YALE
DIVINITY SCHOOL
LIBRARY

Gift of
Krauth Memorial Library
Lutheran Theological Seminary

RELIGION AND, RELIGIONISMS.*

-TREPARED, AND IN. PART DELIVERED, AS THE OPENING SERMON
BEFORE
THE CONTENTION OP THE GENERAL COUNCIL OP THE EVANGELICAL
LUTHERAN CHURCH IN AMERICA,
IN THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY COMMUNION, PHILADELPHIA,
October 10th, 1877,
BT CHAELES P. KKAUTH, D.D., LL.D.,
President of the Council.

Johu viii, 48 : Then answered the Jews, and said unto him, Say we not well that thou art a
Samaritan ? *

The Theme.

In opening the conventions of a great representative Christian bodyr
such as the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America claims to be, it is fitting that a theme should be chosen which
connects itself with the wants of the time as they are contemplated in
the distinctive mission of that body. We have' selected a theme which
should interest the children of the mother church of restored Chris
tianity, for it pertains to one of her most sacred ahd important, yet most
delicate and difficult, duties. But it is a dheme .also which should in
terest all thoughtful men, did they desire no more than to understand
the true genius and spirit of that Church which is justly entitled to be
* Published by the students of the Evangelical Lutheran Theological Semi
nary, Philadelphia.

considered the greatest organic outcome of the greatest movement of
the modern world, a movement by which that world was brought into
living union with the greatest event of all time, the founding of Christian
ity. But beyond our Church, and those who wish to understand her, it has
an interest for our common Christianity, for it involves principlesfpf
universal importance ; principles never more needed, and never less un
derstood than they are now, principles whose gravity is equalled by their
difficulty, and which the more urgently require t^o be discussed, because
there is such an aversion on the part of many to the discussion of. them.
The Problem of the Time.
There is no problem more delicate, none more difficult, yet none more
important or urgent, at this hour, than the mode in which the Christian
Church in her purity should treat schism, sect, heresy, and error; how
she should deal with the strong misleaders and the feeble misled who
have separated from her, and with the imperfectly informed, the weak
and the perverse who remain with her. How shall Christian commun
ions recognize each other's virtues without assuming responsibility for
each other's faults? How can they be faithful to the truth without
seeming to violate the law of love? How can they be loyal to convic
tion without harshness, and warn, reprove, correct, and instruct each
other in righteousness, without arrogance, assumption, or officiousness ;
in a word, how shall we be perfectly truthful without being unloving, and
how shall we be perfectly loving without being untruthful?
Our Guide to its Solution.
So delicate and difficult are the questions here involved, that we could
.come to no solution of them had we not an all-perfect teaching in regard*
to them, made luminous by an all-perfect example ; had not the Church
•Christ to teach her, and Christ to go before her, and apply in his own
"marvellous life his own matchless instructions. He had the same prob
lem to meet, and he met it. The Jews, as we hear in our text, charged
him with being a Samaritan ; the Samaritans would not receive him
because they saw his face set toward Jerusalem. The Pharisees said,
"He casteth out devils by Beelzebub the prince of devils." They
were offended at his most spiritual and searching doctrines. They
tempted, tested, assailed him, took counsel against him, and conspired
to put him to death. The Sadducees and the Herodians united with
the Pharisees in the effort to tempt him and entangle him ; and in his
last days all the powers of Paganism and Judaism united in execrating

£ him, and rejoiced together at his death. Unmoved by every personal
f. consideration and feeling, he applied to Jew, "Samaritan, and Pagan
. « alike the fixed principle of perfect right, by which our judgment is to
v be moulded and our conduct guided.
 Christ's ' Attitude.
* We propose, then, to say something of the attitude of Christ to the
- false, the defective, and the inconsistent religions of his day, as a guide
o"to genuine Lutheranism in its relations to the religionisms of our time.
o The attitude of our Lord, as to its general object, may be said to have re-
r gard to three types of religion : the Pagan, which was in direct antag-
-j~" onism to the true ; Samaritanism, which, in spite of many and gross
^ errors, occupied in part a common ground with the true, both as to faith
to and the rule of faith ; and Judaism, first in its purity as a divine system,
j and then with its internal divisions, especially between the rationalism
If of the Sadducees and the legalism and traditionalism of the Pharisees.
° Beside this, within the Church, our Lord had constant regard to the
great practical shortcomings and defects of those who officially received
Xthe true system in its purity.
> The common attitude of our Lord to all these was, first, that of un-
> sparing condemnation of the wrong in doctrine or practice, even though
-£ it were in the relatively best. Without temporizing, evasion, equivoca-
— ' tion, or compromise, he set himself against all wrong living and wrong
 * teaching. He maintained pure faith alone, as the sole spring of a pure
- life, and gave the fellowship of faith and of -official recognition to none
o but those who confessed the pure faith. It was, secondly, a hearty rec-
^ ognition of the remnant of the right and hopeful, both in doctrine and
I ^ practice, even in the relatively worst. It was, in the third place, one of
careful distinction between the crafty and the simple, the deceiver and
Zr~ the deceived, between the unprincipled or officious misleader and the
^ unhappy dupe. It was, fourthly, an attitude of unabating love and
y fidelity to both, and to all mankind.
The Attitude of Lutheranism. What is Lutheranism?
-4—
^" To this most perfect example Christ's pure Church is bound to conform
^ itself. To the degree to which it is his pure Church it will be so con
formed. If Lutheranism claim to be Christianity, it binds itself to this
^0 conformity. If genuine Lutheranism be genuine Christianity, it is, in
\fact, so conformed. What is genuine Lutheranism, which justifies us,
— on this occasion, in making it a term of our theme? Lutheranism

is Christianity in one definite historical form, the result of reformation
which resisted revolution, the result of progress tempered by conser
vatism. Its visible fact is the existence of an immense communion
of many nationalities. Its visible bond is the Augsburg Confession,
and its creeds, consonant with that confession. Its internal bond is
the system of faith and life taught in God's Word, and brought into
living power by the Holy Ghost. Our Church is Reformed as against
all corruptions ; Protestant as against the assertion of all false prin
ciples in Christian faith, life, and Church government; Evangelical as
against legalism and rationalism, against all restricted atonement and
arbitrary limitation of God's love ; and by a historical necessity, created
not by herself but by her enemies, she is Lutheran, over against all
perversions, mutilations, and misunderstandings of the Word under
whatever name they may come, though that name be Reformed, Prot
estant, Evangelical, Catholic, or Christian, or by false assumption
Lutheran itself. We claim, in a word, as the explanation of the being
of the Lutheran Church, and of her right to be, that Lutheranism is
pure Christianity, under the legitimate historical conditions which have
been the outgrowth of the primitive and middle ages, and of the great
Reformation in the sixteenth century.
What is Genuine Lutheranism?
When we speak of genuine Lutheranism, we do not mean that the
thing itself can be other than genuine — that there can be of right two
kinds, that anything but the real thing is entitled to the name — but, that
in common with all names the name Lutheran may be, and is, misap
plied. That may be called Lutheranism which is not Lutheranism.
Gold must be gold, yet we can distinguish for convenience sake be
tween genuine gold and spurious gold; gold pure and gold alloyed.
We can speak of genuine, true, pure Christianity, and of spurious, false,
corrupted Christianity. It is a part of morality to use qualifying terms
to express qualified things. Genuine Lutheranism we contrast as a
thing of intelligence, over against ignorance. It is the Lutheranism of
those who know why they are what they are— who know the hope that
is in them and have a reason for it. They know what the Confessions
teach, and what is in the Word on which the Confession rests. They
know the genius of their Church, its history, its wants, its glories, its de
fects, the prospects which animate it, the discouragements it has to over
come. A genuine Lutheranism is a living, devoted, earnest Lutheranism,
over against aversion, frigidness, and indifference. It is its "good to be
zealously affected always in a good thing." It is a Lutheranism which

