowledge is irreligious; true, thorough knowledge stands in covenant with faith, and is not possible without it. But faith should be ever struggling to become knowledge; Christianity should enter always more and more into the comprehension of reason. "Negligentia mihi videtur, si postquam confirmati sumus in fide, non studemus quod credimus intelligere." Thus speaks the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, one of the most eminently pious men at the same time belonging to the history of the church.7 So Augustine, whose name is above all praise, and before whose powerful spirit both the Catholic and Protestant Churches bow with almost equal reverence, represents growth in theological knowledge to be a growth of God in the soul itself. "Crescat ergo

Deus, qui semper perfectus est, crescat in te. Quanto enim magis * Or, to speak with Pascal, "La foi dit bien ce que les sens ne disent pas, mais jamais le contraire. Elle est au dessus, non pas contre."

+ Anselm of Canterbury, in the beginning of his work Cur Deus homo?

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intelligis Deum, et quanto magis capis, videtur in te crescere Deus.

. Intelligebas heri modicum, intelligis hodie amplius, intelliges cras multo amplius: lumen ipsum Dei crescit in te...

Sic est et interior homo: proficit quidem in Deo, et Deus in illo videtur crescere; ipse tamen minuitur, ut a gloria sua decidat, et in gloriam Dei surgat."* Theology appears thus an indispensable organ in the life of the church—its head, its consciousness, and so its ornament and joy; theology of course in the sense of our Protestant ancestors, in whose production are joined oratio, meditatio, and tentatio, the theologia regenitorum, besides which indeed there is none that is entitled to the name.

Happy is he who has attained to this exalted view! A generation that crawls in the dust may style him, in pity or derision, an idealist, even perchance a man given to phantasy. But all this he counts an honor. For he knows that it is not gold or steam, but ideas that rule the world and constitute the soul, the heart's blood of history, producing in it all that is either true or abiding. For no price would he separate himself from the regina scientiarum; all the glory of the world, all the praise of men, are to him as nothing, in comparison with the excellency of the knowledge of God in Christ.

It follows then with logical necessity that the progress of the church moves hand in hand with the progress of theology. Where ignorance rules an age, where the diligent study of the Scriptures is neglected, there at the same time the whole Christian life grows sickly, and one form of error after another creeps into the sanctuary. On the contrary, where genuine piety flourishes, where the whole church is made to feel the life-giving presence of God's

Spirit, there knowledge shows itself clear and fresh to the same extent. What is it we admire so much in the age of the apostles?

The striking union of the deepest insight into the character and works of God, with the most vigorous activity; the full-toned harmony of all the powers of the soul, filled and governed by one and the same principle. Paul, who labored more than all the rest of the apostles, is also a master in the way of knowledge, to whom we are indebted for the fullest development of doctrine,

*In Evang. Joann., c. 3, Tract 14. [Schaff alters the text of Augustine slightly.]

The Principle of Protestantism a wonderfully profound exhibition of Christian truth, and most powerful confutation of error at the same time. By his scriptural arguments and his keen logical combinations and conclusions, he so handled his adversaries, both heathen and Jewish, as to leave them ever after without excuse for their unbelief. John, the apostle of love, has been styled not without reason by the church, the "theologian" per eminentiam.

For by the eagle flight of his believing speculation into the depths of God and his Word, made flesh for our salvation, as existing before the world, he may be said to have led the way to Christian theology in its bold and glorious course.* His love is only the strong willforce of knowledge; his knowledge, but the keen vision of love.

The whole history of the church furnishes proof that the men who have exerted the greatest and happiest influence, the wakers of a new life, the pillars in the temple of God, have always been distinguished also above their contemporaries by a thorough scientific cultivation. It is sufficient to call up the names simply of such men as Irenaeus, Origen, Cyprian, Athanasius, the Cappadocian Gregory, Basil the Great, Augustine, Anselm, 'Thomas

Aquinas, Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Beza, Johann Gerhard,* Spener, Bengel, Wesley, Edwards. Where a new religious movement is not rooted at the same time in a solid doctrinal ground— the case of our later awakenings too generally—it is found also to have no enduring force, or at all events cannot carry the church forward as a whole.

Shall now the general rule as established by the history of the church have no application to the time in which we ourselves live? There is an opinion indeed that the Reformers and theologians of the seventeenth century have accomplished in theology all that is to be done, so that we need now only to hold fast this

Protestant tradition and hand it on mechanically to the next generation. This principle of stagnation is openly advocated by * Hence the ancient hymn sings of him:

Volat avis sine meta, Quo nec vates nec propheta Evolavit altius.

Tam implenda, quam impleta Numquam vidit tot secreta Purus homo purius.*?

