FEB 16 1.918 A BR 309 .P75 C.2 Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. General Assembly. The Protestant Reformation V V^V^-- v^/^^ FEB 16 1918 Protestant Reformation and Its Influence 1517-1917 Addresses Delivered in Connection with the One Hundred and Twenty-Ninth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America at Dallas, Texas, on May 19 and 20, 1917 PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY PHILADELPHIA THE WESTMINSTER PRESS TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION 5 HISTORICAL STATEMENT 9 ADDRESSES: THE ORIGIN AND PURPOSE OF THE PROT- ESTANT REFORMATION 21 By David Schley Schaff THE REFORMATION: A REVIVAL OF RELIGION 49 By J. Ross Stevenson THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 59 By William Henky Robeets MESSAGES FROM LUTHER FOR OUR DAY 71 By Henry Sloane Coffin THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION 85 By Feederick W. Loetscheb THE REFORMATION AND HUMANISM. . 109 By William R. Faemee THE REFORMATION AND SOME VITAL AND CON- STRUCTIVE ELEMENTS OF MODERN LIFE 117 By William McKibbin THE REFORMERS AS MEN OF THOUGHT AND ACTION 127 By Andrew C. Zenos THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION AND THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 147 By William H. Black 3 INTRODUCTION The General Assembly of 1916, in session in Atlantic City, took the following action providing for the cele- bration of the four hundredth anniversary of the Pro- testant Eeformation, which began with the posting of the Ninety-five Theses on the church door in Witten- berg by Martin Luther, October 31, 1517 : "Whereas, The four hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Keformation occurs in 1917; and "Whereas, The Churches constituting the Council of the Eeformed Churches holding the Presbyterian System represent historically one great branch of the Christian Church of the Eeformation. Therefore, ^'Resolved, That the Council recommends to the sev- eral supreme judicatories the holding of suitable anni- versary services for the purpose of emphasizing the great principles of the Eeformation of the sixteenth century/'— Minutes, 1916, page 309. The General Assembly also adopted the following: ''Resolved, That, in connection with whatever celebra- tion of the Luther Anniversary may be arranged for 1917. all Presbyterian churches be called upon to commemorate the nailing of the Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Church, by making a special offering, on October 28, 1917, this offering to be sent to the (College) Board for the purpose of maintaining departments of English 5 6 INTRODUCTION Bible in Presbyterian colleges." — Minutes, 1916, page 161. ''Resolved, That in order to carry out the resolution regarding the anniversary of the Protestant Eeformation, it is recommended that the Moderator appoint a com- mittee of five, three ministers and two elders, to co- operate with other committees." — Minutes, 1916, page 122. In accordance with this action, the Moderator of the Assembl}^, John A. Marquis, D.D., LL.D., appointed the following committee : Ministers : Eev. David Schley Schaff, D.D., Chairman; Rev. Frank C. McKean, D.D.; Eev. William Henry Eoberts, D.D., LL.D. Euling Elders : Mr. William H. Scott and Mr. Lansing C. Wet- more. The Assembly of 1917, in session in Dallas, set apart the hour of 11:30-12:30 A. M., May 19, for a com- memoration by itself of the Eeformation. The com- mittee's report was adopted and an address was made by its chairman. Dr. David Schley Schaff, on "The Origin and Purpose of the Eeformation." The report stated, among other things, that the com- mittee had prepared and sent out to all ministers of our communion a leaflet containing a brief presentation of the course of the Eeformation, together with a list of books suitable for consultation and two lists of topics for possible series of lectures on the subject; that it had communicated with the stated clerks of all the presbyteries urging the presbyteries to arrange for cele- brations in the autumn of 1917, and had put itself in INTRODUCTION 7 communication with the committees appointed by other denominations. It had secured the issue by the Board of Publication of an ehiborate program for use by the churches in such celebrations, and the offer, through the Board's depositories, of Bohmer's biography of Luther at a greatly reduced price. It also provided for the preparation and issue of a pageant of the Reformation. The Assembly further appointed four popular meet- ings in commemoration of the Eeformation to be held during its sessions, on Sunday evening. May 20, in four different churches in Dallas, Texas, with the following chairmen and speakers at each: First Baptist Church Chairman : Frank C McKean, D.D., Des Moines, Iowa. Speakers: J. Boss Stevenson, D.D., LL.D., President of Princeton Theological Seminary; William Henry Eoberts, D.D., LL.D., Stated Clerk of the General Assembly. Central Baptist Church Chairman : Elder William H. Scott, of Philadelphia. Speakers: Henry S. Coffin, D.D., pastor of the Madi- son Avenue Presb3'terian Church, New York City, and professor in Union Theological Seminary; Frederick W. Loetscher, D.D., professor in Princeton Theological Seminary. First Methodist Church Chairman : J. Wilbur Chapman, D.D., Moderator of the General Assembly. Speakers : William R. Farmer, 8 INTRODUCTION D.D., professor in Western Theological Seminary, Pitts- burgh; William McKibbin, D.D., LL.D., President of Lane Theological Seminary, Cincinnati. I First Presbyterian Church^ South Chairman: John A. Marquis, D.D., LL.D., retiring Moderator. Speakers: Andrew C. Zenos, D.D., LL.D., professor in McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago; William H. Black, D.D., LL.D., President of Missouri Valley College, Marshall, Missouri. The topics assigned to each meeting were "The Ee- formation" and "The Influence of the Eeformation.'^ The congregations gathered at these meetings were large, and the interest shown in the subject of the Eeformation was warm and sympathetic. The General Assembly instructed the committee to edit a memorial volume containing all the addresses above referred to, and directed the Board of Publication to publish the volume. HISTORICAL STATEMENT It is proper here to give a brief sketch of the prin- cijoles and historic progress of the Eeformation. I. The Medieval Church system against which the Eeformation was a protest. To the doctrines of the Trinity, the deity, incarnation, atonement, and resur- rection of Christ, the divine origin of the Scriptures, and the life beyond the grave, the Church during the course of the Middle Ages added dogmas and practices which to the Reformers appeared unstated in the New Testa- ment, and were a subversion of some of its fundamental principles. Among these unscriptural doctrines and practices were the following : 1. The papal monarchy. The pope as the vicar of Christ claimed headship over the entire Church on earth, with supreme authority in the Church and also over the nations, with right to set up and depose princes and monarchs. 2. The priesthood. The priesthood claimed the right of deciding the eternal destiny of every mortal man. This right was exercised through the sacraments, de- clared to be the necessary channels of grace and eternal life. Apart from these sacraments, it was taught, there can be no forgiveness of sins and no entrance into the fellowship of Christ; the priest alone has authority to 9 10 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION administer them; moreover, his administration invar- iably makes them efficient. In practice two errors of prime importance followed : The individual was debarred from free access to Christ, such as, for example, the blind man had; and the lay Christian had no right to interpret the commands of Christ as laid down in the Scriptures. It belonged to the Church to interpret and make known these com- mands. By the Church we mean the pope, bishops, and priesthood, that is, the hierarchy. The Scriptures were withheld from the laity. 3. The sacraments. The sacraments were increased to seven, whereas the New Testament records only bap- tism and the Lord's Supper as appointed by Christ. One of the seven sacraments introduced was marriage. By this decision, the legitimacy of children and the sanctity of the marriage bond was made dependent upon the priest, who alone had authority to constitute the bond. 4. Transubsta7itiaiion and the sacrifice of the Mass. By the former the bread and wine at the words of the priest are changed into the very body and blood of Christ. The popular statement ran that the priest "created God." In the Mass a true though bloodless sacrifice, repeating the act on Calvary, is said to occur every time the priest consecrates the bread and wine, and it is efficacious for persons absent as well as those who partake of the communion. 5. Withdrawal of the cup. The cup was withdrawn THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 11 from the laity in direct opposition to our Lord's words, '^Drink ye all, of it." 6. Penance. The sacrament of penance was made to consist of four distinct parts: contrition of heart, con- fession to the priest, works of satisfaction prescribed by the priest, and absolution by the priest. To receive pardon from God the offender must go through all these four processes and to omit any one of them is fatal. The human priest is essential to the forgiveness of sin. It was the exercise of these principles which provoked, in 1517, the first act of the Eeformation. 7. Withdraiual of the jmlpit. In the churches the pulpit was supplanted by the altar and the confessional box. 8. Purgatory. This doctrine places a realm between this world and heaven to which go all souls which are redeemed, and yet, without further purgation, are not fit for heaven. The most pernicious feature of purgatory is that the duration of the chastisement depends on the pope and priesthood. The pope has power to release souls at his will so that they go immediately to heaven. Sixtus IV, in 1476, an- nounced that payments of money made by the living might insure the shortening of the pangs of the de- parted in purgatory. Masses for the dead provided for in wills or paid for by the living gave ease to such souls. 9. The worship of the Virgin Mai^y, saints, and relics. Great cathedrals were dedicated to Mary, called "the queen of mercy," as Jesus was called "the king of jus- tice." 12 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 10. The enforced celibacy of the clergy. 11. The Inquisition. By this institution^ established by the papacy in 1215, the right of liberty and even to life on earth was denied to the religious dissenter. Ac- cording to theory, the Church tribunal never went far- ther than to execute the sentence of lifelong imprison- ment ; but, by turning the heretic over to the civil magis- trate and threatening the civil magistrate with spiritual punishments unless he executed the heretic, the Churcli became responsible directly for the death by burning of thousands of heretics. The papacy was therefore guilty of fomenting hatred against heretics and inciting wars against dissenting sects. These unscriptural doctrines and practices, almost without exception, were held up to severest condemna- tion by John Wyclif , and many of them were condemned by Marsilius of Padua, who preceded him, and by John Huss and Jerome of Prague. These men have won a good report through the approbation of the Eeformers, but they stood condemned as diabolical men and arch- heretics when the Eeformation was started. II. Origin and Progress of the Reformation. The Ninety-five Theses posted in Wittenberg, October 31, 1517, were a protest against the sale of indulgences. An indulgence was a pardon for sins granted by a priest. By order of Pope Leo X the sale was being methodically carried on in German}^, a portion of the proceeds going into the papal treasury. Little tickets,' bought by the people, entitled souls in purgatory to immediate passage to heaven and insured purchasers of the pardon of sins. THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 13 Luther's Theses flew through Europe. James Anthony Froude has called October 31, 1517, "the most memor- able day in modern European history." The Theses proved to be the bold stroke which brought spiritual liberty to parts of Europe and liberated the Gospels and apostles from the bondage in which they had been held for centuries by priestly traditions and enactments. In 1517 Luther did not dream of being a reformer of the Church. He supposed he was calling attention to an evil about which the pope was not informed and which the Church authorities would quickly repudiate. But the very first of the Theses had in it the power and the dynamic of the new movement. It was an immediate appeal to "Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ," and the Scriptures. It was the allegiance to Christ's spoken word, too, which carried Luther on from step to step and gave him courage to face the assaults and threats of theologians, pope, and