When Luther regained his mental health, he took courage to be ordained priest in May 1507, and next year, on the recommendation of Staupitz, the elector of Saxony appointed him professor in the university of Wittenberg, which had been founded in 1502. While in the monastery Luther had assiduously pursued his studies, and his severe mortifications and penances had never interrupted his theological work. He read all the great scholastic theologians, but Augustine was his master in theology, while Erfurt studies under Trutwetter doubtless made him pore over Occam (“mein lieber Meister,” as he afterwards fondly called him) till he got his bulky folios by heart. He began by lecturing on Aristotle; and in 1509 he gave Biblical lectures, which from the very first were a power in the university. His class-room was thronged; his fellow-professors were students. Staupitz forced him also to preach; and his marvellous eloquence, felt to be from the heart, attracted great crowds of hearers. The year 1511 brought an apparent interruption, but in fact only a new development, of Luther’s character and knowledge of the world. He went to Rome, probably in fulfilment of an old vow, and the journey was a marked event in his life. He went up in true pilgrim spirit, a mediaeval Christian, and he came back a Protestant. The pious German was horrified with what he saw in Rome, and he afterwards made telling use of what he had seen in various tracts, and notably in his address to the German nobles. He tells us that at Wittenberg he had pondered over the text, “The just shall live by faith,” that while in Rome the words came back to him, and that on his return journey to Germany the evangelical meaning of the phrase rushed into his mind. On his return to the university he was promoted to the degree of doctor of divinity, in October 1512. The oath he had to take on the occasion “to devote his whole life to study, and faithfully to expound and defend the holy Scripture,” was to him the seal of his mission. He began his work with lectures on the Psalms, and then proceeded to comment on the epistles of Paul to the Romans and Galatians, enforcing especially his peculiar views of the relations between law and gospel. His lectures and his sermons were attended by great audiences, and disciples gathered round him. As early as 1516 his special principles were publicly defended at academical disputations. Staupitz made him district-vicar of his order for Meissen and Thuringia. He made short preaching tours, and his influence was felt far beyond Wittenberg. When the plague came to that university town he remained at his post when others fled. Then came 1517, the year of the Reformation. The new pope, Leo X., had sent agents through Germany to sell indulgences, and had chosen John Tetzel, a Dominican monk, for Saxony. Luther, who had passed through deep soul-struggles ere he won pardon, knew that God’s forgiveness could not bo purchased for money, and thundered against Tetzel and his indulgences from Wittenberg pulpit. He wrote anxiously to the princes and bishops to refuse the pardon-seller a passage through their lands. When Tetzel got to Jiiterbogk near Wittenberg, Luther could stand it no longer. He wrote out ninety-five propositions or theses denouncing indulgences, and on the eve t of All Saints, October 31, nailed the paper to the door of the Castle church. In a short time all Germany was ablaze.

These ninety-five theses are one continuous harangue against the doctrine and practice of pardon-selling, but they do not openly denounce indulgence in every form. They make plain these three things:—(1) there maybe some good in indulgence if it be reckoned, one of the many ways in which God’s forgiveness of sin can be proclaimed; (2) the external signs of sorrow are not the real inward repentance, nor are they as important as that is, and no permission to neglect the outward expression can permit the neglect of true repentance; (3) every Christian who feels true sorrow for sin is there and then pardoned by God for Christ’s sake without any indulgence ticket or other human contrivance. And in his sermons on indulgence Luther declared that repentance consisted in contrition, confession, and absolution, and that contrition was the most important, and in fact the occasion of the other two. If the sorrow be true and heartfelt, confession and pardon will follow. The inward and spiritual fact of sorrow for sin, he thought, was the great matter; the outward signs of sorrow were good also, but God, who alone can pardon, looks to the inward state. These theses, with the sermons explaining them, brought Germany face to face with the reality of blasphemy in the indulgences. Luther’s public life had opened; the Reformation had begun.

Second Period (1517-1524).—Pilgrims who had come to Wittenberg to buy indulgences returned with the theses of Luther in their hands, and with the impression of his powerful evangelical teaching in their hearts. The national mind of Germany took up the matter with a moral earnestness which made an impression, not only upon the princes, but even upon bishops and monks. At first it seemed as if all Germany was going to support Luther. The traffic in indulgences had been so shameless that all good people and all patriotic Germans had been scandalized. But Luther had struck a blow at more than indulgences, although he scarcely knew it at the time. In his theses and explanatory sermons he had declared that the inward spiritual facts of man’s religious experience were of infinitely more value than their expression in stereotyped forms recognized by the church, and he had made it plain too that in such a solemn thing as forgiveness of sin man could go to God directly without human mediation. Pious Christians since the day of Pentecost had thought and felt the same, and all through the Middle Ages men and women had humbly gone to God for pardon trusting in Christ. They had found the pardon they sought, and their simple Christian experience had been sung in the hymns of the mediaeval church, had found expression in its prayers, had formed the heart of the evangelical preaching of the church, and had stirred the masses of people in the many revivals of the Middle Ages. But those pious people, hymn-writers, and preachers had not seen that this inward experience of theirs was really opposed to a great part of the ecclesiastical system of their day. The church had set such small store by that inward religious experience that the common speech of the times had changed the plain meanings of the words “spiritual,” “sacred,” “holy.” A man was “spiritual” if he had been ordained to office in the church; money was “spiritual” if it had been given to the church; an estate, with its roads, woodlands, fields, was “spiritual” or “holy” if it belonged to a bishopric or abbey. And the church that had so degraded the meaning of “spiritual” had thrust itself and its external machinery in between God and the worshipper, and had proclaimed that no man could draw near to God save through its appointed ways of approach. Confession was to be made to God through the priest; God spoke pardon only in the priest’s absolution. When Luther attacked indulgences in the way he did he struck at this whole system.