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one at least of the most influential theological journals of the country, whose authority with a large portion of the American church is counted well-nigh infallible. With all our respect however for the piety and standing of its conductors, we must protest decidedly against every such view. How inconsistent to admit a perfectibility and actual progress, both of the individual and of the race, in all departments of mind, in the natural sciences, in jurisprudence, in the knowledge of history, in political development, in all material or outward interests, in morality and piety, only not in philosophy and theology. Is then the Bible alone a book so clear and plain that all its depths are already exhausted? Are then the powers of the human mind so abstractly separate from one another that one may become absolutely complete without the rest? Have our Protestant ancestors perhaps declared themselves to be infallible, requiring us to receive their decisions as oracles; or have they not rather set us free from all bondage to men? Did their work too, in its theoretic character only, spring forth at once complete like Minerva from the head of Jupiter; or was it not rather a gradual process in which they were themselves led from one view and one measure of clearness still onward to another? If Protestantism be indeed the blind faith of authority, unthinking rehearsal of what has been handed down, let us then confess at least that we have no reason to reproach popery on this score. But the case stands not thus. Protestantism is the principle of movement, of progress in the history of the church; progress, not such as may go beyond the Bible and Christianity, but such as consists in an ever-extending knowledge of the Bible itself, and an ever-deepening appropriation of Christianity as the power of a divine life, which is destined to make all things new. Our church should be always prepared to give an account of her faith with joy and to contend manfully against all human distortions of the truth, against every false and injurious representation of the gospel. She dare not, unless she would renounce herself, stiffen into lifeless stability and suffer herself to be left behind by her adversaries in the way of scientific movement. Rather she must explore still further and further the inexhaustible mines of God's word, and seek a fuller and freer representation continually of her own principle; remembering al-

The Principle of Protestantism ways that there is still beyond measure much to be learned, and that she can never become complete in herself, except as her knowledge also may be carried to the highest point.

But the proper home of Protestant theology is Germany, and hence we may say that those who refuse to take account of German theology, set themselves in fact against the progress of Protestantism. The land which gave birth to the Reformation stands pledged by that movement itself not to rest till the great work shall have been made complete, when the revelation of God in Christ shall be apprehended in full and the contents of faith shall be reduced to such form as to carry with them also the clearest evidence and most incontrovertible certainty in the way of knowledge. We wish not to depreciate in the least the merits acquired in former times, by the Dutch and the English in particular, in the way of biblical study—critical, exegetical, and antiquarian. 'The German is always disposed rather to put an undue value on what is foreign, and has long since appropriated the results of these investigations and worked them into the process of his own cultivation. But what is all this beside the gigantic creations of German theology! All its heresies cannot destroy my respect for it. In England and America one learns first to prize it according to its true worth. It must not be forgotten that even the German rationalism, worthy of all reprobation as it is, gives evidence, at least in its better forms, of an extraordinary scientific energy and a deep interest in the investigation of truth, from which we are authorized to draw a favorable conclusion on the opposite side. For only an archangel can become a devil. As England and America would not have been able at all to produce so fearful an enemy of Christianity as David Friedrich Strauss,* so must they have been much less able to meet him with a proper refutation; and I shudder at times to think of the desolation his writings must occasion, if they should come to be much read— which may God prevent—in this country.* It must be borne in * T was informed by a friend, one of the Fellows of Baliol College in Oxford, that two prominent young clergymen of the English Church had fallen upon the Life of Jesus by Strauss and were so overpowered by it as absolutely to despair of all scientific help in opposition to it with the resources or from the standpoint of the English theology as it has stood thus far.

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mind also on the other side that there is a species of orthodoxy, by no means rare, which rests upon the foundation of mere convenience or intellectual indolence, or the lowest motive possibly of self-interest, and is consequently no whit better, yea by reason of such hypocrisy in its constitution is even much worse, than open and honest unbelief.

If we look into church history, we shall be still less disturbed in our estimate of German theology by the heretical elements that belong to it, since they must appear to us only as negative conditions of a new doctrinal conquest. Thus the full determination and clear, close definition of the doctrines of the Trinity and of the relation of the two natures in Christ, as exhibited to us in the ecumenical councils, were conditioned throughout by a succession of heresies in the direction of these articles. The Pelagian error must serve, in the hand of God, to unfold and establish more profoundly, through Augustine, the doctrine of divine grace and human liberty. At the Reformation also heretical tendencies,

Socinianism, Anabaptism, antinomianism, and so on, come into view; as in a period of such vast excitement was to be expected.

They wrought with salutary force on the development of orthodox Protestantism, making it necessary for it to understand more clearly its own commission, to discriminate more closely its proper sphere, and to fortify itself against unauthorized consequences and various misapprehensions of its true character. So we may say that the later heresies of Germany are but the negative side of the process by which the theology of that country has been advancing toward higher and more solid ground than it occupied before. In this view, nothing can well be more unfair than to confound them with the idea of German theology itself.

Those who do so only show their own ignorance of the actual posture of things in the German Church at the present time.