is consistent, as over against one which is continually denying the just
inferences of its own profession. It is happy in that it condemneth not
itself in the thing which it alloweth. Genuine Lutheranism is firm,
over against all vacillation, all temporizing, lowering of principle, and
abasement before the idols of the hour. It lifts itself above the blan
dishments of the time and the dread of its odium and persecution. It
does not fear being left a little flock if the evidence remains of the
Father's good pleasure to give it the kingdom. It sings " Ein feste
Burg " with heart as well as voice, confessing that nothing on earth or
in hell can move it.
It is a Lutheranism which learns from history. It discerns the signs
of all the times, that it may "discern this time." History is God's com
mentary on God's word, and he who cannot read the signs of the times,
as the times pass before him, knows little of the depth of revealed truth.
The Lutheran Church learns from all history, most of all from her
own, varied and instructive as it is. She learns the spirit of true refor
mation from her own greatest of reformations. She can learn from the
gentleness and breadth of Calixtus, without falling into his perilous loose
ness and false spirit of compromise. She can be taught the spirit of his
torical rectitude even to the evil, from Arnold, without imbibing any of
his sympathies with the evil. She learns the lesson of genuine pietistie
piety, without falling into the error of the later and perverted pietistie
indifference to doctrine. True Lutheranism conjoins the piety of the
pietists with the orthodoxy of its opponents ; it neither arrays orthodoxy
against piety, nor piety against orthodoxy, but shows by word and lip
that true orthodoxy is piety, and true piety orthodoxy. From the as
saults of rationalism our Church has emerged with lessons of experience, of
wisdom, of inflexibility in confession, of heightened trust, more than re
paying her for the fury of the warfare. From the net of state intoler
ance uuder the pretences of love, of state distraction and demoralization
in the name of truth, in which her feet have been entangled and her
hands bound, she struggles forth with a deepened conviction that fidelity
to her Master cannot be sundered from fidelity to herself— that she must
hold fast that which she hath, if she is to permit no man to take her
crown. This is the Lutheranism with which the General Council heartily
desires to be pervaded. Of this Lutheranism it would desire to be the
exponent. Like all great ideals, such a Lutheranism must long be an
object of yearning before it can become a thing of complete fruition.
Before we can have apprehended or reached the perfection aspired to, it
is necessary long and persistently to have forgotten what is behind, to

have reached forth to that which is before, and to have pressed toward
the mark for the prize. But the mere striving for a great, and true, and
lofty principle, is better than the attainment of conformity with a lower
one. The least in the kingdom of heaven, which is the kingdom of pure
truth and principle, is greater than the greatest outside of it.
Religionisms. The Religionisms of our Time.
We have used in our theme the term Religionisms. We all know the
effect iri our language ofi the addition in certain cases of the syllable
" ism." It implies distortion, misdirection, abuse, so that it finally comes
to be used as a noun, and we speak of the " isms " of fanaticism, the
"isms" of the wild, the visionary, the illusive. "Ism" is the half of
schism. Irreligion is the rejection of religion in theory or life. Relig
ionism is the perversion of it. We have used the plural, religionisms, for
there are many kinds of it. Every system, in virtue of its separate
existence, implies that other systems, to the extent of their difference in
principle from it, are religionisms. All that claims to be religion, by
virtue of its own being implies, whether it will or not, that there are
religionisms in the world.
We have assumed in our theme that genuine Lutheranism has relations
to the religionisms of our time. For our time, in common with all times,
all ages, all eras, has distinctive religionisms. They act and react — the
religionisms take their color from the time, and the time takes its color
from them. The religionisms of the times are among the most important
signs of the times. All the ages of the Church may be classified witb
reference to these shifting religionisms. They give character to the
Church, they take character from the Church, and out of her receptivity
on the one side, her activity on the other, her coming under their power
or her successful resistance of it, largely results her final characteristic
condition in every age. Religionisms of the Ages.
Thus the first age has been styled by one writer, with reference to its
religion, the Apostolic ; by another, with reference to its religionism, the
Judaizing age. The second age, with reference to its religionism, has
been called the Gnostic, paganizing age. The third, in the same re
spects, the Novatian, Dissimulating age. The fourth, on the side of
religion, the Christological age ; on the side of religionism, the Arian
age. The fifth, the Nestorian, naturalizing age. The sixth, the Euty-
chean ; the seventh, the Monothelectic, the barbarian and papal -tend-

ing age ; the eighth, the Iconoclastic. From the ninth to the fifteenth
century, we have the iron age of the Church, popery, clerical tyranny,
superstition, deepest darkness, with a flash of lightning in it now and then,
and towards its close, faint streaks of light low down in the horizon. The
sixteenth is the era of a new dawn, and to this hour we have on the one
side that light shining in darkness, and on the other the darkness which
comprehends it not.
The Pharisaism of our Time.
The proportioiis of the different forms of religion vary, but more or
less of every form of it is found in every age. In our age we have
Pharisaism, the spirit of traditional legalism, of formal ritualism, of
orthodoxism without living faith, of sanctimoniousness without sanc
tity, of supererogation in things needless, to the neglect of the weightier
matters of the law, the religionism*of pretentiousness, of haughty assump
tion, aud of public display. The Middle Ages are not over ; we still have
flagellations, ostentatious fastings, ceremonial ablutions, withdrawal from
labor, contemptuous control of the masses whom Pharisaism despises, ye,t
who, till they are enlightened by the Word, reverence and follow it im
plicitly. The Sadduceeism of our Time.
In our age we have Sadduceeism, the spirit of unbelief under the
forms of religion. It is always Pelagian in the estimate of man's powers,
making brain the universal solvent, rejecting mysteries, despising doc
trine, covertly materialistic, doubtful of the immortality of the soul, or
of its consciousness apart from the body ; laughing at the resurrection
and the judgment, or teaching that they are past or are passing now;
sometimes accepting heaven but denying hell, or abrogating it by their
theory of annihilation. It takes Scripture piecemeal to torment it for
its own end from all its native force, reducing its stupendous revelations
to the standard of a self-inflated rationalism, and making myths of its
miracles of deed, and of its great miracle of person, the God incarnate,,
Jesus Christ.
The Paganism of our Time.
In our age we have Paganism, not in pagan lands alone, but in its
worstforms in nominal Christendom, rejecting revealed religion altogether,
denying heaven, hell, and immortality, rejecting the God of the Bible,
sometimes in downright Atheism, and yet -more largely in the deifica
tion of the creature and its forces. Pantheism is the secret religion

8

which with Materialism divides the heart of the anti-Christian modern
world. Diana of the Ephesians is the goddess of modern Science. It
nestles among the thousand breasts of all-prolific Nature, and cares not
for the heart of the living God. 1
The Samaritanism of our Time.
We have Samaritanism in our age, the spirit of combination of incom-
patibles and the compromise of principles, the- religionism which fears
Jehovah and worships the false gods of the hour; which agrees to dis
agree without protest against the wrong; the syncretism of a false
charity substituted for the unity of a true faith.
Universality of these Religionisms.
But these tendencies are far from lharply formulating themselves in
every case. While each of them has perhaps a body in which it is
relatively predominant, all bodies have representatives of all these ten
dencies. The widest extremes meet in the actual membership of all
communions. The ripest Sadduceeism may come forth from the seeming
heart of Pharisaism. Reactionary extremes appear just where the pres
sure is greatest in the direction opposed to them. Carlstadt raised the
storm of fanaticism in the very heart of Luther's citadel. Castalio con
fronts Calvin from the professor's chair in which Calvin had placed him.
Socinianism rose in Italy, the reaction of unbelief against credulity.
Anabaptism, most furious in its wilder form, most widespread and
abiding in its gentler form, kept its persistent life in the lands which
met it earliest with the bloody hand, and longest oppressed it. Inde
pendency erects itself in the territory of the Church of England, the
most conservative of all the Reformed organizations ; Puritanism and
Quakerism rise in it, though it is the most ritualistic of the Reformed
churches ; the Baptists'rise in it, though it adheres most strictly of the
Reformed churches to the catholic doctrine of baptism ; Methodism
comes forth from it, though it is the most remote of all the Reformed
churches from enthusiasm — calm to the peril of coldness. And last of
all, "the Reformed Episcopal Church" springs up, effecting a new
organization with unparalleled ease, by that very system of diocesan
episcopacy which has been so mighty a bond of union in the Church of
England, and her daughter churches. Arminius the pupil of Beza,
chosen to defend the harsher Supralapsarianism against the milder Cal
vinism of the Sublapsarians, Arminius, the colleague of Gomarus, is the
man who pierces the centre of Calvinism ; Arminianism breaks down the