Compelled to examine the ancient history of the church, he soon discovered the whole tissue of fraud and imposture by which the canon law had from the 9th century downwards been foisted upon the Christian world. There is scarcely any essential point in ancient ecclesiastical history bearing upon the question of the invocation of saints, of clerical priesthood, of episcopal and metropolitan pretensions, which his genius did not discern in its true light. Whatever Luther denounced as fraud or abuse, from its contradiction to spiritual worship, may be said to have been openly or tacitly admitted to be such. But what produced the greatest effect at the time were his short popular treatises, exegetical and practical—his Interpretation of the Magnificat or the Canticle of the Virgin Mary, his Exposition of the Ten Commandments, and of the Lords Prayer. The latter soon found its way into Italy, although without Luther’s name, and has never been surpassed either in genuine Christian thought or in style. He resolved also to preach throughout Germany, and in 1518 appeared at a general meeting of his order at Heidelberg. There he held a public disputation on certain theses called by him paradoxes, in which he strove to make apparent the contrast between the external view of religion taught by the schoolmen and the spiritual view of gospel truth based upon justifying faith. He made many disciples on this occasion, of whom perhaps the most notable was Martin Bucer. On his return to Wittenberg in May 1518, Luther wrote and published an able and moderate exposition of the theses, and sent it to some of the German bishops. He proclaimed the need for a thorough reformation of the church, which he thought could only be effected, with the aid of God, by an earnest co-operation of the whole of Christendom. This energy awakened opponents. Conrad Wimpina at Frankfort, Hoogstraten at Cologne, Sylvester Trierias at Rome, and above all John Eck, an old fellow student, at Ingolstadt, attacked his theses, and discovered heresy in them. The result was that Luther was summoned to appear before the pope at Rome, but the elector of Saxony intervened, and got the matter so arranged that Luther was cited to appear beforo the pope’s legate at Augsburg.

The pope was unwilling to quarrel with Germany, where the whole people seemed to be supporting Luther, and the cardinal legate James de Vio of Gaeta, commonly called Cajetan, was told to be conciliatory. Luther went to Augsburg on foot, and presented himself before the legate, but the interview was not a successful one. The cardinal began by brow-beating the monk, and ended by being somewhat afraid of him. “I can dispute no longer with this beast,” he said; “it has two wicked eyes and marvellous thoughts in its head.” Luther could not respect either the learning or the judgment of Cajetan. He left Augsburg by stealth, afraid of capture, condemned, but appealing “from the pope ill-informed to the pope to-be-better-informed.” On his return to Wittenberg he found the elector in great anxiety of mind, in consequence of an imperious letter from the cardinal, and offered to leave Saxony for France. The elector, however, allowed him to remain, and the pope sent another legate to settle the affairs of Germany. This was Carl von Miltitz, a native of Saxony, a man of the world, and no great theologian. He resolved to meet Luther privately, and did so in the house of Spalatin, court preacher to the elector of Saxony. In his interview with Cajetan Luther had refused to retract two propositions—that the treasury of indulgences is not filled with the merits of Christ, and that he who receives the sacrament must have faith in the grace offered to him. Miltitz made no such demands. He apparently gave up Tetzel and the indulgences, agreed with much of Luther’s theology, but insisted that he had not been respectful to the pope, and that such conduct weakened the authority which rightly belonged to the church. He wished Luther to write to the pope and apologize. Luther consented. It was further arranged that both parties were to cease from writing or preaching on the controverted matters, and that the pope was to commission a body of learned theologians to investigate. Luther accordingly wrote to the pope, telling him that he “freely confessed that the authority of the church was superior to everything, and that nothing in heaven or on earth can be preferred before it save only Jesus Christ, who is Lord over all.” This was in March 1519. Meanwhile Luther had appealed from the pope to a general council to be held in Germany. In the end of 1518 a papal bull concerning indulgences had appeared, confirming the old doctrine, without any reference to the late dispute.

The years 1519, 1520, 1521 were a time of fierce but triumphant struggle with the hitherto irresistible Church of Rome, soon openly supported by the empire. The first of these years passed in public conferences and disputations. Luther had promised Miltitz to refrain from controversy, on the understanding that his adversaries did not attack him, and he kept his word. But his old antagonist John Eck published thirteen theses attacking Luther, and challenged Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt, a friend and colleague of Luther, to a public disputation. Luther instantly replied to Eek’s theses, and the disputation between Carlstadt and Eck was immediately followed by one between Eck and Luther. In this famous Leipsic disputation the controversy took a new shape. It was no longer a theological dispute; it became a conflict between two opposing sets of principles affecting the whole round of church life. Luther and Eck began about indulgences and penance, but the debate soon turned on the authority of the Roman Church and of the pope. Eck maintained the superiority of the Roman Church and of the pope as successor of St Peter and vicar-general of Christ. His argument was “no pope no church.” Luther denied the superiority of the Roman Church, and supported his denial by the testimony of eleven centuries, by the decrees of Nicaea, by the Holy Scriptures. He maintained that the Greek Church was part of the church of Christ, else Athanasius, Basil, and the Gregories were outside Christianity. The pope has more need of the church, he said, than the church has of the pope. Eck retorted that these had been the arguments of Wickliffe and of Huss, and that they had been condemned at the council of Constance. Luther refused to admit that the condemnation was right; Eck refused to debate with an opponent who would not abide by the decision of oecumenical councils; and so the disputation ended. But Luther immediately afterwards completed his argument and published it. He asserted that he did not mean to deny the bishop of Rome’s primacy, provided the pope kept his own place as servant of the church, but that he did mean to deny that there could be no church apart from the pope. The church, he said, is the communion of the faithful, and consists of the elect, and so never can lack the presence of the Holy Spirit, who is not always with popes and councils. This church, he declared, is invisible, but real, and every layman who is in it and has Holy Scripture and holds by it is more to be believed than popes or councils, who do not. This Leipsic disputation had very important consequences. On the one hand, Eck and his associates felt that Luther must now be put down by force, and pressed for a papal bull to condemn him; and Luther himself, on the other hand, felt for the first time what great consequences lay in his opposition to the indulgences. He saw that his Augustinian theology, with its recognition of the heinousness of sin, and of the need of the sovereign grace of God, was incompatible with the whole round of mediaeval ceremonial life, proved it to be impossible for men to live perfectly holy lives, and so made saints and saint worship and relics and pilgrimages impossible things. He saw the uselessness of the monastic life, with its vigils and fasts and scourgings. These things were not helps, he saw, but hindrances to the true religious life. The Leipsic disputation made Luther feel that he had finally broken with Rome, and it made all Germany see it too, and raised the popular enthusiasm to a white heat. The people of the towns declared their sympathy with the bold monk. Ulrich von Hutten and the German humanists saw that this was more than a monkish quarrel, and recognized Luther as their leader. Franz von Sickingen and the free knights hailed him as a useful ally. Even the poor down-trodden peasants hoped that he might be a luckier leader than Joss Fritz, and that he might help them to free themselves from the unbearable miseries of their lot. Luther became the leader of the German nation after the Leipsic disputation.

