had always been distasteful; they now withdrew the measure of countenance they had at the beginning shown him. Erasmus himself, whom many regarded as the real author of the mischief-"Erasmus laid the eggs, Luther hatched them"-now openly came out against him with a treatise on Free Will, aimed at the crude determinism of Luther's hyper-Augustinianism, and drew from him in his reply, "De Servo Arbitrio," a reaffirmation of the incriminated doctrine pushed to a veritable reductio ad impium. On the other hand, in his "savage book"-as Erasmus called it-against the peasants, Luther committed religion as completely to the support of power and possession, however ruthlessly used, as ever the medieval church had done, and dashed the hopes of those who dreamed that the "gospel" had a promise for the life that now is as well as for that which is to come.

But the greatest consequence of the Anabaptist extravagances and the Peasants' War was its reaction on Luther himself. He had begun with enthusiastic confidence that, when the word of God was set free and the gospel of justification by faith proclaimed, it would make men think right and do right. A revival of true religion in the hearts of men would in due time bring all needed reforms. Of the civil power he asked only protection for the gospel. Now, confronted by the varieties of Anabaptist gospels, all claiming, like his own, the authority of the word of God, and by the revolutionary excesses which defended themselves with the same appeal, he was constrained to put his trust in princes to extirpate obnoxious sects and maintain the social order; and the subsequent political history of the Reformation in Germany permanently impressed on Lutheranism a peculiar territorial character. The old order was overthrown and the new imposed by the princes, each as seemed to him good. The religion of the ruler was the religion of his subjects. In place of Luther's original idea of the independence of each Christian community, came a multitude of Lutheran state churches under the autocratic supremacy of the prince for the time being, who not only legislated in church orders

on organisation, discipline, and worship, but imposed elaborate confessions of faith on his clergy, all subject to equally arbitrary change by his successor. In the violent doctrinal controversies which rent the Lutheran churches almost before Luther was dead, the parties clamoured and intrigued for the theological ear of rulers as the surest way to make the truth prevail.

Luther despised philosophy and had no intellectual interest in theology. Everything in his mind centred about justification solely by faith, in which alone he found the assurance of salvation he sought. The doctrines which are premises, consequences, or corollaries of this-what are commonly called the doctrines of sin and grace, including the sacraments he thought out in his own way; the conflict in which he was thereby involved led him to deny the authority of the church and the whole doctrine of the church on which its authority rested, and to assert against it the sole authority of Scripture. What lay outside these controversial issues he did not impugn.

He accepted the three received symbols of Western Christendom, the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed, as the doctrine of the church universal; and, though he did not find the phraseology of the theological creeds in the Bible, and recognised, as Augustine did, that "Trinity," with its mathematical implications, is a word the use of which can only be justified by inability to find a better one, he never questioned that the dogmas of the Trinity and the deity of Christ formulated the teaching of Scripture and were fundamental articles of the Christian faith. He took pains to emphasise his agreement with "the true Christian church" on these cardinal points by publishing the three symbols in German translation, with an explanatory comment. The religious faith by which alone man is justified is thus limited not only to the church of the word and the sacraments, but by an orthodox confession. "Whoever wishes to be saved must, before all things, hold the catholic faith, which unless a man preserve whole

and inviolate, beyond doubt he will eternally perish"-so runs the beginning of the Athanasian Creed, on which Luther was as sound as the pope himself. That the authority of the creeds lay not in the church but in the Scripture implied that the Bible is a body of revealed doctrine, a conception the evolution of which made the churches of the Reformation dogmatic churches to a degree surpassing Catholicism itself.

The theological teacher of the Lutheran Reformation was Melancthon, who was called to Wittenberg as professor of Greek in 1518. The first edition of his "Loci Communes Rerum Theologicarum" (1521) is little more than a clear and orderly exposition of Luther's ideas; but in the course of time he became more independent, and in the later editions of the Loci as well as in his other writings his views on some important points differed materially though not controversially from Luther's. The principal divergences concerned predestination and the Lord's Supper. Melancthon gave up Luther's deterministic conceptions, with the pure passivity of man and the irresistibility of divine grace. There are three concurrent causes in conversion-the word of God, the Holy Spirit, and the human will assenting to the word of God and not contending against it. In the doctrine of the sacraments Melancthon departed more widely from Luther as time went on. He had comparatively early found himself unable to accept Luther's scholastic theory of the ubiquity of Christ's glorified body-a communication of the divine attribute of omnipresence to his human nature-and inclined more and more to the symbolical interpretation of the words, "This is my body," which Luther always insisted on taking literally.

Both this Calvinistic modification of the doctrine of the sacrament and the synergistic doctrine of salvation became the subject of long and acrimonious controversies among the Lutherans of the next generation, and in these controversies, and in the effort to put an end to them either by the more exact definition of the true teaching of the church or

by arriving at consensus of some kind, the corpus of doctrine having a confessional and normative authority in one part or another of the Lutheran churches grew to formidable dimensions; but what was of more consequence than these dogmatic libraries was the fact that sound doctrine now became the dominant idea. It was the possession of the sound doctrine which made the true church-sound doctrine in the Scripture, sound doctrine in the creed and confessions. Under this incubus of confessional controversy and dogma the moral and religious forces which the Reformation had set in motion came to a standstill for a time, and in some places even turned back.

CHAPTER XII

CHRISTIANITY

THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION. II

Calvin-Institutio Christianæ Religionis-Election-The Law of God -Sacraments-The Church-Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism-The Creeds-Servetus-Antitrinitarian TendenciesSocinus-Criticism of the Doctrine of the Atonement.

CALVIN'S "Institutio Christianæ Religionis" (1536), as has been said above, was originally designed as an apology of the Reformation, which, by a clear presentation of the position of the reformers should convince the king of France and open-minded Catholics that the reformed doctrines were neither so heretical nor so dangerous as they were represented. In this first edition of the Institutio Calvin sets forth substantially the teaching of Luther, with some modifications after Butzer, but in a form which bears the stamp of his own individuality. The chapters treat, in order, of the Law, Faith, Prayer, the Sacraments (Baptism and the Lord's Supper), the False Sacraments, and Christian Liberty, thus including only the reformed doctrine of salvation. In later editions it became a complete system of theology, with a different and more methodical disposition of the material, treating, in four books, of the Knowledge of God, the Creator; the Knowledge of God, the Redeemer, first revealed to the Fathers under the Law and afterward to us in the Gospel; the Way in which the Grace of Christ is Received; and the External Means Leading to Salvation.

In its final form (1559) it is beyond question the greatest theological work of the Reformation, a pre-eminence due in part to the logical character of Calvin's mind and the lucidity of his exposition, in part to his learning and skill as an interpreter of the Scriptures, a field in which he surpassed all his contemporaries.