5. The True Standpoint: Protestant Catholicism or His-

5. The True Standpoint: Protestant Catholicism or His-

a4 The Principle of Protestantism 2. The Prospective Aspect of the Reformation; or the Protestant Principles ts )Positive: EOL Ces. ar mir sane an a nn) The Material Principle of the Reformation, 80

The Formal Principle of the Reformation, 97 PART TWO The Principle of Protestantism in Its Relation to the Later Development and Present State of the Protestant Church, 125

3, 'Lhe Diseases' of Protestantism'

*.) "=

0. eco Rationalism: or One-sided Theoretic Subjectivism, 130 Sectarism: or One-sided Practical Subjectivism, 140

4. Puseyism, the Reaction to These Diseases, but Not Their Remedy: y

sq.

Ga eh ee

Introduction: John W. Nevin THE work, of which a translation is here presented to the English public, has grown out of the author's Inaugural Address, delivered at Reading on the 25th of October, 1844, and still retains to some extent its original form. Only a part of the Address, however, as previously prepared was spoken at that time; and it has been since considerably changed and enlarged in the way of preparation for the press. It is now accordingly more like a book than a pamphlet. If this may be supposed to require any apology, it is found in the difficulty and importance of the subject and in the anxiety of the writer to have his views with regard to it fully understood, from the first, by the Church which has called him into her service. Both the difficulties and perils of the subject indeed were felt to be greater in the progress of the work than had been anticipated at the start; and hence it became necessary that the investigation, only to do justice to itself, should be extended in the same proportion.

It is trusted that the circumstances which have led to the publication will exonerate the author, in the view of all reasonable persons, from the charge of any improper presumption in venra|

The Principle of Protestantism turing so soon before the American public with the discussion of so momentous a theme. He has himself felt sensibly the delicacy of his position in this respect; and would have been glad in the end to have kept back the work entirely, if circumstances had permitted, until he might have become more fully acquainted with the relations of the church in this country, that so no room might have been left for the semblance of impropriety even in his making them the subject of public remark. But the case has been one which he had no power, properly speaking, to control.

His inauguration made it necessary that he should deliver an address; and he felt it to be due to the solemnity of the occasion that he should select a theme of central interest, belonging to the life of the age, and suited to reveal his own general position with regard to the church. The theme, as already mentioned, has controlled the character of the discussion. The publication of the whole in its present form has been in obedience simply to the law by which in the nature of the case every such address is required to appear also in print. The work besides has been prepared primarily and immediately for the use of the German Reformed Church in this country, and with an eye mainly upon the German community in general. As now translated, moreover, it is still a work intended directly of course for the German Church so far as this has become English; though it is expected that it will command in this form a still wider interest. In any view, however, the responsibility of the translation belongs not to the author.

In the circumstances described, it is not strange certainly that the work should be pervaded with a true transatlantic German tone from beginning to end. I have endeavored indeed to make the translation run smooth and free in English, so far as the mere language is concerned. But the method and argument and thought will be found to a great extent invincibly German still. How could it in fact be otherwise? The writer's entire nature and constitution are German.

His whole Entwickelung' besides has proceeded from the first in the element of German thought and feeling, under the active power of a thoroughly German education, up to the moment, when without all previous expectation on his own part, he found himself as by a divine voice constrained to quit

Philip Schaff

Berlin for Mercersburg. In such a case, who would expect him to appear here in any different character? He is entitled to indulgence at least, as not yet having had time to become fully AmeriCall:

But we may go further and say that no such renunciation of the German order of thinking, if it were even possible in such a case, would be either desirable or proper. He had no reason certainly to anticipate that, in coming to this country, he would be required to divest himself of his old life and become absolutely reconstructed, as a preliminary condition to all right activity in his new sphere. And the Church never intended certainly to insist on any such conditions. Why call a professor from Germany, if all that is German in the man is to be left behind, or as soon as possible forgotten? Is he to receive all from those to whom he comes and bring to them nothing of his own? Must he denationalize himself, lay aside his own nationality as barbarous and false; and not rather seek to make it available, as far as it may have value, for the improvement of the new life which has received him into its bosom? These questions it might seem hardly necessary to ask. And yet it is possible that some may be disposed after all to find fault with the present work as too German; just as if in the circumstances it either could have been, or should have been, in the fullest sense ""Native American.''*

* The case of Professor Schaff has been somewhat singular. No man could well be more thoroughly German in his whole constitution and character. Perhaps no one has ever come into the country with more zeal for the consecration and advancement of all properly German interests as such. And yet, strange to tell, no foreigner has ever before encountered among us, within the same time, such a tide of reproach from his own countrymen, on the charge of being untrue to the honor of his nation. Within three months from the time of his arrival upon our shores, a perfect whirlwind of excitement may be said to have been raised against him among the foreign German population, from one end of the land to the other; which has only of late begun to subside, in the way of sheer self-exhaustion; for even whirlwinds, if they are let alone, must in the end blow themselves to rest. The occasion of the uproar was a sermon preached by Professor Schaff,? in connection with his ordination at Elberfeld, in Prussia, just before he came to America; with reference particularly to the moral desolations of the field in which he was called to labor. In the nature of the case, the dark side of the subject was brought into view, especially as constituted by the character to some extent of the emigration itself from Germany to America; including, as it was known to do,

The Principle of Protestantism Some indeed seem to have the idea that whatever is characteristically German must be theologically bad. Especially the philosophy of Germany is regarded as almost universally either infidel or absurd, and incapable altogether of being turned to any serviceable account in connection with religion. Now I would be sorry to appear as the apologist of either German philosophy or German theology as a whole.! Few probably have been exercised with more solemn fears than myself, in this very direction. One thing however is most certain. 'The zeal affected by a large class of persons in this country against German thinking is not according to knowledge. A judgment which is based, in any such case, on the assumption that there is nothing defective or one-sided in the in connection with much good, a large portion also of very different material.

Various classes in particular were described, who might be said to have left their country for their country's good, carrying with them to the new world dispositions and tendencies unfriendly to all right order in the state and all true religion in the church. The sermon was afterward translated and published in this country. In this form, it fell under the eye of some, who immediately set themselves at work to turn it to mischief. A single paragraph was retranslated into German, and sent thus to circulate through the political

German prints of the land, without the least regard to its original connections, with such inflammatory comments as malignant passion was pleased to invent.

Various communications appeared at different points, intended to rouse, if possible, general indignation. 'The author of the sermon, it was said, had slandered and vilified the whole German emigration; betrayed his country; sold himself to the service of the Native American party; and deserved properly to be tarred and feathered, or drummed out of the land, as not worthy to enjoy its free air. The German mind is vastly excitable, and not particularly noted for its moderation when under excitement. It was soon thrown accordingly into a perfect tempest of commotion, through the whole length and breadth of the United States. The name of Dr. Schaff was at once made famous in every direction. Within the course of a few weeks, as many perhaps as thirty different papers were poured in upon him, to let him know how heartily he was hated and cursed. Indignation meetings were held at a number of places at which valorous speeches, and still more valorous resolutions, were exploded in vindication of the German honor. All this on the part of a vast body of people, not one of whom probably had ever seen the original sermon of Professor Schaff, as published in Krummacher's Palmblaetter; not one in a thousand of whom probably had ever seen the translation of it, as published in the Weekly Messenger*; and of whose whole number, not one of a hundred perhaps could say when, where, or how the offense had occurred, with which they were called to be so terribly displeased. In fact, however, the movement is to be referred to a much deeper ground. The whole occasion has served, beyond any previous development, to reveal the true character of the foreign German population in our country. This is reckoned to be now more

Philip Schaff

system of thought and life out of which it has itself sprung; especially if it proceed from such as show palpably that they have never been able to transcend that system in its traditional form at a single point, and who may be possibly altogether ignorant besides even of the language which includes the foreign mind they presume to charge with folly—a judgment so circumstanced, I say

—can never be entitled to much respect. It is an immense mistake to assume that the Anglo-American order of religious life is all right and the German life in the same respect all wrong.

Both forms of existence include qualities of the highest value, with corresponding defects and false tendencies. What is needed is a judicious union of both, in which the true and good on either than a million, perhaps a million and a half strong, and is rapidly increasing every year. Beyond all doubt, it includes a large amount of virtuous and excellent character. At the same time, it has been equally certain all along that elements of an infidel, disorganizing order, have been comprehended in it to a serious extent. But no demonstration has before occurred so well suited as the one now in view, to set the matter in its true light, and to awaken apprehension in the direction here noticed. Because it has been abundantly evident to all who have been in a situation to understand the case, that the uproar which it has been contrived to create against Professor Schaff is attributable properly not to an honest zeal for the credit of the German name as such, but to a secret hostility to the religious views and principles of which he is considered a distinguished representative. At the bottom of the whole movement is to be traced distinctly the spirit of political libertinism and intolerant rationalistic fanaticism, answering too truly to a part of the sketch presented in the Elberfeld sermon, and lending it light and confirmation beyond all that could have been anticipated in the same form previously. The active part taken in the business by certain rationalist ministers serves only of course to establish this charge. The papers which have been making a noise in the case reveal their irreligious character in general with very little disguise, and the same thing may be said of the proceedings of the indignation meetings.

In some instances the displays of rationalism have been carried to the point of downright blasphemy. One sheet in New York has shown itself particularly vile and abominable in this way. Altogether the movement has been carried forward in the most low and ribald style. It has however served one important purpose in the case of Professor Schaff, besides revealing more than had been revealed before of the spirit of this section of our foreign population. It has shown clearly in how little sympathy he stands with the rationalism and radicalism with which we are so unfortunately invaded from abroad. From no quarter has he been so immediately and violently repelled, as with an instinctive consciousness of irreconcilable opposition. 'This in the circumstances must be counted a high advantage—one of the greatest recommendations, in fact, under which a learned German divine could make his appearance in our country.

a2 The Principle of Protestantism side shall find its proper supplement in the true and good of the other, and one-sided extremes stand mutually corrected and reciprocally restrained. Realism and idealism, practice and theory, are both, separately taken, unsound and untrue.

Their truth holds, can hold, only in their union.

We are a practical people preeminently and are entitled to great credit on this account. But it is in vain to expect that in this character simply we shall be able to do our duty to the world or to the Church of Christ. All great epochs in the world's development, after all, owe their presence primarily to theory and speculation. Our religious life and practice can be sound and strong only in connection with a living, vigorous theology. But to be thus living and vigorous, our theology must be more than traditional. It must keep pace with the onward course of human thought, subduing it always with renewed victory to its own power. Not by ignoring the power of error, or fulminating upon it blind ecclesiastical anathemas, can theology be saved from death; but only by meeting and overcoming it in the strength of the Lord. Now this requires, in our day, a legitimate regard in this form to the errors of Germany in particular. For it is preposterous to suppose that in the most speculative portion of the whole Christian world these errors stand in no connection with the general movement of the world's mind, or that they do not need to be surmounted by a fresh advance on the part of truth, as being only the dead repetition of previously vanquished falsehood.

In immediate contact with the evil, the friends of religion in Germany itself know the case to be different. There it is felt that theology must advance so as fairly to conquer or die. We may not feel the pressure of the same necessity. But this is no evidence that we stand on higher or surer ground. In the end our theology, to be worth anything as a science, must be carried over this limitation. It may not devolve on us possibly to achieve the work for ourselves. We may trust rather that this precisely is the special commission of the church in Germany itself, the land of Luther and the glorious Reformation. Certainly at this very time the struggle with error may be regarded as most auspicious and full of promise. And if there be one country in the whole compass of the church, where at this moment orthodox theology is not

Philip Schaff

dead, but full of life and spirit and power, that country is Germany. We may hope then it will be found sufficient for its own work. This however when accomplished must be viewed as a work properly for the whole Christian world; and we owe it to ourselves at least, to be willing to take advantage of it in its progress, and to employ it for the improvement of our own position, if it can be so used.

This much I have thought it proper to say on this point, merely to counteract, if possible, the poor prejudice that some may feel toward the present work, simply because of its German source and German complexion; as if all must needs be either rationalistic or transcendental, that breathes a thought in common with Hegel, or owns a feeling in sympathy with the gifted, noble

Schleiermacher.

But after all, the work stands in no special need of apology in this direction. It is more likely to be met with distrust, in certain quarters, under a different view. It may seem to occupy suspicious ground with regard to the church question. With the argument for Protestantism, in the first part, in its positive, separate character, even the most rigid in their zeal for this interest can hardly fail to be generally satisfied. But some may not like the relations in which it is made to stand, nor the consequences it is made to involve. And then they are still less likely of course to be pleased with the formal development of these consequences in the part that follows. They may think that too much is surrendered in the controversy with Oxford and Rome. They may not be willing to endure that the nakedness of Protestantism, in its modern position, should be so freely exposed. It is always difficult in the case of earnest, violent controversy to have an eye for anything less than extremes. All must be right in one direction, and all must be wrong in the other; although in fact, no great controversy in the church is ever precisely of this character. So at this time, the excitement which prevails on the subject of popery and Puseyism, and for which undoubtedly there is good reason, must naturally render it hard for many to exercise any moderate judgment upon questions that lie in this direction. In such circumstances then particularly, there is some danger that this book may not escape censure in the view already mentioned.

The Principle of Protestantism This much however is certain at the same time. The work will not be regarded by Puseyites and papists as a plea in their favor.

Rather, if I am not much mistaken, it will be felt by them, so far as it may come under their observation, to be one of the most weighty and effective arguments they have yet been called to encounter in this country in opposition to their cause. For it is not to be disguised that a great deal of the war which is now carried on in this direction is as little adapted to make any impression on the enemy as a battery of popguns in continual fire.

Instead of being alarmed or troubled on its account, the enemy is no doubt pleased with it at heart. Nothing can be more vain than to imagine that a blind and indiscriminate warfare here can lead to any true and lasting advantage. Not with circumstances and accidents simply must the controversy grapple, but with principles in their inmost life, to reach any result. The present argument accordingly, in throwing itself back upon the true principle of Protestantism, with a full acknowledgment of the difficulties that surround it, while proper pains are taken to put them out of the way, may be said to occupy the only ground on which any effectual stand can be made against the claims of Rome.

To contend successfully with any error, it is all-important that we should understand properly and acknowledge fairly the truth in which it finds its life. The polemic, who assails such a system as popery or Puseyism with the assumption that its pretensions are built upon sheer wind, shows himself utterly unfit for his work and must necessarily betray more or less the cause he has undertaken to defend. All error of this sort involves truth, apprehended in a one-sided and extreme way, with the sacrifice of truth in the opposite direction. Hence a purely negative opposition to it, bent simply on the destruction of the system as a whole, must itself also become inevitably one-sided and false, and can only serve so far to justify and sustain what it labors to overthrow.

Romanism includes generally some vast truth in every one of its vast errors; and no one is prepared to make war upon the error, who has not felt, in his inmost soul, the authority of its imprisoned truth, and who is not concerned to rescue and save this, while the prison itself is torn to the ground.