During 1520 the first great political crisis occurred, on the occasion of the death of Maximilian, and ended fatally, in consequence of the want of patriotic and political wisdom among the German princes. Ranke has pointed out the political elements which then existed for creating a Germany as free and independent as France or England; and Justus Möser of Osnabruck had long before truly declared, “If the emperor at that time had destroyed the feudal system, the deed would have been, according to the spirit in which it was done, the grandest or the blackest in the history of the world.” Möser means that if the emperor had embraced the Reformed faith, and placed himself at the head of the lower nobility and cities, united in one body as the lower house of a German parliament, this act would have saved Germany. Probably some such idea was in the mind of the archbishop of Treves when he proposed that Frederick, the elector of Saxony, should be chosen emperor. Frederick might have carried out this policy, just because, if elected, he had nothing to rely upon except the German nation, then more numerous and powerful than it has been since; but he had not the courage to accept a dignity which he supposed to require for its support a more powerful house than his own. Charles, the son of Maximilian, was elected emperor, and that election meant the continuation of a mediaeval policy in Germany.

Meanwhile Luther was at Wittenberg continuing his course of preaching, lecturing, and writing. The...

The earliest controversy which divided the Lutheran Church arose in Luther’s lifetime and lasted till 1560 (1537-60). It sprang out of differences of opinion about the precise meaning to be attached to the term law in Luther’s famous distinction between law and gospel. According to Luther, and the distinction runs through all Lutheranism, law and gospel are the two factors which bring home to the individual experience the knowledge of salvation. Law is the rule of life given by God and accompanied by threatening and promise, which counts on fulfilment from selfish motives, threatens, terrifies, and so produces contrition; while the gospel, which is the message of salvation, comes after the law has done its work, and soothes. In this description the term law has a distinct and definite meaning; it signifies legal injunction or command; and Luther and his followers were accustomed to say, using law in this definite way, that Christ was not under the dominion of the law, and that Christ’s people are also free from its restraints. They said that believers ascend to the Christian life only when they have transcended a rule of life which counts on selfish motives for obedience. The word law manifestly means more than Luther put into this definition, and certain Lutherans who accepted Luther’s distinction between law and gospel did not understand his limitation of the term law, and taught that believers were not bound by the moral law. These antinomians, of whom Agricola was chief, took Luther’s statements about law in the sense of legal injunction, and applied them to law in the sense of ethical rule. The confusion perplexed the Lutheran Church for more than twenty years.

The debates which harassed the Reformed Church in the Arminian controversy, and the Roman Catholic Church in the Jansenist controversy, appeared in the Lutheran Church in three separate disputes lasting from about 1550 to 1580. In these discussions the stricter Lutherans were on the one side and Melanchthon with his followers on the other. The first dispute was about the relation of good works to conversion. George Major, founding on an expression in Melanchthon’s Commonplaces (ed. 1543), said that good works were both necessary and useful to holiness. He was attacked by Mat. Flacius and Nie. Amsdorf, and after a long and tedious discussion, in the course of which it was made plain that both sides were sadly in want of general principles to guide them, and that important words were used ambiguously, George Major’s proposition was condemned because it savoured of Pelagianism. The problem took a new form in the Synergist controversy, which discussed the nature of the first impulse in conversion, and in the controversy about original sin which followed. Pfeffiuger taught that the first impulse in conversion came from grace and was due to the Holy Spirit, but he said that this impulse and its effect might be compared with the reviving of a man apparently dead. According to the strict Lutherans the sinner was not apparently but actually dead, and grace was not merely the occasion, it was also the actual cause, of the new life. Flacius, who had made this last assertion, which seemed to be generally approved of, started a fresh controversy by his assertion that sin was part of the substance of man in his present natural condition, and that man was no more able to cooperate with grace in conversion than was a stick or a stone. This was contradicted by Striegel, a follower of Melanchthon, who asserted that sin had not totally destroyed man’s ethical nature, but that grace by its action changed what was morally insensible into what was morally living and sensible, so that there could be an actual synergy or co-operation between God’s grace and man’s will.

The controversy raised by Andrew Osiander was much more important, and revealed the lack in Lutheranism of a systematic doctrine of the work of the Holy Spirit. Osiander^felt that Lutheran dogmatic had omitted to make adequate answer to a most important practical question in theology, how Christ’s death on the cross could be so brought into connexion with each individual believer as to be the ground of his actual justification. The mediaeval church had spanned the centuries by their doctrine of the prolongation of Christ’s death throughout time in the sacrifice of the mass, but he could not see any such real connexion of time in Luther’s theology. He proposed to get rid of the difficulty by saying that justification is a real work in the believer done by that same Christ who had died so many centuries before. He distinguished between redemption, which he said was the result of the historical work of Christ upon the cross, and justification, which was another work of the same Redeemer within the individual, and was the influence renewed daily of the Saviour upon each believer. The controversy which followed was full of ambiguities and misunderstandings, but out of it rose two distinct theories, one of which was generally adopted by the Lutherans, while the other has become a characteristic of Reformed or Calvinist theology. Striegel declared that the principal effect of the work of Christ upon the cross was to change the attitude of God towards the whole human race, and that in consequence whenever men come into being and have faith they can take advantage of that change of attitude, the ground of their assurance being that because of what Christ did God regards all men benevolently. Calvinist divines, on the other hand, found in Osiander’s criticism the starting point of that close connexion between Christ’s work and His redeemed which is expressed in the doctrine of the limited reference in the atonement.