emperor. Gradually he repu- diated all the medieval errors and abuses enumerated above. With undaunted boldness he continued in his course, braving the papal bull and the ban of outlawry pronounced upon him by the emperor. In open day- light, in 1520, he burned the bull, which declared him a heretic, and in 1521, on trial before the emperor and the imperial diet at Worms, he refused to recant what his conscience bade him was truth. Confined in the Wartburg, he translated the New Testament into Ger- man. In 1525 he was married. Four years before this, he had written a treatise calling upon those who were monks and nuns against their will to abandon the con- 14 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION vents. Supported by Melanchthon, by his prince, the duke of Saxony, and by other sympathizers, he gave the Eeformation to Germany and to the world. He stated all the doctrinal principles of Protestantism and set the example for other Eeformers in his catechism and hymns, in his preaching, and in his call to the State to provide universal education. In judging Luther's services it must be remembered that John Calvin did not espouse the new views till 1533, sixteen years after Luther had posted up the Theses; that John Knox did not fully begin his work in Scotland till 1560, forty-three years after that event; and that the early Eeformers in England all derived their teachings from Wittenberg. The leading Eeformer at the side of Luther was John Calvin, who, after a brilliant course in the study of law, was "suddenly converted" to the new views in 1533, and, obliged to flee from France, settled in Geneva in 1536. He outlived Luther by eighteen years and died in 1564. With the vision and organizing power of a statesman, he established a Christian commonwealth. The university which he founded became the chief cen- ter of letters and law for France, Holland, and Great Britain. He expounded the Scriptures in scholarly and critical commentaries. He wrote the chief work on systematic theology produced by the Eeformers. He did what Luther did not do. He gained the far western states of Europe, Holland, England, and Scotland, per- manently for Protestantism. From these states and France came the first Protestant colonists to America, the Huguenots, the Dutch, the Puritans, as also the THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 15 Palatine Germans. Geneva became the hearthstone of representative government in Church and in State. Ulrich Zwingli, 1484-1531, who died on the field of battle, was the second leader to espouse the movement for reformation in the Church. A priest and a great preacher, he gave the Eeformation to Zurich, which, like Geneva, became a refuge for persecuted Protestants from England and Italy. In some respects Zwingli antici- pated our modern theology, by extending salvation to unbaptized infants, children of heathen as well as of Christian parents. In France the king opposed the new movement, and the Huguenots, as the French Protestants were called, were subjected to massacre on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1572, and to repeated wars until, in 1685, they were denied all toleration by Louis XIV. In Holland the Lutheran views early took root, but were supplanted by the Genevan type of the Eeforma- tion, with William the Silent as leader. The awful barbarities of Philip II and the Spanish Inquisition have been told by Motley, who gives the graduated scale of prices at which pardon for the worst crimes might be bought. In England the progress of the Eeformation was now encouraged, now checked, by the reigning sovereigns, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth; its type was finally decided to a large degree by Eliza- beth's preferences. Cambridge was the first hotbed of the new views, but Tyndale, who received his training there, fled to Germany to put his translation of the Greek 16 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION Testament into print (1526). Under Mary Tudor, 1553-1558, a great company of martyrs testified to their faith in the flames, unlearned men and men of learning, mechanics and men of highest ecclesiastical standing, such as Bishops Hooper and Latimer and Archbishop Cranmer. In Scotland the Eeformation views were first preached by men like Patrick Hamilton and George Wishart, both of whom suffered death for their convictions. After a period of exile in England and in Geneva, John Knox returned to Scotland, and, with Edinburgh as his parish, made permanent the Eeformation which had been begun by enactments of the nobles in the National Covenant. Before his death in 1572, Knox gave to his people the First Scotch Confession, the First Book of Church Dis- cipline, and the so-called Liturgy. Of other Eeformers whose names have not been men- tioned, the most noteworthy were Melanchthon, Bucer of Strasburg, OEcolampadius of Basel, and two men of the later generation, Bullinger of Zurich, and Beza, Calvin's learned and able successor in Geneva. Peter Martyr and Oehino came from Italy. The Eeformation in the greater part of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and part of Hungary, was Lutheran. The rest of the Protestant world was called Eeformed. The Eeformers were one in purpose, and in teachings were in almost absolute agreement. Their differences, as in regard to the Lord's Supper and the use of a prescribed liturgy, were, as we look back, of small concern in com- parison with the unanimity with which they insisted THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 17 upon the Scriptures as every man's Book and the final source of religious authority, the marriage of the clergy, the doctrine of justification by faith, withdrawal of the sacerdotal element from the priesthood and the sacri- ficial element from the Lord's Supper, and the priest- hood of all believers. The teachings of the Eeformers, all of which they insisted w^ere based upon the Scrip- tures, were incorporated in the Protestant Confessions, beginning with the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and including the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566, the Galilean Confession, 1559, the Thirty-nine Articles of Eeligion, 1563, the First Scotch Confession, 1560, the Heidelberg Catechism, 1563, and the Canons of Dort, 1619. They were brought to a close by the Westminster Confession of 1648. The Council of Trent restated and, with some modifi- cation, reaffirmed the tenets and usages of the Medieval Church. Its canon and decrees, 1563, became the official teachings of Koman Catholicism as opposed to Prot- estantism. To these dogmas were added in 1854 and 1860, under the pontificate of Pius IX, the dogmas of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary and papal infallibility. The era of the Eeformation beginning with the post- ing of the Theses in 1517 was concluded in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which brought peace after the ravages of the Thirty Years' War and recognized the divisions of Europe into Protestant and Eoman Catholic nations — For the Committee. David Schley 8 chaff , Chairman. THE ADDEESS BEFOEE THE GENEEAL ASSEMBLY The address was delivered before the General Assem- bly, Saturday, May 19, at 11 :30 A. M. Eev. Wallace Eadcliffe, D.D., LL.D., pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington, D. C, and a former Moderator of the Assembly, presided. In introducing the speaker Dr. Eadcliffe spoke of the importance of the Eeformation and the distinction of the speaker's father, Dr. Philip Schaff, as a Church historian. THE ORIGIN AND PURPOSE OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION BY DAVID SCHLEY SCHAFF, D.D., LL.D. Mr. Moderator, Members of the Assemhly, Ladies, and Gentlemen: The Protestant Reformation, the four hundredth anniversary of which we are now commemorating, is the most memorable event since the days of the apostles. It marked the close of the ]\Iiddle Ages and ushered in these modern centuries. It was a protest against the ecclesiastical system built up by the practice of able pontiffs and justified by the acute reasoning of the Schoolmen. It was more than a protest: It was a reproclamation of the gospel. It announced emanci- pation from the papal monarchy. It brought release from bondage to the priesthood, v/hich claimed as a monopoly the function of mediating between the soul and God. It gave the Scriptures to the common man. It republished salvation by free grace. It asserted for all alike the right to go at once for pardon and life to the chief Bishop and Shepherd of our souls. It pro- claimed the sovereignty of the individual man. Setting aside the monastic ideal, it taught once more the true use of the world and the dignity of all legitimate human occupations; it taught that every creature of God is 21 22 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION good, and nothing to be despised, if it be received with thanksgiving. The impulse which gave the Eeformation birth was wholly religious. Social and economic unrest prevailed in the sixteenth century as in the twentieth. Social and economic changes were engaging the dreams and speculation of the age — not all Utopian. Social and economic betterments followed the preaching of the Eeformers. But, in the first instance, and all through, the Eeformers had it as their controlling aim to rean- nounce the plain way whereby a man may be just with God. Starting in Wittenberg, the movement spread to Switzerland, where it had Zwingli and Calvin foi its chief leaders. It extended to Holland and crossed the channel to England and Scotland. In Denmark, Swe- den, and Norway, the new system completely replaced the old. In Hungary it divided the population. In France it promised well, but met with disfavor from the king, and by the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day and bloody wars was almost blotted out. In Spain and Italy the Inquisition soon crushed the seeds of the rising faith. The extensive spread of the uprising shows how widely religious dissatisfaction prevailed. But for the divisions among Protestants, which we lament, the principles of the Eeformation would have been planted in a wider area than the land which proved to be a permanent soil for them. Save for these divisions, there probably would have been no Thirty Years' War, no THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 23 century-long struggle in England, no harrowing of the Covenanters. Like the apostles of the first century and the School- men of the Middle Ages, the Eeformers form a group by themselves. Belonging to different nations and speaking different languages, they were united in a common purpose and remarkably agreed in their teach- ings. They had no thought of constituting a new Church. Their purpose was to clear the Medieval Church of corruptions and once more conform it fully to its charter, the New Testament. To the question once put to a Protestant, "Wliere was your Church be- fore Luther?" the reply was made, and aptly, "Where was your face before it was washed ?" The aim of the Eeformers was to cleanse. No new truth did they invent any more than Columbus and the Cabots created a new world. The Italian navigators found the old lands lying under the western sun and made them known. What the Eeformers did was to open the old Book and make known what they found written therein. This, at least, they professed to do. But, though their aim was one, the Eeformers were distinguished by personal traits and also by the specific contributions which they made to the main movement. To Martin Luther it was given to be the leader of the Eeformation and to state its leading Biblical prin- ciples. His life was full of dramatic scenes : his sudden withdrawal from the world in favor of the "religious life"; his visit to Eome; the posting of the Ninety-five Theses; the appearance before Cajetan; the colloquy at 24 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION Leipzig; the burning of the papal bull at Wittenberg; the trial before the emperor at Worms ; the confinement in the Wartburg; the meeting with Zwingli at Marburg in 1529. He gave to his people — ^to follow the Catholic historian^ Dollinger — what no other single man gave to a people : the Bible, the catechism, and the hymn book ; and in these respects he set an example to the other Reformers. He was the strongest of the strong. He felt the full onset of the papal opposition. Yet no- where was he more himself than in the home, trans- lating "^sop's Fables" for his children and praying at the deathbed of his little daughter, Lena, weeping as if his frame would be shaken to pieces. After the Diet of Worms he could write, "If I had a hundred heads, they should be all cut off before I would yield up my conscience." On the other hand, his letters to his wife are full of tenderness, and parents were never shown more filial devotion by a distinguished son than Martin Luther gave to his old father and mother. It is one of the noblest of his traits that he was never spoiled by honors, never forgot his lowly