In this view, no respect is due to an infidel or godless zeal,

Philip Schaff

when it may happen to be turned in this direction; and that must be counted always a spurious religious zeal, which can suffer itself to be drawn into communion with such an irreligious element simply because for the moment it has become excited against Rome. It is greatly to be feared that the spirit into which some are betrayed in this way is unhallowed and profane, even where they take to themselves the credit of the most active zeal for the glory of God. So with regard to Puseyism. Nothing can well be more shallow than the convenient imagination that the system is simply a religious monstrosity, engrafted on the body of the church from without, and calling only for a wholesale amputation to effect a cure. Such a supposition is contradicted, to every intelligent mind, by the history of the system itself. No new phase of religion could so spread and prevail as this has done, within so short a period of time, if it did not embody in itself, along with all its errors, the moving force of some mighty truth, whose rights needed to be asserted, and the want of which had come to be felt in the living consciousness of the church, vastly further than it was Clearly understood. If the evils against which the system protests were purely imaginary, it could never have acquired so solid a character itself, as it has done in fact. Most assuredly the case is one that calls for something more than a merely negative and destructive opposition. Only by acknowledging and honoring that which is true and good in the movement is it possible to come to any right issue with it so far as it is false. The truth which it includes must be reconciled with the truth it rejects, in a position more advanced than its own, before it can be said to be fairly overcome.

In this view, it is not saying too much to affirm that a large part of the controversy directed against it thus far has been of very little force. It has been too blind and undiscriminating, as one-sidedly false in its own direction at times, as the error it has opposed in the other. Our newspapers and reviews and pamphlets and books show too often that the question is only half understood by those who undertake to settle its merits. While they valiantly defend the citadel of Protestantism at one point, they leave it miserably exposed to the attacks of its enemies at another. With many it might seem to be the easiest thing in the

The Principle of Protestantism world to demolish the pretensions of this High Church system.

Its theory of the church is taken to be a sheer figment; its idea of the sacraments, a baseless absurdity; its reverence for forms, a senseless superstition. The possibility of going wrong in the opposite direction is not apprehended at all. Such a posture however, with regard to the subject, is itself prima facie evidence that those who occupy it are not competent to do justice to the case.

Some have told us that the controversy comes simply to this: whether we shall have a religion of forms or a religion of the spirit. They claim accordingly to be the friends of inward, living, practical piety, and charge upon the opposite tendency a secret disaffection to this great interest, as exalting the letter above the life, and substituting for the fact its mere sign. But the issue in this form is false. Religion is the union of soul and body, spirit and matter. To resolve it into naked forms is indeed to part with the substance for mere show; but it is just as vain to think of holding the substance, where forms are treated with contempt. The man who takes the issue in the way now stated shows himself to be disqualified for the controversy. Because it is not a question with him then simply as to the quality or quantity of forms, whence they shall come and how far they shall reach; but a question as to the right that forms have to be included in the idea of religion at all; in the case of which he shows clearly that his own conception of the true nature of religion is one-sided and false. He will be a spiritualist only, and not a formalist. Why not then become at once a Quaker? In its own nature, the issue is false. No such alternative as it supposes has any place in the idea of religion. It separates what God has joined together. Not soul or body, but soul and body, is the formula that represents humanity, as truly after its union with Christ as before. The issue is false, monstrously false; and the champion who takes ground upon it, is not fit to be entrusted with the interests of truth, in Opposition to Oxford or in any other direction.

Again we are told the controversy has for its object the question whether salvation be an individual concern or something that comes wholly by the church—the fruit of a private, separate transaction of the subject with God's word and Spirit, or the product of a more comprehensive, inexplicable force, residing in

Philip Schaff

the mystical body of Christ, and showing itself particularly in and through the sacraments. But here again the issue is false and those who plant themselves upon it only betray their own incompetency for intermeddling with the subject. Ecclesiasticism, as held by Rome and also by Oxford, is indeed a terrible error; but it does not follow that the mere negation of ecclesiasticism is the truth. The error itself includes a truth—a vast, great, precious, glorious truth—and if our negation annihilate this along with the error, it has become itself an error as false as the other. The position that religion is an individual interest, a strictly personal concern, a question between a man singly and his Maker, is one which it would be treason to the gospel to reject. He that believeth shall be saved; he that believeth not shall be damned. Every tree that beareth not good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire. Here is a vast, vital truth. But if it-be so held as to exclude the dependence of the individual spiritual life on the general life of the church, it becomes necessarily one-sided and false. Individualism without the church is as little to be trusted as ecclesiasticism without individual experience. Both separately taken are false, or the truth only in a one-sided way; and the falsehood, sooner or later, must make itself practically felt. The full truth is the union of the two. Every issue then which puts them apart must be counted an untrue issue; and as before said, the very fact that any man should make it, in contending with popery or Puseyism, proves him unfit for the task he has been pleased to assume.

So again when the controversy is made to lie between the liberty of private judgment and the authority of the church, the issue is equally false. And the matter is not mended at all, but only made worse, when the alternative is exhibited as holding between the Bible and the church.

It is indeed an abominable usurpation, when the church claims to be the source of truth for the single Christian separately from the Bible, or the absolutely infallible interpreter of the sense of the Bible itself, and so requires him to yield his judgment blindly to her authority and tradition. But it is a presumption equally abominable for a single individual to cast off all respect for church authority and church life, and pretend to draw his faith immediately from the

The Principle of Protestantism Bible, only and wholly through the narrow pipestem of his own private judgment. No one does so in fact.

Our most bald, abstract sects even, show themselves here as much under authority almost as papists themselves. Where shall we find a greater traditionist than the Scottish Seceder?® Who less free ordinarily in the exercise of what he calls his private judgment, upon the sense of scripture? His ecclesiastico-theological system, as handed down by his church, or fraction of a church, sways his interpretation at every point. Such a thing as an absolutely abstract private judgment we meet with in no denomination, party, or sect. But if we had it, what would it be worth?

Or so far as we find anything like an approximation to it, to what honor or confidence is it entitled? For at the last, what sort of comparison can there be between the naked judgment of a single individual and the general voice of the church? The argument from prescription here is one which no spiritually sane mind can despise. We employ it with overwhelming force against the antiTrinitarian, the antipedobaptist, the antisacramental Quaker, and the whole host of fanatical upstarts who modestly undertake to make the world believe that the City of God has been buried for eighteen centuries like Herculaneum and Pompeii, and is now to be dug out of the Scriptures for the first time by such as themselves. Even the theories of a learned man are deservedly borne down by the weight of this authority; clothed in such a form, for instance, as it carries in opposition to the fancy of Professor Bush,° when he tries to persuade us that the resurrection of believers takes place at their death. The private judgment of a Grotius, as such, is a small thing as compared with the judgment of the church.

But we are told, the issue is properly not between a Grotius or a George Fox and the church, but between the Bible and the church, evangelism and ecclesiasticism. As if the Bible could interpret itself, without the intervention of a human judgment, either public or private! There is gross sophistry in the alternative, as thus presented. In any true statement of the case, neither the judgment of the church nor that of the individual is to be exhibited as a professedly separate source of truth. Romanism and nationalism, in this view, fall here in opposite directions under

Philip Schaff

the same condemnation. The only fair alternative lies between the Bible as apprehended by the church, and the same Bible as apprehended by an individual, or by some party or sect to which he may happen to belong. Shall the church interpret the Bible for the single believer, or shall he interpret it for himself? The question comes at last to this. But the issue in such a form is false. Neither side of the alternative separately taken is true, and yet neither is absolutely untrue. The church may err; and every man is bound to exercise his own reason in things pertaining to his salvation. But still the church is the pillar and ground of the truth. The Bible lives and has power as God's word, only in and by the church, the Body of Christ.

It is most certain then that private judgment, extrinsical to all felt communion with the life of the church, as a continuation through all centuries of the life of Jesus Christ, is entitled to no confidence whatever. Private judgment, or if anyone please, the use of the Bible in this form, is a sacred right, to be parted with for no price by those whom the truth has made free; but it can hold only in the element of true church authority. In proportion precisely as the sense of that general life, which has constituted the unity of the church from the beginning, is found to be wanting in any individual; in proportion precisely as it is possible for him to abjure all respect for the organic whole, in virtue of which only he can have any life as a part; in proportion precisely as he is ruled by the feeling that the Bible is to be interpreted as a revelation just fallen from heaven, without any regard to the development of its contents, the stream of its living waters, as carried forward in the faith of Christendom from the beginning down to the present time—in the same proportion, I say, precisely— must such an individual, be his qualifications and resources in other respects what they may, be counted an unsafe expounder of God's word, either for himself or for others. The Bible mirrored from his mere private judgment, as thus sundered from all proper church consciousness, is likely to reveal but little of the mind of the Spirit. The issue then as made between the Bible and the church is false and sophistical; and the polemic who takes ground upon it as though it were of any real force, only shows himself again unequal to the wants of this great controversy.

The Principle of Protestantism The case requires a reconciliation of these unhappily divided interests, in such form that the truth which each includes may be saved in the union of both. This of course is not to be reached by yielding to Rome. The very nature of the papacy is that it sacrifices the rights of the individual wholly to the authority of the church, which so far at the same time becomes itself false and dead. Puseyism is but a return toward the same error. We need not this. But as little may we feel ourselves abidingly satisfied with the mere contrary. What is to be reached after, as the true normal form of the Christian life, is such an inward marriage of the two general tendencies, as shall be sufficient to make them one.

There is no reason at all why zeal for experimental godliness and zeal for the idea of the church should not go hand in hand together. The single case of Paul, to say nothing of Augustine and Anselm and Luther and many others that might be named, may furnish full proof to the contrary. Who more zealous for all that is comprehended in the personal piety and personal freedom of the single believer? And yet who more carried away and ruled continually by the idea of the church, as the Body of Christ, and the organic whole in which and by which alone all individual

Christian vitality must be upheld and carried forward to its proper perfection? This is the only form in which religion can deserve to be considered complete. This is to be regarded as the true consummation of the church, in which the life of the whole body and the life of all its parts may be expected to proceed harmoniously and vigorously together. 'Toward the full and final accomphshment of this glorious result, should be directed the prayers and efforts of all who love the prosperity of Zion or seek the salvation of the world.

Or will it be seriously pretended by any competent to discern the signs of the time that the state of the church at present involves no necessity for looking or reaching after any such new position?

Is all that is wanted for the great ends of the gospel, that is, for the actualization in full of the idea of the kingdom of God in the world, the simple annihilation of all the elements and tendencies embraced in the objective church system as such, and the undisputed supremacy of the opposite subjective interest, in the form in which it now prevails in the Protestant world? Can we say of

Philip Schaff

Protestantism that, as it now stands, it forms the true, complete, symmetrical, and ultimate state of Christianity; or that this requires at most, only that its existing tendencies should be carried out still further in the same direction? They must be dull of vision truly, who can impose upon themselves so far as this. Vast evils, and tendencies that must, if carried out, inevitably defeat the whole movement, are palpably incorporated at this time with its very constitution. These must be acknowledged and put away before it can be expected to prevail.

Taking the present state of Protestantism as ultimate and complete, we must despair of its being able to stand against its enemies. Our faith in its divine mission can be intelligent, only as we confidently trust that it will yet in due time surmount its own present position, and stand forth redeemed, and disenthralled from the evils that now oppress it, to complete the Reformation so auspiciously begun in the sixteenth century. The necessity of some such new order of things is coming to be more and more sensibly felt, and may we not trust that the way for it is fast being prepared—though to our narrow view, chaotically still and without light—in the everdeepening and extending agitation with which men's minds are beginning to be moved, as it might seem all the world over, in this direction. The feeling that we are on the eve of some vast religious revolution, by which a new epoch shall be constituted in the development of the history of the church as a whole, has taken strong possession of many of the first minds in Europe. And it is quite evident that in this country, too, a sentiment of the same general sort is steadily gaining ground.

Men feel that they have no right to be satisfied with the actual state of the church, and they are not satisfied with it in fact.

That there is reason in these circumstances for looking with apprehension toward popery, particularly in these United States, is not to be doubted. Both the author and the translator of the present work, participate in this apprehension, to a greater extent probably than most of those who may be ready to exclaim against it as treasonable to the Protestant interest. 'The danger however is of a much deeper kind than is often imagined. It lies principally in the fact that we have come to such a crisis in the history of religion as has just been mentioned; involving for the moment at

a2 The Principle of Protestantism least a reaction in the direction of Rome, and making it necessary for the Protestant interest to advance to a new position in order to save itself; while at the same time those who stand forth in its defense show themselves too generally ignorant of the true posture of the case, and not unfrequently by their blind misguided zeal only help on in fact the cause they oppose. Meantime Romanism, with an instinctive sense of the importance and critical opportunity of the time, is putting forth vast policy and immense effort for the purpose of securing the land. The system is growing rapidly. It is beginning to assume a bold and confident tone. All its works are on a large scale and all its enterprises are crowned with success. No religious body is advancing at the same rate.

Then it is a united, well-organized phalanx, from one end of the land to the other. Protestantism, alas, is a divided interest.

Most assuredly the danger that threatens us on the side of popery is real and great. But for this very reason it is not to be turned aside by superficial declamation, hard names, or blind opprobrious epithets; especially if with all this no corresponding zeal be shown to build up and clothe with strength the positive life of Protestantism itself. Still we will hope that the end of all these things is destined to be different from what might seem to be their tendency at this time. It belongs to the crisis of the age that, along with this new impulse imparted to popery in the way of life, the same system is itself made to tremble at other points with infirmities and disorders that threaten its very existence. All this is included in the chaotic struggle by which the way is to be opened for that new epoch which seems to be at hand; and which, it may be with good assurance expected, will be, not a retrogression of the church to papal bondage, but an advance by the grace of God to the true standpoint of Protestant Catholicism.

The present state of Protestantism is only interimistic. It can save itself only by passing beyond itself. In this country particularly, our sect system is an evil that may be said to prey upon the very vitals of the church. The evil itself however is but the index of a false element, incorporated with the life of Protestantism itself. The case then is not to be remedied by any merely external change. We are not called to a crusade against sects as they stand, as though by storming them to the ground we could do for

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Christianity all that is needed in this direction. Only as the sect principle can be reached and cured in the inward habit of the church, may any such revolution (in connection with the openings and orderings of God's providence) be expected to take place, as the existing crisis demands. Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord. We are not to run before God, nor to take his work rashly and violently into our own hands. All true redemption and salvation, in the case of the church, must come in the way of historical development, self-mediated under God, and in a certain sense self-produced. Still it may not be said that on this account we are at liberty to sit absolutely still, inwardly as well as outwardly, passively content with the present, in the midst of the onward flow of the counsels of the Almighty.