These controversies all implied more or less vagueness in the earlier dogmatic teaching of Luther. Others, however, arose from what may be called the distinctive teaching of Luther upon the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and what was implied therein. In the article Luther it is stated that Luther, at least after the peasants’ war, held strongly a theory of the connexion between the elements (the bread and wine) and the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament of the supper which has been called consubstantiation, and that this theory depended not merely on certain scholastic definitions of bodily presence but also on the supposition that the attribute of ubiquity belonged to the glorified body of Christ. A large number of Lutherans, followers of Melanchthon, were inclined to depart from these views and approach the more reasonable opinions of Calvin, and this occasioned controversies about Crypto-Calvinism and about Christology. J , he university of Jena was the theological headquarters of the stricter Lutherans, while Wittenberg was the centre of the Philippists or Crypto-Calvinists, as the followers of Melanchthon were called. At first the controversy mainly gathered round the questions of the corporeal presence, the oral manducation, and the literal eating of Christ’s body by unbelievers as well as by the truly faithful, but it soon included discussions on the person of Christ, and into these discussions Reformed theologians were brought. The result was various conferences at Maulbronn (1564), which only confirmed both parties in their peculiar opinions; at Dresden (1571), where the Lutheran theologians of Wittenberg and Leipsic renounced the doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ’s body and agreed with the Calvinists; and elsewhere. It seemed as if the Lutheran Church was about to fall in pieces.

Out of these disputes came the Form of Concord, due principally to Jacob Andreae of Tübingen, to Martin Chemnitz of Brunswick, and to Nicolas Selnecker of Leipsic. Various theological conferences were held, and various articles of agreement more or less successful were framed, of which the most notable was the Torgau Book of 1576; and at last in 1577 the Form of Concord was published, and after much discussion and negotiation was adopted by most of the Lutherans in Germany. Its recognition was mainly due to the exertions of Augustus, elector of Saxony It was also adopted by the Lutheran churches of Sweden in 1593, and of Hungary in 1597. It was rejected by the Lutheran Church of Denmark and by the churches of Hesse, of Anhalt, of Pomerania, and of several imperial cities. It was at first adopted and afterwards rejected by Brunswick, by the Palatinate, and by Brandenburg. The German churches which refused to adopt it became for the most part Reformed or Calvinist; and the Form of Concord, which ended the more violent theological controversies among the Lutherans, greatly decreased their numbers and territorial extent.

The divided state of Germany in the 16th century, aided by the. maxim of the peace of Augsburg which gave Protestantism a legal standing, and by the consistorial system of ecclesiastical rule which followed in consequence, divided the Lutherans in Germany into a number of separate churches as numerous as the principalities. At the peace of Augsburg the adherents to the Augsburg Confession were recognized legally as having a right to exist within the German empire, and the power of determining whether the Roman Catholic or Lutheran confessions should be the recognized creed of the state was left, with some reservation, in the hands of thς supreme civil authority in each separate principality {cujus regio ejus religio). This virtually gave the direction of the church of each German state into the hands of the supreme civil power therein; it belonged to the princes in the various principalities and to the municipal councils in the fιee imperial cities. This legal recognition of the supreme authority of the civil power in ecclesiastical affairs was intensified by the adoption in the Lutheran Church of the consistorial system of church government, which was the distinctive mark of the Lutheran as opposed to the Reformed Church. The consistorial system took a great variety of forms, but it had one common characteristic: it simply transferred the jus episcopale from the bishops to the civil authorities, and, as the bishops ruled their dioceses in ecclesiastical and-other matters by means of councils or consistories appointed by themselves, so in the Lutheran Church these old episcopal consistories were transformed into councils whose members were appointed by the civil rulers. Thus each petty German state had its own church with its special organization and peculiar regulations. Richter in his Evangelische Kirchenordnungendeslβten Jahrhunderts (2 vols., 1846) has collected more than one hundred and eighty separate constitutions of churches adhering to the Augsburg Confession. This minute subdivision makes it almost impossible to recognize any unity in the Lutheran Church save what comes from the profession of a common creed.

The publication of the Form of Concord drew the strict Lutherans more together, and set over against them in Germany a Calvinist Church, and the divided state of Protestantism greatly weakened its strength in the religious wars of the 17th century. As the smaller German states came together in larger principalities the awkwardness of the separate Protestant churches was more keenly felt. Many attempts were made by conferences, as at Leipsic (1631), Thorn (1645), Cassel (1661), to unite Lutherans and Reformed, though without success. At length the union of the two churches was effected mainly by the force of the civil authority in Nassau (1817), in Prussia (1817), in Hesse (1823), in Anhalt Dessau (1827). These unions for the most part aimed, not at incorporating the two churches in doctrine and worship, but at bringing under one government the two confessions, and permitting every congregation to use at pleasure either the Lutheran or the Heidelberg Catechism. They were sometimes accompanied, as in Prussia, by a separation of the stricter Lutherans, who formed themselves into dissenting churches. The separation in Prussia was caused mainly by a new liturgy which Frederick William III. forced on the church, and which the dissenters or Old Lutherans refused to use. The divisions caused in this way were at first repressed but were afterwards tolerated, and have reproduced themselves in the flourishing Lutheran Church of the United States.

See Ritschi, “Die Entstehung der Lutherischen Kirche” {Zeitsch. fur Kirchengeschichte, i. 1); Hundeshagen, Beiträge zur Kirchenver· fassungs Geschichte, &c., 1864; Dorner’s History of Protestant Theology ; Hering, Geschichte der kirchlichen Unionsversuche seit die Reformation, 1836-38; Sack, Die Evangelische Kirche und die Union, 1861. (T. Μ. L.)