dykes of Holland, and sweeps over that land which had been Calvinistic
after the strictest order. Individual separation, pseudo-mysticism, in-
differentism, syncretism, rationalism, have tested the Lutheran Church,
which is most alien to them all. Deism and Atheism have been the
counterrack and thumbscrew of Rome, and the greatest names in the
worst classes of infidel literature are furnished by her lands.
Rigorous consistency and solid orthodoxy find themselves harboring
the very extremes of looseness and error. Some alarming heresiarch
comes leaping up from some quiet nook of doctrinal conservatism, like
those phantoms of fur and red flannel which bound from unsuspected
boxes into the faces of children, frightening them out of their little wits.
Whether these phenomena have arisen by development or by reaction,
whether they have resulted from the maturing of the life of the Church
or by a violent struggle against it, is indeed a most important question
in determining from them the character of particular churches, but it is
a question which has no bearing on the proposition that the tendencies
from which? they arise are widespread, the exhibition of them in some
measure almost universal. »
The Strong Contrasts of Religionism in our Time — Its Supra-
ecclesiasticism and sub-ecclesiasticism.
The religionism of our time is marked by the strong contrasts which
result from the tendency of one extreme to beget another. It is an age
of tendency to supra-ecclesiasticism, of extravagance in the externalism
of the church idea. It is our time in which Rome has finally pronounced
for the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope. The poisonous fruit
which exhausted for its maturing the sap of ages, now hangs in its
deadly rotten ripeness. It is our time in which the Church of Eng
land, that great guardian of Protestantism, has been so fretted in the
struggle with what Pio Nono has blandly called " Mr. Pusey's Theory
of Popery without a Pope."
Oursistitimeahoof sub-ecclesiasticism. There be many who would reduce
the Church to the level of a mere voluntary organization, with no divine
authority to give her being, and with no divine authority in her teachings
and discipline. The power of self-restoration, self-healing, by the use of
what God has placed in her very constitution, is ignored, and the Church's
wants are met by unchurchly provisions; her wounds are healed by lini
ments neither of her Master's hands nor of her own. Those who wound
her most, are most lively in the application of their self-devised remedies,
and play the double role of the robbers who strip, wound, and leave their
victim half dead, and of an equivocal good Samaritan, not at all of the

10
olden time, who pours in the oil of unctuous addresses and the wine of
spirited resolutions. Ah ! how often are the robes of union cast over the
undressed sores of sectarianism ! What an evasion there is of the real
problems ; what an avoiding of the questions which glow in the hearts of
thoughtful men ; what a putting of strength into settling what nobody
disputes; what a going into battle with Pope and Pagan, with the
harness gaping at every joint, and the edge of the sword duller than its
back ; what a crying down of sectarianism in the interest of sects ; what
shouts of love, which are but the strategy of warfare ! Many, who in their
innocence wish to swell the train of attendants in the pageant of peace,
are deluded into the position of captives dragged at the wheels of the
triumphal car of sectarianism, a chariot covered with artificial olive-
leaves of tissue-paper.
Ours is the time of associations in which those who need to be led are
the leaders ; those who need to be taught are the teachers ; in which the
young think themselves wiser than the old — and a quasi church, without
responsibility and without discipline, is established outside oi the Chris
tian' Church, modestly claiming to do better for Christ than Christ could
do for himself.
Ours is a time of effort to dissociate moral reforms from religion, or
to associate them with what claims to be religion, but which refuses to
subject itself to healthy tests or necessary safeguards.
Ours is a time of running without being called, of preaching without
vocation, of movements whose force rests on advertising, puffing, and
secular mechanism in general, and in which a little element of particu
lar good is associated with a vast body of general evil, a temporary
benefit to individuals, with an enduring curse to the Church and the
world at large. It is a time of self-constitution and of careless choice,
in which people wijl take a religious teacher to their confidence with less
precaution than they observe in securing a housemaid, and dismiss him
with equally little ceremony.
Religionism and the Divine Institutions.
Ours is a time in which religionism, true to its own spirit, is perpetu
ally meddling with divine institutions, reconstructing them, improving
on them, or setting them aside, as may suit it. God has instituted the
family, and religionism modifies it with free-love and polygamy, and over
throws in every form the law, nurture, and discipline of the home. God
has instituted the Church, and religionism kindly undertakes to supply
men in its own better way with what the Church alone has been ordained

.11
to supply — assumes the Church's prerogatives and pretends to give its
privileges apart from its responsibilities. God has instituted the State,
religionism establishes little states within states, arrogates the power of
binding by oath, a power which God strictly limits to those who represent
him in his own institutions, sunders society by artificial divisions where it
ought to be bound together, and unites it by fictitious bonds in conflict
with the most sacred rights and duties of the family, the Church, and the
State. Miseducation comes in to aid the work of misassociation. Our
education tends to a onesided materialism of the most extravagant kind.
Out of these manifold causes comes forth a general carelessness in regard
to conviction, a distrust of all that holds men to responsibility, an aver
sion to distinct confession, an abandonment to the impulse of the mo
ment, the furor of the hour. Nothing can describe our time but Mil
ton's phrase. It is " a windy sea of land."
The Unionism of our Time.
And because it is so distracted, so disunited, so blind to the conception
and spirit of true unity, — which is unity in truth, — ours is a time of union
ism. Because it is a time of irreconcilable variances it is a time of syn
cretism ; because it has so little real brotherhood, it is so full of empty
talk of fraternity ; because it is the enemy of clear principles, honest con
sistency, manly defence of confession, it is the time of unscrupulous
proselytism. It is the age of varnish.
Religion sighs for unity, religionism pants for unionism. It is, indeed,
a common impression that this is a time of special longing for Christian
union, for closer communion, but, in fact, the reverse is the case. Real
Christians, in virtue of being such, yearn in all ages for union. But in
our time the conception of Christian union and the desire for it have
been dying out together. The superficial thing which takes the mask of
this desire is, in fact, its deadliest enemy. It is not the division which
pains, but the discomfort of it. Sects are sorry, not for the sin, but for
the penalty it brings, and the unionism of the day is trying to escape
from God's punishment of the sin of sectarianism without abandoning
the sin itself. Unionism does not mean to remove division, but to per
petuate and hallow it. The sectarianism of big bodies takes the form of
unionism that it may the better absorb the smaller bodies. The union
ism ofthe hour is one of the most dishonorable and perilous of its worst
features. Unionism means the effort of the strong to betray the weak,
and the acquiescence ofthe weak in the honeyed insincerity which seeks to
destroy them. The desire for fellowship is not for its spiritual advantages,.
but for denominational strength.

12,
The Sectarianism of our Time.
For ours is a sectarian time. The loving sects are unscrupulous in the
general proportion of their boastful love. Their love is a prelude to de
vouring each other. They send missionaries to work in the old fields of
Protestantism. On Pagan ground they are completely regardless ofthe
work of others.
It is a materialistic age. The .crimes against which society cries out
are often not the criminal principles or the criminal attempts, but the
criminal failures. They are not condemned because they are wrong,
but because they did not succeed. It takes the Spartan code — the crime
is in being detected. Religionism itself assumes that there is no success
but worldly success, and before this it bows down and worships. It sac
rifices to the net and burns incense to the drag, always provided that it
catches men in the net, and gathers them in the drag. The crime is not
in making men as the fish of the sea, but in failing to entangle them.
Was it ever truer than of the sectarianism of our age, that it compasses
land and sea to make one proselyte? What pitiful littlenesses are partisans
guilty of, under the most sacred names and pretences, for the purpose of
extending sect! It often looks, on the surface, as if the children of light
were quite as wise and quite as cunning as the children of this world in
their generation ; but the solution is reached when we get a little deeper.
These children of light are the children of this world.
The Relations of Genuine Lutheranism.
We have assumed in our theme that genuine Lutheranism has rela
tions to the religionisms of our times. It has ; for following in the steps
¦of the Master it acknowledges a relation of love and obligation to the
whole world and the whole time in which it lives. The Lutheran
Church humbly claims to be a lamp of that true light which lighteth
every man that cometh into the world, a miuistrant of that only begotten
Son who was the gift of God's love, not to a race, or a class among races,
but to the world.
Like Christ, genuine Lutheranism confesses a relation tp the religions,
a relation to the irreligious, a relation to the religionisms of the world —
to everything that makes or mars the spiritual estate of man. That is
not an Evangelical Chu rch to which one soul for which Jesus died is a
thing of contempt or indifference, which turns aside from any interest
of the race, however lowly, from any sinner, however abject, which thrusts
away the conscience-roused publican or the penitent harlot— to which
earth has a wound for which she has no balm, a forsaken one for whom it