If our present position be unsound, it is right that we should feel it, and lay it solemnly to heart; that we may not cling to the old superstitiously, like the papists in the age of the Reformation, when the fullness of time is come for the new. 'Though we may not be able to see at once how our sect leprosy is to be healed, it must be a great evil still to justify it as something compatible with good health, or to acquiesce in it patiently as merely a necessary inconvenience. What is first of all and most of all needed in the circumstances, as a preliminary to the coming of a more glorious church epoch, is that the Protestant Christian mind generally should be brought to see more and more the actual wants of the time, and thus be engaged to sigh and reach after the deliverance, which in that case might be supposed to be at hand.

Some, I know, have no faith in this idea of church progress.

Rather they regard it as derogatory to the perfect character of the gospel, and false to the true unity of the Christian life. The subject is one of great importance, and very liable to be misapprehended; and as the light particularly in which it has lately been exhibited by Professor Bush in his Anastasis' or theory of the resurrection cannot be regarded perhaps as exactly the most fortunate, it seems proper to bestow upon it here some additional consideration.

The knowledge of revelation, Mr. Bush tells us, is progressive.

But the progress he seems to have in his mind, may be said to be more of an outward than inward sort. The knowledge of the

The Principle of Protestantism truth is expected to grow only by accretion, accumulating new material in an external, mechanical way. A certain number of truths are taken to be at hand for all, clear and complete from the beginning. But along with these are many dark things in the Bible, which come to be understood gradually by dint of study and helps of science, improved hermeneutical apparatus, and new external facilities and opportunities generally. The discoveries thus made are to be added from age to age to the knowledge previously collected, so that the quantity of it may be continually increased; and this is what we are to understand by the law of progress and gradual development in the sphere of religion.

Now it is certainly true that the case does include the conception of such enlargement simply from without, although it is clear that the form in which this conception is presented by Professor Bush is perilous as rationalism itself. For if all foreign science as such have a right to require that its discoveries, so far as they may seem to be related to religion, shall be allowed to assist in shaping its structure and making out the sum of its contents in a merely external, mechanical way, the independent life of Christianity may be considered gone at the same time.

But in opposition to this we say, with Schleiermacher, that Christianity is a new living creation in itself that can be enlarged properly speaking only from within, and not at all from without.

Not by mechanical accumulation or accretion can it be said to erow, but only in the way of organic development. These conceptions are entirely different, and it is of the first importance that the difference should be understood and felt in the present case. The outward gain that may be secured for the interpretation of the Bible, or that may be found in the actual results of such interpretation, can become important only as it is taken up by the inward life of Christianity itself, and is made subservient to its progress in this view.

Christianity, we say, is organic. This implies, in the nature of the case, development, evolution, progress. The law of its life moreover in this form includes its whole life. It is not as though the knowledge of some truths had been absolutely complete, and so stationary from the beginning, while the knowledge of other truths has been numerically added to it from time to time. But

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the whole, in all its parts, is comprehended more or less in the same law; since no truth can be absolutely complete separately from the rest, though the general process may require that some should be developed to a certain point at least, as it might seem, in advance of others. In this view Christianity has an inward history, vastly more important than that which is simply outward; and all its leading doctrines have a history, too, and cannot be understood, it may be added, apart from their history. The idea of such a development does not imply of course any change in the nature of Christianity itself. It implies just the contrary. It assumes that the system is complete in its own nature from the beginning, and that the whole of it too is comprehended in the life of the church, at all points of its history. But the contents of this life need to be unfolded, theoretically and practically, in the consciousness of the church. What it includes potentially and in principle or idea, requires to be actualized or made real in humanity as a new creation in Christ Jesus. All this is something very different from such a Fortbildung des Christenthums, as has been commended to us by the rationalist Ammon.

Christianity can never transcend itself. It can never become absolutely more than it has been from the beginning, in the person of Christ and in the truth of the gospel. It belongs to its very nature, however, that it should not remain in the person of Christ or the letter of the gospel, but pass over into the life of the church. This implies development. In its very constitution the church involves a process, which will be complete only when the "new heavens" shall reflect in full image the "new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness." And still all this will be nothing more than the full evolution of the life that was in Christ from the beginning, and the full power of which has been always present in the church, struggling through all ages toward this last glorious

"manifestation of the sons of God."

I am not able to see how any intelligent person, with a distinct understanding of what is meant in the case and any tolerable knowledge of history, can refuse to admit this view at least to some extent. Can any such person seriously imagine that the consciousness of the church at the beginning of the second century, in the days of Ignatius and Polycarp, included all that prop-

The Principle of Protestantism erly belonged to it in the century following, or all that it reveals in the sixteenth century through the persons of Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and the Reformers in general? Was the new spiritual creation in Christ Jesus exhibited from the start as a finished system, clearly bounded and defined at every point; or was it not rather the power of a divine life that was expected to subdue the surrounding elements to its own law, and organize itself continuously from within? No one surely can read the masterly church history of Neander,' without being compelled to yield his mind in some measure to the force of this idea; and for one who has at all entered into the spirit of the work, the impression is never likely to be erased. Without this idea indeed, church history may be said to be shorn of all its interest and meaning. It is no longer entitled to the name of history, and for all practical ends must be counted the most barren and useless of all studies; while in fact in its true form, it is a river of instruction—deep, broad and full

—conveying life to every other department of theology and religion. No man who rejects this idea entirely can penetrate the spirit of any of the early centuries, or do justice to the character of a single church father.

But has not the church in fact gone backward at times, instead of forward? Have not doctrines been obscured? Has not Christianity been vastly corrupted? And what shall we say of the law of progress, in view of such facts? Does the great Roman apostasy constitute part of the development of Christ's Body? Is the tenth century to be held in advance of the third?

To one who has any right sense of history, questions like these will not be particularly confounding. Assuredly those who hold the idea of historical progress, with any proper knowledge, do not conceive of it as a continuous movement, under the same form, in the same direction. They mean by it only a movement, whose general, ultimate tendency is forward and not backward; and which, though it may seem at times to be differently turned, is still found in the end steadily recovering and pursuing its original course; as a stream of water carried aside, or pressed back upon itself, by some obstruction, does but force for itself a more circuitous way, or only gather strength to burst or overflow the barrier, that so it may roll onward as before. Truth can be said

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to advance, only as error is surmounted and thrown to the pear, But this requires that the error should always, in the first place, make itself known and felt. A position in which the elements of a still latent error are included is of course less advanced than a position which has been gained by overcoming the same error after it has come to light; and as this can be reached only through the manifestation of the error, we may say that the intermediate stage itself in which such manifestation takes place, though it may seem to be a falling away as compared with the period before, is nevertheless also an onward movement in fact. In certain circumstances it may be absolutely necessary that false tendencies should work themselves out through a long, vast experiment of disastrous consequences, before they can be so brought home to the consciousness of the church in their root and principle, as to admit a radical cure. Whole centuries even may be comprehended in the circuit of such a process.

With this explanation then, we need not shrink from saying that the course of the church has always been onward, in periods of apostasy as well as at other times; onward in such sense that the position gained in surmounting such apostasy has never been just the same ground that was occupied before, but an actual advance upon it that could not have been made in any other way.

The proposition of course holds good, only of the proper central stream in which the one life of the church is organically comprehended and carried forward; without regard to separate, particular movements that may refuse to go along with this in its general course. In this view the Middle Ages form, properly speaking, no retrogression for Christianity. They are to be regarded rather as the womb in which was formed the life of the Reformation itself.

For it is perfectly unhistorical to imagine that this might have connected itself directly with the life of the fourth century, or third, or second, in the way of simple continuation in the same direction, and under the same form. Palpably the tendencies, which at last produced the papal system as a whole, were all in operation as early as the end of the second century. The Middle

Ages then as the resolution of the latent mystery of iniquity, in connection with the life of the church, stood nearer the redemption that followed, not only in time, but also in constitution, than

The Principle of Protestantism the period that went before. The tenth century, with all its darkness, must be considered in advance of the third.

And so too, according to the view presented in the present work, it is our privilege to believe that the course of Protestantism— comprehending since the Reformation the main, central stream of the history of the church—involves in the same way a true onward movement of Christianity; although manifestly it has included from the start certain false tendencies, which are working themselves out interimistically in great and sore evils. If it should prove inadequate in the end to rise superior to these, it must stand convicted of falsehood. Our faith is however that it will in due time surmount them, and thus throw to the rear the epoch of the sixteenth century itself, by taking a position in which the elements of such aberration shall no longer be found; which in such case must be regarded of course as the end toward which, through all seeming retrogression in the way of heresy and division, the church of the Reformation has been steadily tending from the beginning.

Such a view of church progress is certainly much more full of encouragement than any theory in which the idea is rejected. What a depressing imagination, if only it were properly laid to heart, is that by which the papacy is taken to have been for eight long centuries the grave of all true Christianity; and the honor of the Reformation is supposed to require that the whole life of the Middle Ages should be relinquished to Rome, as part and parcel of the great apostasy, instead of being claimed as the catholic heritage of the Reformation itself. If Protestantism be not derived by true and legitimate succession from the church life of the Middle

Ages, it will be found perfectly vain to think of connecting it genealogically with the life of the church at any earlier point. For if it might even be imagined possible to effect a junction—say with the fifth century, or the fourth, or the third—by means of the small sect of the Waldenses'' and other such "witnesses of the truth"

(than which no dream can well be more visionary), still, who that has the least true knowledge of history can feel that the Reformation was in fact the continuation simply of the life of the church as it stood in either of these centuries, secretly carried forward to the age of Luther in any such way?

Philip Schaff

The life of the church in the fifth, fourth, and third centuries, looks indeed toward the age of Luther; but not immediately or directly. It looks toward it only through the Middle Period that was to come between; the entire constitution of which it may be said to have carried in its womb. If the Reformation has indeed sprung directly from the life of the third century, it must have been something widely different from what we find it to have been in fact: a birth that could only have repeated, in its subsequent development, the general course of the Roman apostasy itself, as we may see exemplified to some extent in the tendencies of Puseyism as borrowed from this distant antiquity. That Protestantism in its true character has been something immeasurably better, is owing altogether to the fact that it did not spring in the way of direct historical continuation from the fourth century, or the third, or the second; but strictly and fully from the more advanced life of the Middle Ages, by means of which only the way was prepared for it to surmount, as it has done, the gigantic errors that have been left behind.

As regards too the present state of the church, there can be no comparison again between the two theories, that which admits and that which rejects the idea of progress, in the same general view. Only as we can believe that Protestantism is itself a process, which three hundred years have not yet conducted to its issue, and that its very diseases, monstrous as they may seem, are only helping it onward to a triumphant resolution of its appointed problem, does it appear possible to be intelligently satisfied with the present posture of the great experiment.

Thus much it has been thought proper to say on this subject of the progressive development of Christianity, as it is one which is very liable, in certain quarters, to be misunderstood and misrepresented. The difficulty which is made with regard to it comes partly from this, that no proper distinction is made between Christianity itself in its ideal character, and the same Christianity as actually apprehended and realized in the life of the church; and partly also from the fact that so far as some notion of such a distinction may prevail, the relation between the two is still contemplated as outward and mechanical, rather than inward and organic. In any true view of the case, however, Christianity must

The Principle of Protestantism be regarded as the only proper idea of humanity itself. It is not to be joined with its other modes of existence externally to make them complete, but it is to penetrate all modes of existence alike with its own life and take them up organically into its own constitution. Till this be done, humanity must remain imperfect, and the idea of Christianity cannot be said to be fully evolved in the world. And yet who will dare to say that the history of the church has not this evolution for its object, which however is only to say, in other words, that it is such a process as has now been represented.

In the case of the individual believer, something of the kind is generally admitted. His religion is expected to pervade his entire nature, not at once, but gradually and progressively, like leaven; till in the end the whole man, soul and body, shall appear transfused and transfigured with the power of it at every point. Here is a process, beginning at regeneration and ending in the resurrection; and yet at the last it cannot be said properly to include more than it has included from the first; only that which existed at first in principle merely, or potentially, in a state of involution, is fully actualized or evolved in the end in the perfect life of its subject. But such a process in the case of single Christians separately considered, can never fully represent the relation of Christianity to our nature. The life of man, in any view, is not something single and separate. To a great extent, it holds in the order and constitution of his nature as a whole. Humanity is not an aggregation merely of men, but an organic unity rather in which all men are one. And so Christianity also as the perfect conception of humanity, must take possession of it not by separate individuals simply, separately taken, but generically. It must penetrate and transform into its own image the life, the whole life of the race, as such; and not till this shall have been done, can it be said to have fulfilled its mission, or actualized its idea, or accomplished its full development in the consciousness of the world.

Thus we have in the church as a whole necessarily, the same progressive, leavenlike action of the Christian life, which we have just seen to hold in the history of the single believer. The kingdom of heaven here also is like leaven, not simply as diffusing it-

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self extensively through the world, but in a still more important sense as transfusing itself intensively into the life of humanity itself, as an organic whole. We do not yet see the life of humanity in this view thus transfigured—just as little as we see the single saint made perfect in holiness and glory. Science and art and government and social life are by no means yet taken up organically into the living constitution of the church. How then can it be imagined that the life of the church involves in its totality no process? And does it not lie clearly in the nature of the case that this process must actualize or evolve from the idea of Christianity, age after age, what was not apprehended in the consciousness of the church before, till it shall become complete finally in the new heavens and the new earth? Only indeed as it is comprehended in this general process, can the particular process by which the salvation of the single Christian is accomplished, from the new birth to the morning of the resurrection, be carried successfully forward. He is saved in the church—the mystical body of Christ

—and can become complete only as the whole is made complete of which he is a part. His resurrection accordingly, the last result of the organific power of his new nature, will be reached only in connection with the consummation of the life of the church as a whole, when, in the fullest and most glorious sense, old things shall have passed away and all things become new.

The great question of the age undoubtedly is that concerning the church. It is evidently drawing to itself all minds of the more earnest order, more and more, in all parts of the world. Where it comes to be apprehended in its true character, it can hardly fail to be of absorbing interest; nor is it possible perhaps for one who has become thus interested in it to dismiss it again from his thoughts. Its connections are found to reach in the end, through the entire range of the Christian life. Its issues are of the most momentous nature, and solemn as eternity itself. No question can be less of merely curious or speculative interest. It is in some respects just now of all practical questions decidedly the most practical. In these circumstances it calls for attention, earnest, and prayerful, and profound. At the same time the subject is clearly one of great difficulty and hazard, as we may see from the strange confusion and contradiction in which the controversy

DZ The Principle of Protestantism with regard to it has come already to be involved. A subject manifestly that is not to be disposed of in any way satisfactorily in such flippant wholesale style as with some might seem to be considered sufficient for the purpose.