That the Holy Scriptures are the only source whence we are to draw our religious sentiments, whether they relate to faith or practice, John v, 39; 1 Cor. iv, 16; 2 Tim. iii, 15–17. Reason also confirms the sufficiency of the Scriptures; for, if the written word be allowed to be a rule in one case, how can it be denied to be a rule in another?

That justification is the effect of faith exclusive of good works; and that faith ought to produce good works purely in obedience to God, and not in order to our justification; for St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Galatians, strenuously opposed those who ascribed our justification, though but in part, to works: If righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain,” Gal. ii, 21. Therefore it is evident we are not justified by the law, or by our works; but to him that believeth, sin is pardoned, and Christ’s righteousness imputed. This article of justification by faith alone, Luther used frequently to call _articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiæ_;” that by which the church must stand or fall.

That no man is able to make satisfaction for his sins; for our Lord teaches us to say, when we have done all things that are commanded us, We are unprofitable servants,” Luke xvii, 10. Christ’s sacrifice is alone sufficient to satisfy for sin, and nothing need be added to the infinite value of his atonement. Luther also rejected tradition, purgatory, penance, auricular confession, masses, invocation of saints, monastic vows, and other doctrines of the church of Rome. Luther differed widely from Calvin on matters of church discipline; and on the presence of Christ’s body in the sacrament. His followers also deviated from him in some things; but the following may be considered as a fair statement of their principles, and the difference between them and the Calvinists: 1. The Lutherans in Germany reject both Episcopacy and Presbyterianism, but appoint superintendents for the government of the church, who preside in their consistories, when that office is not supplied by a delegate from the civil government; and they hold meetings in the different towns and villages, to inquire into the state of the congregations and the schools. The appointment of superintendents, and the presentation to livings, is generally in the prince, or ecclesiastical courts. The Swedes and Danes have an ecclesiastical hierarchy, similar to that of England. 2. They differ in their views of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. All the Lutherans reject _trans_-substantiation, but affirm that the body and blood of Christ are _materially_ present in the sacrament, though in an incomprehensible manner: this they called _con-_substantiation. The Calvinists hold, on the contrary, that Jesus Christ is only _spiritually_ present in the ordinance, by the external signs of bread and wine. 3. They differ as to the doctrine of the eternal decrees of God respecting man’s salvation. The modern Lutherans maintain that the divine decrees, respecting the salvation and misery of men, are founded upon the divine prescience. The Calvinists, on the contrary, consider these decrees as absolute and unconditional. The Lutherans are generally divided into the moderate and the rigid. The moderate Lutherans are those who submitted to the _Interim_ published by the Emperor Charles V. Melancthon was the head of this party, and they were called Adiaphorists. The rigid Lutherans are those who would not endure any change in their master’s sentiments, of whom M. Flaccius was the head. The Lutherans are partial to the use of instrumental music in their churches, and admit statues and paintings, as the church of England does, without allowing them any religious veneration; but the rigid Calvinists reject these, and allow only the simplest forms of psalmody. The modern Lutherans, about the close of the seventeenth century, enlarged their liberality toward other sects, and gave up the supposed right of persecution; confessing that Christians are accountable to God only for their religious faith. They admit, also, into their sacred canon the Epistle of St. James, which Luther rashly rejected, because he could not reconcile it with St. Paul’s doctrine of justification; and the Revelation of St. John, which Luther also rejected, because he could not explain it. On some of the doctrines of the early German reformers the following remarks by Archbishop Laurence are entitled to high consideration:--Against the church of Rome, which always, when attacked, fled for protection to the shield of scholastical sophistry, Luther had waged a dauntless, unwearied, and effectual warfare. He entered the field of contest without distrust or apprehension, under a rooted persuasion that the victory over superstition would prove easy at an era when learning had already begun to extend itself in every direction, and was become closely allied to theological attainments. When the light of day appeared, the genuine doctrines of Scripture and the primitive opinions of antiquity began to be more distinctly perceived, and more accurately investigated. With an attachment to classical pursuits arose a zeal for Biblical inquiries. Taste and truth went hand in hand. Luther, than whom no one was more capable of infusing energy into the cause in which he had embarked, was of all men the worst adapted to conduct it with moderation: he was calculated to commence, but not to complete, reformation. Prompt, resolute, and impetuous, he laboured with distinguished success in the demolition of long established error; he also hastily threw together the rough and cumbrous materials of a better system. But the office of selecting, modelling, and arranging them was consigned to a correcter hand. Melancthon was of a character directly opposite to that of Luther, possessing every requisite to render truth alluring and reformation respectable; and hence upon him, in preference, the princes of Germany conferred the honour of compiling the public profession of their faith. But it ought not to be concealed, that, previously to the time when Lutheranism first became settled upon a permanent basis, and added public esteem to public notice, tenets were advanced, which retarded the progress of truth more than all the subtleties of scholastic argument, or the terrors of papal anathema. At the beginning of the Reformation, as Melancthon frankly observed to Cranmer, there existed among its advocates stoical disputations respecting fate, offensive in their nature, and noxious in their tendency. The duration, however, of these stoical disputations was but short; and the substitution of a more rational as well as practical system, for the space of more than twenty years before the appearance of our Articles, prevented the founders of our church from mistaking, for the doctrines of the Lutherans, those which they themselves wished to forget, and were anxious to obliterate. As we descend to particulars, it will be necessary to keep our eye upon one prominent doctrine, which was eminently conspicuous in all the controversies of the Lutherans,--the doctrine of COMPLETE REDEMPTION BY CHRIST, which in their idea their adversaries (the Papists) disregarded, who denied in effect the depravity of our nature, believed the favour of Heaven in this life recoverable by what was denominated _merit of congruity_, and, in the life to come, by that which was termed _merit of condignity_, and founded predestination upon merits of such a description; thus in every instance, while retaining the name of Christians, rendering Christianity itself superfluous. In opposition to opinions so repugnant in many respects to reason, and in almost all so subversive of Scripture, the Lutherans