13
has no sympathy. She dare not pass by on the other side. In the sphere
of her heavenly love, her human and divine sympathy, succor, and aid, she
knows no distinction between Jew and Samaritan, Christian and Pagan,
Romanist and Protestant, Caucasian and Negro. She has missions for
Pagan, Mohammedan, and Jew, and for waste places in Christendom.
Within Christendom, holding fast that she hath, aud permitting no man
to take her crown, clinging to Christ's every word, protesting against all
untruth, no matter how dear they may be who hold it, she yet has
heavenly charity for all churches.
She would not take up the sword for the political interest of her own
faith, declined all covenants of war for the extension of the Reforma
tion, and looked with sorrow on the civil strife of the Swiss Cantons, in
which the heroic Zwingli fell. She mourned for her martyrs and hal
lowed their memories, but did not take from God's hands the avenging
of them ; she shrank even from defensive warfare. At a time when the
world was iu flames in religious hostility, and she was hard pressed
for her life, she declared, before God and men, that she did not condemn
" entire churches," no, not the entire church from which were poured
forth those who were thirsting for the blood of her children.
The massacre of the French Protestants on St. Bartholomew's night
had been followed by rejoicings and public thanksgivings in Rome.
More than a hundred thousand Protestants had been butchered in France
in the course of thirty days, under circumstances of atrocity almost
without parallel in the annals of hell. At this era the Lutheran Church
uttered those grand words of Christian recognition, and of tender sym
pathy with the Reformed Church of France, and of appeal and protest
against the awful crimes of the Church of Rome toward God and hu
manity. "In the presence of Almighty God," say the electors, princes,
and Orders of the Empire, who adhere to the Augsburg Confession,
" and of the whole Christian world, we testify that it is no part of our
purpose by this pious formula of conciliation to create trouble or danger
for those poor oppressed Christians who are this day enduring persecu
tion. For as moved by Christian love, we have come into the fellowship
of sorrow with them, so do we abhor and detest from our souls that per
secution and most cruel tyranny which have been directed against those
unhappy persons. In no respect do we consent to the shedding of that
innocent blood, which, without doubt will be strictly required at the
hands of their persecutors, who shall render account in the awful judg
ment of the Lord, at the bar of Christ, and shall be visited for their
tyranny with fearful penalties."*
* Prefatio Electorum, etc., Formula Concord, 18.

14
Our Church pleaded for all innocent blood, and for a long time stood
alone among the great communions of Christendom in maintaining that
heresy should not be punished by the sword. The first official embodi
ment in the history of Christendom of the true doctrine concerning the
power of the Church and the power of the State is in the Augsburg
Confession. " Both Church and State power," it says, " are of God, both
to be religiously reverenced and preserved as God's supreme blessing on
earth." The Church's power is confiued to the ministry of the Word
and sacraments, to discipline of a purely moral kind over her own vol
untary children, "not by human power but by the Word." Her blessings
and powers are wholly spiritual. Then came a principle sufficient in
itself to have saved Europe from the horrors of her religious wars.
" The civil government has to do with far other matters than with the
Gospel. The civil power does not protect the souls of men, but their
bodies and their property against outward injuries, and coerces men with
the sword and bodily penalties, that it may preserve civil justice and
peace."* There is the principle of America's religious freedom, centuries
before free America ; and when our Church asserted it she stood alone.
Rome asserted then, and asserts still, that heretics should be put to
death. She asserts it iu words through her representative writers.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Gregory of Valentia, Bellarmine, Coster, Peter
Gregory, Majerhofer, Possevin, and a host of other great Romish di
vines assert and defend it. Here are some of their words. " This is no
proper place for clemency. Burn heretics, cut them to pieces;" "that
heretics should be put to death is something in which Catholics are so
united that they hold it as an article of faith ;" " they should be at once
overthrown by war and violence." Loyola's first name, Ignatius, the
fiery, was linked by a dreary puu with the fires of death to heretics, which
the order of Jesuits has so often helped to light. But Rome has asserted
death to heretics by the deed as well as by the word. " The Inquisi
tion " is a world's name of horror, taking its rank above war, pestilence,
and famine. The Duke of Alva confessed that in his short rule in the
Netherlands eighteen thousand men and women had been executed, and
that yet the Fathers bf the Inquisition thought he was too mild.
When Cardinal Farnesius started from Italy to the Smalcald war, he
said that he would make such a slaughter in Germany that his horse
should swim in the blood of Lutherans. Charles V said that the Pope
had made it a condition of his favor that he should behead the Elector.
Pope Adrian wrote in 1522 that the course pursued with Huss and
Jerome of Prague furnished the right example as to the mode of deal-
* Aug. Conf., Art. xxviii (Abus. vii).

15
ing with the followers of Luther. We know with what the name of
Bonner, and Gardiner, and Bloody Mary are linked in England, and at
whose hands Rogers, Hooper, Latimer, and Ridley died. The dominant
sentiment of Rome is well embodied by an anonymous Romish writer,
probably the Jesuit Tournemin, who says: "It is only false religion
which can authorize tolerance."
Alas, that even in the ranks of Protestants should be found defenders
of this dreadful principle. Zanchius, the great Calvinistic divine of
Heidelberg, says : "Nearly all of us hold the opinion that heretics should
be punished with the sword." Calvin in 1554 published his book against
the errors of Servetus, and showing that heretics should be put to death.
Beza, Calvin's great disciple and successor, says : " To permit liberty
of conscience, to allow any one, if he wills, to perish, is a doctrine purely
devilish." The great body of the old Calvinistic divines have either
specially defended or in most explicit statement justified, the putting
of heretics to death. The gentle Turretin is not an exception.
It is true these divines never justified the wholesale style of Romish
murder, never justified the promiscuous putting to death of masses of
people, but looked on the execution of heretics as an awful duty, only
to be carried out after careful trial, under the guardianship of law.
But though the practical application was guarded, the principle itself
was explicitly maintained, and our standard Lutheran divines in con
troverting it were compelled to notice at length the Calvinistic arguments
for it. When the old Romish divines argue for the putting heretics to
death, they constantly cite the Calvinists as most valuable witnesses to
this truth over against the Lutherans, and when Calvinists complain
of Romish persecution, retort on them that they not only held that
Papists should be put to death, but actually, as they had opportunity,
put them to death. And Rome has always attempted to soften the
world's condemnation of some of her greatest atrocities by insisting
that they were necessitated, or at least precipitated, by the violent and
aggressive political spirit of Calvinism. AH the protests of the old
Calvinists for freedom of conscience are for their own freedom ; their
objections to persecution, are objections to being persecuted; their plea
for the protection of the lives of heretics a plea for the protection of
their own.
The services to human freedom rendered by Calvinism have largely
been connected with the fact that it has so often been the system of op
pressed minorities, who could not fight their own battle without gaining
advantages of wider reach than their own communion. The liberty of
conscience for which Calviuists have suffered has been in general the
liberty of the Calvinistic conscience, and success in their struggle has

16
more than once turned them from the persecuted into the persecutors.
Calvinistic conviction made them heroic men. The spirit of compromise
never makes heroes. We respect their fidelity to conviction, though we
do not share the conviction ; nor do we justify all that it led them to do,
though much that it gained became the common gam of mankind.
But our Church must not be ungrateful to God for her own history, nor
let the world forget who were the first to throw forth the banner, and
to stand alone under it, the banner of protestation against state interfer
ence in spiritual matters.
, As our Church has been distinguished for her forbearance toward her
enemies, so has she been distinguished for the conservation of civil peace
among her own sons. Her nationalities have never been torn asunder by
the religious disputes of her children. She has had no wars in which
the Episcopal rule fell before the Presbyterian, or in which Presbyte-
rianism was overwhelmed by Independency. She has no Marston Moor,
no Preston, no Dunbar, no Worcester. She has needed no Cromwell.
But hers, most of all, are the fields of unparalleled sorrow and of
dearbought triumph in the Thirty Years' war, which secured liberty of
conscience to the Reformed as well as to the Lutheran Church, which
saved the Reformation itself, rescued Europe, and in anticipation our
own land, and with them the great present and the long future, from the
night of Romish error, superstition, and persecution. Placed as the
pillar of truth in the world, she has, as Providence gave her opportunity,
endeavored to support it wherever it was feeble. Genuine Lutheranism
never asks, "Am I my brother's keeper?" nor shrinks from the burden
which weighs down others. Whether to friend or foe, it has the com
mon mission of showing the more excellent way.
The Relation to Religionism Confessed and Accepted.
Genuine Lutheranism, then, in its relation to the religionism of the
time, like its Lord, confesses the relation and the obligation it brings.
It draws a line, indeed, between religion and religionism, between the
house of Israel and the Samaritans, between the pure faith and the
clouded faith ; the groping credence which worships it knows not what,
and the illumined conviction which knows what it worships. But as it
has its distinctive mission, so has it its broad and general mission, and
in this, the field of obligation and sympathy is the world.
Discrimination. .
In all its fidelity to truth, genuine Lutheranism, following Christ, dis-