Both the solemnity and difficulty of it have been deeply felt in the preparation of the present work. It is the fruit of painfully severe thought, baptized it is trusted in the element of prayer. Not without true spiritual conflict does it make its appearance in the world. And not without prayerful anxiety is its course followed, now that it is launched from the press, as the first fruit of the author's labors in this form, in the new hemisphere. Should the views it offers be disapproved in any direction, it is desired only that it may be in the same spirit of earnestness in which they are presented. If anyone can show them to be wrong, not by declamation or positive assertion, but with deeper and more thorough exposition of the question itself, it will be not only respectfully but thankfully received. For the theme is one that calls for light; and if the publication should only indirectly serve this end, by leading to the exhibition of some higher and better view, in which its own position shall be fairly and truly surmounted, it will be felt that it has not appeared in vain. The author however does deprecate all hasty and superficial judgment in which ignorance and presumption may prevail more than a heartfelt reverence for truth. Especially he protests solemnly beforehand against all false or partial statement of his views—an evil, to which from the nature of the subject and the posture of the times with regard to it, he cannot help feeling that he is particularly exposed.

JouHN WILLIAMSON NEVIN

Mercersburg, Pennsylvania March 4, 1845

Introduction: Philip Schaft

BRETHREN BELOVED AND HONORED IN THE Lorp:

Guarded and led by the almighty hand, which rules the winds and the waves, I find myself standing at length in your midst, on the threshold of my new sphere of labor. But little more than a year ago I had not the most distant idea of ever visiting the new world, while to you all my very existence was unknown. You had sent two worthy representatives of your church to the mother country to secure for your theological seminary a man, whose name simply, carrying with it such a charm as it does for the friends of the gospel on both sides of the Atlantic, was sufficient to clothe the institution with new importance and credit; for whose sake alone you were led to embark in so bold and weighty a movement. In the hands of Him who so often frustrates the prayers and plans of his people in one form, to establish them contrary to their shortsighted wisdom in another, this distinguished servant of God became the medium by which you were conducted to myself. In no turn of my life have I ever held myself more passive, than in this removal to America; in none, at the same time, have

I endeavored more conscientiously and steadily to surrender myself entirely to the guidance of the Lord.

The Principle of Protestantism Strong indeed was the temptation, I confess, to remain in the world-renowned metropolis of German science, where my academic career had just begun under favorable auspices, in the society of so many cultivated, profound, and noble minds, well-fitted to enlarge and invigorate my inexperienced powers, and under the fostering care of a pious and highly gifted monarch, who has rendered his name immortal also in the annals of your church, by the magnanimous interest he has shown in its welfare; there, along with the German Evangelical Church and theology, though only as one of the least in her service, to fall or conquer in the deadly war, that now rages with fire and sword in the spiritual life of the old world. But the voice of nature became dumb when the most competent judges in Germany, honored instructors and beloved friends, men long conspicuous in the religious history of the age, with strange unanimity joined in recommending me as one specially qualified for the vacant post at Mercersburg; and when your

Synod subsequently, after the most earnest and mature deliberation, saluted me, as from the mouth of a single man, with the solemn call: "Come over and help us!"

And thus I stand here today with the consoling consciousness, by which all darkness is made light, that in forsaking literary connections, country, kindred, and friends, as a missionary of science,

I have not pursued a road cast up by my own hands. How could I do otherwise than I have done? Israel's pillar of cloud and fire has gone before me, in clear unbroken vision, from the palaces of Berlin to the foot of the Blue Mountains; so that I almost tremble in view of the vast perspective that is made to open upon me through such foretokenings, and under an unfeigned sense of my own weakness am ready to ask misgivingly, of one greater than myself, "Who am I, Lord, that thou shouldst send me!"

Yes, I speak it plainly in your presence, when I consider the vast expectations that rest upon me, and the unmerited marks of honor which attended my reception on the 12th of August, before all service on my own part, I should be cast down utterly, were it not for the stay I find in God's encouraging word: "T will be with thy mouth, and will teach thee what thou shalt do. Fear thou not; for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God. I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee, I will uphold thee with the

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right hand of my righteousness. Behold, I give power to the faint, and increase strength to them that have no might. Even the youths shall faint, and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall; but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint."

Whether now I shall close my earthly career in the western world, or find myself called to the temporary service simply of scattering some germs that may be watered afterward and brought to perfection by more competent hands; then to return to my original home, enriched with such observation and experience touching the church, as are to be gathered from a land, mirroring like this her youthful infirmities and the fresh practical zeal of her first love, in one picture; this, I say, is a question that is not for me, nor for anyone else, at this time, to decide. God's thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are his ways our ways; and the man is to be counted happy, who by humble renunciation of his own counsels, and passive surrender of his course to the conduct of his heavenly Father, provides against painful disappointments; planting his feet on the firm ground of the actual present, and devoting his entire strength to its claims, free of all useless cares or empty dreams for the future. Now at least Iam here, to serve your church, and in and through this the Church Universal of Jesus Christ.

At present no field is before me save that to which I have been called in America, and I have no ear for any call besides, cheerfully resigned to any issue that may follow. "Whether we live, we live unto the Lord," it matters not where, in the old world or in the new; ''and whether we die, we die unto the Lord. Whether we live therefore or die, we are the Lord's."

In such frame of mind I proceed, according to ancient, venerable custom, before entering formally on my appointed work, to lay down in your presence, as representing here the German Reformed Church in this country, a sort of scientific religious confession, that may serve to explain distinctly the ground on which I expect to stand in your midst. I find myself at no loss, in these circumstances, in choosing my theme. On the practical relations of the service to which I am called, I have already spoken, in my ordination sermon, at another place. Here we have to do with its

The Principle of Protestantism theoretic side; in such method however as to hold in full view at the same time the connection of this with the other interest, and the end toward which it should continually reach in the life of the church.

I may say then comprehensively that the foundation on which I stand, since by the grace of God I have come to any clear consciousness of religion and theology, is no other than the orthodox

Protestant, or what in my view is the same, the Reformed Catholic faith; as it was preached loudly and powerfully by the Reformers of the sixteenth century, or rather by the Spirit of God in their persons, at once purifying the church from the springs of its primitive life, and raising it besides into a new and higher form. Upon this ancient, venerable rock accordingly, against whose front so many hostile waves have already been broken, I propose to build, with divine help, in my present vocation; making due account at the same time of the past history of our church as a medium of instruction, and having constant respect also to the special wants of our own country and our own age.

Allow me then to speak of the Principle of Protestantism, and its relation to the present posture of the church, particularly in the United States.

PART ONE The Principle of Protestantism in Its Original Relation to the Roman Catholic Church To BE TRUE to its own idea, a reformation must hold its course midway, or through the deep rather, between two extremes. In opposition on the one side to revolution, or the radical and violent overthrow of an existing system, it must attach itself organically to what is already at hand, and grow forth thus from the trunk of history, in regular living union with its previous development. In opposition to simple restoration, on the other side, or a mere repetition of the old, it must produce from the womb of this the birth of something new.

Christianity was such a reformation, not simply of Judaism, but of humanity as a whole. With what gentle and loving accommodation the Savior and his apostles applied themselves to meet the general wants of the human heart, and those particularly of their own time! Toward the institutions of the old dispensation, disfigured though they were with arbitrary human additions, and toward its official ministers also, however poorly for the most part their personal character comported with their office, they exhibited all becoming respect. No iconoclastic zeal distinguished their steps; no revolutionary whirlwind gave token of their Di

The Principle of Protestantism presence. Christ must fulfill all righteousness himself, and charged his hearers to observe and do what was commanded by those who sat in Moses' seat.

Paul, as he informs us himself, became to the Jew a Jew, to the Gentile a Gentile, and in one word all things to all men, that he might if possible gain all to Christ. John was ready to allow the gift of prophecy to Caiaphas in his character of high priest; and found no difficulty in admitting that the everlasting light of the divine Logos had shined in darkness through all ages, eradually preparing the way for its personal manifestation. And yet the watchword both of himself and his fellow apostles, openly and broadly proclaimed upon their common banner, was the Lord's declaration: "Behold, I make all things new!" And what was the result of their mission? In the end these humble, unlettered fishermen of Galilee caused both the Jewish and pagan systems to fall to the ground together, and turned the history of the world into a different channel altogether.

The same twofold character belongs to the vast ecclesiasticoreligious movement of the sixteenth century. This, too, carries upon its standard the sacred field motto:

"I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill!" And thus neither the unhistorical radical on the one hand, nor the motionless slave of the past on the other, can find in the true representatives of the Reformation either precedent or pattern.

The case requires to be surveyed under both aspects, in order that the principle of our church may be fully comprehended, and its position turned to right account for the purposes of God's kingdom.

ul be The Retrospective Aspect of the Reformation; or Its Catholic Union with the Previous History of the Church IN THE FIRST PLACE, we contemplate the Reformation in its strictly historical conditions, its catholic union with the past. This is a vastly important point, which thousands in our day appear to overlook entirely. They see in the 31st of October, 1517, it is true, the birthday of the Evangelical Church, and find her certificate of baptism in the ninety-five theses of Luther; but at the same time cast a deep stain upon the legitimacy of this birth itself, by separating it from all right relation to the time that went before.

In this way all interest is renounced in the spiritual wealth of the Middle Ages, which however belongs to us of right as fully at least as it does to the Church of Rome. And what is worse still, the lie is given practically to the Lord's promise itself: "Lo,

I am with you always, even unto the end of the world."

No work so vast as the Reformation could be the product of a single man or a single day. When Luther uttered the bold word which called it into being, the sound was at once echoed back again, as in obedience to an enchanter's wand, not only from every quarter of Germany, but from England also, and France and Italy and Spain. He gave utterance to what was already darkly present to the general consciousness of his age, and brought out

The Principle of Protestantism into full view that which thousands before him, and in his own time, had already been struggling in various ways to reach.

Genuine Protestantism is no such sudden growth, springing up like a mushroom of the night, as the papist, and certain narrowminded Ultra-Protestants, would fain have us believe.

Its roots reach back to the day of Pentecost. In all periods of the church, in connection with the gradual progress of Romish corruption, it has had its witnesses, though not always fully conscious of their own vocation. And it was only when it had become fully prepared, in all parts of the Christian world, both negatively and positively, to stand forth in full separate, objective manifestation, that the Lord of the church in the end, from an obscure corner of Germany, called into life the herald, whose word was to solve the oppressive riddle with which all Christendom had been so long burdened—the spiritual Columbus, that should open the way into the territory, still unknown though long at hand, of evangelical freedom.

As the several departments of human life are bound together by an inward organic union, like the members of the same body; while religion in particular, which takes hold upon the entire man, in the inmost ground of his personality, must exert a modifying influence in every other direction; the case requires that we should take account of the tendencies which led the way to the Reformation in the spheres of politics and science, as well as in that of the church strictly taken.

As regards the first, it is clear that both Romanism and Protestantism rest constitutionally upon a national basis.

Christianity, in its eternal and everlasting character, is raised indeed above every distinction of nation or race. It is a religion for the whole world. Still, on its first publication, it found on all sides a given historical development, a settled system of society, already at hand. This, of course, it did not seek to demolish and reconstruct, but simply to transfuse with the power of its own divine life. In this way it became possible for the old order of existence to break into view again, with all its characteristic faults and virtues in the bosom of the church itself, reflecting the Christian religion under its own peculiar image.

Philip Schaff

Where previously the eagle of the war god spread forth his powerful talons, and the earnest, manly spirit of pagan Rome was enabled to organize and hold together, by the force of one gigantic and yet minutely specific system of law, the entire world lying submissive at her feet; there, now, a new empire appeared,

Rome restored in the church; built up in part by the same agencies as before, invigorated only by the presence of a higher principle; subduing the most barbarous nations, under the banner of the cross, and binding the most distant to a common center; but at the same time repeating the lightnings of the Capitol in the thunders of the Vatican, directed against every motion of freedom, and in its conflict with the world gradually taking up all the elements of the world's corruption into its own constitution.

In both cases we meet essentially the same features of character: immovable resolution, iron constancy, a restless grasping after universal dominion, and confidence of perpetual stability; but in connection with all this, an artful, cunning policy, disguised beneath a show of urbanity, the Jesuitic maxim of the end sanctifying the means, and a heartless disregard to both national and individual rights, in the midst of vast pretensions to liberality and broad-hearted pliant toleration. The papacy is a Christian wniversal monarchy, erected on the popular spirit of ancient Rome.

And as it is necessary that authority should go before independence, the general before the particular and single; which implies that barbarous tribes require the force of a heavy disciplinary institute, in the first instance, to bring them to a full, free knowledge of themselves; no unprejudiced historian will dispute the merits of the Romish system, as eminently fitted for this service.

Nay, in view of such countries as Italy, Spain, and Ireland, which have not yet outgrown their political minority, must we not allow a relative necessity for it, even in our own day?

Protestantism springs, as all know, from the German life, which may be considered constitutionally its proper womb and cradle; as we find prophetically indicated by many voices of the Middle

Period even, like that of Mechtildis,! with her remansurum pauperem et afflictum coetum in Germania, qui pie ac pure

The Principle of Protestantism Deum colat.* It was not a matter of mere chance therefore, or something indifferent in its nature, that the father of the Reformation, surpassing all his followers both at home and abroad, should have borne upon him the impress of this particular nationality, in its purest, most perfect form; and that his German translation of the Bible became the recruiting call to so many thousands, to rally around the standard of the new, or rather, renovated faith.

In Luther all the essential traits of the German nationality are found collected as it were into a single focus: indomitable energy, earnest childlike integrity and simplicity, unaffected humility, and a predominant tendency toward the world of thought and feeling; to which must be added, it is true, a blunt carriage, running not unfrequently into downright rudeness, and a certain undervaluation of the outward costume of life, not to be approved in any case. Such a nationality is fitted constitutionally for a deep, inward apprehension of the Christian system; while the Roman and Romanist spirit, as naturally, was led to embrace it prevailingly in more outward way, as a body of mere rules and statutes.

Those forms of character which have distinguished the German nature from the beginning, its love and truth, its geniality and depth, should be regarded as a prophetical preparation for Christianity. They were so, more emphatically even than the penitential discipline of the Hindus, or the earnest idealistic longings of the Platonic philosophy; the latter, as is well known, served the purpose of a bridge, to conduct so many of the early fathers to Christ.

These two opposite orders of life, which might have seemed to be forever disjoined by inward, ineradicable, mutual hatred, no less than by the heaven-climbing mountains of snow that separated them outwardly, found the middle wall of partition between them broken down notwithstanding by the power of Christianity, as the religion of the world. But now in proportion as the German

*"Only the inwardness of the German nation," says Hegel (Philosophie der Geschichte, Works, Ist ed., Vol. IX, p. 417), "was the soil of the Reformation; only from such simple, straightforward character, could the great work proceed. While other nations were wholly taken up with worldly dominion, conquests and discoveries, a plain monk toiled after perfection in his spirit and brought it to pass."

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tribes, under the motherly supervision of Rome, began to wake to self-consciousness, the old struggle of Arminius? also, which may be said to have foreshadowed the disruption of the papal yoke by Christian Germany, was gradually renewed.

The entire Middle Period is full of the conflicts of the imperial power in Germany with the papal authority at Rome.

German blood was poured out like water on the battlegrounds of Italy. As far back as the time of the Hohenstaufen, a sect in Swabia declared the pope a heretic; and it was long a popular tradition in Germany that Frederick II would one day return, or an eagle spring from his blood, to overthrow the Romish Church.