It is to be lamented indeed that the representations usually exhibited of German theology in this country, by those who pass for its friends as well as others, have been, and to a great extent still continue to be, borrowed from a period which has been fairly surmounted and left behind in Germany itself—the period of the older rationalism, in which the truth might be said to have become for a time so entangled in the folds of error as hardly to

2.04

The Principle of Protestantism be distinguished from it, even in the writings of its most orthodox defenders. There is reason to believe that this rationalistic orthodoxy, as represented for instance by such men as Ernesti® and Morus,** has indeed been made the vehicle by which more or less of a truly pernicious neological spirit has been introduced into the American church in the name of German theology. Undoubtedly at least, rationalistic elements and tendencies are extensively involved in the religious thinking of the country, even under what are regarded often as its most orthodox forms. Elements and tendencies that need only to be carried out consistently to their proper consequences, to show themselves in their true light. Elements and tendencies, it may be added, which the orthodox German theology of the present day, all slandered as it is, would reject as heretical and false, no less decidedly than it rejects the entire standpoint of a Bretschneider® himself. Nothing, I repeat, can well be more unfair than to confound the true, positive theology of Germany, now so successfully asserting its spiritual independence, with the negative heretical entanglements of a former time, from which it has extricated itself in large part already and is in the way of extricating itself still more triumphantly, we may hope, in time to come.

It is not to be desired of course that the mighty struggles of German philosophy and theology should repeat themselves, in their whole compass, in this country. Rather it may be trusted that the victory achieved by believing science in Germany, over both the popular and speculative forms of rationalism, will redound to the general benefit of the entire Protestant Church. But what we wish is this, that the spirit of German theology in its better form, as now predominant, might be transplanted into our midst, and with proper modification of course and adjustment to our circumstances made to enter organically into our religious life. Here all must be more practical; science must go hand in hand with the proper activities of the Christian life. As we will have no order of priests specifically different from the laity, so we want no separate order of theologians, restricting to itself all sacred wisdom. Such a union of the German scientific and English practical tendencies would furnish a better form of existence

Philip Schaff

than either of these separately taken, which it might seem to be the vocation of America in particular to realize, where German elements, in the middle and western states especially, are entering so largely, and with such vast increase every year, into the social mass. I regret not in the least the modification, which the science of Germany, and its theology in particular, must thus undergo, to be turned here to any good account. Rather I rejoice in it with all my heart. For decided foe as I am to the mere utilitarian principle, I am well aware that German science is but too prone to run to an extreme in the other direction, and thus to lose itself in unprofitable speculations and subtleties that come in the end to nothing.* Nor should it be forgotten that a large proportion of the German immigration has been, and still is, of such a character, that we must wish to see it brought under the force of the English nationality for its own sake, and have reason to bless God for the favorable change it has been made to undergo by this means in part already. But this is not enough. May we not trust that the time is at hand when the American Germany shall again rise from the ruins of its own nationality and language, purified and enriched with the advantages belonging to the English character, and so enter upon a new career of its own, that shall be fraught with lasting benefit to the whole country.

Altogether there seems to be reason to believe that the way is opening at least toward such an order of things as the wants of the time are found to demand. There are indications certainly which imply that our church relations are destined, before a great while, to assume a new form in one way or another. The system of thinking which has hitherto prevailed is coming to lose its authority at different points. Difficulties are causing themselves to be felt, where formerly they were not imagined to exist. Ideas of deep and far-reaching import are steadily working their way, where only a few years since perhaps hardly a trace of their presence was to be found.

* To which the well-known verse in Goethe's Faust may be applied in all its force:

Ein Kerl, der speculirt, Ist wie ein Thier, auf duerrer Heide Von einem boesen Geist im Kreis herumgefuehrt,

Und rings umher liegt schoene gruene Weide.

The Principle of Protestantism The absolute despotism of the metaphysics of Locke is in a measure broken. In spite of the earnest warnings of certain influential literary organs, the general unconditional confidence with which the system was formerly held has been seriously shaken, particularly, it would seem, in New England. Let us hear on this point Professor Stowe*® of Lane Seminary, who will not at least be suspected of any improper leaning toward German transcendentalism. '""The metaphysics of Locke," he tells us, "under various modifications, have prevailed over the English and French mind

—the most effective mind in the civilized world—for more than a century, a long period certainly in an active and thinking age for any one system of mental science to maintain its dominion.

This style of philosophizing did not long retain its ascendancy among the Germanic nations, but was there entirely overthrown more than sixty years ago; and for about twenty-five years past there has been a gradual but certain undermining of its influence in France, England, and the United States. Almost all the ardent, youthful, investigating minds in these countries, now feel that the system of Locke, in all its modifications, is meager, unspiritual, and unsatisfying, and are anxiously looking for something better.'* This change has been produced mainly by the writings, on the one hand, of the French eclectic Cousin,®® who is known to have borrowed largely from the later German philosophy, and by the works of Coleridge and 'Thomas Carlyle, on the other—both of them thoroughly steeped in the element of German thought.