17
criminates between the bodies infected with religionism and the particu
lar members of these bodies, between the normal in the creed and pre
vailing character and tendency of a communion, and the exceptional in
the individual.
In the Saviour's great parable of loving discrimination, we have the
priest of the only true religion, the man of a divinely ordained order,
and we have the Levite, a man of the tribe of peculiar divine prerog
ative. Yet over both our Lord exalts the Samaritan, the man whose
national faith was corrupt, whose priesthood was without divine warrant,
whose teachers were blind guides of the blind. But our Lord does not,
in the parable of the good Samaritan, commend the priesthood or the
teaching or the doctrine of the Samaritans. What he commends is, that
over against the passing by on the other side, of which the priest and
Levite were guilty, in defiance of the religion they professed, and of
their own sacred character, the Samaritan, true to the purer part of
his own mixed and motley religionism, has compassion on his wretched
fellow-man. The priest and Levite were bad exceptions to a good class,
the Samaritan was a good exception to a bad class, and on this very
supposition the whole force of the parable depends. And though our
Lord, in his answer to the lawyer, drew the illustration from the Sa
maritan, he drew the doctrine from the Law of Moses, acknowledged
both by Jew and Samaritan, and by the standard of its command,
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," he tested both. He uses
the good Samaritan, not to teach Samaritan theology, but to teach
divinely guided benevolence.
When our Lord healed the ten lepers, the only one who turned back
and glorified God was a Samaritan, and Jesus said, " Were there not ten
cleansed? but where are the nine? There are not found that returned
to give glory to God, save this stranger." It was the contrast, not be
tween the Jewish faith and the Samaritan faith, but between the men
who forgot the duties taught them by their purer faith, and the man of
alien race who, faithful to his less perfect knowledge, fell at Jesus' feet,
and gave him thanks.
Men may be worse than their system of faith, and men may be better
than their system of faith ; for the heart and the lip may belie each
other, but a bad man does not make a truth a lie by professing to re
ceive it, nor does a good man make a lie a truth by allowing himself to
be entangled in it. We are to judge doctrines as doctrines, for this is
the sphere of faith. We are to judge men as men, for this is the sphere
of love. We are to exercise a just discrimination in doing both, for

18
there are many seeming exceptions to the rule that the life is the wit
ness to the faith, and that the faith is the power of the life.
Faith not in Conflict with Love.
Hence genuine Lutheranism follows the example of Christ, in not re
garding faith in the sphere of love; that is, it does not remit the duties of
love to those who are aliens in whole or in part from the truth.
When our Lord's disciples would have him call dowu fire from heaven
against the Samaritans, he corrects their unloving heart. Christ heals
the Samaritan leper, and seals to him a blessing higher than healing,
when he says, "Thy faith hath made thee whole." Christ holds up the
good Samaritan lovingly, and in that great historic parable there is a
tacit argument: If it be right that a Samaritan should so treat a Jew,
shall not a Jew so treat a Samaritan in the broad brotherhood and
neighborship of mankind ? How gently, in his fidelity, he deals with
the Samaritan woman, and how hopefully he looks at the Samaritans
themselves, who afterward throng forth to see him. He reminds the
men of Nazareth that even under the old dispensation the divine com
passion was not limited to the bounds of the chosen race. Though
many widows were in Israel, in the time of famine, to none of them
was Elias sent, but to the widow of Sarepta, a city of Sidon, a pagan
region. Many lepers were in Israel, in the time of Eliseus the prophet,
yet he cleansed none of them, but sent the healing word to Naaman the
Syrian, a man of a pagan race. Christ himself hears the prayer of the
Syro-Phcenician woman and heals her daughter. Christ hears the
prayer of the nobleman at Capernaum, and restores his son to health.
Among his last acts he heals the ear of his enemy, wounded by the
hand of his friend ; defends his assailants against his defenders, and on
the cross prays for his murderers, " Father forgive them."
Love not in Conflict with Faith.
But in this discrimination, and all the more because of it, genuine
Lutheranism, like Christ, in the sphere of faith, does not regard the sphere
of love; that is, it does not remit fidelity to the' truth, under the pretence
of charity. It maintains as absolute the sacredness and necessity of
truth, truth as the thing over against all shadows, even truth's own
shadow; truth as over against conscious falsehood; truth as over
against involuntary ignorance and misunderstanding ; truth pure, over
against all mingling; and truth entire over against all mutilation.
"The Word that dwelt among us was full of truth;" and "truth came

19
by Jesus Christ." "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make
you free." « I am the truth." The Spirit is " the Spirit of the truth."
He will guide you into all the truth." Christ's prayer is: "Sanctify
them through the truth, thy Word is truth." "And for their sakes I
sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth."
He sums up the purpose of his life in one of its grand aspects, in the
words : " For this cause came I into the world that I should bear witness
of the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice."
The religion whose centre and embodiment and supreme teacher is
Christ, is indeed a life, but it is a life of the whole man, in the divine
order of his nature ; a life of holy act conditioned by holy experience ; a
life of holy experience conditioned by a sanctified will ; a life of holy will
conditioned by sanctified desire ; a life of holy desire conditioned by
sanctified knowledge. In a word, it is a life which begins in knowledge
and is consummated in holy love. Therefore our Lord makes divinely
given knowledge the primary condition of the whole spiritual life : " If
ye had known what this meaneth." " It is given unto you to know the
mystery." " If thou hadst known, even thou." " Art thou a master of
Israel and knowest not these things ?" " He shall know of the doctrine."
'•' Ye shall know the truth." " I am known of mine." " If ye had known
me, ye should have known my Father also ; and from henceforth ye
know him." " This is life eternal that they might know thee." "Do ye
not therefore err because ye know not the scriptures." "Woe unto you,
lawyers, for ye have taken away the key of knowledge." In the phil
osophy of our Lord the understanding is the first faculty called into
exercise in the great change which the divine illumination produces in
man. Those to whom the mysteries of the kingdom are hidden, are
those who " shall hear and shall not understand." " When any one
heareth the word and understandeth it not, the wicked one catcheth
away what was sown." " He that received seed into the good ground
is he that heareth the word and understandeth it." And when our Lord
would test his hope that his word was not to prove unavailing, he asks :
" Have ye understood all these things ?" He says to the multitude :
" Hear and understand." And in his last work as the direct teacher of
his apostles, he " opened their understanding that they might under
stand the scriptures."
To enlighten this understanding of man, the Saviour teaches the in-
dispensableness of pure doctrine set forth in divine words. The associa
tion of false doctrine vitiates everything, however seeming fair : " In
vain they do worship me teaching for doctrines the commandments of
men." Himself the Master and Teacher, his demand was that of im-

20
plicit acceptance of his teaching : " Ye call me Master (Teacher), and
ye say well, for so I am." " My doctrine is not mine, but his who sent
me." His commission is a commission of teaching, and the Holy Spirit
is promised to teach all things. And everywhere the word is spoken of
as the sacred medium of light for the understanding, and the sacred
and supreme authority to which man's mind, heart, will, and life must
conform. " The words that I' speak unto you, they are spirit and they
are life." " The seed is the word of God." " Ye are clean through the
word." " The word is truth." " He that is of God heareth God's words."
" He that rejecteth me and receiveth not my words hath one that judgeth
him ; the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last
day." Fidelity to Chri'stfs word is the condition of answered prayer :
" If my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be
done unto you." " I have given unto them the words which thou gavest
me, and they have received them."
Never did our Lord treat truth, or the doctrine which embodies it, or
the word which expresses it, as other than divine, inexorable in its demands
on human acceptance, and incapable of softening in expression, of res
ervation in confession, of compromise in the minutest respect, or of
dubiousness of attitude in the least degree. He dealt with all as faith
fully as with the Samaritan woman, whom he warned that she and her
race worshipped they knew not what, and that God's true worship and
salvation were not to be found in the path of corrupted and mingled
doctrine the Samaritans were treading, "but only in that race among
whom the living oracles were treasured and the true sense confessed.
Nor is the claim of truth weakened by the unworthiness and odious
ness of those who may teach it. Jesus spake to the multitude and to
his own disciples, saying, " The Scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' seat :
All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do."
Truth is truth though the devil speaks it, and Scribes and Pharisees, so
far as they purely teach the truth, are to be listened to. Even honest
human opinions in relation to little things, political, literary, social, are
not to be sacrificed for mere personal consideration, and we feel with the
noble lender, who, finding that his loan had made his hitherto candid
friend unduly deferential, said : " Either contradict me or return my
money." Religionism confounds the sphere of faith and love. Faith
worketh by love, but in order to work it must live. There is a bigotry
which is the abuse of conviction, but it is not more frequent than the
bigotry of indifference, nor is it as odious.
Religionism Antagonistic to Religion.
" If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much