origin. "I am a real peas- ant," he used to say. "My father and grandfather and all my forefathers were peasants." Ulrich Zwingli, brought up in the humanistic cul- ture, was as firm as Luther. It was characteristic of him, as later of Calvin, that he used the State to help the new views to prevalence. As a patriot, he died on the field of battle. The strictest of the Eeformers in his view of divine predestination, he was yet. the mildest of them all in the application of divine mercy, extend- THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 25 ing salvation to all children dying in infancy, heathen or Christian, baptized or nnbaptized. John Calvin, exile from the land of his birth, made Geneva the bulwark of Protestant liberties and the out- post of free education. With a strong hand, sometimes gloved with steel, he established a Christian common- wealth. He died in surroundings solemn and august. He did what Luther did not do. He won the peoples of far western Europe permanently for the Eeforma- tion, and, either through his efforts or through his dis- ciples, has proceeded the representative form of Church government. Upon him Eenan pronounced the judg- ment that "he was the most Christian man of his age." In England the new views won against the old, lost, and won again, until, under Elizabeth and by the defeat of the Armada, England was established as a Protestant nation. But not without "times both sharp and bloody," as Heylin put it. Martyrs form a bright cloud of wit- nesses. One of these witnesses, William Tyndale, was strangled and burnt at Vilvorde for having dared to translate the New Testament into English. One of the chief heirlooms handed down from that age, is the say- ing of Bishop Latimer : "Play the man, ]\Iaster Pidley, we shall this day light such a candle in England as by God's grace shall never be put out." In the northern kingdom, the land of the kirk and the covenants, Knox, in the spirit of John the Baptist, denounced the introduction of a single Mass into the realm as more fearful than the landing of ten thousand armed men. Over his grave the regent might fitly say, y 2G THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION "Here lies the man who never feared the face of man." To all these men Protestant peoples owe a debt. They opened a new religious era; they gave the Bible to the people; they taught justification by faith alone; they laid the foundation of popular institutions; and it is fair to say that if you want to read the chapter of growing religious liberty, the chapter of popular intel- ligence, the chapter of civil liberties based on the dignity of the individual man, if you want to read the chapter of enterprise in commerce and invention, you must go to the lands which stopped to listen to the voices of Luther and Calvin, Zwingli and Beza, Latimer and Knox. When the Eeformation came, it was like a bolt out of a clear sky. This does not mean that there was not religious unrest in Europe. It does not ignore the pre- monitions and presentiments of doctrinal reform voiced by Marsilius of Padua, Wyclif, Huss, and Savonarola, and John of Wcsel and John Wesscl along the lower Ehine. John Wyclif anticipated the movement of the sixteenth century by setting aside the doctrine of tran- substantiation and almost all the medieval dogmas whicli the Protestant Peformers renounced. John Huss was burned to death. Both of these men pronounced cer- tain popes antichrists and defined the Church as the body of the elect. Wyclif gave the Scriptures in the vernacular of his people. Huss accomplislied more, perhaps, by his death than was ever accomplished by the death of any other mere human l)eing. In noble words he expressed the watchword of religious sincerity and THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 27 l^rogTcss when he said, "Not custom are we to follow, but the law of Christ and the truth." A splendid testi- mony was given by Savonarola when, dying on the square of Florence, he rej^lied to the words of the bishop of Vasona, "I separate thee from the Church militant and the Church triumphant/' with the words, "Nay, not from the Church triumphant." Wessel anticipated the coming movement when he declared : "The Church cau not err, but what is the Church? It is the communiou of saints, to which all true believers belong, who are bound by one faith, one hope, one love to Christ." A noble body of men were these reformers before the Eeformation, but no general uprising followed their teachings. The Church went on after they were dead as it had gone on before, if we except the movement in the remote kingdom of Bohemia. When Luther be- gan his work, he was independent of them all. To him they were all heretics. He had not read their writings. From them he did not get his message. His career was not the last act fulfilling a drama. It opened a drama. When the Eeformation came it came from a most unexpected quarter. It did not arise among the peoples of the South, moved by those impulses which gave to culture and art a new birth, and to the study of phil- osophy and statecraft a fresh impetus. It did not arise with the prelates of the Clnircli, the presumed guar- dians of apostolic teaching and the infallible superin- tendents of Christian progress. It did not originate in the central seat of western Christendoui, hallowed by the blood of early Christian martyrs, the goal of genera- 28 THE PR0TE8TANT REFORMATION tions of pious pilgrims, the throne of the vicar of Christ. It originated among that people of the North which in Eome and Italy was called a race of barbarians and beasts. It originated in an obscure town — as it were in another Nazareth — and, as if further to confound the calculations of men, it was proclaimed by a simple monk of lowly origin. Nor was there any collusion between Luther and any group of men of his time to overthrow the inherited ecclesiastical institutions. As soon as that remarkable critic and scholar, Erasmus, came to recognize that a religious change was threatened, which would involve the 23unitive opposition of the Church authorities, he discreetly passed by on the other side. "I abominate tumult more than anything else,'^ he wrote. "I am not so insane as to do anything against the chief vicar of Christ and I am unwilling to cross even a bishop." Ad- dressing Leo himself, he spoke of that pontiff '^as the chief imitator of Christ, who spends himself for Chris- tian salvation." These words were written at the time when the Diet of Worms was impending, and in several other letters Erasmus went on to say that if they wanted Luther to roast or to boil, it mattered not to him. In passing a judgment upon the Eeformation, it is of prime importance to bear these facts in mind. Luther entered upon his career as a Eeformer, not with any hostility to the Church, not through a message from the reformers before the Eeformation, and not in col- lusion with any body of men, his contemporaries. If ever mortal man since the days of Paul started off on his THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 29 mission independently of human aid, it was Martin Luther. When Luther entered upon his career in 1517, he was impelled by an inward conviction won through the study of the Bible. Poring over its open pages, he received his message. The Eeformation was an experi- ' ence in Luther's own soul before it became a historic movement which spread over Europe. He proclaimed a new era, because the new era had first dawned in him. Not of man, not by man, did this conviction arise. It developed gradually as by a process and yet he became conscious of it suddenly as if by revelation. Throughj recent and most unexpected literary discoveries this statement of the origin of the Eeformation has had abundant confirmation. In entering the convent at Erfurt, Luther sought to make his calling and election sure, to escape or appease the punitive justice of God. The monastery was the surest way, known to the Middle Ages, to reach holiness here and heaven hereafter. Anselm, in his letters, de- clared that no other way was so sure. St. Bernard was not satisfied until he had persuaded all his brothers to enter the convent and his sister to take the veil. The monkish vow came to be treated as equivalent to a second baptism by which the monk was restored to innocency. This was the teaching of St. Bernard and Thomas Aquinas. The meritorious holiness to which the monkish vow was the introduction, no one follow- ing a lay calling could ever hope to secure. With singular intensity Luther devoted himself to 30 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION monastic rule and wasted his body with asceticisms. "If monk," so he said in after years, "ever got to heaven by monkery, surely I shonld have got there." He had the privilege of seeing religion in practice at its central hearth, Eome. In that city he ran from altar to altar and crypt to crypt, saying Masses and wishing his parents were in purgatory, that he might pray them out. He climbed the Scala Santa, at every step making petition that his grandfather might be released from that uncomfortable abode. His opportunities for cultivating piety were the best the age knew. Strong in religious purpose, he yet failed through these experiences to find religious peace. But his punctuality in religious exercises, together with his abilities, made him a marked man. He was held up by his superiors as a model monk. The head of the Augustinians, John of Staupitz, gave him his warm friendship, and wdien he went to Eome it was as a delegate of this order. On his return, Luther was chosen its district vicar, and on the recommendation of Staupitz, he was called to a professorship in the Uni- versity of Wittenberg. A year later, he received the theologian's highest academic honor, the doctorate of divinity, an honor of which he was proud. But at the time of receiving the doctorate, so he tells us, he did not know what justification by faith means. Then fol- lowed the period of five years leading up to the hour of high noon when he posted the Theses on the church door in Wittenberg, October 31, 1517. What was he reading in those j-ears? What thoughts were making THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 31 pathways tlirongh this monk's mind? What messages was he delivering to his students? Was he undergoing any special preparation for his public career? By the literary discoveries, to which allusion has been made, these questions have all been answered. We now possess some of the very books which Luther read and diligently annotated during these five years. From Melanchthon we knew that he was lecturing on The Psalms and The Epistle of Paul to the Eomans, but nothing more. Now we have tlie very texts of those lectures, in copies taken down by students in the lec- ture room, and, in the case of the lectures on Eomans, we have in addition the very manuscript which Luther wrote with his own hand. The lectures on The Psalms were delivered 1513-1514, the lectures on Pomans 1515- 15K3. It is noteworthy, on first sight, that the new pro- fessor took up the very books of the Bible which set forth in every verse the immediate communion of the soul with God and elaborate the doctrine that the sinner is saved by faith alone. The Schoolmen, one after an- other, had reveled in the imagery of the Song of Songs; Luther interpreted the cold statements of Paul in his fullest epistle. But most noteworthy is the progress which these lec- tures show as going on in Luther's mind as he sank himself in the teachings of God's Word. As he pro- ceeds we find him denouncing Aristotle, the authority of the Middle Ages, "as the accursed heathen philos- opher," and dissenting from Tliomas Aquinas, the prince 32 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION of the Schoolmen. The Schoohnen themselves he pro- nounces '^swine theologians/' a designation somewhat offensive but expressing forcibly what Luther meant, that they had fed upon the husks of the human reason instead of upon the pure wdieat of Scripture. He even dares to dissent from the African Father. More and more he holds forth Augustine as the reliable teacher on the doctrines of human inability and unmerited grace. More and more his independence as a student and ex- positor comes into view. He pronounces treatises ascribed to Augustine spurious, a judgment confirmed by modern criticism. He compares Scripture with Scripture, making it its own interpreter — a principle the Eeformers afterwards with unanimity insisted upon. He goes back to the original Greek text, saying again and again, "The Greek is thus and so.'' Finally, in the comments on the latter chapters of Paul's epistle, the reader is fairly swept along by the spirit with which they are pervaded, the spirit of triumphant joy and assurance of salvation. Here Luther seems to be lifted above himself with the conviction of justifying grace. "Man," he says, "is at all times a sinner, at all times penitent, at all times righteous" — semper peccator, semper penitens, semper Justus. If it be true that Jonathan Edwards, as he