Coleridge, a noble, fertile, half-poetic, half-philosophic spirit, proceeded from the school of Schelling, which is characterized by a tendency toward the objective and historical; whence it is not strange that his numerous disciples in England sympathize to a certain extent with the Puseyite movement, though not so as to yield themselves to it in a slavish way. One of the most able and interesting productions called forth in this connection is The Kingdom of Christ by F. D. Maurice®® of London. Carlyle's mind is more of the negative, critical order, with a strong leaning to pantheism; as is seen particularly in his hero worship, which reaches even to Muhammad, and toward Goethe rises into extravagance

* The Biblical Repository and Classical Review (New York, January, 1845), p. 65.

Philip Schaff

itself. By the uncommon richness of his intellect, however, and his keen portraits, he exerts a kindling influence on youthful, excitable spirits, and at all events enlarges the field of their vision and opens before them new regions of thought. He sees the defects of our time indeed, and of our present Protestantism, only too well; but has no power to direct us to any positive remedy.

Hence a certain character of gloomy dissatisfaction, not to say cynical despair, runs through all his writings. Still the knowledge of the disease must always precede its cure, and in this view the widely extended influence of this energetic writer is to be considered favorable, as leading beyond itself to something that may be better.

In theology itself, directly or indirectly, Germany is coming to be more and more widely felt. An almost absolute authority having been exercised for nearly a hundred years in church history by the learned chancellor of Géttingen, Mosheim®!—long since thrown into the background in his own country by those who have come after him—the works of Neander® and Gieseler® have at length made their appearance here also in an English dress. These it is known are distinguished for the most conscientious study of original sources; to which must be added in the case of the first the genial presence of a deep religious spirit, that lovingly welcomes the manifestations of the divine life under all forms and causes them to live again upon the historic page with magic reproduction. We could wish only it were pervaded with deeper church feeling. The History of the Reformation, also, by Merle d'Aubigné,* which has had such an immense circulation in this country, is, properly speaking, in its main parts, a skillful working up of German material, particularly the Geschichte der Reformation by Marheinecke,® which still remains superior to it in the estimation of all competent judges.*

* The recent production of the celebrated Genevan doctor, translated for The Biblical Repository and Classical Review

(Jan. 1845), under the title "Lutheranism and the Reform: Their Diversity Essential to Their Unity," can make still less pretension to originality. We hold this essay important on account of its catholic spirit and tendency, and for the acknowledgment it contains, that the question concerning the church has now become the first question, "the greatest, the all-engrossing subject." We have been really surprised, however, to see how Dr. Merle allows himself to plunder German

The Principle of Protestantism Still all this, as compared with the wealth of the German literature, 1s but a small beginning. It would be easy to name more than a score of new works, of exegetical and dogmatic character in particular, which are fully as worthy to be translated as those which have been mentioned, and some of them much more so.

A special society has been formed in French Switzerland for transplanting the better theological literature of Germany into that country, which has already entered upon its work with good success. Much more might we look for some institution of the sort here, and that no such measure has been thought of only shows how little interest the Germans of this country take in the monuments which reflect the greatest honor on their own race. 'They are put to shame in this respect, even by the English themselves. The best literary institutions of the land are coming to understand authors. One idea is taken from the first volume of Twesten's Dogmatik; three ideas are borrowed from Lange's academical inaugural address at Zurich; all the rest are found in the well-known book of Goebel on the Union. Here we meet the representation, for instance, that Lutheranism places the material principle foremost; the Reformed Church, the formal; that the first has proceeded on the maxim of holding fast all that is not expressly condemned by God's word; the second, on the maxim of rejecting all for which no explicit authority is to be found in the Bible; that the work of reformation with the first was carried on prevailingly in a doctrinal and theological way; while with the second, it took also a practico-moral and political form; that the first was aristocratic and monarchial; the second, democratic and republican; that the first showed itself exclusive and in the end hostile to the Reformed Church; while the second was always disposed to a union with Lutheranism, but perseveringly opposed to all peace with Rome; etc., etc.

Even the examples, pp. 139, 148, and 160, are copied from Goebel.

All this is mentioned, not to depreciate at all the Genevan theologian, but only to show how ready the most distinguished French writers are to take lessons in the school of German learning and to recommend their example to imitation in this country. Why should we undervalue in German what we are ready to laud as exhibited to us at second hand in French? What confidence is to be reposed in the judgment of those who undertake to proscribe the entire theological literature of Germany as worthless and full of peril only to the church, without having read perhaps a volume of it themselves, while they suffer the same material to be smuggled in upon us in any quantity from a different quarter, as profitable and wholesome in the highest degree?

The French theological literature, such as it is, owes nearly all its value to the use of German helps; and when all is done, it may be pronounced immeasurably poor and meager, as compared with the theological literature of Germany itself.