21
more shall they call them of his household?" The relation of genuine
Lutheranism to the religionism of the time, like the Master's, is one
which excites its antagonism. Fanaticism hates Lutheranism with a
peculiar intensity. That we might expect. But there are good men
in bodies which live by the breath which the Lutheran Reformation has
breathed into our modern world, who declare that they would rather
recognize Rome's claim to be the infallible and only saving Church,
than the claim ofthe Lutheran Church that she teaches pure Christian
ity. That means that the catholicity of their vision is bigness, splendor,
organization, rather than truth. Many of our own children, distracted
by the sectarian unionism of the time, distrust their mother Church,
because now, as ever, in the quiet consciousness of God's great gift to
her, she claims to hold, confess, and teach to them and all men, the
simple truth as it is in Jesus — that completely, and that alone. Thus
was it with her Lord. When Christ's face was set toward Jerusalem the
Samaritan religionism would not receive him. When he condemned the
narrowness of Jewish prejudice against the gentile races, at Nazareth,
the Jews, filled with wrath, rose up and thrust him out of the city and
led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built that they
might cast, him down headlong. He talks with the Samaritan woman,
and abides with the Samaritans two days, pointing them to the coming
hope of the world, and the Jews take up the reproach of our text :
"Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan?" The Jews would none
of his faith, because he breathed love to those who did not hold it. The
Samaritans would none of his love because he would not sacrifice his •
faith to it. The Jews said, You must hate with us, or we will drive
you forth. The Samaritan said, You must believe with us, or our roofs
shall not shelter you. The sectarian Samaritan hates him for his fidelity
to the Jewish faith ; the sectarian Jew hates him for his love and gentle
ness to the Samaritan. The Samaritan and Jew alike are blinded to
the knowledge that, as man, his faith is the spring of his love, his love'
the outstreaming of his faith ; that love without faith is a quality with
out a substance, and faith without love a thing without an attribute.
Like its Master, and because it is like him, genuine Lutheranism is
antagonistic to the spirit of the age, and that spirit is antagonistic to it.
The world of religionism around us will give us to understand, unmis
takably, that unless we allow that they are in the truth we may keep
our love to ourselves. It is a part of the paradox of religionism, that
while it speaks contemptuously of soundness in the faith, nothing makes
it more furious than to deny that it has it. It sneers at orthodoxy, and

22
is angry at being called heterodox. Religionisms empty a name of all
meaning, but will not pardon you for withholding it from them.
Genuine Lutheranism, like our Master, expects to bear, and is willing
to bear, the brunt of opposition from the religionism of the time. A
popular religion is never a pure religion. The severest thing which can
be said of a minister of Christ is, that he has no enemies. It could
not be said of our Master. Rather is it true that no man ever had so
many enemies and such bitter ones. He says : " Woe unto you when all
men speak well of you." And what is true of the Master and of the
teachers is true of the Church. The Church admired by the world,
praised by it, flocked to by it, enriched by it, is not the Church as Christ
designs it. The Church which bears reproach for his name now, which
is hated by the careless, the politic, the fashionable, is like his Church
in all its purest time. " If they have persecuted me, they will also per
secute you ; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also."
Religion enduring the Antagonism of Religionism.
Genuine Lutheranism receives the antagonism and hatred of religion
ism in the spirit of the Master. We have seen how free it is from the
spirit of coercion and persecution. But while it casts away from it with
horror the, bloody weapons of carnal force it all the more faithfully uses
its legitimate weapons, those spiritual arms which are mighty through
God. " Heresy," says Luther, " can never be restrained by force. It
must be grasped in another way. This is not the sort of battle which
can be settled with the sword. The weapon here is to be God's word.
If that does not decide, the decision will not be effected by worldly force,
though it should drench the whole earth with blood. Heresy is a thing
of the soul ; no steel can cut it, no fire can burn it out, no waters can
drown it. God's word alone can destroy it."* Christ was embodied
meekness and gentleness, but on fit occasions he was embodied severity.
Never were rebukes sharper than his, for nothing is so intense as wounded
love and the yearning to deliver men from error.
Religionism within the Fold of Religion.
Genuine Lutheranism, like our Lord, is not blind to the religionism
which creeps into its own fold and mars its visible glory and visible con
sistency. When our Lord had gathered his own disciples around him in
direct fellowship, this close relation to him and to each other was used for
special fidelity to them in pointing out their defects and their sins. To
* Werke Altenburg, ii, 269, Leipzig, xviii, 397.

23
his own Apostle, to whom he had said, " Blessed art thou," he says
"Get thee behind me, Satan." To him he says, " 0 thou of little faith."
To his own disciples he says, " Ye know not what spirit ye are of." It
is to his own disciples he says, " 0 ye of little faith." It is his own dis
ciples he calls " fools and slow of heart to believe." It is his disciples'
failure he explains by their unbelief. It is his disciples in whose
midst he places the little child to correct their vain self-seeking. It
is his own Church which he pictures as having those who wither be
fore the scorching sun, as having those who are choked out of growth by
the thorns which grow with them, as a field in which tares spring with the
wheat and stand till the harvest, as a net which holds the bad with the
good till the end of time. It was Christ's Apostles among whom were
found a James and John to aspire in false ambition, a Thomas to doubt,
a Peter to deny, a Judas to betray ; and in the great crisis all forsook
him and fled.
The Lutheran Church draws no sharp visible line, and says : Within
this visible communion which we call Lutheran everything is right;
outside of this visible communion everything is wrong ; within it every
thing is religion, outside of it everything is religionism. On the contrary,
she confesses for herself: Within this visible community we call Lutheran
much is wrong, and outside of it there is much to thank God for and
admire. There is much religionism inside of it, and much religion out
side of it. Genuine Lutheranism is pure doctrine, but many nominal
Lutherans are unsound in the faith. Genuine Lutheranism is fidelity to
the faith, but many nominal Lutherans are careless in the faith, dead,
indifferent, vacillating, compromising, ambiguous, trimming. Genuine
Lutheranism is loving, pitying, sparing, healing, but many nominal Lu
therans are hard, unsparing, uncharitable, pitiless, harsh. Genuine Lu
theranism is life, but many nominal Lutherans give nothing, do nothing,
for the Lord they pretend to love ; they seem to think the glory of the
widow's mite was its littleness, not its being all her living. Genuine Lu
theranism rises above all distinctions of race, nationality, and language,
but many nominal Lutherans make the meat more than the life, the
raiment more than the body, the form more than the power. They are
rather bondchildren of the bondmaid of race, than free children of the
free mother of faith. They suspect all who have not been rocked in their
cradle, and who do not speak their tongue. It is not enough for you
to have p, common faith with them and a common confession, but you
must own both, in their outward mode and accent, or they will not be
lieve you are in earnest. If there be those who, " cold themselves, think

24
ardor comes from hell," there are those also who, fierce themselves,
think calmness comes from hell.
The Lutheran Church in her Recognition of other Churches.
When we speak, then, of the religionism of our time, we do not mean
to insinuate that whatever in the religious world does not bear the name
Lutheranism is mere religionism, that all religion or all Christianity is
confined to our Church. Tbat would be the supreme of ignorance, the
supreme of the ridiculous. A Lutheranism" which would assert that,
would give the most complete evidence that it is not genuine. God for
bid such pitiful littleness in conflict with the spirit of the New Testa
ment, in conflict with the express witness of our Church again and again.
The Lutheran Church has put it on record in her confession, as part of
her faith, that God's children are not confined to her bounds, but are
"scattered" from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof.
Spener did but echo the very voice of the confession, when he said :
" Christ, our Master, is not so poor as to have no disciples but those who
are of our Lutheran fold." No 1 We acknowledge, we reverence, we
thank God for the tokens of Christian life wherever they are found — in
churches, in schools, in institutions of beneficence, in societies which
scatter the Bible and holy books, and send the Word and ministry to
pagan lands. With all the intermingling of human infirmities, with
all shortcomings, these institutions are largely the result of the genuine
spirit of Christianity. As we do not condemn entire churches, neither
do we condemn entire associations, unless they are consciously immoral
and ungodly in principle. Even in the condemnation of associations in
their errors, we exercise the judgment of charity that there may be those
in them who are kept from the worst influence of them. For some men
move in the line of the worst elements of their systems, some in the line
of the best, some imbibe all the good, some all the bad. If you pour out
oil and water together, some surfaces shed the oil and absorb the water,
some shed the water and absorb the oil. Men, in the same dip, strike
different colors, as their mordant prepares them. Rome has a Torque-
mada and a Fenelon, a Loyola and a Pascal. Calvinism has had its
Gomarus, with his rigid school, but it has had its Turretins, its Chalmers,
its Edwards, its Davies, its Payson. The Church of England has had a
Laud, but it has had a Leighton, a Taylor, a Heber, and its daughter
Church in America has had a White, and a Bedell, a Meade, and
Johns, and Muhlenberg. Our testimony against the wrong, the imper
fect, the mistaken, is all the mightier for our cordial recognition of the