tells us, studied Locke's phil- osophy with the greed with which a miser counts coins of gold, so this monk in the silence of his study, was searching with intense craving for the meaning of Paul's chapters setting forth God's grace. Gradually, by severe study of the Scriptures, Luther THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 33 came to his conviction that justification is by free grace through faith alone. It is not at all inconsistent with this experience that the apprehension of this truth came to him as by a flash. Suddenly, so Luther said in later years, In the convent in Wittenberg, the meaning of the passage, "The just shall live by faith," burst upon him, opening to his soul, as it were, the very gates of paradise. This happened sometime between the years 1512 and 1517. Sir William Hamilton had a like experience. For months he had been working upon a higher problem, when suddenly, while walking on the street, the solu- tion flashed upon his mind. So it was with Anselm in the case of the ontological argument. That cele- brated argument for the existence of God was the result of a long process going on in Anselm's mind and yet its solution came as a revelation, when in the darkness of the night its outline suddenly stood before the great Schoolman's intellect in clear statement. When Luther posted up his Theses, he had already made the transition from a Church-taught man to a Bible-taught man. To him, as the lectures on Eomans state again and again, the Scriptures had come to be of compelling authority. Not upon Church teachers did he depend for their meaning but upon the plain text as he found it in the original. Before he posted up the Theses, this doctrine, and the doctrine that we are justified by faith apart from works of the law, had taken full possession of his thought. The opening words of those Theses were a firm statement of the former con- 34 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION viction. "Our Lord and Master, when he said '^repent/ meant that the entire life should be a repenting." They had the ring of a new era. They were the assertion of the supreme immediate authority of Christ to which all other authorities were to be subordinated. On this point Luther and the other Reformers never wavered. It was the victory that overcame. The experience of Calvin was likewise the result of a process of study and struggle and yet also, as it were, a sudden revelation. Pie has left on record two brief accounts. "By a sudden conversion," so he said, he was transferred from the mire and his feet set upon the rock. "After trying," he said, "by all the ways of the Catholic faith to reach peace, I failed, and finally the Gospel, like a sudden ray of light, showed me the deep abyss of error I was in, and, frightened and with tears, I took God's way." The inner experiences of these two leading Reform- ers stand, as it were, like bastions of rock at the en- trance of the reform movement of the sixteenth cen- tury. All sorts of psychological explanations of Luther's course may be attempted, but these things stand sure of these two men : They left the old system with reluc- tance; they knew its workings by training and experi- ence; they were diligent students of the Scriptures; they were in no conspiracy to establish a new system; a compelling conviction from within moved them to enter on their new course. The same is true of other Reformers. In his first sermon on The Lord's Prayer, Bishop Hugh Latimer THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 35 declared : "I was as obstinate a papist as any was in England, insomuch that, when I should be made a bachelor of divinity, my whole oration went against Philip Melanchthon and against his opinions. Then having met Master Bilney, or rather Saint Bilney, that suffered death for Christ's sake, I learned more by his confession than before in many years, so that from that time forward I began to smell the Word of God and forsook the school doctors and such fooleries." The bishop then went on to give an account of the practical ministries he set out to perform in Bilney's company. Again, if we would pass a fair judgment upon the Eeformation, we must bear in mind another considera- tion^ of prime importance : Its leaders, the Eeformers, were men imbued with the highest education of their time. I have no intention of enlarging upon their writings which constitute a large contribution to religious literature. I am now interested in calling attention to a single feature. The Eeformers studied the latest books and were familiar with the most recent investigations of their age. The study of Greek and Hebrew, a new thing, was looked upon with suspicion by many of their con- temporaries or denounced as reprobate. The Eeformers, on the contrary, gave themselves to it diligently and were, in respect to theological studies, in the van of their age. "The old ways are good enough," said many. "We cannot improve upon the Fathers and the School- men. What they did not know is not worth knowing. The Vulorate is sufficient. It has served for a thousand 36 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION years and more." "Man/' said the old English priest, when Tyndale told him he was intending to make God's laws accessible to the boy that drove the plow (that is, translate the Scriptures into English), "we were better without God's laws than the pope's." If the Reformers in Wittenberg, Zurich, Basel, Stras- burg, Geneva, and Cambridge, had not been up-to-date men, there would have been no Eeformation. Gregory the Great knew no Greek. Anselm knew no Greek. Thomas Aquinas knew no Greek. Bernard knew no Greek. Wyclif knew no Greek. John Huss knew no Greek. During the seven or eight centuries before 1500 — if we except the hazy traditions of Irish convents — not a single western Churchman knew Greek. But Luther did, and Calvin did, and Zwingli and CEcolampa- dius and Bucer did, and Bullinger and Beza did. In Luther's lectures on Eomans we can point almost to the precise moment when he had a copy of Erasmus' Greek New Testament in his hands. No sooner did that epochal volume appear, March, 1516, than Luther was using it at the ninth chapter of Eomans. Later in his replies to his assailants who fortified their state- ments with conciliar decisions and papal decretals — precedents of the canon law — Luther bulwarked his pages with texts from the Scriptures and referred back to the Greek, notably to the word metanoeo, which, he told his assailants, did not mean to do works of pen- ance, as the Vulgate translated it, but to experience an inward change of heart. To accurate linguistic attainments Calvin also added a THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 37 mind of rare acumen and logical precision. This was abundantly recognized in the schools where he studied law under eminent jurists. He was a humanist before he was a Eeformer and issued a commentary on Seneca's treatise on mercy. Luther translated the Scriptures from the originals for the first time in ten centuries. Calvin was the chief critical expositor among the Ee- formers, basing his studies on the original text for the first time in ten centuries or more. Even Augustine did not do this and had to content himself with the Itala and the Yulgate. As for Zwingli, no sooner did he see one of Erasmus' New Testaments than he copied the Greek of the Paul- ine epistles for his own use. He had studied in Vienna and Basel and his humanistic attainments won from the pope an annual pension. Beza was an expert Greek scholar, as his edition of the Greek Testament shows. Among the English Eef orm- ers were Cambridge and Oxford men, who had sat at the feet of Grocyn, Colet, and Erasmus. When these and other Eeformers spoke and wrote it was as men endowed with high intellectual gifts, conversant with the medieval system and unequaled in their knowledge of the Scriptures in the original. If ever a body of men was competent to speak against a prevailing system, then the Eeformers by reason of mental gifts, by reason of scholastic training, by reason of experience in convent and university, by reason of familiarity with the customs of the people and priest- hood, were competent to speak against the prevailing 38 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION religious system inherited from the Middle Ages. Who of his age was so quick as Luther to accept the proof given by Laurentius Valla that the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals were an invention? Who was more deeply read in the Fathers than Calvin? Who introduced the modern school method into Germany, if not Melanch- thon? Who insisted on general education for poor as well as rich, if not Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and John Knox? These men were acquainted with the past and familiar with the conditions of their age before they advocated the policies which these modem times have put into practice. The medieval scheme, against which the Eeformers with one consent contended, presented three main con- structions : The monarchical papacy, the sacramental system, and the Inquisition, all so deeply grounded by the dialectics of the Schoolmen that they seemed to be as firmly established as the foundations of the medieval cathedrals. The papacy was accepted as the final arbiter in all things human. The notorious bull of Boniface VIII, the Unam Sanctam, issued 130,2, asserted three things with a clearness which leaves nothing to be desired. As against the claims of the Greek Church, it asserted the unity of the Church under the Eoman pontiff. As against the independence of the State, it asserted that both swords, the spiritual sword and the sword of steel, are subject to the will of the Eoman pontiff. As against the idea that Christ can give eternal life independently of all seen institutions, it asserted that it is "altogether THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 39 necessary for the salvation of every human being that he be subject to the Eoman pontiff." A crass assertion, this last, as opposed to our Lord's words, "He that be- lieveth hath eternal life" ! These assertions of Boni- face stirred up many a pamphleteer from Dante and Marsilius of Padua to Wyclif and Huss and Gerson and Nieheim ; but, in spite of opposition, they remained the unmodified view of the hierarchy. The Council of Constance, 1415, declared that the final arbiter in eccle- siastical matters should be a general council. This decision solemnly made, with such men as Gerson, d'Ailly, and Cardina Zarabella, leaders in the council, was easily superseded fifty years later by Pius II in his famous hulla execrahUis. Just six months before Luther posted up his Theses, the bull of 1303 was solemnly reaffirmed by Leo X. According to Prierias, Leo X's spokesman against Luther, the pope is above all councils : he judges all and is judged by no man. From his tribunal there is no appeal: his word releases from purgatory ; the Scriptures themselves get their authority from his approval. This notable treatise was written in 1520. The sacramental system, to further which the School- men bent their best energies, placed the priest at the gate of heaven. E^xcept by his sufferance, no man can have entrance. The sacraments which he dispenses act like drugs. They contain and confer grace by a virtue inherent in themselves and grace cannot be had with- out them. By the Inquisition, the Church took away the right / 40 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION of private opinion in religious matters and denied exist- ence on earth to an3^one daring to dissent from its dogmas. This is the explicit teaching of Thomas Aquinas. To these three mighty constructions, the Eeformers opposed the open Bible as every man's Book, and the teaching that justification is by faith in Jesus Christ, independent of works or sacerdotal ministrations^ As for the papacy, to Luther the pope came to be an antichrist, ^"^the very worst that all devils with all their power could do.'' Luther's words were vehement and, when it came to calling names, as one of my students once put it, Luther "could beat them all." But the provocation was great. If we choose to forget x\lexander VI, recently deceased, his mistresses, the open marriage of his children from the Vatican, his sale of cardinals' hats; if we forget Julius II, whom Luther called the sanguinary pope, clad in armor and fighting without mercy against the French in upper Italy, himself also the father of children ; if we forget Leo X, entering the Vatican with the frivolous words, "God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it," his pawning of the tiara to keep up the extravagances of his court, his duplicity in politics — if we choose to forget such papal practices, we must remember that Leo X called Luther the boar out of the woods and the wild beast of the forest, a heretic — and heretics were burnt — and that the car- dinal legates, Cajetan and Aleander, called Luther "that German beast," that "pernicious monster," that "scoundrel and dog for whom the iron and fire were THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 41 prepared/' No one was in doubt that they were seeking Luther's blood, and, from the broad human standpoint, the monk of Wittenberg was no more guilty in using strong words than was the man at Eome or the cardinals in Augsburg and at AVorms. Of one thing we are pretty certain — that Luther, the Wittenberg monk, never sought the life of pope or cardinal or commended injury to their persons. As for the sacraments, the Eeformers set aside the sacerdotal function of the clergy and the sacrificial ele- ment from the Mass, and recovered for every man the right to go immediately to the throne of grace to find mercy and obtain help in every time of need. As for the Inquisition, we confess with regret that the Eeformers did not give full swing to the principle, enunciated by Luther at the outset, that it is against the will of the Spirit that compulsion be used in mat- ters of religious opinion. It is quite possible, as Nicolas Paulus shows in his w^ork on religious toleration, to prove that the Protestants erred badly and not infre- quently in this matter, even to the dealing with the presumed witches at Salem. Nevertheless, the Eeform- ers were headed in the right direction and, among Prot- estant peoples, the right of private judgment found expression in William the Silent's edict of religious tolerance, 1576, in the noble expression of the West- minster divines that "God alone is Lord of the con- science," and in the article giving "soul liberty," which that spiritual and somewhat heady descendant of Calvin, 42 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION Eoger Williams, put into the constitution of one of our colonies. The Eeformers have been called revolutionaries. So they were. They destro3'ed and they built up. A new era was not otherwise possible. The plea that an orderly current of religious reform was moving in Europe is hardly worth consideration until we have set aside con- temporary popes, beginning, say, with Sixtus IV and Alexander VI and ending with Alessandro Farnese and Julius III, or until the testimonies of all the Eeform- ers are set aside, from Luther's and Tyndale's to the very last of them, as ignorant or malicious perjuries. Stigmatizing epithets heaped upon Luther and the per- sons of the other Eeformers will not be sufficient per- manently to darken the Eeformation and discredit its principles, any more than the fires at Smithfield and Oxford and St. Andrews could burn up the good names of British martyrs. The main question will always be: Did the teachings of the Eeformers accord with the Word of God ? By the Word of God those teachings stand or fall. What God may have in store for the Church in the future in bringing together into hearty fellowship and cooperation Christians, Eoman Catholic and Protestant, I do not presume to be able to foresee. But Protestant Christendom will have its mission, we may be assured, so long as it remains true to the con- fession that Christ is the immediate Head of his Church and of every individual member of the Church, even as in the body the head is in immediate connection with every one of the members; so long as it holds to the THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 43 declaration made before the powers of the world at Worms in 1521 : "My conscience is bound captive in the Word of God and to do anything against conscience is unsafe and dangerous. Here I stand. I can do no otherwise. God help me. Amen." THE SEJ^VICE IN THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH, REV. GEORGE M. TRUETT, PASTOR Rev. Frank Chalmers McKean, D.D., pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church of Des Moines, and a member of the Assembly's Committee on the Celebra- tion of the Four Hundredth Anniversary of the Re- formation, presided. The Scripture lesson was read by Rev. George 0. Nichols, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Guthrie, Oklahoma, and the prayer was offered by Rev. Hugh B. McCrone, D.D., pastor of the Wakefield Presby- terian Church, Germantown, Pennsylvania. The addresses were delivered by Rev. J. Ross Steven- son, D.D., LL.D., President of Princeton Theological Seminary, and Rev. William Henry Roberts, D.D., LL.D., Stated Clerk of the General Assembly. In introducing Dr. Stevenson, Dr. McKean said : We meet to-night to celebrate in advance the anni- versary of one of the world's mightiest movements, for the influence of which the world owes a debt — the Pro- testant Reformation. Carlyle aptly said, "All heroes are intrinsically of the same material, but their out- ward shape depends upon the environment in which they find tliemselves." Great characters, therefore, are the outgrowth of their conditions. They stand out prominently as products of their age. The sixteenth 45 46 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION century was not one of kid-gioved diplomacy. Like John the Baptist, the personalities of Luther, Calvin, and Knox, laid the ax to the root of the trees. In the history of nations we find no men who displayed a grander faith in God, a more dauntless courage, or a more uncompromising attitude toward the evils of their day, than those personalities whose lives and deeds are indelibly stamped upon Europe and the world. We love them and revere their memories because of the principles they advocated. In introducing Dr. Eoberts, Dr. McKean said : It frequently happens that the age in which a man lives does not appreciate his worth. The modern world has a higher opinion of Socrates than had those who pressed thq hemlock to his lips. If Jesus were sent to the cross in this age he would have more followers about him than a handful of women and a few ignorant fisher- men. The ultimate verdict of history upon the life of any individual may always be determined by his atti- tude toward the progressive movements of the age in which he lives. We can better judge the men of the Eeformation who attacked error in its own fortified citadel than they could be judged when the sea of Europe's religious life was lashed by the angry waves of Eeformation days. As we glance back over four centuries, well might we ask. What does modern civiliza- tion owe to these men? They helped to settle the true relation between the State and its subjects. They were mighty factors in establishing political and religious freedom. THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 47 N'o man in the Presbyterian Church is better able to discuss the Eeformation in relation to civil and religious liberty than our own beloved Stated Clerk, Dr. William Henry Roberts. THE EEFOEMATION: A EEVIVAL OF EELIGION' BY J. ROSS STEVENSON, D.D., LL.D. The Eeformation may be considered from three main points of view. It may be regarded as an intellectual awakening, a revival of learning, making possible popu- lar education and all the science and philosophy of our time. Or we may study it as a political event, a rebel- lion against corruption and absolutism in government, a great democratic movement toward popular rule and the blessings of civil liberty. But although the Eef- ormation brought Europe out of the Dark Ages into a new era of enlightenment and intellectual freedom, though it was an effective protest against moral wrong and political oppression, and was the beginning of a "government of the people, by the people, for the peo- ple," it was primarily and essentially a revival of religion, an awakening of spiritual life. It stirred the universities of Europe. It shook thrones and principali- ties and powers, but it dealt mainly with the Church, It was a reformation of religious beliefs and practices and its fruitage is to be found in new creeds, new forms of worship and polity, new channels of service, and new hopes for the redemption of mankind. At the same time it should be remembered that this 49 50 THE PR0TE8TANT REFORMATION revival cannot be understood as a separate and inde- pendent religions event. It is safe to assume that it would not have taken jDlace had it not been for the intellectual awakening which preceded it. Nor would it have been worth while — or perhaps I should say it would not have been a real religious awakening — had it not issued in a reformation of social, political, and moral life. I wish we might grasp the full significance of this. There are revivals of religion which simply touch the surface of life. The seed falls upon stony soil where there is no deepness of earth. It springs up and endures for a little while, but it is soon scorched and withers away. A revival of lasting fruitage strikes its roots deep. Not only the soil but the subsoil has to be plowed up and amply prepared for a vigorous growth and a lasting fruitage. Before Christianity could be planted throughout the Eoman Empire, the soil of Judaism, with its genius for religion, the soil of Greek thought and language, with its clearness and accuracy, the soil of Eoman power and talent of organization, had to be prepared. It took Luther but a moment to post the Mnety-five Theses, but their preparation was a labor of years, and their comprehension and acceptance meant a people made ready — fallow ground broken up — by the Spirit of God. Different forces produced this intellectual awakening preceding the Eeformation. The fall of Constantinople introduced Greek learning into the universities, and made possible the critical study of Scripture by such men as Eeuchlin and Erasmus. The invention of print- THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 51 ing made possible the more rapid dissemination of knowledge, and the proof that the earth revolves around the sun, the use of the compass, and the discovery of x4Lmerica, opened up a new world of thought and inquiry which forecast the overthrow of bigotry, deceit, and un- reality. The intrepid pre-Eeformers — Wyclif, Huss, Wessel, and Savonarola — with their fearless denuncia- tions of the existing order, paved the way to a new w^orld. The rising spirit of national independence in England, in Bohemia, in Germany and the Netherlands, in France and Italy, was dynamiting the soil for moral and political changes which must take place. When all was ready the revival began. It makes us wonder whether God has not been pre- paring our w^orld for a second Eeformation in the great movements which have characterized the recent years. As against the revival of learning we have had our intellectual awakening, the dominance of culture, and the world-wide extension of education. A new national consciousness is everywhere manifest, which has to reckon with relationships to all mankind, and prophets have arisen not only to rebuke the Church, but to demand the overthrow of autocratic governments and all forms of oppression. I wish to speak of this further in another connection. The Reformation as a revival of religion was construe- . tive rather than destructive in its aims. That kings were tyrants, that popes were scoundrels, that priests and monks were ignorant and immoral, that the whole Church was corrupt, and that reformation of both head 52 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION and members was needed, no one could deny. The Church herself summoned councils for the reformation of the clergy and Christian people, and the restoration of ecclesiastical discipline. But how could this be accomplished ? Evidently not by exposure and denun- ciation alone. Men like Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio, with blazing satire scourged the Church from head to foot, without effecting any perceptible change. The great reform councils of Pisa and Constance recognized existing moral evils, but would acknowledge no error in doctrine and thus accomplished nothing of any moment. The pre-Eeformers, Wyclif and Huss, clearly perceived that corruption of life was due to erroneous beliefs, and that only truth could make men free, but they did not grasp with sufficient boldness the truth which would serve as a flame of fire to purge away the dross of centuries, and illuminate and purify the Church with the very life of God. It remained for Luther and Calvin and Knox to apprehend the saving, transforming truth of the gospel of Christ, which each had tested in his own experience, and for the reality and power of which each was ready to lay down his life. The message of the Eeformation summoned the people of Europe back to Christ, to his sovereignty and all- sufficiency in the work of salvation; back to the Scrip- tures as the one supreme and only authoritative source of religious truth; and back to the simplicity of the early Church, in which all Christians stood on the same level and had equal place and worth in the sight of God. This positive truth thrust aside all obstructions, such THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 53 as confession and penance, which a medieval priesthood had placed between the soul and God. It overthrew all man-made deliverances as to truth and belief, to which assent was necessary in order to salvation, and in place of a divine right of kings and an apostolic succession