Philip Schaff

that no modern education can be complete which does not include some acquaintance with German learning, and think it necessary accordingly to make some provision for the cultivation of it in their academical course. The most distinguished theologians in the country, such as Stowe, Stuart,°® Hodge," and Robinson,°** have bestowed their careful study on the theological literature of Germany and acknowledge themselves under lasting obligations to its help. This study ought not indeed to be confined simply to the critical, isagogical, and antiquarian departments, which some appear to consider most valuable and safe; though in fact they have been occupied to a great extent by rationalism. We need to have rather, in larger measure, the spirit and the ideas of the later

German theology. We need to fortify ourselves in this way against errors and tendencies to err, to which we are already exposed.

Against the rationalism of the abstract understanding we can have no better protection in the way of science than is here placed within our reach. In no other quarter have these false forms of thought been met and vanquished in the same thorough style. Germany has produced the most pious as well as the most godless philosophers and theologians; those whose influence has been the most salutary, as well as those who seem to have been born only to work mischief and death. The greatest demerit of the land and its highest glory are found here in close conjunction. So it was with Greece, where the Sophists appear in intimate connection with a Socrates, and along with the followers of Plato, the followers of Epicurus. One tendency is always naturally coupled with another, as its own opposite.

This then is one desideratum in our circumstances. A fresh, vigorous theology, in which the most decided faith might appear in union with the freest and most thorough scientific culture, could not fail to advance us to a new position, and to give us a triumphant advantage over infidelity and popery and semipopery in all their forms.

This however of itself is not of course enough. We need also a change in our practical church state, an antidote to the sect plague. What is first wanted in this direction is the conviction that the present distracted condition of Protestantism is contradictory to the idea of the church, whose normal character neces-

The Principle of Protestantism sarily includes catholicity and unity, as well as an earnest sacred grief on this account. Nor have we any right to console ourselves with the fancy of a vague spiritual unity in the case. It belongs to the inward always, if it have life, to manifest itself in an outward way. The soul must form for itself a body as its appropriate organ. Visibility lies necessarily in the conception of the church, which is the Body of Christ; the mark of unity consequently must also clothe itself in an outward form. 'The unity we are to seek must be no dead sameness indeed, but such as is full of life, one and endlessly manifold at the same time. Here again the case requires, not that we should go back to the old, but that we should go forward rather with all that has been won by Protestantism, in the way of developed subjectivity. Outward unity does not require one visible head, as the pope, who is called antichrist for this very pretension. This place belongs to Christ alone, and he needs no vicarius, since he is himself present in his own Body. In the apostolic age, and long after, the unity of the church was maintained without any such human chief bishop. Even at the end of the sixth century, Gregory the Great, it is known, wrote to the patriarch of Constantinople*: "Certe Petrus Apostolorum primus, membrum sanctae et universalis Ecclesiae, Paulus, Andreas, Ioannes, quid aliud quam singularium sunt plebium capita, et tamen sub uno capite omnes membra?" And in another lettert: 'Ego autem fidenter dico, quia quisquis se universalem Sacerdotem vocat, vel vocari desiderat, in elatione sua Antichristum praecurrit, quia superbiendo se caeteris praeponit. Nec dispari superbia ad errorem ducitur, quia sicut perversus ille Deus videri vult super omnes homines; ita quisquis iste est, qui solus Sacerdos appellari appetit, super reliquos Sacerdotes se extollit."" Neither is a single organization absolutely necessary, as the Puseyites dream.

The unity must proceed from within, from the deepest ground of the religious life itself, and then it will provide for itself a suitable external form. What this will be, we are not prepared now of course to say. In any case, however, a living outward intercommunication must come to hold among all Christian churches, such as may furnish practical proof that they are not only one spirit

* Lib. V, Epist. 18.

¢ Ad Mauricium Aug., Lib. VII, Ep. 33.

Philip Schaff 2a but one body also, that is, the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ.

What cheering indications now, the guaranty of a better future in this direction, can the time be said to bring to our view?

There, to be sure, in England and America, is the mighty movement of Puseyism. With this however we can make no common cause; if for no other reason, yet simply as nonepiscopal Protestants, whom it unchurches without ceremony altogether; on which account too it can never find much favor on the continent in Europe. It has been already shown, in the way of objection to the system, that it has no proper sense of the world-historical importance of Protestantism in its origin and later development. It leads backward rather than forward. Still it must be counted a salutary fermentation. It has served to bring up again, with powerful interest, the great questions of the church: catholicity and unity.