25
right, the good, the lovely in others, and of the imperfections in our
selves. It does not follow that because we protest against the errors of
Calvin's system, we may not do admiring justice to his clearness as a
thinker, his wonderful faculty as an organizer, still less that we shall
shut our eyes to the evidence of saintly virtue, self-consecration, service
to our common Christianity and to the growth and freedom of the mod
ern world, presented in the history of the great Calvinistic communions.
We dare not ignore their labors either as to their earnestness or their
rich results ; we dare not undervalue their heroic warfare aud untold
endurance for our common Lord. I have seen a strong man — strong
as a man and strong as a Lutheran — -stand weeping before the picture
of the Relief of Leyden. On many a battle-field, in self-defence, against
a common foe, the blood of their sons mingled with the blood of ours ;
beneath many a sod, hallowed by truer relics than those which' Rome
worships, the ashes of their soldiers rest with the ashes pf ours, waiting
one trumpet-call to rise for the crown of the faithful, and the words,
" Well done !" If we resist the spirit of doctrinal indeterminateness,
the sacrifice of unity to uniformity, the politic eclecticism, the occasional
lordliness of assumption, which mark in part the Church of England,
we are not thereby obliged to forget the graces and glories of her noble
martyrs and divines, her men of holy song, of missions, and of mercy,
and that beautiful array of exquisite individual character in which she
stands almost unique and alone.
Even in our direct antagonisms, our necessary warfare, we are not to
forget that a fight against principles is often distinct from a fight against
men. We sunder the Church of Rome itself from the papacy which is
its incubus. We acknowledge the light of love, of devotion, of Christian
heroism which struggles through all her corruptions, the wonderful wit
ness ofthe divine vitality of every germ of truth.
Questions of Principle not to be Confounded with
Personal Questions.
If we fight slavery, must we deny every personal grace to slaveholders,
or if men defend slavery shall we allow them to argue to its excellence
from the character of some who represent it ? Shall one man say, Slavery
is a good thing because Washington was a good man, or shall another
say, Washington was a bad man because slavery is a bad thing ? Shall
a man of the South say, I believe secession was a good thing because I be
lieve Lee and Jackson were good men, or shall a man of the North say,
I believe Lee and Jackson were bad men because I believe secession was

26
a bad thing? If we fight England when she assails us, must we hate Eng
lishmen ? The soldiers who fight hardest in the sphere of the fight, may
be the warmest friends outside of it. If we vote for a man, do we vote
for his person or his principle ? If we vote against him, do we vote
against the person or the principle ? May we not, in fact, vote for the
man we personally dislike, and against the man we personally respect?
Fidelity to principle is not to be confounded either with personal likes
or personal dislikes. The young man who went from Jesus' presence
very sorrowful, was a young man whom Jesus loved, and the city whose
sins Jesus scourged, was the city over which Jesus wept.
The Two Discriminations of Christ.
There are two passages which preserve the balance between fidelity to
the faith on the one side and charity toward human imperfections on
the other. The one passage is : " He that is not with me is against me,
and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad." The other,
less frequently quoted, is: "He that is not against us is on our part,"
or, as what is perhaps the better reading has it : " He that is not against
you is on your part." Both are true. Cicero said to Csesar : " We
friends of Pompey hold every man to be our enemy who is not our
friend. You hold every man to be your friend who is not your
enemy :" and history vindicated the sagacity of Caesar. In our Lord's
two utterances each is necessary to the full comprehension of the
other. The first was meant to show how wide is the sphere of enmity
to him. All that are not with him are against him ; there is no medium
position after men are called to a choice; if they are not Christ's
friends they are his enemies. He that will not take up his cross aud
follow Christ is not worthy of him. The second utterance was meant
to show how wide is the sphere of work for Christ. He that has faith
in Christ, who looks to him for divine power, who works miracles in
his name, is not to be obstructed in this, because of defects of view on
other points, or inconsistencies in his course in other respects. The
harmonies of the good are not absolute : even in their agreement good
men are in some respects opposed. The differences of good men are not
absolute: even in their diversity good men are in some respects in
agreement. And good men are to see to it that while they honestly
oppose each other in the wrong, they do justice to each other in that
which each sees in each to be right. Thus interpreted these two great
declarations show their internal agreement. He that is not with us is,
so far as he is not with us, against us ; if he is totally not with us he is

27
totally against us, and our recognition is to be totally withheld ; if he is
partly not with us he is partly against us, and our recognition is to be
withheld in the one part in which he is against us, and given in the
other in which he is with us. He that is not against us is, so far as he
is not against us, with us. If he is totally not against us, he is totally
with us, and our recognition is to be total. If he is but partly not against
us, he is but partly with us, and our recognition is to be given in the
one part, withheld in the other. This is Christ's law of discrimination
and recognition, as it rises from the unison of his two great utterances.
The Two Discriminations of the Lutheran Church.
Do you ask where the Lutheran Church conforms to this law of dis
crimination ? We reply, she does it in the most solemn official form,
in which her whole life embodies itself — in her confessions. In them is
set forth : First, her harmony with truth everywhere ; in the Roman
and Greek Churches, in the Protestant Churches, in sects, the world
over. Her creed is the solemn attestation of her unity and s)'mpathy
with truth wherever it is found, and with all men as far as they hold it,
whatever may be their name. So far as this truth is held we confess that
he that is not against us is on our part ; so far we prevent him not, but
bid him God speed, though he followeth not with us externally. And in
the great practical confession which our Church makes in her worship
she acknowledges in many a collect, canticle, aud hymn gathered out of
the heart of all the great communions, that she delights to recognize all
that breathes of the Spirit of God, wherever He may have caused it to
bloom. These same confessions set forth, secondly, Our Church's" invincible
conflict with error everywhere, in Rome, in Protestant Churches, in
sects, in her own nominal but unfaithful children, the world over, and
thus confesses that he that is not with us is against us, he that gathereth
not with us scattereth abroad, whether he followeth with us externally
or is in open warfare with us.
But these Confessions have a third function. They mark those who
are totally not against us, who are totally on our part. Hence, in the
very act of forming a bond with all other Churches, as she and they
contain a part of the Church invisible, in this very act, the Confessions
draw a dividing line between the parts of the Church visible— between
that part which is of the Church visible in consequence of all its doc
trines and in spite of none, and those parts which are of the Church
visible in consequence of some of their doctrines and in spite of others.

28
The Church made visible in the first sense is the Lutheran Church. The
Church made visible in the second sense is the parts of Christendom
which in more or less respects deviate from perfect purity of doctrine,
whether it be those parts which are nearest to us or those which are
most remote, their Confessions forming the basis of comparison with
ours. Nor can we go beyond this, back of the profession and confes
sion ; while men officially adhere to a Confession, all their official rela
tions are determined by it. While Lutherans remain nominal Luther
ans, and are acknowledged as Lutherans, that determines their official
relation to their own communion and to all other communions, and
while others voluntarily remain nominally of this or that communion,
and are acknowledged as such, that determines their official relation to
their own Church and to ours. And this holds true though nominal
Lutherans should be un-Lutheran, and nominal non-Lutherans should be
Lutheran.
The Distinction between Error in the Individual and
Error in Organization.
For there is a vital distinction between relation to tacit individual
error, within a pure Church, and to error," even the very same error, pub
licly avowed, taught, and defended. Sharpest of all is the distinction
when such error comes into organized opposition to the Church, or any
pure part of it, and is made the basis of schism and sect. Genuine
Lutheranism, like Christ, distinguishes between those who though they
may be in error or doubt, are yet in the implicit position of learners of
the truth, and those errorists who are in the explicit attitude of teachers,
who deny the truth, and who set forth falsehood in its place, with whom
stand their followers, who shut their ears and hearts against the truth.
There are those to whom he says : " Ye have made the commandment
of God of none effect by your tradition," those of whom he says : " In
vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of
men ;" " Let them alone, they be blind leaders of the blind ; and if
the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch ;" " Woe unto
you, ye blind guides." But when he saw the multitudes he was moved
with compassion on them, because they fainted and were scattered
abroad, as sheep having no shepherd : and as that good shepherd dis
tinguishes from himself the robber who climbs in by some other way,
the stranger whose voice they know not, the hireling whose own the
sheep are not, so does he distinguish the flock with his pitying love,
from the wolf which catcheth them and scattereth the sheep.