constantly pressed the unsophisticated tenet of the atonement, not contractedly in a Calvinistical, but comprehensively in a Christian, point of view,--in one in which both Calvinists and Arminians alike embrace it. Upon original sin the doctrine of the schoolmen was no less fanciful and remote from every Scriptural idea, than flattering to human pride. They contended that the infection of our nature is not a mental but a mere corporeal taint; that the body alone receives and transmits the contagion, while the soul in all instances proceeds immaculate from the hands of her Creator. This disposition to disease, such as they allowed it to be, was considered by some of them as the effect of a peculiar quality in the forbidden fruit; by others, as having been contracted from the poisonous breath of the infernal spirit which inhabited the serpent’s body. On one point they were all united; by preserving to the soul the bright traces of her divine origin unimpaired, they founded on a deceitful basis an arrogant creed, which, in declaring peace and pardon to the sinner, rested more upon personal merit than the satisfaction of a Saviour. In commenting upon the celebrated _Book of Sentences_, a work once not much less revered than the Scriptures themselves, the disciples of Lombard never failed to improve every hint which tended to degrade the grace of God and exalt the pride of man. Original sin the Romish schoolmen directly opposed to original righteousness; and this they considered not as something connatural with man, but as a superinduced habit or adventitious ornament, the removal of which could not prove detrimental to the native powers of his mind. When, therefore, they contemplated the effects of the fall, by confining the evil to a corporeal taint, and not extending it to the nobler faculties of the soul, they regarded man as an object of divine displeasure, not because he possessed that which was offensive, but because he was defective in that which was pleasing to the Almighty. Adam, they said, received for himself and his posterity the gift of righteousness, which he subsequently forfeited; in his loins we were included, and by him were virtually represented: his will was ours, and hence the consequence of his lapse is justly imputable to us his descendants. By our natural birth, therefore, under this idea, we are alienated from God, _innocent_ in our individual persons, but _guilty_ in that of him from whom we derived our existence; a guilt which, although contracted through the fault of another, yet so closely adheres to us that it effectually precludes our entrance at the gate of everlasting life, until the reception of a new birth in baptism. Thus they contended, that the sin of Adam conveys to us solely imputed guilt; the corporeal infection which they admitted not being sin itself, but only the subject matter of it,--not _peccatum_, but, according to their phraseology, _fomes peccati_, a kind of fuel which the human will kindles or not at pleasure. Such was the outline of the doctrine maintained in the church of Rome. The tenet of the Lutherans, on the other hand, is remarkable for its simplicity and perspicuity. Avoiding all intricate questions upon the subject, they taught that original sin is a corruption of our nature in a general sense, a depravation of the mental faculties and the corporeal appetites; that the resplendent image of the Deity, which man received at the creation of the world, although not annihilated, is nevertheless greatly impaired; and that, in consequence, the bright characters of unspotted sanctity, once deeply engraven on his mind by the hand of the living God, are become obliterated, the injury extending to his intellect, and affecting as well his reason and his will as his affections and passions. To conceive that inclination to evil incurs not in itself the disapprobation of Heaven, appeared to them little better than an apology for crime, or at least a dangerous palliation of that which the Christian’s duty compels him not only to repress but abhor. The case of Cornelius, whose prayers and alms are said to have ascended up for a memorial before God, was often quoted, by the advocates of the church of Rome, to prove the merit of works before the reception of grace; to prove the human will capable, by its own inherent rectitude, of deserving the favour and approbation of Heaven. The Lutherans, on the other hand, contended, that the argument supported not the conclusion drawn from it, and was therefore irrelevant; that the works of Cornelius were not the _causes_ but the _effects_ of grace; and that this is sufficiently apparent from the context, in which he is described as a devout man, who feared God and prayed continually.” The disciples of Lombard, in whatever mode disposed to pervert reason and annihilate Scripture, universally held, that neither before nor after the fall was man in himself capable of meriting heaven; that by the gratuitous endowments of his creation, even in paradise, he was only enabled to preserve his innocence, and not to sin; and that he was utterly incompetent to proceed one step farther, efficaciously to will a remunerable good, and by his natural exertions to obtain a reward above his nature; original righteousness being reputed not a connate quality, but a supernatural habit. Thus, he could resist evil, but not advance good to perfection; could in some sense live well, by living free from sin, but could not without divine aid so live as to deserve everlasting life. For such a purpose they asserted that grace was necessary, to operate upon his will in its primary determinations, and to co-operate with it in its ultimate acts. It was, therefore, in the loss of this celestial aid, this superadded gift, and not in any depravity of his mind, that they supposed the principal evil derivable from his lapse to consist; a loss, however, which, by a due exertion of his innate abilities, they deemed to be retrievable; and hence sprung that offensive doctrine of human sufficiency which, in the Lutheran’s eye, completely obscured the glory of the Gospel, and which, when applied to the sinner’s conscience, taught the haughty to presume, and the humble to despair. According, then, to the system under consideration, the favour of God in this life, and his beatific vision in the life to come, are both attainable by personal merit; the former by _congruous_, as it was termed, the latter by _condign_; the one without, the other with, the assistance of grace. By our natural strength, it was said, we can fulfil the commands of God as far as their obligation extends; yet was it added, that we cannot fulfil them according to the intention of the divine Legislator; an intention of rewarding only those who obey them in virtue formed by charity, under the influence of a quality rather regulating the tendency, than augmenting the purity, of the action. They stated, that we may so prepare ourselves for grace as to become entitled to it congruously, not as to a debt which in strict justice God is bound to pay, but as to a grant which it is congruous in him to give, and which it would be inconsistent with his attributes to withhold. This favourite doctrine was supported by every denomination of scholastics, and by every individual of the church of Rome. Congruous merit was universally esteemed a pearl above all price, the intrinsic value of which attracted the regard, and conciliated the benevolence, of the Almighty. According to their conception, we are endowed with an innate propensity to good, which vice itself can never obliterate, and are able not only to reverence and adore the supreme Being, but to love him above other objects. They supposed man competent no less to the efficient practice, than