The conflict grew always more violent and fierce in proportion as the papacy surrendered itself more and more to the Machiavellian policy of employing mere worldly influences for the accomplishment of its ends, and laid itself-out, under cover of the church, to advance the private interests simply of the popes and their courtiers, directing the sword of St. Peter against every liberal movement that came in their way.

Such foul prostitution of things sacred and divine to mere secular ends, carried to the most shameless climax at last in the traffic in indulgences as conducted by Tetzel, together with such hierarchal despotism intolerant of all right and all freedom, could not fail to shock the moral earnestness of the German spirit in the most serious manner. How could it be otherwise in the case of a people, that in its purest representatives has ever subordinated national, political, simply egoistic interests to the world-embracing claims of the spirit, as embodied in the church; and that in the sixteenth century, in particular, when almost every other nation either remained altogether in communion with Rome or stood forth simply on general Protestant ground, chose to be torn in pieces of its own children, and to see its fields laid waste and its fair territory divided, rather than to give up eternal truth for a political advantage, the momentous issue which divided the two

Confessions, to save the unity of the nation.

The long-cherished opposition just mentioned passed over toward the close of the Middle Ages into the most distinguished popular productions of the German national literature, particularly in its epic, dramatic, and satiristic forms. It is sufficient to

The Principle of Protestantism remind those who are acquainted with the subject, of the Eulenspiegel, the German version of Reineke Fuchs, and the Fastnachtspiele of Hans Rosenblut. All these compositions served to bring continually nearer to the consciousness of the people, the faults of the time, and especially the corruption of the clergy and the pernicious consequences of transalpine influence. In the end the tendency of the popular national literature found its most eloquent expounders, simultaneously with the appearance of Luther, in the persons of Ulrich von Hutten* and the celebrated Hans

Sachs.* But with all the importance of this political and literary opposition to Italy, it is by no means sufficient of itself to explain the Reformation. To suppose this would be superficial in the extreme; as is shown at once by the fact that a large part of Germany still continues, though in a more inward and free way than other nations, to do homage to the see of Rome. It would have been a calamity rather if the political tendency had drawn the direction of the Reformation into its own hands. Luther found no pleasure in the later enterprises of Hutten and Sickingen®; taking the eround against them, that the church was not to be revived by means of outward, carnal weapons, but only by means of the divine word from which it had its life in the beginning. The war of the peasants, which rose like a dark column of smoke in connection with the pure fiame of the Reformation, was repudiated by him as a miserable caricature of his work; and just as little respect did he show for the Anabaptists and their wild dreams of liberty and equality.

The way of the Reformation was prepared in like manner in the smaller circle of the learned by the revival of the sciences; and it is a circumstance accordingly not to be overlooked that the representatives of the movement, in particular Melanchthon, Calvin and Beza, surpassed in thorough humanistic culture, almost all their contemporaries. The emigration of learned Greeks to the West, which took place after the destruction of Constantinople, and the fruitful labors of Petrarch, had contributed to extend still more and more the study of the ancient languages; the darkness of ignorance and superstition was coming gradually to disperse; the spiritual horizon of the nations had begun to grow clear.

Philip Schaff

In Italy the ancient life, through living contemplation of the monuments of classic art, stood forth in fresh reproductions, revolutionizing on a large scale the entire literature, and indeed the whole order of thinking. Almost all the philosophical systems of Greece and Rome were honored again with living adherents and advocates. Platonism once more, as in the first ages of the church, excited a longing for something higher and better than all that was offered by the present. We see this particularly in Marsiglio

Ficino,? who may be taken as the representative of a widely extended feeling, and who especially in his latter years—a sort of Christian Plutarch—endeavored to reconcile the culture of the age with Christianity.

The knowledge of the Hebrew and Greek languages, promoted with untiring zeal by Reuchlin and Erasmus, furnished the key to the understanding of the Old and New Testaments, and enabled the Reformers (indispensable for the purpose) to translate them into the vernacular tongues, and so to open the way for them into the life of the people. It deserves notice particularly that the two first editions of the Greek New Testament, that of Erasmus in the year 1516 and that of the Complutensian Polyglot in the year 1520, appeared simultaneously with the commencement of the Reformation; and under protection too of the papal authority, which dreamed not yet of the powerful assault that was to be made upon it soon from this book. The edition of Erasmus was repeated in a short time, over and over again, and thus by means of the art of printing, not long before discovered, found its way into thousands of hands.

It shows strikingly how very general the feeling of opposition to the superstition and immorality of the clergy had become, that this same small, cowardly and cautious Erasmus was enabled to occupy so successfully, as he did, the apparently bold and perilous position in which he stood. No one attacked the vices of the clergy so sharply with the same cutting wit and inexhaustible humor.

His hatred for the monks seemed to be constitutional. He made it his great business to draw theological study off from the reigning scholastic method and back to the fathers of the church and the New Testament, and to this last, not as exhibited in the Vulgate, which he was bold enough to convict of an immense mass of

The Principle of Protestantism errors, but as found in the original text. And still this man stood in the most honorable correspondence with the leading men of his time. Presents and marks of respect were showered upon him from all sides. Wreaths of fame adorned his person. His presence was courted, with special invitation, in all parts of the world. And his Encomium Moriae, the most severe of all his works against the clergy, passed during his lifetime through twenty-seven editions, and made its appearance in every cultivated language of the age.

But still these scientific and humanistic tendencies again, are not sufficient to account for the Reformation. Many, by the study of the ancient languages and philosophy, were led, in Italy particularly, into the most decided infidelity, which is worse of course than superstition itself. Erasmus himself, it is known, drew back in his latter years always more and more from the work of the Reformation. We cannot pronounce him void of all regard for evangelical truth; but altogether his influence was mainly of the negative sort, and was just as likely, but for the intervention of the Reformation in its true form, to have called forth a false and perilous action, in the freethinking, liberalistic style, as it was to serve the cause in question. ""He knew well," as Luther tells us, who saw through him completely, "how to expose errors, but not how to teach the truth."' Indeed if science and art could have produced the Reformation, Leo X, in whom they found so zealous a patron, must have been one of the best reformers. The learning and cultivation of the age were primarily of the nature of a mere instrument, which, as it came to be associated either with piety or with the spirit of the world, might be made subservient to exactly opposite ends.

Leaving behind now the outer court of politics, popular literature and profane science, as thus far surveyed, we approach nearer to the proper sanctuary of the Reformation, and fix our attention on the movements by which its way was prepared in the sphere of theology and the church. Here however we must distinguish carefully between simply negative action, so directed against error as to make war upon the truth more or less at the same time, and that of a positive character, springing from the life of the church itself.

The first we find exemplified, in general, by the sects of the Albigenses, the Beghards and Beguines, the Bogomiles, and Catha-

Philip Schaff

rists'; and by such men moreover as Arnold of Brescia,' Amalrich of Bena,® David of Dinanto," and others, who without any proper church feeling, and under the influence of hyperspiritualistic, and not unfrequently Manichean and pantheistic views, set themselves in Opposition to truth and error promiscuously. The Catholic

Church regarded all these properly as heretics, but employed carnal weapons, instead of the sword of the Spirit, to put them down and in this way rendered them only so much the more dangerous.

Of much greater account, of course, is the positive tendency of the theology and church of the Middle Ages toward the Reformation. Here we meet whole communities, and also single voices.

Among the first, a principal place belongs to the Waldenses, who accompany us, in spite of the fierce persecutions of the papacy, like a lamp in the night, from the middle of the twelfth century down to the time of Luther; and whose life of simplicity and strict virtue is still perpetuated indeed, even in our own time, amidst surrounding Romish superstition, in the valleys of Piedmont, near

Turin. They based their opposition to the reigning church upon the holy Scriptures, which many of their members knew almost entirely by heart; so that, in some instances, they were called in even by the Romish ecclesiastics themselves to assist them in their disputations with heretics.

Wickliffe in Oxford, and Huss in Prague, though apparently overwhelmed by the ruling hierarchy, had not labored in vain in contending against abuses and false doctrine, and in calling men's minds away from externals to inward godliness, and from human traditions to the word of God as the only fountain of true theology.

We find a large number of Wickliffites in England; and from the Hussites arose by degrees the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren, who made it their object to restore the simplicity, spirituality, and strict discipline of the apostolic age. 'They had already as many as two hundred churches and houses for prayer, in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

The Society of the Fratres communis vitae," instituted by Gerhard Groot, toward the close of the fourteenth century, also must not be forgotten. It proposed to preserve what was true and good in the conventual system of the age, without its excrescences. 'Thus for instance it allowed no monastic vows, but only free resolutions

The Principle of Protestantism in dependence on God's grace. From this association proceeded many distinguished men, with Thomas 4 Kempis at their head; who preached the word of God in the vernacular tongue; devoted themselves earnestly to the instruction of the young; insisted in a style very different from the Pharisaic formality of the times on deep, inward, practical piety; and in opposition to the prevalent dry learning of the schools, acknowledged no wisdom, but such as carried with it at the same time a sanctifying power.

Attention is due further to an association that rose in Italy and formed an interesting analogy of German Protestantism, though for reasons easily understood it fell far short of it in its development. An Oratory of Divine Love was established in the Church at St. Sylvester and Dorothea, across the Tiber at Rome, where in the time of Leo X as many as fifty or sixty distinguished men, including such names as Contarini, Sadolet, Giberto, Caraffa, and Lippomano," were accustomed to meet statedly for mutual rel1gious edification. 'These men, some of whom afterward struck into a very different path when they came to be adorned with the cardinal's cap, had come to the very threshold of the evangelical doctrine of justification!

Contarini composed a treatise on the subject, which led Pole to say, in writing to him: "You have brought into the light a precious jewel, which was before half concealed in the keeping of the church." Another member of this association, M. A. Flaminio, writes in his letter to Theodorina Sauli: "The gospel is nothing else than the glad tidings, that the only-begotten Son of God, clothed in our flesh, has rendered satisfaction to the righteousness of the eternal Father on our account. He who believes this enters into the kingdom of God, finds universal forgiveness, is changed from a carnal to a spiritual nature, from a child of wrath to a child of grace, and leads a life of sweet peace in his conscience."'*

But among all the movements and connections in which a reformatory element may be discovered to have been at work before the time of Luther, none is more worthy of being noticed than

* For more on the subject of this interesting tendency, the influence of which extended even to the gay, pleasure-seeking Naples, the reader is referred to Leop. von Ranke's Die roemischen Paepste im 16ten und 17ten Jahrhundert

(2d ed.), Vol. I, p. 134.

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the interest of mysticism. Its influence was felt indeed by several of the associations to which we have already referred, particularly by the Brethren of the Common Life. But we find it besides running in various forms, with more full development, throughout the Middle Ages; and the influence of it, in this view, on Luther himself, is not to be mistaken. He was the affectionate disciple of John von Staupitz, in whom a profound, Augustinian, mystical tendency strongly prevailed; and he was the publisher and eulogist of the old treatise entitled The German Theology, which may be regarded as the flower of the ascetico-speculative spirit in this form.

The reformatory bearing of the mystical system appeared in this, that it drew attention away from mere externals, in which the idea of religion and the church had become well-nigh lost, to the exercises of the heart; and breaking through the barriers, which had been interposed between man and his Maker by the hierarchical framework of the papacy, and in defiance at the same time of the dialectics of the schools, threw itself directly into the stream of the divine life itself. In its view, religion was to be apprehended not as a system of forms, but as the inmost life of its subject. It thirsted after direct communion with God.

Mysticism however had no power of itself to produce a reformation. It is deficient in practical energy. Predominantly subjective in its nature, and resting too exclusively in mere feeling, it has no capacity to overcome the world. Its life proceeds accordingly in lonely retirement, without action, like the mysterious flower that unfolds its petals in the stillness of the night, but gathers them in again with shrinking sensitiveness as soon as they are touched by a hand.

Not less significant however than these collective tendencies, are the separate strivings toward the Reformation to be considered, which show themselves in particular individuals with growing frequency, in the course of the fifteenth century and with the opening of that which followed. These sprang partly from a practical religious interest, and partly from an interest in theology as a science, and in both forms wrought powerfully, in the way of controversy and in the way of quiet positive teaching, to prepare the way for the new era that was at hand.

The Principle of Protestantism The celebrated Councils of Constance and Basel, which had insisted on a reformation of the church in its head and members, though with their self-contradictory constitution they could not accomplish the work; and the deep-toned lamentations of Nicolas of Clamenge (de Clemangis)" Pierre d'Ailly," John of Gerson,* and others, over the reigning corruption, had served to disseminate a longing desire for a better state of religion through all sections of Europe. This feeling found its organs in such men as the Dominican Savonarola of San Marco in Florence, who preached with prophetic indignation, in the boldest style, not without a hurtful mixture indeed of political zeal, against the licentiousness that had come to abound in the church, and sealed his testimony with his blood in the year 1498. Such also were John von Wesel

(de Wesalia), professor of theology at Erfurth (d. 1482), John von Goch, a native of Cleves (d. 1475), and the Frieslander, John WesSele (dmi4so rn These all insisted more or less clearly on the Augustinian doctrine of grace, in opposition to the prevailing Jewish idea of righteousness by works and bondage to the law, and appealed to the * In the way of example I present a single passage from the most conspicuous of these, John of Gerson [Jean Charlier de Gerson], Chancellor of the University of Paris (d. 1429). "The apostle says indeed, Let every soul be subject to the higher powers. But this must be understood with the provision that such obedience shall not run into blasphemy against God Almighty, or dishonor to Christ and his gospel. Certainly however there can be no greater blasphemy against God Almighty than when our superiors without distinction expose the church to sale publicly as merchandise, and for gold deliver her like a strumpet into the hands of murderers, adulterers, malefactors of every sort; the church, which is the glorious bride, the elected virgin of Christ, that he has purchased of his mere mercy by his precious blood, his sufferings, his reproach, the accursed death of the cross itself. Judas sold Christ once for thirty pieces of silver; these sell him continually a hundred times over. In many cases they sell to one, and when they have the money take his purchase from him again, to offer it the next hour for more money to another. I conclude then that obedience to superiors ceases to be a duty, where their works are openly bad and a source of scandal to the whole church; where the shepherds are shearers; not sheep, but wolves; not sober, but drunken; not prelates that give their lives for the sheep, but Pilates that serve the lusts of others; casting forth their net, not to catch souls, but money."

(De reformatione ecclesiae in concilio universali, c. 24.) "The church of the present day is not apostolic, but apostate; not a place to stay in, but to flee from rather to the greatest distance." (Ibid., c. 25.)

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sacred Scriptures as the only sure ground and source of Christian doctrine. This was carried so far indeed in the case of John Wessel, who went beyond all others before the Reformation in his apprehension of the Protestant doctrine of justification, that Luther,

[although he undervalued his own merits], did not hesitate to say, "If I had read Wessel previously, my adversaries might have supposed that Luther had borrowed all from Wessel, so well do our views agree." In none of these men however was there found such a union of all the powers that are needed for a reformation, as was possessed by Luther and Calvin, for whom it was reserved accordingly to accomplish so great a work.