29
Christ and the Church: the Church as Invisible.
Christ's direct doctrine concerning the Church is summed up in two
passages, the only two in which he uses the word " Church," yet in which
in his own matchless way he has expressed or implied all we need know.
When he says on this rock,— the rock of Confession in Peter and all be
lievers, and the rock of Peter and all believers in Confession, — on this
rock I will build my Church, he means the Church in its unity, known
in its essence to God only, knit by invisible bonds, covering all time and
all lands, and embracing the whole company of the redeemed on earth
and in heaven, past, present, and to come ; above the power and spite of
men and devils, the distraction of heresies, the schisms and divisions
belonging to the Church on her earthly side. It is the Church of the
saved, of true believers, and the elect, scattered throughout the earth, yet
one in the communion of saints.
The Church as Visible.
But our Lord in the second passage opens to us the Church in
another point of view : " Tell it unto the Church." This implies that
there is an aspect of the Church in which it can be found, can be
identified, can be approached and appealed to ; that this Church can ad
judicate and pronounce judgment. It can see and be seen, can hear and
be heard, can be spoken to and can speak. It implies that in the com
plete fraternity of believers there is a Church to which they make a
common appeal, whose decisions they respect, whose discipline they ac
knowledge. In a word, there can be no official fraternal union without
the recognition of a common organization and discipline, and these must
be made valid by association with pure confession of the truth and with
right sacraments. " If he neglect to hear the Church let him be unto
thee as an heathen man and a publican ;" that is, if acknowledging that it
is the Church which speaks, he refuses to hear its voice, then the official
bond is as completely broken as if he were heathen in his faith, and as
destitute as the ordinary publican of all morality in his life. But if he
be in an organization opposed to the Church to which you appeal, if he
says, " I will hear my Church, not yours," then, though we may not treat
him as an heathen man or a publican, for his attitude may be not that
of refusal to hear the Church but of mistake as to what is the Church,
yet his own act makes it impossible to recognize him as in ecclesiastical
communion and fellowship with us. It is the Saviour's law : Common
rights and common privileges imply common responsibility to discipline.
They are not in complete Church fraternity, Christ being witness, who

30
have no power to appeal to a common Church, whose voice, they confess,
speaks to them in Christ's name, and bears his authority with it.
Christ drew a sharp distinction between the true visible Church, though
with errorists in it and what was not the Church. " Ye worship ye
know not what. We know what we worship, for salvation is of the
Jews." Our Lord was a minister of the circumcision, and while the
Jewish Church stood as the Church of God, he and his disciples recog
nized its teachings alone, did honor to its institutions alone, worshipped
in its ordained ways and places alone, were faithful to its laws, and rev
erently received and taught as a rule of faith and life its holy oracles
alone. The Samaritans had a ministry, but Christ never told men to
listen to it. They had a Paschal Supper, but he never united in it.
From the Jewish Church alone Christ took his Apostles and the earliest
laborers, and as a last token of his recognition of the place of the Jews
in the divine plan, he commanded his Apostles to begin at Jerusalem
the work of evangelizing the world.
The Church of the Future.
For the great Church of coming time his grandest prophecies were
uttered, his most fervent prayers poured forth. " On this rock I will
build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."
"Other sheep I have which are not of this fold, them must I also bring,
and they shall hear my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shep
herd." "Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall
believe on me through their word, that they all may be one, as thou
Father art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us. I in
them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one, and that
the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them as thou
hast loved me." Words of surpassing sweetness ! How they float as
from some world above the jar, the din, the conflict of our earth and of
our time. They are the music of heaven for the faithful who make the
communion of saints in the hidden fellowship which knows no discords.
For that communion and fellowship Luther's heart yearned, as perhaps
no heart except the great loving heart of Christ himself ever yearned.
Of that fellowship Luther has said : " I believe that there is on earth a
holy little assembly and communion of pure saints, under Christ the one
head, called together by the Holy Spirit, in one faith, one sense, and one
understanding, with manifold gifts, but of one accord in love, without a
sect, without a schism. From this communion of saints, this Christen
dom, the Holy Spirit shall never depart, but shall abide with it to the
end of the world."

31
This is the divine ideal of faith, the Church invisible. The human
real, as a thing of vision, is the Church as it stands, visible. Both are as
Christ has painted them, yet how unlike. How unlike, yet iu essence one,
as the soul in its manifestations in the body seems so unlike that same
soul apart from its bonds, yet is one with it. In proportion as the visi
ble is more fully pervaded by the invisible the contrast more and more
fades away toward that heavenly paradox when the visible shall have
become invisible, and the invisible shall have become visible. On earth
the invisible is deep hidden in the visible, in heaven what was the invisi
ble shall be the only and glorious visible. To bring the Church as far
as may be on earth toward this full pervasion is the problem of all ages,
the problem of our owu age.
The Solution of the Problem.
Has genuine Lutheranism any solution to offer of the problem of the
time? Is there any source of healing to which the good may look for
a final relief of the conflict which distracts aud distresses God's true
children? We reply : It has, for Christ has, and what he proposes, it
proposes. God's grace alone can heal his Church. God's grace has its
great administrator, the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost has his suffi
cient means, the Word and Sacraments, and regenerate men are co
workers with God the Holy" Ghost. God alone can do it efficiently ;
man's part is as God's most humble instrument. God's grace can do it,
not panaceas of human compounding, nor machinery of human device.
The Holy Spirit can do it, not the spirit of humanity, culture, progress,.
science, refinement, or popular education. How shall the Church obtain
in all his power this divine one ? God will give his Holy Spirit to
them that ask him. When the Church in all the majesty of that
prayer before which the omnipotence of God is pleased to bow, shall
lift her heart to the throne, then shall the Spirit who takes of all the
things that are Christ's to make them ours, take of his peace, and with
it unite his whole Church. When the spirit of God, who alone is the
author of unity, shall be found, unity shall be found.
Do you ask where is this great gift of God, this gift of his Spirit, to be
found ? In God's own Word, the Word of the Spirit, the Word which is
written ir Scripture, the Word taught publicly by a faithful ministry,
and privately by all saints, the Word sealed in the sacraments by the
very Spirit, and the very Christ of which the sacramental promises
themselves speak, the Word which also gives life and consecration to
true confessions. It is Christ's solution of error : " Ye know not the
Scriptures." It is Christ's mode of relief for error : " Search the Scrip-

32
tures." It was Christ's glorious work on that mysterious journey to
Emmaus, which is the foreshadow of his walk as prophet by his
Church's side, through her pilgrimage in all time, that he "opened the
Scriptures," and in the last hours of his life on earth, as the preparation
for his great world-embracing commission to his apostles, " He opened
their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures."
But those Scriptures themselves teach us how slow, how impeded,
how intermitted is the progress of truth. The grain maturing with tares
to the end of time ; the blade, the ear, the full corn in the ear ; the
mustard seed ; the leaven, are images of slow growth or gradual diffu
sion. Neither in nature, history, nor grace is any great thing sudden.
Every great transition follows a grea,t preparation. " Watch and wait "
is the password of the ages.
Our Duty.
Let us not then like impatient children dig up and destroy the seed
sown yesterday, because it does not show itself above ground to-day.
Let us do our whole duty and leave issues to Him to whom issues
belong. He who takes a place in the communion of saints has done the
first great thing for the communion of saints. Let us see that we hold
and acknowledge, confess and maintain at every cost, the truth of God,
the whole truth, the truth alone, nothing added, nothing taken away,
nothing weakened, nothing distorted, knowing that "one jot or one
tittle of it shall in nowise pass from it till all be fulfilled." Let us
witness to the truth in word and deed, by act and sacrifice. Let us
consider this faithful witness one of the highest revelations we can make
of our love to God and our love to man. Above all that flatters and
all that moves fear, let us be exalted by the assurance that Christ's
words shall abide in their own divine sense, and that the Church which
holds them in that sense shall abide by them and with them forever :
" Though earth be dust
And vanish, though the heavens dissolve, her stay
Is in the Word, that shall not pass away."

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

3 9002 05318 3589