from other languages are always translated, but when the original words have a disputed meaning, or a special force or importance, they are also quoted. The author has, as nearly as he was able, given to the book such an internal completeness as to render it unnecessary to refer to other works while reading it. While he has aimed at something of the thoroughness which the scholar desires, he has also endeavored to meet the wants of that important and growing class of readers who have all the intelligence needed for a full appreciation of the matter of a book, but are repelled by the technical difficulties of form suggested by the pedantry of authors, or permitted by their carelessness or indolence. So far as the author's past labors were available for the purposes of this work, he has freely used them. In no case has a line been allowed to stand which does not express a present conviction, not simply as to what is true, but as to the force of the grounds on which its truth is argued. In what has been taken from his articles in Reviews, and in other periodicals, he has changed, omitted, and added, in accordance with a fresh study of all the topics. He has also drawn upon some of the Lectures delivered by him to his theological classes, and thankfully acknowledges the use, for this purpose, of the notes made by his pupils, Rev. F. W. Weiskotten, of Elizabethtown, Pa., and Messrs. Bieber and Foust. To Lloyd P. Smith, Esq., Librarian, and to Mr. George M. Abbot, Assistant Librarian, of the Philadelphia and Loganian Libraries, the author is indebted for every possible facility in the use of those valuable collections. An Index has been prepared, in which the effort has been made to avoid the two generic vices of a scantiness which leaves the reader in perplexity, and a minuteness which confuses him. The positions taken in this book are largely counter, in some respects, to the prevailing theology of our time and our land. No man can be more fixed in his prejudice against the views here defended than the author himself once was; no man can be more decided in his opinion that those views are false than the author is now decided in his faith that they are the truth. They have been formed in the face of all the influences of education and of bitter hatred or of contemptuous disregard on the part of nearly all who were most intimately associated with him in the period of struggle. Formed under such circumstances, under what he believes to have been the influence of the Divine Word, the author is persuaded that they rest upon grounds which cannot easily be moved. In its own nature his work is, in some degree, polemical; but its conflict is purely with opinions, never with persons. The theme itself, as it involves questions within our common Protestantism, renders the controversy principally one with defects or errors in systems least remote in the main from the faith vindicated in this volume. It is most needful that those nearest each other should calmly argue the questions which still divide them, as there is most hope that those already so largely in affinity may come to a yet more perfect understanding. The best work of which isolated radicalism is capable is that of destroying evil. The more earnestly radicalism works, the sooner is its mission accomplished. Conservatism works to a normal condition, and rests at last in habit. Radicalism presupposes the abnormal. Itself an antithesis, it dies with the thing it kills. The long, fixed future must therefore be in the hands of conservatism in some shape; either in the hands of a mechanical conservatism, as in the Church of Rome, or of a reformatory conservatism, as represented in that historical and genuine Protestantism which is as distinct from the current sectarianism, in some respects, as it is from Romanism in others. The purest Protestantism, that which best harmonizes conservatism and reformation, will ultimately control the thinking of the Christian Church. The volume which the reader holds in his hand is meant to set forth some of the reasons in view of which those who love the Evangelical Protestant Church, commonly called the Lutheran Church, hope to find pardon for their conviction that in it is found the most perfect assimilation and co-ordination of the two forces. It has conserved as thoroughly as is consistent with real reformation; it has reformed as unsparingly as is consistent with genuine conservatism. The objective concreteness of the old Apostolic Catholicity, Rome has exaggerated and materialized till the senses master the soul, they should serve. The subjective spirituality of New Testament Christianity is isolated by the Pseudo-Protestantism, which drags the mutilated organism of the Church after it as a body of death from which it would fain be delivered, and which it drops at length, altogether, to wander a melancholy ghost, or to enter on the endless metempsychosis of sectarianism. To distinguish without separating, and to combine without confusing, has been the problem of the Lutheran Church. It has distinguished between the form of Christianity and the essence, but has bound them together inseparably: the Reformatory has made sacred the individual life and liberty, the Conservative has sanctified the concrete order. Nor is this claim extravagant in its own nature. No particular Church has, on its own showing, a right to existence, except as it believes itself to be the most perfect form of Christianity, the form which of right should and will be universal. No Church has a right to a part which does not claim that to it should belong the whole. That communion confesses itself a sect which aims at no more than abiding as one of a number of equally legitimated bodies. That communion which does not believe in the certainty of the ultimate acceptance of its principles in the whole world has not the heart of a true Church. That which claims to be Catholic de facto claims to be Universal de jure. A true unity in Protestantism would be the death of Popery; but Popery will live until those who assail it are one in their answer to the question: What shall take its place? This book is a statement and a defence of the answer given to that question by the communion under whose banner the battle with Rome was first fought, — under whose leaders the greatest victories over Rome were won. If this Church has been a failure, it can hardly be claimed that the Reformation was a success; and if Protestantism cannot come to harmony with the principles by which it was created, as those principles were understood by the greatest masters in the reformatory work, it must remain divided until division reaches its natural end,-absorption and annihilation. MARCH 17, 1871. |