of infallible bishops, it put the priesthood of believers and the rule of the people. The effect of this Eefor- mation preaching, under the power of God's Spirit, was to bring to distressed souls the assurance of pardon, a new, free spiritual life in Christ, and courage to stand for the right. Only a truth as great and strong as eternity can grip the conscience and alter the bent of men's lives and make them free. Such a truth we need just now amid the throes and anguish of world travail. Some one has said that the present Great War is primarily a religious war. Men are not unanimous as to God. They are not agreed as to his character and purposes. The term, God, is not distinctly Christian. A man's god may be wholly pagan, the embodiment of force and the patron of a race or nation, so that it is consistent for him to do in the name of his god what he would not do in the name of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Paul expressed this very forcibly when he said, "Though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth; as there are gods many, and lords many ; yet to us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we unto him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him." Surely the world at this time needs to know that God is the Father of men, that each is made ^i 54 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION in his image and is to be recognized, not as an enemy to be slain but as a brother to be loved, and that there is one Lord, who must be supreme over all nations and in every relation and department of life, whose cross must be the dominating factor in all faith and service. That the Reformation bore a rich and abiding religious fruitage is evidenced by the new and more Scriptural definitions of the Christian faith, by the simpler and more spiritual forms of Church worship, and by a ministry which gave guidance, strength, and hope, to seekers after God. But what I would have you note more particularly is the moral, the social, the politi- cal consequences of this religious revival of the six- teenth century. Dr. Eoberts in the address which is to follow will portray the influences of the Eeformation in their broad and beneficent sweep, but let us not forget the religious fountain from which these influences streamed. People sometimes speak of an ethical revival, and we are told that the coming revival will be social in its service. I can well believe that, because every true revival of religion has borne at least some fruitage of this character. The first recorded service of the Church after Pentecost had to do with a case of poverty. A lame man was laid at the gate of the Temple, because then as now the place where men meet God is the place where they come into contact with human need. And the gospel of Peter and John was equal to the social task of curing the cause of the man's poverty, so that he might thenceforth take care of himself and no longer beg for alms. The same power which gave strength to THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 55 the man's ankle bones so that he could walk, gave strength to his heart that he might enter the Temple to praise God. As I read Church history, genuine revivals of religion and thoroughgoing reformations of society are inseparably connected. It was so in the sixteenth century; it was so in the evangelical revival of the seventeenth century; it was so in the great awakening of 1800. It should be so in the coming revival. Our Permanent Committee on Evangelism expressed a great truth in its annual report when it declared, "Unless sin- ful men and women are led to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ and are by him joined to the living Church, there can be no service rendered by the Church which will satisfy God or be of value to society; while on the other hand, the evangelism which does not lead men into loving and unselfish service for society is both un- scriptural and dangerous.'' Could we but discern the signs of the times, we might discover that we are already in the midst of a great awakening, in some respects the greatest of all history. When we think of the interests at stake, of the vast forces which are arrayed and the awful cost of the struggle, we should look forward in hope to a compen- sation or a consummation, which will show that the upheaval has not been in vain. At the beginning of the Christian era the Church was being formed. Under the influence of Greek thought and Eoman organization and pagan cults the Church was deformed and rendered impotent, though still the body of Christ. The Eef- ormation restored the Church in large part to her 56 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION apostolic norm and life, and great has been her ser- vice for God and humanity in the years that have passed. However, in spite of her resources and opportunities, she has not been equal to the tasks which have con- fronted her. She has not been able to fulfill her Lord's commission and disciple the nations. There is needed a transformation which will rid the Church of all selfish and worldly aims, and fit her through the fullness of the Spirit to bring the kingdom of this world into the cap- tivity of Christ. When the gospel of a crucified, risen Christ was first proclaimed, it gripped the individual soul and made each Christian the child of God and the heir of eternal life. In the succeeding years we find on the pages of Church history illustrious names, great per- sonalities, the apostles, the Church Fathers, the School- men, the pre-Eef ormers. The personal power of the gospel is thus demonstrated. The Eeformation, while it devel- oped conspicuous individual leaders, made them also great national figures. We naturally associate Luther with Germany and Knox with Scotland, and following the Eeformation we have the rise and progress of strong and enduring national life. Our own life as a nation, our principles, institutions, and purposes, can be understood only in the light of Eeformation history. In this national consciousness the power of personality is not eliminated, but is lifted up into a higher unity and a larger life. We have now reached an era where the gospel must serve not only the best interests of per- sonality and of nationality, but of a Christian imiver- sality, a world brotherhood, in which nations brought THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 57 into close touch with one another shall not attempt to annihilate one another like the warring factions of feudal times, but shall trust one another and serve one another as members of a Kingdom into which shall be gathered all tribes and nations, a Kingdom which is to rule over all and endure forever, the Kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. THE REFOEMATION IN RELATION TO CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY BY WILLIAM H. ROBERTS, D.D., LL.D. The discussion of the relation of the Reformation of the sixteenth century to civil and religious liberty will be found at once important and inspiring. In dealing with the subject it is necessary, first of all, to bring out clearly the fact that the discovery of the art of printing, with movable type, during the fif- teenth century, was the first great step in promoting the Reformation. The earliest printed Bible appeared between 1450 and 1455, from the press of Johannes Gutenberg, at Mainz, and was a historic event of a most notable character. It is interesting to recall the fact that when copies of this printed Bible were first put on sale the vendors were arrested for witchcraft ; the Bibles themselves were offered in evidence, the statement being made that it was impossible to have produced so con- siderable a number of copies, exactly similar in every particular, without the help of the Devil. The sufficient answer to the charge, however, Avas the statement of the discovery which had been made. From 1455 onward, for seventy-five years, the Bible was printed in many countries, chiefly in Latin, and the knowledge of God's Word was thus widely disseminated, and became the 59 60 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION basis of that clear knowledge of divine truth which was the foundation of the Eeformation. The Bible, multi- plied by the printing press, was a chief instrument of the great movement. Another important factor in connection with the Eeformation was the general consensus of opinion among all the Reformers that the Bible as the Word of God is the only infallible rule of faith and conduct. The Reformers rejected any supreme authority other than that of God in his Word. In all controversies with the Roman Catholic authorities, they appealed con- stantly to the Holy Scriptures. They declared that the Bible is the only authority as to what is sound Chris- tian doctrine, and they insisted that the rules of con- duct found in the Bible apply to popes, kings, and the nobility, as well as to the common people. Resting on God's Word for authority, they evolved from it the doc- trine that all men ought to be enfranchised with the liberty with which Christ makes men free. This lib- erty of which they conceived was the liberty of men as the children of God, without reference to class distinc- tions. At first, these claims for liberty, either in Church or State, were not so definite as they became later, and there was strongly organized resistance to the Reformers in all countries. The battle in favor of the tyranny of monarchs and of privileged classes was waged with great fierceness, and for a time it seemed as if the opponents of the Reformers would be victors. But the latter had that quality in them which we know as the perseverance of the saints. In the halls of debate, as well as on the THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 61 field of battle, the adherents of the Eeformation went forward resolutely, with a courage which never failed, and laid broad and deep the foundations of those civil and religious liberties which are so large a possession of humanity in this twentieth century. Civil liberty, which we consider first, may be defined to be right of the individual to the enjoyment of life, liberty, and happiness, simply and solely as a human being, on terms of equality with all other persons, under the regulations of righteous law. In connection with civil liberty, as it has been devel- oped during the past three centuries, it is necessary to emphasize the fact that its first teacher in modern clays was John Calvin, of Geneva. Calvin was great as a theologian, but he was equally great as a statesman. Modern parliamentary government found in him not only a founder, but also a clear and dominant thinker and advocate. His teachings as to the rights of the representatives of the people, as over against those of kings and emperors, were accepted in all Eeformation lands. They were regarded as authoritative in Scot- land, Holland, France, and Switzerland, during the sixteenth century, and during the seventeenth by the English Puritans also. It was Calvin who first promul- gated not only the fundamentals of popular representa- tive government, but also the idea of a written consti- tution; and both conceptions were based upon his con- ception of the teachings of God's Word. Civil liberty is what? During the eighteenth cen- tury the principal development in the Hue of civil 62 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION liberty was achieved through the independence of the x^merican Colonies of Great Britain, and the adoption of the Constitution of the United States of America. In the year 1788 the only other federal republic in existence was the Swiss confederation. To-day more than half the surface of the globe is occupied by republics, and, if the British Empire be counted in, with its thoroughly democratic tendencies, three fourths of the population of the globe is under influences which make for "government of the people, by the people, for the people." Calvin's political ideas seem to have won out all over the world, and permanent victory will be secured for them, it is hoped, through the present war. As we consider religious liberty it is important, first of all, to understand that its beginnings were, in a peculiar sense, the results of the great Protestant Eeformation as a religious movement. Eeligious liberty is, fundamentally, the right of the individual Christian to his own interpretation of what the Holy Scriptures teach as to faith and duty. This right was not recognized by law in any country in the world at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The authority of the Church, and of the pope as the head of the Church, was the supreme and only power to determine the meaning of the Bible. In every so-called Christian land, the acceptance of one form of the Christian re- ligion was legally required of all persons, and in all these lands the authority of the pope of Eome as the head of the Church was recognized by the civil power. The hierarchy of the Eoman Church was further pos- THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 63 sessed of