to the barren admiration, of holiness; enabled as well to obey the laws, as to love the goodness, of the Almighty; and, if not to deserve the rewards, at least to discharge the obligations, of religion. Impressed, therefore, with such exalted notions of human ability, and forgetful of the Christian propitiation for sin, the sophists of the schools maintained, that the soul of man possesses in the freedom, or rather in the capacity, of her WILL a faculty almost divine. Stimulated by the most upright propensities, and undepraved in her noblest powers, she directs her progress in the path of truth and the road to bliss, by the pure and inextinguishable light of an unperverted reason. Although mutable in her decisions, nevertheless complete controller of her conduct, she becomes at pleasure either the servant of righteousness or the slave of sin; and, disdaining to be anticipated by God himself, prevents him in his supernatural gifts by a previous display of her own meritorious deeds, challenging, as a congruous right, that which only could have been otherwise conferred as a favour undeserved. By the bare observance of my holy order,” exclaimed the secluded devotee, I am able not solely to obtain grace for myself, but, by the works which I then may do, can accumulate merit sufficient both to supply my own wants and those of others; so that I may sell the superabundance of my acquired treasure.” Can we be surprised that a reformer of Luther’s manly disposition, who wrote without reserve and reasoned without control, when adverting to opinions of so noxious a tendency, should sometimes, from excess of zeal, lose sight of moderation in his censures? The Lutherans commenced the attack upon these unscriptural dogmas, under a persuasion that the position of their opponents militated against the leading principles of Christianity. If man,” they said, be capable of pleasing God by his own works abstractedly considered, without divine assistance, where is the necessity, and what is the utility, of that assistance?” They argued, that, were it possible for the moral virtues of the mind by their own efficiency to render our persons acceptable to God and obtain his lost favour, no need would exist of any other satisfaction for sin, and thus the whole scheme of Gospel redemption would have been fruitless, and Christ have died in vain. While, therefore, the doctrine of the atonement presented nothing but _a cloud and darkness to their adversaries, it gave light by night to these_; on them it shone, amidst surrounding gloom, with lustre unobscured. Luther advanced a proposition which proved highly offensive to the Papists, and which they never ceased to condemn and calumniate. His assertion was, that he who exerts himself to the utmost of his ability still continues to sin. On the other side, unassisted man was thought incapable of performing an action remunerably good, or, as it was usually termed, condignly meritorious, even before his lapse; and that consequently, in his fallen state, all to which he was conceived competent by his innate strength was _not to sin_. When Luther therefore drew up his thesis for public disputation against the tenet of congruous works, if little delicacy, yet some caution, and much discrimination, appeared requisite. Had he stated them to be thus good in a scholastic sense, he would have completely lost sight of his object, and allowed more than even his opponents themselves. Had he described them as not demeritorious, or, in other words, not sinful, he would have precisely maintained the adverse position, and might consequently have spared his labour, at the same time that he would have tacitly acknowledged them to possess, what he could not consistently with truth attribute to them, every natural perfection of virtue and holiness. Under what denomination, then, could he class them, except under that of _sinful_? a denomination which he the more readily adopted because, even among his adversaries themselves, the words SIN and GRACE, as he remarked, were in general immediately opposed to each other. Anxious to rescue Christian theology from the grasp of those who embraced only to betray, the Lutherans laboured to restore that importance to the doctrine of redemption with which the Scriptures invest it, but of which, by a subtle perversity, it had been deprived. The principal object, therefore, in their view evidently was, to Christianize the speculations of the schools; and the principal drift of their argument is to prove, that human virtue, how extravagantly soever extolled by a vain philosophy, is wholly insufficient (because imperfect) to merit the favour of Heaven. Allowing no medium between righteousness and unrighteousness, the approbation and disapprobation of the Almighty, characterizing that as sinful which is confessedly not holy, and thus annihilating every ground of self-presumption, they inculcated the necessity of contemplating with the eye of faith those means of reconciliation which Christianity alone affords. But it has been insinuated, that the Lutheran doctrine went to prove man’s total inability to extricate himself from crime, until the arrival of some uncertain moment, which brings with it a regeneration from on high, the sudden transfusion of a new light and new virtues. But those who thus conceive of it are not probably aware, that Melancthon, the venerable author of the Augsburgh Confession, warmly reprobates this precise idea, which he denominates _a Manichean conceit and a horrible falsehood_. Upon the abstract question of free will it is indeed true, that Melancthon, no less than Luther, at first held opinions which he was happy to retract. But when this is acknowledged it should be added, that he made ample amends for his indiscretion by not only expunging the offensive passages from the single work which contained them, but by introducing others of a nature diametrically opposite. And although the more inflexible coadjutor of Melancthon was too lofty to correct what he had once made public, and too magnanimous to regard the charge of inconsistency which his adversaries urged against him; yet what his better judgment approved clearly appears from a preface written not long before his death; in which, while he expressed an anxiety to have his own chaotic labours, as he styled them, buried in eternal oblivion, he recommended in strong terms, as a work admirably adapted to form the Christian divine, that very performance of his friend which was remarkable for something more than a mere recantation of the opinions alluded to. It was not against any conceived deficiency in the quality of our virtue that they argued, but against its supposed competency, whether wrought in or out of grace, with greater or less degrees of purity, to effect that which the oblation of Christ alone accomplishes. Upon both points Luther treated the doctrine of his adversaries as altogether frivolous, and incapable of corroboration by a single fact. Futile, however, as the scholastical tenet appeared to be, although deficient in proof and unsupported by example, upon this, he remarked with indignation and grief, was founded the whole system of papal delusion. Justification was on both sides supposed to consist entirely in the remission of sins. The popish scholastics, on this head, were remarkably distinct in their ideas, and express in their language. They represented it as an effect produced by the infusion of divine grace into the mind; not as a consequent to a well spent life, but as preceding all remunerable obedience, as the intervening point between night and day, the gloom of a guilty and the light of a self-approving conscience; or, in other words, and to adopt their own phraseology, as the exact boundary