These questions belong not exclusively to the Episcopal Church and there is no reason why they should be identified at all with the idea of episcopacy. They challenge the attention of the entire

Christian communion. We may make room for them and yield ourselves to their power, without surrendering ourselves in so doing to the errors of the false tendency with which they stand connected in the Oxford Episcopal school. The force of them has already begun to be felt indeed, in some measure, in other denominations. The different sections of orthodox Protestantism have not by any means now the same quiet confidence in their own position, as the ne plus ultra of church perfection, the unimprovable absolute of Christianity itself, which they had only ten or fifteen years ago. It is coming to be felt that the present posture of things cannot be rested in, as permanent and ultimate, and along with this is waking the desire for something better. Single voices are heard here and there, from the bosom of the evangelical church, calling for a true union among all who belong to the household of faith, in spirit, soul, and body, and find a lively echo in many a breast. It is to me a source of great satisfaction and encouragement to find among these the man with whom I am called to labor as a colleague in the same institution; with whom altogether, notwithstanding the entirely independent and widely separate spheres of our previous history—God be praised—that | have been enabled, to my own no small surprise, so fully to sym-

The Principle of Protestantism pathize in the most weighty points from the first moment of our acquaintance. * True, appearances are not such at present as to encourage the idea that a general union will soon take place. The differences which prevail in doctrine, government, and worship, and the abstract view too generally taken of the relation of Christianity to the world, stand hopelessly in the way. Rather, division threatens to go still further, as the question of slavery—to say nothing of other difficulties—is fastening itself with resistless force upon the heart of the church. Episcopal Methodism is already rent by it into two great sections, which are not likely soon to be reconciled. Other denominations, it is to be feared, will be gradually involved in similar division. At this very time there are strong indications that the great Presbyterian body, of both schools, will very soon find it necessary to meet the question in its whole length and breadth; and already the most serious apprehensions are entertained of a new ecclesiastical rupture on its account.

In the Protestant Episcopal Church, on other grounds, as all know, there is still less show of peace. The mournful scandal of the Onderdonk trial' has brought the quarrel between the Puseyite and evangelical parties to its climax. The Puseyites are now in desperate plight, not only by reason of the moral wreck of their principal leader in the view of the public, but still more as they are drawn into collision with their own principles; since they declare the sentence of suspension which has taken place to be unjust, though passed by a decided majority of their own bishops, those anointed and inviolable bearers of the apostolical succession, wronging thus in heart at least the duty of canonical obedience. The appeal of Seabury™ to the example of Fénelon'™

(s7 parva licet componere magnis), who himself read in his church the * [A very long note occurs here in the German work, containing a special reference to the translator's sermon Catholic Unity, preached at the opening of the Convention of the Reformed Dutch and German Reformed Churches,

Harrisburg, Aug. 8, 1844, with a series of extracts exhibiting its principal thoughts. For various reasons it has been considered best to attach the whole sermon to the present publication in the way of an appendix, to which of course it is enough at this place to refer. The original note closes with a notice also of the last chapter in particular of the second edition of The Anxious

Bench, as unfolding the same general views.—TRANSLATOR]99

Philip Schaff Zo papal bull directed against his own person, is here of no avail. For Fenelon submitted himself truly to the judgment of the church; acknowledged the faults charged upon his work Explication des

Maximes des Saintes; forbade the reading of it in his diocese; and burned all the copies of it he could reach, in a court belonging to his archiepiscopal palace, with his own hand. This the Puseyites could not easily be brought to do in the case of their "Tracts for the Times"; and in the present instance they even proclaim the suspended Onderdonk openly to be their bishop still; so that even that outward subjection to the decision of the court of bishops, for which Seabury takes credit to himself in his noted sermon, amounts at last to nothing. Whether they will now go over in mass to Rome, or form a church of their own, remains to be seen.

At all events the matter has gone so far that they must either bend or break.

Still all these storms that gather on the horizon will but serve fully to purify the atmosphere. The disease must pass through its last crisis before it can be thoroughly cured. The growth of division will cause the longing after Christian union to break forth at last with irrepressible force. The mighty advances of the Romish Church, stalking forward through the motley crowd of our sects, in proud confidence of victory, as a single man, though in very questionable alliance with the most rank political demagogism, must in the end compel the Protestants to take another position in order that they may save themselves. The conflict is waxing more earnest every day. Who would have thought twenty years ago that popery was ever to acquire importance in the land of freedom?* Now according to the Metropolitan Catholic Al- * {I remember very well that when the venerable Dr. Alexander of Princeton, less than twenty years ago, solemnly warned the students under his care of the danger that was to be expected from this quarter, exhorting us to prepare for the conflict with Rome as the great controversy of the American church, his words to most were very much like empty wind. And yet how prophetical they have proved to be already! What a change in fact have not the last five years only produced in the posture of Romanism in this country relative to both church and state? The numerical increase of the body is no proper measure of its actual gain. By far the largest amount of progress is in the form of preparation for action that is expected to tell with wide effect hereafter. It is actually startling to find in what broad, comprehensive, and far-reaching style, the policy of the system is revealing itself on all sides; and

The Principle of Protestantism manac for the year 1845, it embraces in the United States: a population of 800,000 souls; 21 episcopal dioceses with one apostolical vicarship; 675 churches, 709 priests; 28 male and 63 female seminaries; 94 orphan houses and other benevolent institutions; a multitude of convents and religious associations—as Jesuits, Redemptorists,