Enough has been said already to vindicate an absolute historical necessity to the Reformation, and to expose in its utter emptiness and nakedness the reproach, cast upon it by its enemies, as an uncalled for innovation. We go further, however, and affirm that the entire Catholic Church as such, so far as it might be considered the legitimate bearer of the Christian faith and life, pressed with inward necessary impulse toward Protestantism, just as Judaism— not in its character of Pharisaism and Sadduceeism indeed, but as a divinely appointed preparatory institute, and viewed in its true historical import—rolled with steady powerful stream, in its interior legal, symbolical and prophetical principle, directly toward

Christianity, as the fulfillment of the law, the prototype of all its symbols, and the accomplishment of all its prophecies. 'The Councils of Constance and Basel alone furnish proof that the call for a reformation had its ground, not simply in the sects, and in single individuals more or less estranged from the objective life of the church, but in the heart of the church itself, and in the persons of those who were most fully penetrated with its life. This affirmation, as well as the appeal to the case of Judaism, may require some additional illustration.

The Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, as already intimated, was a church of law and authority; well-fitted, by means of its vast disciplinary system, turning on a single living center and perfectly complete in all its parts, to exercise a wardship over the nations, still in their childhood, till such time as they might be ripe for a fuller appropriation of the evangelical principle, and the use of an independent, manly freedom. In saying this we do not question

We The Principle of Protestantism the presence of the gospel in the communion of the Roman Catholic Church, any more than we doubt the comfort of the promise that went hand in hand with the development of the Old Testament law. Still, the predominant spirit, in both cases, was legal; as might easily be proved, in minute detail, if this were the proper place;* Now it belongs always to the nature of the law to excite in man a feeling that reaches beyond itself and refuses to be satisfied by its means, a feeling that craves reconciliation with the lawgiver and the full possession of that righteousness which he requires.

More definitely expressed, the law is a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ, who has fulfilled its requisitions in their largest extent and makes over to us the benefit of this obedience, as a free unmerited gift, by the power of his Spirit. Thus the Jewish dispensation looked always toward the gospel; and in like manner the discipline of the Roman Church involved an inward strugele that became satisfied at last only in the evangelical emancipation of Protestantism.

It is only from this point of view we come to understand fully the personal life of Luther, in which the genesis of our church itself is reflected with the most clear and graphic representation. It was no political, national, scientific, or theological interest even, that impelled him to his work. The immediate, original ground of it, is to be sought in the very center of the religious life of the Catholic Church itself, as it stood at the time. This church he was proud at one time to call his mother; and his separation from her visible head cost him a struggle, a self-immolation, of which, now that the great rupture is past, it is hard for us to form any clear

* This legal character of the Middle Ages was clearly perceived by many of the forerunners of the Reformation themselves. Specially worthy of notice in this respect is an uncommonly striking description of Cornelius Graphaeus, of Flanders (b. 1482), which is to be found in the classic work of my much esteemed friend Ullmann, entitled Reformatoren vor der Reformation," Vol.

I, pp. 153 ff. All who wish to become acquainted with the forerunners of the Reformation in Germany and the Netherlands, may find all they need for the purpose in this thoroughly learned and well-written work presented in the most entertaining form. May the learned author soon add to the two volumes which have already appeared, a further continuation on what still remains of his general subject, at least so far as the philological and humanistic precursors of the Reformation are concerned.

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conception. The most faithful and conscientious of monks, he subjected himself intellectually to the logical discipline of the schools, and bore practically the prescribed penances and other legal burdens of the Catholic Church, as those of Judaism had been borne by Paul. To become righteous before God, to appear as a saint in his presence, was the object for which he wrestled without intermission.

But the longer he continued in this hard school, [the more he became aware] of his own weakness, and of his immeasurable distance from the ideal he was laboring to reach, and in the same proportion was brought to long for a redeemer from the body of such death, and the terrible conflict between the law in his members and the law of the Spirit; till in the end, like his great apostolical pattern, he beheld the Crucified in his spiritual glory, and by faith in him received at once, in all its fullness, as a free gift, all that he had been vainly endeavoring to secure by his own strength before. Of a truth, we may say, the pains endured in the mortification of the flesh and in legal wrestlings after righteousness with God, by the noblest spirits of the Middle Ages, the mystics in particular, with the anxiously religious Augustinian monk at their head, are to be regarded as the true birth pangs of our

Protestant Church.* As the result then of this whole representation, we reach the following [proposition which is vastly important and even indispensable for the vindication of Protestantism]: The Reformation is the legitimate offspring, the greatest act of the Catholic Church; and on this account of true catholic nature itself, in its genuine conception: whereas the Church of Rome, instead of following

* We may observe in Calvin also, and to a greater extent indeed than in Luther, the traces in every direction of the severe legal discipline, intellectual and practical, which the Catholic Church, in spite of all her corruptions, still continued to exercise at least over minds of the more serious order. It would be wholly beyond the capacity of our own age to produce such an amount of resolute, vigorous, large-proportioned character, as is presented to us in the Reformers. We have lost almost entirely the consciousness of the power of the law, as it is felt always in the earlier stages of life. Along with our scientific seminaries, we stand in great want of institutions expressly for the cultivation of character; and in this particular we might, and should, learn much from the Romish Church, the schools especially of the Jesuits.

The Principle of Protestantism the divine conduct of history has continued to stick in the old law of commandments, the garb of childhood, like the Jewish hierarchy in the time of Christ, and thus by its fixation as Romanism has parted with the character of catholicity in exchange for that of particularity.* * Compare, on the difference between Catholicism and Romanism, my articles in the Literar. Zeitung of Berlin, 1843, No. 87 and No. 100.

ale:

The Prospective Aspect of the Reformation, or the Protestant Principle in Its Positive Force WITH THIS PROPOSITION We have already touched upon the second essential constituent of the Reformation, according to which it is to be viewed as a historical advance on the part of the church; and in the closest connection with the pressure of previous, longaccumulating want, a new birth from the womb of its life in the old form. The subject however in this aspect, calls now for closer elucidation, in a direct way.

It must be remarked, in the first place, that when we speak of advance or progress here, we do so with reference only to the previous apprehension of Christianity in the church, and not to Christianity itself, as exhibited in its original and for all times absolutely normal character in the writings of the New 'Testament.

Our comparison of the relation of the Evangelical Church to the Roman Catholic, with the relation of Christianity to Judaism, must be taken therefore with a material limitation. Christianity stands related to Judaism, not simply as fulfillment to presentiment, enlargement to compression, substance to shadow; but is at the same time specifically a new creation. No expansion simply of the idea of the Old Testament, as such, was sufficient for its

The Principle of Protestantism production. This could take place only by the creative act of God, in his incarnation, his life, sufferings, death, and resurrection, as God and man in one person, and in the real and full communication of the Holy Spirit, which had irradiated the human consciousness before only in a transient and sporadic way.

Beyond Christianity itself however, as thus introduced into the world, there can be no similar advance. Our faith must be subverted in its very ground, if now that Christ has appeared, "the fullness of the Godhead bodily," and given his Spirit to the apostles to "'lead them into all truth," we should allow ourselves to expect, like the Jews, a still higher revelation. In its own nature, as a new order of life, Christianity has been complete from the beginning; and there is no room to conceive that any more perfect order can ever take its place, or that it may be so improved as in the end to outgrow entirely its own original sphere.

But notwithstanding this, we are authorized to speak of advance or progress in the case of the church itself, and on the part of the Christianized world; and of this not merely as extensive, in the spread of the gospel among pagans, [Muslims], and Jews; but as intensive also in the continually growing cultivation and improvement of those four great interests of the church: doctrine, life, constitution, and worship.

The church, not less than every one of its members, has its periods of infancy, youth, manhood, and old age. This involves no contradiction to the absolute character of Christianity; for the progress of the church, outward or inward, is never in the strict sense creative, but in the way only of reception, organic assimilation, and expansion. In other words, all historical development in the church, theoretical and practical, consists in an apprehenston always more and more profound of the life and doctrine of Christ and his apostles—an appropriation, more full and transforming always of their distinctive spirit, both as to its contents and its form.

Only so far as a doctrine or ordinance of the church bears this character, may it be allowed to have normative and enduring force. If it could be clearly shown, for instance, that the doctrines of the Trinity and the two natures in Christ, as dogmatically developed and symbolically established in Opposition to heretical

Philip Schaff

errors in the fourth and fifth centuries, are not contained so far as substance is concerned in the New Testament, but contradict it rather, their authority must fall before the culture of the age to make room for a different view in consonance with the Scriptures.

In this sense then the Reformation is an advance, not of Christianity itself, but of its tenure at least upon the consciousness of the Christian world. We may bring forward indeed many passages from the writings of Augustine, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, and other men occupying a position near to the Reformers, which seem to teach the cardinal doctrine of justification by grace; and it may be affirmed with truth that all real Christians from the beginning had lived upon this doctrine at bottom, unconsciously to themselves. But still their piety, in its general character, must be admitted to carry with it more or less of a legal complexion. Only in single, exalted moments of their existence at best, were they enabled to lay hold of the freedom, the assurance of salvation, and full triumphant faith, to which we have been raised by the Reformation. This merit at least belongs to the Reformers, that they have brought into clear consciousness what existed only darkly before in the soul, and have made that to be common property in the church which had belonged previously only to single and highly gifted individuals.

On the other hand, when we bring the soteriological ground principle of the Reformation into the light of the New Testament, particularly the letters of Paul, we find it ratified here with such clear and distinct enunciation that we are ready to wonder why the church should not have come to the knowledge of it a great while sooner. But to penetrate from the surface into the depth, from the shell to the kernel, is something far more difficult than it seems; a work belonging to God's chosen instruments, the architects of the world's history, the wakers of slumbering centuries.

The new vital principle of the Reformation, as compared with the form in which Christianity had been held previously, is not to be sought in the sphere of the objective, more theoretic doctrines, such for instance as the Trinity, the incarnation, or the relation of the divine and human natures in the person of Christ.

These it incorporated into itself rather, as they had been previ-

The Principle of Protestantism ously perfected by the great ecumenical councils, asserting and maintaining thus its catholic interest in the true spiritual acquisitions of the ancient church.

On the contrary, the sixteenth century was the classic period for the full exposition of the Christian soteriology, as standing in the subjective appropriation of the work of redemption. The reappearance of Unitarian and Arian errors at the time must be considered a mere accidental excrescence, such as we find attending every great historical occasion. The essential, fundamental doctrines of the Reformation then fall within a sphere, which had not previously been occupied by the decision of any general council, as in the case of the Trinity and the constitution of Christ's person, and where accordingly it was possible to advance new scriptural statements, without contradicting the true Catholic Church. The movement in this view was not an effort to overthrow and reconstruct the work of this church in the case of its great cardinal doctrines as already positively defined by the general councils, but to carry forward and complete that work rather by going on to define and settle what had not yet been made the subject of action, in the same positive style.

As little may we say that the Reformation stood essentially in an effort to subvert the papacy and hierarchy, although this 1s often affirmed. 'Those who regard it in this light do not consider that Luther had already uttered his positive life principle, before he thought of a breach with the pope; and that much later even Melanchthon, in subscribing the Articles of Smalcald, professed himself willing to accept the pope, as de jure humano head of the church. Such a principle besides would give no distinction between the Protestant Church and the Greek, or common sects even, which all agree in rejecting the primacy of Rome to the same extent. The great point was to eradicate popedom from the heart itself, which is too prone, away from all connection with Rome, to make an idol of mere human authority, in forms that may appear more plausible perhaps, but are often more intolerably tyrannic on this very account.

Still more prevalent is the view by which the essence of the Reformation is placed in the emancipation of the human mind subjectively considered, that is, in the triumphant assertion of

Philip Schaff

the liberty of faith and conscience, as well as of unlimited scientific inquiry. Rightly understood this, to be sure, has its truth; but as commonly represented, it is a sheer caricature of history. It is made to mean very often, for instance, a full liberation of the subject from every sort of restraint, the overthrow of all authority as such. But of such escape from discipline and rule, the Reformers had no thought. Their object was rather to bind man to the grace of God, and to lead his conscience captive to God's word.

In every view, the act of protesting is not the first and main constituent in the Reformation, but the result only of a positive affirmation going before. This last accordingly is the great point from which alone its true importance springs. Only in connection with such an original positive life principle, and as flowing from it, can deliverance from the papacy and the restitution of private judgment to its rights find any-right sense, any religious value. Apart from this connection, they fall over to the province of infidelity, with which the Reformation has nothing to do.

Such a positive religious principle now, is the doctrine of the exclusive authority of the sacred Scriptures as a rule of faith; and it is a very current idea, particularly in the Reformed Church, that this doctrine forms the proper center and root of Protestantism. But this also we cannot admit, although the Christian life of the Reformers was shaped from the beginning by the Scriptures. For this principle is formal only, and so secondary, presupposing the presence of a definite substance which it must include.

In order that the Scriptures may be taken as the exclusive source and measure of Christian truth, it is necessary that the faith in Christ of which they testify should be already at hand, that their contents should have been made to live in the heart by the power of the Holy Spirit accompanying the word and the church.

And so all turns upon the particular constitution of this faith.

The Socinians, Swedenborgians, later Unitarians, and other sects, made the same strenuous appeal to the Scriptures as their only authority, but they stood quite off from the true living eround of the Reformation notwithstanding, and gave accordingly a wholly different sense to the Bible in the most weighty points.

The Principle of Protestantism

THE MATERIAL PRINCIPLE OF THE REFORMATION

That we may come to the furthest source then, we must inquire after the material or life principle (principium essendt) of the Reformation. This, according to history, is no other than the great doctrine, which is presented by Paul especially as the entire sum of the gospel—the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through fatth. This doctrine was the fruit of Luther's earnest spiritual conflicts already noticed; and it formed the proper soul, the polar star and center of his life from the commencement of his reformatory career on to his last breath.* The Romish Church may be said to urge precisely her most earnest and pious members always toward this point; as we see in the case of the Jansenists, condemned indeed by the pope, and in our own day in such men as Sailer, Veith,

Gossner, Boos, and others."® For all earnest legal wrestling after righteousness and holiness leads naturally at last to the abandonment of every fleshly confidence, and a reliance on God's grace alone.

[By virtue of this doctrine, the Reformers first discovered the * Hence he says himself in the Articles of Smalcald, p. 305 (Edition of the Symb. Books by Hase): De hoc articulo cedere aut aliquid contra illum largiri aut permittere nemo piorum potest, etiamsi coelum et terra ac omnia corruant. Non enim est aliud nomen hominibus datum, per quod salvari possimus (inquit Petrus, Act. 4:12), et per vulnera ejus sanati sumus (Esaj. 53:5).