where merit of congruity ends and where merit of condignity begins, the infallible result of a previous disposition on our part, which never fails of alluring from on high that supernatural quality which, being itself love, renders the soul beloved. While the Lutherans, however, adhered to the general import of the term as understood in the schools, they waged an incessant warfare upon another point; while they allowed that justification consists in the remission of sin, they denied that this remission is to be acquired by the merit of the individual. Their scholastic opponents maintained that man is justified in the sight of God in consequence of his own preparation, and on account of his personal qualities. They, on the other band, argued with an inflexibility which admitted of no compromise, that, possessing not merits of his own to plead, man freely received forgiveness through the mercy of God solely on account of the merits of Christ. The effective principle, therefore, or _meritorious cause of justification_, was the great point contested. The doctrine of the popish divines, explained more at large, was this: When the sinner, conscious of his past transgressions, inquired where he was to seek the expiation of his crime, and deliverance from the dreadful consequences of it, the general answer was, _In the merit of penitence_; a merit capable of annihilating guilt, and appeasing the anger of incensed Omnipotence. He, they argued, who, having disobeyed the laws of Heaven, is desirous of returning into that state of acceptance from which he has fallen, must not expect free forgiveness; but previously by unfeigned sorrow of heart deserve the restoration of grace, and, with it, the obliteration of his offences. To effect this desirable purpose he is bound strictly to survey and detest his former conduct, accurately to enumerate his transgressions and deeply feel them; and, impressed with a due sense of their magnitude, impurity, and consequences, to condemn his folly and deplore his fault, which have made him an outcast of Heaven, and exposed him to eternal misery. So far he can proceed by that operation of the mind which they denominated ATTRITION, and which, being within the sphere of his natural powers, they regarded as _congruous piety meritorious of justification_, as a preparation of the soul more or less necessary to receive and merit justifying grace. When, therefore, he is arrived at this point, ATTRITION ceases and CONTRITION commences; the habit of sin is expelled, while that of holiness is superinduced in its stead, and with the infusion of charity, the plastic principle of a new obedience, justification becomes complete. But even here it was not conceived that a total deliverance takes place; a liberation from guilt and _eternal_ punishment is effected, but not from _temporal_, which is never remitted unless either by the infliction of some personal suffering or satisfactory compensation required of him who is already justified and approved by Heaven. However, to accomplish this remaining object, nothing more is wanting than a continuation, to a sufficient intensity, of that compunction of heart which is now denominated CONTRITION, grace supplying the defects of nature, and enabling penitential merit not only to justify, but to obtain exemption from punishment of every species. But so great appeared to the popish scholastics the frailty of man and the severity of God, that no inconsiderable difficulty occurred in the due application of this favourite doctrine to individuals; for the means of expiation, they imagined, ought always to be proportionate to the magnitude of the offences. How,” they reasoned, are we to be assured that our contrition has been either sufficient or sincere, and whether it has been so in the obliteration not only of one crime, but of all; whether it has atoned for past transgressions of every kind, the number of which may perplex, as well as their guilt confound, us?” Instead, therefore, of penitence in its strictest acceptation as a perfect virtue, God, they said, in condescension to human infirmity, has substituted for general practice _the sacrament of penitence_, which, for the attainment of full remission, requires only a moderate compunction of soul, with confession to the priest, and the discharge of such satisfaction as he may enjoin. And, still lower to reduce the terms of acceptance, they even argued that it is not absolutely necessary for the penitent to experience an entire conversion of heart, but only not to oppose the impediment of mortal crime, to feel some displeasure at his past conduct, and to express a resolution of amending it in future. But, after all, and in spite of the boasted authority of the keys, complete confidence in divine forgiveness was never inculcated; for it was neither the interest nor the inclination of the church of Rome to teach the simple doctrine of Christian faith, but rather to involve it in metaphysical obscurity. Under the pretext, therefore, of relieving the throbbing breast from its apprehensions, they had recourse to numerous inventions for propping the insecure fabric of penitential hope; asserting, among other extravagancies, that the sacraments are in themselves efficacious by virtue of their own operation, exclusively of all merit in the recipient; and that the sacrament of the altar, in particular, acts so powerful in this respect as to communicate grace not only to those who partake of it, but to others from whom it is received by substitution, provided its operation be not hindered by confessedly flagrant immorality. So deeply rooted in the minds of the papists had become the persuasion of its thus effecting the best of purposes, and that even without the necessity of an actual participation of it by him upon whom the benefit is conferred, that the celebration of the mass was universally regarded as the means of appeasing the anger of Heaven, and obtaining pardon and peace, of procuring divine assistance for the living, and, for the dead, deliverance from the bitter pains of purgatory. Nor by the sacraments alone, but by every good external work, as well as internal disposition, was justifying grace supposed to be merited _congruously_, and satisfaction for sin to be made _condignly_. In monastical institutions, likewise, were found no mean materials for similar purposes; for in those feigned religions,” as the homily _On Good Works_ describes them, the devotees boasted of having lamps which ran always over, able to _satisfy_ not only for their own sins, but also for all other their benefactors, brothers and sisters of religion, as most ungodly and craftily they had persuaded the multitude of ignorant people; keeping in divers places marts or markets of merits, being full of their holy relics, images, shrines, and works of overflowing abundance, ready to be sold.” Yet, whether the dubious penitent was instructed to derive consolation from the efficacy of the sacraments, from his own personal qualities, or from any of what Cranmer aptly termed “the fantastical works of man’s invention,” it should be observed that he was not directly taught to consider these as wholly superseding the virtue of repentance, but as supplying his deficiencies in the performance of it; an incongruous system of atonement, fabricated by the avarice of Rome, and the obsequiousness of scholastical philosophy, to augment the treasures and extend the influence of the church, to extinguish the light of Gospel truth, and, while keeping the world at large in ignorance, to hold the conscience of the individual in slavery. Upon the whole, then, the scholastics maintained that justification is unattainable without repentance, at least, without some degree of attrition on our par