so absolute a power that it could require the penalty of death for heresy to be imposed by the State. It is true that men such as Wyclif in England and Huss in Bohemia denied the authority of the pope long before the Eeformation^ and insisted upon the Holy Scrip- tures as the only supreme rule of faith and life; but they, and those who thought as they did, were perse- cuted and many of them put to death. The first great step in securing religious liberty was taken by Martin Luther on December 10, 1520, when he burned in public the papal bull, or decree, which threatened him with excommunication for heretical opinions. It is true that Luther began his work by nailing Ninety-five Theses to the door of the cathedral at Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517, and yet it was the burning of the pope's bull which declared his separation from the Church of Rome. Luther performed many other acts which emphasized his antagonism to the papacy, and wrote many treatises upon Christian doctrine, one of which, "The Liberty of the Christian Man," written in 1520, is a definite utterance concern- ing the freedom of Christians in Jesus Christ. Indeed the Eeformers all took as their motto the words of Paul to the Galatians, "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and be not en- tangled again with the yoke of bondage." The struggle in Germany for religious liberty begun by Luther led to bloody wars, extending over more than a century. It was not until 1C48 that the right of 64 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION Germans to be Protestant in religion was acknowledged in that country. In Switzerland the struggle for religious liberty be- gan with the teachings of Ulrich Zwingli, and here, too, bloody strife ensued between Catholics and Protestants. Zwingli was killed at a battle fought at Ivappel in 1531. In France the struggle for religious liberty was bitter with wars between the Huguenots and the Catholics, and found a culmination in the Massacre of St. Bar- tholomew in 1572, when thousands upon thousands of Protestants were massacred. Protestantism was toler- ated in France from 1598 to 1685, but renewed perse- cution under Louis XIV, after 1685, drove out of the country at least five hundred thousand persons, and the refugees were scattered to every country of Europe and to the American colonies, and were a blessing wherever they went. The restoration of Protestantism was de- creed by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802. In England at the time of the Eeformation, many martyrs had already suffered for their loyalty to religious liberty. Among these the names which stand out most notably are those of William Tyndale, who translated the New Testament into English in 1525, and Arch- bishop Cranmer, of the Church of England. When Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, though she was a Protestant, there was no real religious liberty in Eng- land for persons who declined to conform to the Church of England. It is only in recent years that the rights of dissenters have been recognized, and Lloyd George, present premier of England, was first elected to Parlia- THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 65 ment on an issue raised with the established Church. In Scothmd the struggle for religious liberty began with the martyrdom of Patrick Hamilton in 1528, and reached the first stage of its progress through the Eef- ormation, led by John Knox, in 15G0. Scotland, how- ever, was not finally free from ecclesiastical tyranny until 1689, on the advent of William of Orange to the throne of Britain. In Holland the struggle for liberty was long and arduous. The first mart3Ts suffered in 1523. The people resisted both Spanish and Eoman Catholic tyranny, led by such men as William the Silent, and finally secured independence in 1579. Holland was often the refuge for English dissenters, and it was from Holland that the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620 set sail for New England. In other European lands such as Italy, Spain, and Portugal, the Eeformation failed, and religious liberty was unknown in any measure until the nineteenth cen- tury. In Eussia there is to-day nominal religious lib- erty. Because of the sudden rise of the republic, the Greek Catholic Church, however, is the National Church, and it remains to be seen what sort of liberty will be guaranteed for the future. Toleration is not liberty. The only country in the civilized world in which there has been for nearly a century absolute religious liberty is the United States of x\merica. America has now no State Churcli. At first, certain of the colonies, as Virginia, recognized the Church of England as the State Church, and Massa- 66 THE PR0TE8TANT REFORMATION cliusetts and Connecticut established the Congregational Chnrch as such. The Congregational establishment of religion was abolished in Connecticut in 1818, and in Massachusetts in 1831:. The only American colony in which there was real liberty of religious opinion from the beginning, was that of Pennsylvania, and the in- scription on the Liberty Bell, cast in 1752, "Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,'' Lev. 25 : 10, was prophetic of the coming of the day when there would be true liberty in the United States. It is evident from the above facts that the connection between Church and State was the main source of the power which denied religious liberty to men and women. The Eonian Catholic Church, it should be said, has always declared that its duty is simply to find men guilty of heresy, and then to turn them over to the State for final punishment. But the State in Europe at the time of the Reformation was completely under the domina- tion of the Eoman Church, and the laws of the State were so constructed and construed as to punish heresy with death. The first Christian leader to take the step which made possible the securing of true religious liberty in America, was the Baptist, Roger Williams, the founder of the Colony of Rhode Island. The first organized American Cliurch, however, which declared as a Church for religious liberty, was the Presbyterian. This was by an act adopted by the General Synod, at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1729. THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 67 In this twentieth century, throughout the English- speaking world, there is liberty of opinion. The only form that religious intolerance assumes is the assump- tion on the part of certain Churches that they occupy in matters of Church order and government a place superior to that of certain other Churches. There is still limita- tions upon religious liberty in many European countries. It is hoped that the time will soon come when the con- ditions of religious liberty everywhere may be such as appear in the twenty-third chapter of the Confession of Faith of the Presbyterian Church, in the following words : "It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the Church of our Common Lord, without giving the prefer- ence to an}^ denomination of Christians above the rest, in such a manner that all ecclesiastical persons what- ever shall enjoy the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of discharging every part of their sacred functions, with- out violence or danger. And, as Jesus Christ hath ap- pointed a regular government and discipline in his Church, no law of any commonwealth should inter- fere with, let, or hinder, the due exercise thereof, among the voluntary members of any denomination of Christ- ians, according to their own profession and belief. It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the person and good name of all their people, in such an effectual man- ner as that no person be suffered, either upon pretense of religion or of infidelity, to offer any indignity, vio- lence, abuse, or injury, to any other person whatsoever; and to take order, that all religious and ecclesiastical 68 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION x\ssemblies be held without molestation or disturbance." This declaration adopted in 1788, at Philadelphia, is the true law of religious liberty. That it will become in time the law for both State and Church everywhere is heartily believed. The reason for this faith is, that the Eeformation was and is a movement produced within men, a work of the Holy Spirit. The Eeformation was and is full of divine life. Based upon the Bible as the Magna Charta of true lil)erty, it will progress until it fills the earth with the grace and glory of Christian freedom. THE SERVICE IN THE CENTEAL BAPTIST CHURCH, REV. W. A. HEWITT, PASTOR William H. Scott, elder in the Market Square Church, Germantown, Pennsylvania, President of the Board of Publication and Sahbath School Work, a commissioner to the General Assembly, and a member of its Com- mittee on the Celebration of the Four Hundredth Anni- versary of the Reformation, presided. The addresses were delivered by Henry Sloane Coffin, D.D., pastor of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, 'New York City, and Associate Professor of Homiletics in the Union Theological Seminary, and by Frederick W. Loetscher, Ph.D., D.D., Professor of Church History in Princeton Theological Seminary. MESSAGES FEOM LUTHEE FOE OUE DAY BY HENRY SLOANE COFFIN, D.D. In Martin Luther God gave the world a religious genius^ who is destined to stand for all time among the major prophets of the Christian faith. In his com- plex personality discordant elements jostle one another. Mentally he was a child of his age, sharing to a large degree its superstitions and prejudices as well as its aspirations, and voicing so accurately its feelings that his message won instant popularity. Yet he so far transcended his age as to become one of the foremost makers of the modern world, a force whose creative energy is by no means yet exhausted. In character, he was a combination of many serious faults, faults of taste and of temper, and of heroic virtues. He was coarse, abusive, obstinate, domineering, passionate, yet also intrepid, generous, broadly human, sincere, with high spirits that bubbled over in humor, and an intensity of devotion to his purpose that made him an incalculable power. He was guilty of two ugly moral blunders : the incitement to bloody reprisals against the rebellious peasants, and acquiesce in the bigamy of Philip of Hesse ; yet he is to be credited with a fearless conscience seldom equaled in history. But what gave him, a mere preacher and theological professor in a small out-of-the- 71 72 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION way Saxon town, his abiding influence was his unique discovery of the living God, whose good pleasure it was in him, as truly as in his great master, Paul, to reveal his Son. In a letter that comes down from his student days Luther expressed the wish that instead of philosophy he might be studying theology, adding, "I mean that theology which searches out the meat of the nut, the kernel of the grain, and the marrow of the bones." Such was his main contribution, to discover the essential thing in the Christian religion, to get at and bring into the heart the Christian faith. Commenting on the famil- iar words of the First Commandment, he asked, "What is it to have a God?" and answered: "To have a God is nothing else than to trust and believe in him with all our hearts. Whatever, then, thy heart clings to (I say) and relies upon, that is properly thy God." Such unwavering trust of the heart in the God whom he found in the Christ of the Bible was for Luther the Avhole of religion. In throwing everything else aside, as relatively trifling, he recovered the Christian faith for mankind. Luther was careful to distinguish what he meant by faith. "There are," he wrote, "two kinds of believing — first, a believing about God which means that I be- lieve that what is said of God is true. This faith is rather a form of knowledge or observation than a faith. There is, secondly, a believing in God wdiich means that I put my trust in him, give myself up to thinking that I can have dealings with him, and believe without any THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 73 doubt that he will be and do to me according to the things said of him. Such faith which throws itself upon God, whether in life or in death, alone makes a Chris- tian man." Such faith Luther preached, and of such faith he became the living embodiment. Many things that he be- lieved are now obsolete; at a number of points he was inconsistent with his own fundamental conviction; but wherever he acted in thorough loyalty to it, he is increasingly approved as right, and he remains a mag- nificently contagious believer in the God and Father of Jesus Christ. There are three aspects of this fundamental convic- tion which repay our special study in this anniversary year : Luther's faith in the self -evidencing character of religious truth, his faith in Christian men, and his faith in the historic Christ. 