Et 7n hoc articulo sita sunt et consistunt omnia, quae contra Papam, diabolum, et universum mundum, in vita nostra docemus, testamur et agimus. Quare oportet nos de hac doctrina esse certos et minime dubitare, alioquin actum est prorsus, et Papa et diabolus et omnia adversa jus et victoriam contra nos obtinent. Comp. Form. Conc., p. 683, and Melanchthon, Locus de grat. et justif., where he says of the doctrine of justification: Hic locus continet summam evangelii. When the younger Bengel (Archiv fuer die Theol., Bd. 1., St. 2.,

S. 469) and the celebrated historian Planck (Worte des Friedens an die kath.

Kirche, 1809, pp. 47 £.) represent the whole controversy between the Protestants and Romanists on the doctrine of justification as of no vital account, a mere logomachy in fact, the thing finds its explanation in the dogmatic indifferentism of the age to which these men belonged. But it is incomprehensible how at the present time, when the difference of the Confessions has come to be more clearly felt again in a recurrence to its foundations, the latest Protestant expositor of the Catholic system, Koellner (in his otherwise very accurate and learned Symbolik der heil. apost. kath. roemischen Kirche, Preface, pxix), should affirm the same thing, and find on the contrary the main difference in the outward relations, constitution, and worship of the two churches.

Philip Schaff

scripture to be what they claimed it to be]; and Luther, it is known, employed this doctrine as a measure for the sacred canon itself, not allowing it to include as God's normative word anything that might carry an opposite sense. His harsh censures on certain portions of the established church canon, the Epistle of James, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Revelation to John, we do not of course defend, but reject them rather as one-sided and rash; [but we would recite them as facts for the position which we assign to the doctrine of justification by faith]. Pressed as he was by his

Romish adversaries, with whom James especially was always a favorite authority, Luther's unfavorable judgment of the books just named arose altogether from his not being able to find in them his cardinal truth, justification by faith only.*

It devolves upon us now to go into a somewhat closer examination of this material principle of the Reformation; and for this purpose it is necessary to direct our view first, in brief, to the opposite tenet of the Romish Church. The Christian salvation rests upon the primary truth that Jesus Christ, the absolute Godman, is the only Redeemer and Mediator between man as a sinner and his offended Maker. It is a long time, however, before man is brought to take up this doctrine in its full import into his consciousness, and to part radically with the Judaism that is in him from his birth. So we find it in the experience of the individual child of God at all times; and so it has been with the life of the church as a whole, from the beginning.

In the Church of Rome, we find the doctrine, according to the * From this it appears, with how much wrong, the modern negative criticism makes its appeal to Luther's example. He, standing in the element of God's unwritten word, and animated by the one all-regulating principle of justification, uttered his judgment against certain parts of the canon handed down by the church, because they seemed to him to be in conflict with that word, as the essence of the gospel itself. Luther's criticism in one word was the action of faith in the free grace of God in Christ against all human distortion of the truth. The modern criticism of a David Friedrich Strauss or Bruno Bauer?? however, in full reverse, starts from unbelief in this grace, and is aimed destructively against the positive ground of the gospel itself. (Comp. my articles on true and false criticism in the Literar. Zeitung of Berlin, 1843, No. 40 and No. 61.) Let anyone read Luther's judgment upon the Epistle of James continuously in Walch, Vol. XIV, pp. 148 f., and he will be fully satisfied of the truth of our representation.

The Principle of Protestantism Council of Trent, acknowledged objectively and in thesi, but always laid under restriction, as soon as it comes to a particular explanation of the way in which the atonement is carried over into the life of its subject, and made available for his salvation. In opposition, not only to Pelagianism, but to Semi-Pelagianism also

(which may be charged indeed upon the papal bull, "Unigenitus,"

A.D. 1711,71 and the whole practice of the church, but not on the Council of Trent), she teaches, it is true, that the grace of God, as gratia praeveniens, commences the work of conversion in man, by calling him to the salvation which is in Christ.*

In her view, however, the natural condition of man is not as with us, a state of positive corruption, but holds simply in the absence of supernatural endowments, as defectus justitiae originalis, on the one hand, and a mere debilitation of the natural powers of reason and freedom on the othery; and so the natural man is made to take part also in the work of his own conversion and justification. When the power toward good, which is still in him though debilitated by original sin, is again set free and invigorated in his gracious calling, he disposes himself, we are told, to the acquisition of justification; so that God's grace (gratia operans) and the human will (voluntas humana cooperans) work now in conjunction, the first in the way of illumination, and the other freely consenting and moving toward God.t

CAC ONGMIAILC SVL GO——OF

+S. VI, Decr. I, c. 1, and can. 4, 5, 7. Bellarmine consequently (Disputt., etc., de gratia primi hominis, I, 1) states the doctrine of his church correctly, when he says: Docent enim (catholici Doctores), per Adae peccatum totum hominem vere deteriorem esse factum, et tamen nec liberum arbitrium neque alia naturalia dona, sed solum supernaturalia perdidisse. And what he remarks, de gratia primi hom., c. 5., agrees with this fully: Quare non magis differt status hominis post lapsum Adae a statu ejusdem in puris naturalibus, quam differt spoliatus a nudo; neque deterior est humana natura, si culpam originalem detrahas, neque magis ignorantia et infirmitate laborat, quam esset et laboraret in puris naturalibus condita. Proinde corruptio naturae non ex alicujus doni naturalis carentia, neque ex alicujus malae qualitatis accessu, sed ex sola doni supernaturalis ob Adae peccatum amissione profluxit.

+ Conca Prd S. Vi, can. 4) Si quis dixerit, liberum hominis arbitrium a Deo motum et excitatum nihil cooperart assentiendo Deo excitanti, atque vocanti quo ad obtinendam justificationis gratiam se disponat ac praeparet, neque posse dissentire, si velit, sed veluti inanime quoddam nihil omnino agere, mereque passive se habere; anathema sit. In the 5th and 6th cap. of the same session, this is made the subject of further positive explication,

Philip Schaff

As the result of this twofold action justification in due time takes place, not suddenly however, but gradually, partly by faith, and partly by works of love. For justification here, agreeably to the etymology of the word indeed, but against both classical and biblical use, is taken to mean making righteous in the proper sense; whence it is made the same substantially with sanctification, and regarded as a property residing in the man personally, justitia inhaerens or infusa.* The objective ground of justification, according to the Council of Trent, is in every view the propitiatory death of Christ; but the apprehension of it is not by faith alone. This has justifying power only so far as it is the beginning of salvation, the root of justification, humanae salutis initium, fundamentum et radix omnis justificationis.+ Full justification, however, it cannot effect, if it were only for the reason that in the Romish view of it, differing from the evangelical, it is exhibited prevailingly as simple historical assent.t The grace becomes complete only by means of good works flowing from faith; and has different degrees accordingly answerable to the character and number of these works.$

*S. VI, cap. 7: Hanc dispositionem seu praeparationem justificatio ipsa consequitur, quae non est sola peccatorum remissio, sed et santificatio et renovatio interioris hominis per voluntariam susceptionem gratiae et donorum, unde homo ex injusto fit justus et ex inimico amicus, ut sit heres secundum spem vitae aeternae. Comp. can. 16.

7S. VI, cap. 8. Comp. can. 9, 11, and 12. In the 9th can. it is said: Si quis dixerit, sola fide impium justificari, ita ut intelligat nihil aliud requiri, quod ad justificationis gratiam consequendam cooperetur et nulla ex parte necesse esse eum suae voluntatis motu praeparari atque disponi; anathema sit.

+S. VI, cap. 6: credentes vera esse, quae divinitus revelata at promissa sunt.

Comp. Cat. Rom. I, 1, 1: [Sed quoniam in divinis literis multiplex est fidei significatio, hic] de ea fide loquimur, cujus vi omnino assentimur, iis, quae tradita sunt divinitus. Bellarmine, de justific., I, 4: Catholici fidem in intellectus sedem habere docent.

§ S. VI, cap. 10: Sic ergo justificati et amici Dei ac domestici facti, euntes de virtute in virtutem, renovantur, ut Apostolus inquit, de die in diem; h.e., mortificando membra carnis suae et exhibendo ea arma justitiae in sanctificationem, per observationem mandatorum Dei et ecclesiae, in ipsa justitia per

Christi gratiam accepta, cooperante fide, bonis operibus crescunt atque magis justificantur. Comp. can. 13, 14, and 24. In the last it is said: Si quis dixerit, justitiam acceptam non conservari atque etiam non augeri coram Deo per bona opera, sed opera ipsa fructus solummodo et signa esse justificationis adeptae, non autem ipsius augendae causam; anathema sit.

The Principle of Protestantism In this way a proper merit is held to belong to such works; a meritum de congruo, as they speak, to those which precede justification and a meritum de condigno to those which follow.*

Practically however this coordination simply of faith and works, as producing justification, cannot be preserved; but the chief weight must be given to the last; since they can be multiplied indefinitely, coming thus under the category of number and quantity, while faith is one act properly flowing over into a continuous state. The Romish Church accordingly has carried her estimate of human virtue so far that she not only holds a perfect fulfillment of the law to be possiblet; but in broad opposition to that scripture, When ye have done all, say, We are unprofitable servants, has to tell even of a surplus meritoriousness of good works, her so-called opera supererogationis, in which a man may do more than his duty, and raise himself to the character of a saint. Such supermeritorious works are deposited in the treasury or fund of the church, which has the right to disposeof the trust at pleasure, and may employ it to cover the sins of less advanced

Christians, or of souls even that have already passed into pureatory.t * Comp. the way in which this doctrine was carried out by the scholastics with the notices furnished in Koellner's Symbolik der heil. apost. kath. roemischen Kirche (Hamburg, 1844), pp. 325 ff.

Come, Wiel, S Wil, Cayo, IG.

+ The Conc. Tred. indeed does not utter itself clearly on this point (comp., however, S. VI, cap. 11, can. 18 and 32; S. XXI, de reform, c. 9); and it is remarkable that the Cat. Rom. has not a word on the subject. But the doctrine had already become complete with the scholastics, particularly Thomas Aquinas; and the Council informs us, $. XXV, decr. de indulg., that it was to be held agreeably to the authorities, and only the practical abuses of it to be put away. The Roman Catholic divines accordingly bring it forward without reserve. Comp. Bellarmine, de indulg., I, 2: Extat in Ecclesia thesaurus satisfactionum ex Christi passionibus infinitus, qui numquam exhauriri poterit—

Ad hunc thesaurum superfluentium satisfactionum pertinent etiam passiones b. Mariae virginis et omnium aliorum sanctorum, qui plus passi sunt, quam eorum peccata requirerent.—Cap. 14. Res autem certissima est et apud catholicos indubitata, indulgentiis juvari posse animas, quae in purgatorio poenas luunt. Theologians of more evangelical views in the Romish Church, such as Hirscher,"" regard indulgences, to be sure, as the regular continuation simply of the early penitential discipline, a remnant of the old church punishments.

But the whole practice of the church serves to confirm the other view.

Philip Schaff

Hence sprang the traffic in indulgences, the abomination that gave the first shock to the moral sensibilities of Luther. In this scandalous trade, that which forms the inmost sanctuary of man's life—the pardon of sin and holiness—was put to sale for the most paltry and outward of all interests, money. The profits thus made were applied to the building of St. Peter's Church, to gratify the ambition of the popes. But the completion of this dome, whose

Sistine chapel Michelangelo had decorated with the scene of the Last Judgment, might be said to have brought with it at the same time the last judgment for the Romish Church itself, thus fallen into the arms of the world.

Where full justification is thus made to depend on the fluctuating subjective ground of human works and merit, it is impossible, on the other side, for a Christian, however honest and humble, to attain to any certainty of his salvation; and all such assurance is expressly condemned accordingly by the Council of Trent, unless as it may be the product of a special revelation.*

Thus it happens very generally that the piety of precisely the most excellent and earnest members of this church carries with it a legal, fettered, anxious character, that never allows them to come to the full joy of faith, the glorious liberty of the children of God. The further the man advances, the more he sees and feels what is still wanting; while such as can be satisfied with themselves, only show the absence of all right judgment and feeling by this fact. Such self-righteousness no doubt is much more common in the Roman Catholic Church than rigid self-probation or self-knowledge.

The Tridentine view then of this most momentous dogma, in which all subjective Christianity is comprehended, is fairly chargeable with the following serious defects:

(1) a very superficial knowledge of human sinfulness, in affirming a dispositio, praeparatio and cooperatio, on the part of man, as necessarily preceding and making way for justification;

(2) a confounding of justificatio with sanctificatio in the conception of the central idea itself; (3) a most insufficient representation of the nature of faith; (4) an overvaluation of good works after conversion, invest- * Sess. VI, cap. 9 and 12, and can. 13-16.

The Principle of Protestantism ing the whole Christian life with a Pelagianistic complexion; and (5) an entire want of evangelical freedom and assurance.

Now in all these points, which are inseparably connected with the doctrine of justification itself, the Protestant system, both as Lutheran and orthodox Reformed, exhibits a greater depth of Christian consciousness, and an advance consequently upon the soteriology of the Middle Ages. The doctrine as it stands in this system presupposes necessarily a much more thorough knowledge of sin, the guilt of which is to be taken away by justification.

The natural state of man, or his original depravity, is viewed not simply as a debilitation of the moral powers, egestas naturalis, justitiae debitae nuditas, as 'Thomas Aquinas expresses it; but as a real corruption of these powers, of such sort, that before the introduction of a new life-giving principle into his person, so far as a justitia spiritualis is concerned on which all turns in the case, he is unable to produce from himself anything that is good. After the will has once made choice of evil, it is no longer free, no longer an undecided liberum arbitrium; but on the contrary, it is filled with the contents of evil, sold under its power, and thus an object of divine wrath.* The only disposition then which Protestantism can require, and in fact does require,t as a prerequisite to justification, is the consciousness of guilt awakened by the judicial function of the law—that 'schoolmaster to Christ"—and grounded on this the felt need of redemption, which is still included in our nature in spite of its corruption, and without which indeed redemption

* That the tract may not be unduly extended, we must limit ourselves mostly to mere references, leaving the reader to consult the proof passages for himself, as every Protestant divine at any rate should have them within reach. We cite the Lutheran symbols, from the edition of Hase (Libri Symbolici, 1837); the Reformed, as published by Niemeyer (Collectio Confessionum in Ecclesis Reformatis publicatarum, 1840). On original sin, and the whole state of the unregenerate, see Confessto Augustana, Art. 2, ja Dice

Apologia Confessionis, Art. 1, de peccato origin, pp. 50 ff.; Articuli Smalcaldici, III, 1, pp. 317 f.; on the Reformed side: Confessio Helvetica Il, c. 8—9, pp. 477 ff.; Catechismus Heidelbergensis, quaest. 7-8, p. 431. Articuli Anglicant, Art. 9, p. 603; Confessio Fidei Gallicana, Art. 10-11, p. 332; Confessio

Belgica, Art. 15, p. 370; Confessio Scoticana I, Art. 3, p. 342; Canones Synodi Dordrechtanae, cap. 3, Art. 1-3, pp. 708 f.; Confessio Fidei WestmonasterienSIS SIUC PUNtLanaene Omen =O 1G OSes

+ Comp., for example, Formula Concordiae V, de lege et evangelio, [De TN

could have no place. This repentance and desire however are so little operative and meritorious as regards justification, that they form rather the sense of complete unworthiness, the feeling of absolute emptiness and want, resembling bodily hunger, which craves food, but has no power to satisfy its own call.