Lazarists, Augustinians, Dominicans, Eudists, the Society of the Precious Blood, the Brethren of St. Joseph; also,

Sisters of Charity, Carmelitesses, Nuns of the Visitation of Mary, Nuns of Loretto, Dominican Nuns, Ladies of the Good Shepherd,

Sisters of Notre Dame, Sisters of Providence, Ursuline Nuns, Ladies of the Most Sacred Heart, etc. There appear among us, besides, ten weekly and three monthly Roman Catholic periodicals; to which must be added now the quarterly of Brownson,'" a man of much reading and ready pen, whose accession to the Roman

Church has recently been hailed with no small triumph. Romanism directs its eye mainly toward the West, well knowing that this must hereafter give law to the whole land. "Give us the West," says one of its bishops, "and we will soon take care of the East."

For the final issue of the conflict, we have no fear, since the Lord of hosts reigns supreme. Let all human work fall to pieces, that the work of God may have the more free scope. In the end all must advance the glory of his name and the welfare of his children. We will not be dismayed then at the gathering conflict.

We will carry on the sacred war in word and in life, keeping always in view the honor of God and the interest of the church, forwith how much quiet, unaffected confidence, it is pursuing a course that looks confessedly to nothing less than the spiritual conquest of the whole land.

Within a very short time, the Catholic press has gained immensely in point of respectability and power; and there is reason to believe that the literary weight of the system will be made to press upon us, in the course of the next ten years, in a way of which few have begun to dream. Most assuredly the American church has need now to consider well the danger that is fast gathering upon her in this direction. But alas, how few seem to understand what the times require or to be prepared for the emergency which is at hand. How few show themselves qualified to go to the ground of the controversy and to deal with it in its principles. Here precisely is our greatest danger. For one who has only begun to comprehend something of the force of the ideas that are involved in the conflict, and who can feel at all the nature of the historical crisis to which we have come, it is truly alarming to consider the style in which the championship of Protestantism among us is too generally conducted.— TRANSLATOR]

Philip Schaff

getting not our own faults in our zeal against those of others; not with the rough weapons of the flesh in the way of wild fanaticism, but with the weapons of the Spirit—the sword of God's word, the breastplate of faith, and the helmet of hope. Let it be a war of extermination against all error and division, but a conflict of prayer at the same time and love toward the souls of the blinded enemies of the church, to win them if possible to eternal life.

Then shall we be soldiers in the sense of Paul, worthy followers of this spiritual hero. Then shall we too at last be adorned with the crown of righteousness, which the glorified apostle has long since received from the Judge, who holds life and death, heaven and hell, in his almighty hand.

As members of a particular division of the Church of Christ, we must be true to the patrimony of our fathers, conscientiously turn to profit the pound entrusted to our care, and advance with free, genuine historical progress as the wants of the time may require. To forsake the church communion in which we have been born naturally and spiritually, without urgent reason, is base perfidy. Let us labor then within our own denomination and for it, as knowing that God has given us here our own special commission to fulfill. We will manifest, in this very way, our church feeling and regard for history. Only, let all be subordinated to the interest of the general kingdom of God. If we have any right idea of the church as the communion of the redeemed transcending all limits of time and space, we shall feel that we cannot extend our view too far. We may not exclude the Romanists themselves. Let them go on to treat us as lost heretics; we must still return good for evil. We believe confidently that even for this church, which once thrust out our fathers with terrible ban from its bosom, the Lord has still great things in store. Why should we despair of another reformation as impossible in the case of its vast and powerful communion? This is wished and hoped for, by many even of its own best members.* * [Who can say what vast results may not yet proceed from the agitation, which is going forward in the German Roman Catholic Church? at this very time, in connection with the case of priest Ronge, and the stirring example set by the congregation at Schneidemihl? All accounts concur in representing the excitement to be immense and not likely soon to subside. The idea of a

The Principle of Protestantism Protestantism cannot be consummated without Catholicism; not in the way of falling back to the past, but as coming into reconciliation with it finally in a higher position, in which all past errors shall be left behind whether Protestant or Catholic, and the truth of both tendencies be actualized, as the power of one and the same life, in the full revelation of the kingdom of God.

The consummation of both will be at the same time their union.

Ttmistwritteny ohne 026. Theresshall@hevonc fold and one shepherd''—a word that can be accomplished in its full and absolute sense only when all confessional antagonisms shall come to an end.