The renovation of the sinner can proceed only from the creative grace of God. If the divine goodness, in the first creation, formed for itself its own object, this is necessary much more in redemption, where its object is in the first place its opposite also and enemy (Romans 5:10). Not the love we bear to God, but the love with which he has loved us in Christ, is the ground of our salvation (1 John 4:10). This love accordingly has prevented

[gone before] us; it has borne all sin and expiated all guilt in our stead, but fulfilled at the same time all righteousness, as required by the law, that is the published will of God.

This all-sufficient satisfaction of Christ takes hold upon the individual subjectively, in justification. This is a judicial, declarative act on the part of God, by which he first pronounces the sincrushed, contrite sinner free from guilt as it regards the past, for the sake of his only-begotten Son, and then

(''freely,'" Romans 3:24; "without the deeds of the law," 3:28; by grace, through faith, and not of himself, Ephesians 2:8) makes over to him, in boundless mercy, the full righteousness of the same, to be counted and to be in fact his own. It is in this way (1) negatively remissio peccatorum (Psalm 32:1-2; Romans 3:25; 4:7; Luke 11:4; 2 Corinthians 5:19) and (2) positively imputatio justitiae and adoptio in filios Dei (Romans 4:5; 5:9; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians

3:6; Philippians 3:9). Man by justification steps into the place of Christ, as Christ had previously stepped into the place of man.

What he did altogether, he did not for himself, but out of free, self-sacrificing love toward the human race, of which he is the head.* * Conf., Aug., Art. 4., p. 10; Apol. Conf., Art. 2, pp. 71 f£; Form. Conc., Art.

3, pp. 683 fE.: Unanimi consensu credimus, docemus et confitemur, ee quod homo peccator coram Deo justificetur, h.e., absolvatur ab omnibus suis pec: catis et a judicio justissimae condemnationis, et adoptetur in numerum filiorum Dei, atque haeres aeternae vitae scribatur, sine ullis nostris meritis aut dignitate, et absque ullis praecedentibus, praesentibus aut sequentibus nostris

The Principle of Protestantism In this way, all Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian self-righteousness is torn up by the roots; humility is exhibited as the ground of piety; and all rightful honor is secured to Jesus Christ, as the only and all-sufficient Mediator between God and man.

While the merit of Christ is thus viewed as the only ground, the efficient cause (causa efficiens and emeritoria) of this righteousness, the only means of its appropriation (causa instrumentalis, instrumentum, organon lepticon) is presented to us in faith. This is not a natural product of man, although it finds a basis in the possibility and want of redemption belonging to his fallen nature; but the free gift of God, which is offered and imparted to him through the word and sacraments.* Nor is it moreover, as regarded in the Romish system (and this is a very essential point), a mere historical assent, and so a theoretic process simply; but along with this, and principally, a cordial unconditional trust in the atoning efficacy of Christ's merit, a personal appropriation of it to the entire spiritual life of the subject.+ It holds, back of operibus, ex mera gratia tantummodo, propter unicum meritum perfectissimamque obedientiam, passionem acerbissimam, morten et resurrectionem Dom. nostri J. Chr. cujus obedientia nobis ad justitiam imputatur. Reformed symbols—Conf. Helv., c. 15, pp. 494 ff.: Justificare significat Apostolo in disputatione de justificatione, peccata remittere, a culpa et poena absolvere, in gratiam recipere et justum pronunciare, etc. Cat. Heidelb., quaest. 60, p. 443:

Ut... sine ullo meo merito (Rom. 3:24) ex mera Dei misericordia (Tit. 3:5; Eph. 2:8-9) mihi perfecta satisfactio (1 John 2:2), justitia et sanctitas Christi

(1 John 2:1) imputetur ac donetur (Rom. 4:4-5; 2 Cor. 5:19), perinde ac si nec ullum ipse peccatum admisissem, nec ulla mihi labes inhaereret, imo vero quasi eam obedientiam, quam pro me Christus praestitit, ipse perfecte praestitissem

(2 Cor. 5:21)—a most clear, complete, and valuable definition. Art.

Anglic., Art. 11-12, pp. 603 f.; Conf. Gallic., Art. 18, p. 334; Conf. Belg., Art.

22, p. 374; Conf. Scot., Art. 12, p. 346; Declar. Thorum., de gratia, p. 673; Gan:

Syn. Dordr., III, c. 10, p. 710; Conf. Westmonast. cap. 11, de justif. § 1—6, and c. 12.

* Conf. Aug., V, p. 11: Nam per verbum et sacramenta, tanquam per instrumenta, donatur Spiritus Sanctus, qui fidem efficit, ubi et quando visum est

Deo, in iis, qui audiunt Evangelium, etc. Conf. Helv., Art. 16, Pp. 496-7 Hlaec autem fides merum est Dei donum, quod solus Deus ex gratia sua electis suis, secundum mensuram, et quando, cui et quantum ipse vult, donat, et quidem per spiritum sanctum, mediante praedicatione evangelii et oratione fideli.

+ Besides the passages already cited, comp. Conf. Aug., Art. 20, p. 18. More fully in his Loci theologici, p. 226 (1562 ed.), Melanchthon?' describes the nature of faith, first as an assentiri universo verbo divino, and further as a fiducia misericordiae Dei, and then proceeds: Fiducia est motus in voluntate,

Philip Schaff

the psychological distinction of understanding and will, in the inmost depth of man's personality, and so works with like influence upon both. The later Protestant theologians tried accordingly to exhaust the conception of faith, as much as might be, under three characters. The first is notitia, the knowledge of its object, Jesus Christ namely and his all-sufficient merit; the second, assensus, free inward consent to all the Scriptures teach of the mercy of God in Christ; the third, which is most essential and full of comfort, fiducia, or the act of the will moving toward Christ and resting in him for redemption, the confidence that this erace is not only of general objective force, but personally proper also to the believing subject himself.

In what relation now does this justification stand to holiness; faith as thus described, to works? Decided as Protestantism is in limiting all justifying efficacy to the apprehension of Christ's merit by means of faith, it is just as far from denying, however remotely, the necessary connection between this grace and a godly life.

This even the most shrewd, clear-sighted, and profound of modern opposers of the system, has been constrained to admit when he says: "It would be in the highest degree unfair, however, not to add that according to the Lutheran theory, the apprehension of this free remission of sins must always draw after it the renewal of the sinner, and a transformation of his life to holiness."

Genuine Protestantism has ever in its eye the faith of Paul, that works of love—or to speak with the Helvetic Confession—the necessario respondens assensioni, seu quo voluntas in Christo acqutescit.

Comp. Calvin's Instit. Chr. Rel., III, 2, 8; Conf. Helv. II, Art.

16, p. 496.

Fides enim Christiana non est opinio et humana persuasio, sed firmissima fiducia et evidens ac constans animi assensus, denique certissima comprehensio veritatis Det, propositae in scripturis et symbolo apostolico, atque adeo Dei ipsius, summi boni, et praecipue promissionis divinae et Christi, qui omnium promissionum est colophon. Most masterly also, and drawn from the deepest experience, is the definition of faith by the Heidelberg Catechism, in its answer to the 2Ist question. No such deep views of the constitution of faith had been taken since the time of the apostles. Sarpi*4 relates that the bishops of the Council of Trent were not able to conceive of it as anything more than assent simply to historical truth; and that they were brought into the greatest embarrassment with the subject, since they could find no satisfactory light, either from the fathers or the schoolmen, on what had not before come under thorough discussion.

The Principle of Protestantism fides, nulla operum fiducia, is at the same time operum foecundissima. Its very being consists in the appropriation of Christ, the holy and the just. How then should it not produce good works, as necessarily as a good tree must yield good fruit? It is the parent of all virtues. As soon as we have known and believed the love which God has toward us (1 John 4:16), we cannot but love him in return (4:19).* This relation between faith and love is of such inward force that this last also can have no place without the first, as little as one may gather grapes from thorns.

Faith is always necessarily presupposed in love; for what does not spring from faith is sin, and so not love—the essence of which is a forsaking of self, while self-seeking forms the inmost nature of evil. "Good religious works make never a good religious man, but a good religious man maketh good religious works. So that always the person must first be religious and good before all good works, and good religious works follow and go forth from the religious good person. As the tree must be before the fruit, so must the man be first good or bad in his person, before he doeth good or bad works. The like we see in all handiwork. A good or bad house maketh not a good or bad carpenter, but a good or bad carpenter maketh a good or bad house. No work maketh a master, such as is the work; but as the master is, his work also is such.

. Works, as they make not believing, so they make not pious GOs 0B, INA, O [> ING Ate 2D; jaye Wallies: Apol. Conf., Art. 3, pp. 83,

85. In the same, pp. 133 f., it is said: Ideo justificamur, ut justi bene operari et obedire Legi Dei incipiamus. Ideo regeneramur et Spiritum Sanctum accipimus, ut nova vita habeat nova opera, novos affectus, timorem, dilectionem

Dei, odium concupiscentiae, etc. Form. Conc., epit. Art. 3, p1586;) Ant. 4p:

589; sol. decl. Art. 3, p. 688. The noble passage of Luther in his preface to the Epistle to the Romans is known: "Oh, it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing with faith, that it cannot possibly cease from working good. It does not ask either if good works are to be done, but before the question is put it has done them already and is doing-them still .

. ; so that it is impossible to sunder works from faith, as much so verily as that burning and shining should be sundered from fire." The Reformed symbols, without exception, press this point in terms equally strong, and in actual life indeed this church has shown herself more zealous for good works even than her sister. I refer only to Conf.

Helv. II, Art. 16, pp. 496f.; and Cat. Heidelb., Q. 64, p. 444: neque enim fieri potest, quin ii, qui Christo per fidem insiti sunt, fructus proferant gratitudinis.

Philip Schaff ol either. But faith, as it maketh pious, so doth it make good works also.' * Protestantism in this way only places faith and love in their natural relation to each other, without detracting in the least from the dignity of the last. Rather, with the apostle Paul, it puts this highest, for the very reason that it comes last; as the beginning is always the less perfect, that points to a more complete form of existence. The evangelical morality, as the product of free love and gratitude, is also much more sound, pure, deep, than the Roman Catholic, which even in its highest exhibitions must be allowed to include a sinful mixture of spiritual pride or mechanical formality.

Good works then, in the Protestant system, are held to be acceptable to God; and it is taught even that God rewards them graciously.+ But no room is left for the imagination that we can earn salvation by their means, much less to think of any surplus

* Luther's sermon "Liberty of a Christian Man"; one of his most profound productions (edition by Gerlach, Vol. V, pp. 37f.). The two theses of Luther, "Jf faith be not without all work, it maketh not righteous,' and "Tt is impossible that justifying faith should be without constantly many good works," have been tiresomely paraded by the papists as an irreconcilable contradiction. To this however, Sartorius?

(Evangel. Kirchenzeitung, 1835, p.

826) has rightly answered that both agree admirably, and the more the truth of the one is seen, the more true must the other show itself to be at the same time. In proportion as the man, renouncing himself, ascribes his salvation only and altogether to God's preventing love, the more deep and inward will be the devotion of his love in return, and his grateful zeal in all good works; which flow the more richly from faith, as its fruit, the less they are made to go before it, or take rank with it, in the way of principle or ground. As for the dictum finally of the same great Reformer, so ignorantly misconstrued:

Si in fide fiert posset adultertum, peccatum non esset; we must bear in mind the bold, reckless, wholesale, sweeping style in which he was accustomed to speak; and then reflect further that with him no such sin could be committed in faith, so that he argues simply ex imposszbili.

{ Apol. Conf., Art. 3, pp. 96, 135; Form. Conc., Art. 4, pp. 700 £.; Conf. Helv.

II, c. 16, p. 498: Placent vero approbanturque a Deo opera, quae a nobis fiunt per fidem. —Etenim docemus Deum bona operantibus amplam dare mercedem. —Referimus tamen mercedem hanc, quam dominus dat, non ad meritum hominis accipientis, sed ad bonitatem, vel liberalitatem et veritatem Dei promittentis atque dantis, qui cum nihil debeat cuiquam, promisit tamen, etc.

Conf. Belq., Art. 24, p. 376: Interea non negamus, Deum bona opera in suis remunerari; sed id mera sua gratia fieri dicimus, ut qui dona sua in nobis coronet.

The Principle of Protestantism merit. The entire Christian life is made to appear as a debt of gratitude, for the boundless, eternally to be praised love and mercy of God manifested toward us in Jesus Christ.* When we have done all accordingly, we have at best done only what was our duty (Luke 17:10).

Sanctification, however, is in its nature a continually progressive work that becomes complete only when the whole body of the church, of which the individual Christian is a member, has reached its state of perfection. Yea, strictly considered, even the best works of the believer, so long as he sojourns in the body, by reason of the continued presence of sin in his person, are not good absolutely, but only so much and so far as they are wrought in him and through him by the Spirit of God.j If he might say even with the apostle, "I know nothing by myself,' that is, am conscious of no wrong, he must with him also still add, "yet am I not hereby justified." His confidence of salvation consequently can never rest upon his works of love, but only upon the objective rock of Christ's merit, whose he feels himself to be in faith.

Even Paul himself, the apostle, at the end of his career—a career such as no saint of the Romish Church certainly can exhibit—declares it to be the highest object of his desire that he might not have his own righteousness, which was of the law, but a foreign righteousness, which was of faith in Christ, the righteousness namely that is of God by faith (Philippians 3:9).

The last point of difference in the case before us regards the assurance of justification. Being justified by grace through faith, we have peace, the apostle tells us, with God (Romans 5:1-5).

This peace is a state of mind, which necessarily attends the exercise of faith. For God is the fullness of all blessedness, and faith

* With admirable judgment accordingly, the Heidelberg Catechism has comprehended all Christian practice under the article of "Gratitude." The Conf. Helv. II, Art. 16, p. 497, agreeing with this says:

(Bona opera) fieri debent, non ut his promereamur vitam aeternam, Donum Dei enim est, ut

Apostolus ait, vita aeterna; neque ad ostentationem, quam rejecit Dominus Matth. 6; neque ad quaestum, quem et ipsum rejecit Matth. 23; sed ad gloriam Dei, ad, ornandam vocationem nostram gratitudinemque Deo praestandam, et ad utilitatem proximi. Art. Anglic., Art. 14.

+ Conf. Helv. II, c. 16, p. 499: Sunt multa praeterea indigna Deo, et imperfecta plurima inveniuntur in operibus etiam sanctorum.

Luther's word is known: Justus in omni bono opere peccat.

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