It is an interesting and beautiful thought (to be felt indeed only by those who have some sense for the philosophy of church history) by which the three most conspicuous apostles—Peter,

Paul, and John—are made to stand as the representatives in character of three great stages of development, through which the church is to be carried to its final consummation. We meet the separation from the headship of Rome, with a general retention at the same time of the Catholic system, is taking hold of many minds, in every direction, with extraordinary power. Steps indeed have begun to be taken, it would seem, toward the organization of churches on this plan in a number of the most prominent places—Berlin, Leipzig, Breslau, Dresden, Elberfeld, etc. If only the Catholic Church in Germany might be severed from Rome, what vast bearings the event must have, at the present crisis, on the history of Christianity! Still, the whole movement as yet needs to be regarded and spoken of with caution. We know too little of its moral constitution, its secret principles and reigning spirit, to speak of it with much confidence. Let us hope that we shall soon be permitted to look upon it through the medium of a proper critical review on the part of the evangelical press in Germany itself. It is certainly very precipitate, to say the least, for our religious papers, on the authority of the notoriously rationalistic correspondence of the New York Schnellpost, to glorify Johannes Ronge at once as a second Huss or Luther. His second letter furnishes painful evidence that he stands in the element of a widely different spirit. To say nothing of the air of self-reliance which runs through the whole article, what must we think of the Christianity of a man, who can say, "Humanity is the Church of God, and in it rules the Spirit; to this church I am sworn'? Is not this the very cant of rationalism itself? The whole movement however is deeply interesting, in this view at least, that it serves to show the force with which the spirit of the age, even in the Church of Rome itself, is struggling toward a new order of life. In such a case it is not strange that much should seem dark and chaotic. But the Spirit of God, we may trust, is moving on the face of the deep.— TRANSLATOR]

Philip Schaff ral idea even among some of the old theologians, particularly with the prophetic monk Joachim of Fiore' in the twelfth century.*

Among the moderns, H. Steffens (Four Norwegians) and H. E.

Schmieder (Introduction to the Holy Scriptures) again bring it into view. Very recently, however, it has been clothed with new poetically scientific interest by the greatest living philosopher, who in the evening of his days has again come forth like the sun from behind the clouds, and is now pouring the last splendid rays of his genius from Berlin, over the philosophical horizon of Germany. Schelling closes his Philosophy of Revelation, promised in vain for twenty years past as the complement and crown of the negative system published in his youth, with a section on the great periods of the church. So far as I can recollect from his lectures, this is the amount of his view. The Lord chose three favorite disciples, who are to be regarded as types at the same time of as many stages of development for the church. Peter, the apostle of the Father, the New Testament Moses, or the representative of the principle of authority and law, answers in his personality and form of doctrine to the first stage of church history, the period of Catholicism, flowing over in the end to popery itself. Paul, the apostle of the Son, the New Testament Elias, the representative of the principle of movement and of the free justifying power of faith, is the type of Protestantism. Both stages, separately taken, are one-sided and incomplete. The principles of authority and freedom, law and gospel, hope and faith, must at last become united. The Roman Catholic Church, it is true, has like Peter denied her Lord by a threefold gradation in the way of apostasy; but she will one day yet go out and weep bitterly. 'Then will the Lord turn toward her with a look of compassion, and restore her again to confidence and trust. This will be, at the same time, the epoch of the final reconciliation of both communions. So united, they will form the ideal church, whose type is exhibited to us in the disciple that lay on Jesus' bosom, the apostle of the Holy

Spirit, the apostle of that love which shall never fail, the law of freedom made perfect and complete in the gospel. 'To him corresponds, under the old economy, John the Baptist, in whose

* Compare on him, Neander's Kirchengeschichte, Band V, Abth.

1, pp.

291 ff.

The Principle of Protestantism person the rigor of the law and consolation of prophecy are united. As he immediately preceded the first appearance of Christ, like the dawn of morning, so also the revivification of the spirit of John the evangelist, in the church, will open the way directly for his second coming, to establish the church absolute and tr1umphant, in which law and freedom shall both be perfect in one and the results of all previous development appear conserved as the constituent elements of a higher and more glorious state. 'To this refers the mystical sense of Christ's word (John 21:22), where he speaks enigmatically of John's tarrying till his second coming.

Such is an outline of this prophetical speculation of Schelling.

We mean not of course to endorse it as correct, though it is certainly ingenious and beautiful. But putting out of view all that may seem to be simply fancy, it still turns at least upon a great and most consoling truth as regards the church, to which, though in quite different form, the faith and hope of thousands upon thousands of Christians have been directed.*

May the nineteenth century, by a magnificent union, consummate the ever memorable Reformation of the sixteenth! May the New World, enwombing the life spirit of almost every nation of the Old, prove the birth soil of this new era for the church! As the distractions of Protestantism have been most painfully experienced here, so here also may the glorious work of bringing all the scattered members of Christ's Body into true catholic union be carried forward with the greatest zeal and soonest crowned with the great festival of reconciliation, transmitting its blessings in grateful love to the world we honor and love as our general fatherland.

* The reader is referred to substantially the same thought, presented by the celebrated church historian, Neander, at the close of the third edition of his

History of the Planting of the Christian Church.

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