1. His faith in the self-evidencing power of religious truth. In all ages devout minds have asked themselves : "How may I attain certainty? How may I be sure that I know God?" The Eoman Church had replied: "Truth is a mystery which lies beyond human power to test and prove. These mysteries are contained in the Bible and can be interpreted correctly only by the Church through its popes and councils." Luther from his reading of the Bible, found God's truth flashing out on him and authenticating itself to his own soul. It is often said that the difference between Romanists and Protestants is that the former accept as their authority an infallible Church, and the latter an infallible Book. 74 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION But that is misleading. The real difference lies in two contrasted views of truth. To the Eoman Catholic truth is so hard to recognize that only a divinely accred- ited teacher can guarantee it to us; to Luther truth was so clear that conscience once faced with it cannot but acknowledge it. Augustine had stated the tradi- tional position when he wrote, "I would not believe in the gosi^el without the authority of the Church.^' Luther, much as he respected Augustine, revolted: "Thou must not place thy decision on the pope or any other; thou must thyself be so skillful that thou canst say, '^God says this, not that/ Dost thou stand upon pope or councils? Then the Devil may at once knock a hole in thee and insinuate, "^How if it were false? How if they have erred?' Then thou art laid low at once. Th'erefore thou must bring conscience into play, that thou mayst boldly and defiantly say, ^That is God's Word; on that will I risk body and life, and a hundred thousand necks if I had them.' Therefore no one shall turn me from the Word which God teaches me, and that must I know as certainly as that two and three make five, or that an ell is longer than a half. That is cer- tain, and though all the world speak to the contrary, still I know that it is not otherwise. Who decides me there ? 'No man, but only the truth which is so perfectly certain that nobody can deny it." The evidence of a revelation is simply that it reveals, exactly as the evi- dence of daylight is its ability to make us see. No amount of external signs, miracles, or fulfilled prophe- cies, can make anything convincing that does not grip THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 75 US by its own cogency. The evidence of GocVs truth, in the Bible or from any quarter, is its power to make us see God and live with him, the Fact of facts in a world of facts. Luther found God's self -evidencing truth primarily in the Bible; but that did not mean that to him the two were identical. The Bible is the literary record of events through which God unveils himself. Luther bowled before God's self -revelation, but he was singu- larly free in his handling of the Scriptures, in which as the soul in the body, God's Word is contained. Speak- ing of Genesis, he said, ''What though Moses never wrote it?" He considered the books of Chronicles less reliable history than the books of the Kings, and he thought the present form of the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hosea, probably due to later hands. He asserted that the prophets had not always given the kings of Israel sound political advice. In the 'New Testament he dis- tinguished between ''chief books" and those of less mo- ment, and called The Epistle of James a letter of straw in comparison with the writings of Paul and of John. It is quite certain that Martin Luther could not be licensed in some of our presbyteries, and could not sub- scribe to some doctrinal deliverances of recent Assem- blies. He read the Bible with the eyes of his own spiritually enlightened heart, exactly as his Lord had read the Old Testament; and he found God everywhere through it, as the soul pervades the body. But the Bible itself was not to him God's truth; that was the gospel or the Christ in the Bible. Only in the books 76 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION where he found Christ did he recognize authoritative Scripture. "That which does not teach Christ," he wrote in his vigorous fashion, "is not apostolic, though Peter or Paul should have said it; on the contrary that which preaches Christ is apostolic, even if it should come from Judas, Annas, Pilate, or Herod." Here is no doctrine of Biblical inerrancy stultifying free investigation. Here is the liberty of the Spirit bearing witness within him to the divine message through the Book. Matters of authorship, of historical accuracy, of science, are left completely open for scholar- ship. God's life is imparted to the believing soul through the literary record, whoever wrote it, whether the alleged events occurred exactly as recorded or not, and whether the scientific views held by the Scripture writers be correct or incorrect. Needless to add that had our own Presbyterian communion been as Pro- testant as Martin Luther in its attitude to Scripture, the controversies of recent years would never have occurred. Until we recover his spiritual freedom, until we rise to his greater faith in the self-evidencing power of God's truth, we shall not fulfill our mission to the thinking men and women of our day. To the Eoman Catholic the Bible is a book of laws and propositions to be obeyed and believed; to Luther it was a book of life, quickening him with its own vitality. The life he attained was its own indisputable evidence: he was alive unto God through Jesus Christ in the Scriptures. 2. His faith in Christian men. Luther struck a pro- digious blow for democracy, little as he himself realized THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 77 its full consequences, when in his "Address to the Ger- man Nobility" he tore down the wall that separated clergy and laymen, the spiritual and the temporal estates, and declared, ''All Christians are truly of the spiritual estate and there is no difference among them, save of office alone." It was the logical conclusion from his conviction that God's truth is accessible to every believer. Each man is a priest with direct rela- tions with God, each a pope hearing for himself the authoritative word of God. His treatise on "Christian Liberty," one of the finest things he ever penned, lays down two famous propositions: "A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Chris- tian man is the most dutiful servant of all and subject to everyone." Here is religious individualism at its fullest, and here is religious solidarity at its closest. Eoman Catholicism had supplied all manner of checks and restraints to control men and to help them to sup- press themselves. Luther believed in the duty of a Christian man to be himself and to give himself free expression. He encouraged "the perpetual play Of every faculty that heaven bestows." Timorous souls have always complained that there can be no agreement where every man freely thinks for himself, and no harmonious corporate life where each gives rein to his own impulses. Luther believed that truth, being one, would guarantee all needed unity among those who obey it, and that whoever is ruled 78r THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION by the Spirit of Christ will bind himself most securely to all his brethren in helpful service. He phrased it exquisitely when he said^ "I will, therefore, give my- self as a sort of Christ to my neighbor, as Christ has given himself to me; and will do nothing in this life except what I see will be needful, advantageous, and wholesome for my neighbor." He insisted on both the liberty and the unity of the Spirit. It is but just to point out that historical circum- stances interfered with Luther's ideal and led him into inconsistencies. He found the early protectors of his movement among the German princes and nobles, and he allowed them, perhaps not unnaturally, to control the evangelical churches. The dire consequences to the spiritual freedom of those churches are seen conspicu- ously in Germany to-day. State domination had throt- tled the gospel liberty of the Church. As a miner's son, the peasants expected his sympathy, and they freely gave him theirs in his attacks upon ecclesiastical tyranny. But like many another who has risen from lowly origins, he grew away from their point of view. The darkest blot on his career is his urgent call to the princes to put down with a stern hand the peasant uprising. Some of his sentences are shocking : "What is more ill-mannered than a foolish peasant or a common man when he has enough and is full and gets power in his hands?" "The severity and rigor of the sword are as necessary for the people as eating and drinking, yes, as life itself." "The ass needs to be beaten, and the populace needs to be controlled with a THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 79 strong hand. God knew this well, and therefore he gave the rulers not a fox's tail, but a sword." It is a lamentable fact that only rarely has Prot- estant Christianity been a sturdy force among the working classes, and that it is scarcely such in any land to-day. Even in our country, with its complete separa- tion of Church and State, and in those communions which are most democratic in their organization, the mass of the toilers are not its adherents. The Prot- estant churches, like Luther, have not been sympathetic with the disinherited in their aspirations for social jus- tice, and the result is that they are despised as negli- gible factors by the leaders in social advance. Our churches, despite our good intentions, are not making for social unity but for division. In how very few of them do rich and poor, capitalist and laborer, meet side by side! It is noticeable that there are practically no artisans in the present General Assembly. Many of our officer bearers, while they have better taste than to employ Luther's language, assume his superior and domineering attitude toward the immigrant industrial population who are the counterparts in our society of the peasants of his age. During strikes, elders and Sunday-school superintendents have been known to ex- press themselves not altogether differently from Luther, when he wrote : "Our peasants want to share the goods of others and keep their own. Fine Christians they are ! I doubt whether there are any devils left in hell, for they all seem to have entered into the peasants, and passion has gone beyond all bounds." Undoubtedly the peas- 80 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION ants, like many strikers since, were not without serious faults, but the neighborly spirit of the gospel, which Luther knew so well how to commend, demands that the Church of Christ keep open-minded and open-hearted to the pleas of all the wronged and the weak, and sym- pathize with the restless, for are we not also seeking to turn our world upside down until it stand, as God means it shall, with the love side up? Further, Luther's combination of his cause with that of the German princes, and his own intense nationalism, led him to lose sight of the international character of the Christian Church. Protestantism has always been or- ganized on national lines and the ties between the churches have been very loose. It has lost its power to hold nations together; and the present world catas- trophe, in which the two protagonists are Protestant Germany and Protestant Britain, is in one aspect a fearful condemnation of our Protestant Christianity. To be sure the Eoman Church with its supernational organization is almost as powerless, but it has machinery that can be set in motion to accomplish some helpful ends. The pope is said to have been the means of re- storing, at least in part, the deported Belgians, and the cardinals from warring nations come together in Eome so that the universality of the Church is given some expression. Protestantism lacks adequate international, or rather supernational, organization. Worse yet, most Protestant Christians are not conscious that their loyalty to the Church universal is a prior loyalty to their devo- tion to country. They forget that German and Ameri- THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 81 can Christians have more in common than either have with non-Christian fellow countrymen, for the unsearch- able riches of Christ transcend our wealthiest national heritage apart from him. They lose sight of one aspect of our commission, the ministry of reconciliation, so that while we discharge to the full our obligations as citizens and as loyal patriots of our fatherlands, we dare not cease to fulfill this heavenly calling. It is pathetic that while little groups of international socialists meet together, seeking some basis on which this hideous car- nage may be ended, Protestant Christendom has no means of bringing its leaders face to face to look at the situation as servants of Christ, and to employ the legitimate influence of our large numbers and command- ing positions to hasten a just peace. 3. His faith in the historic Christ. To Luther the Christ of the gospels was the controlling revelation of God. "Wie must neither worship nor seek after any God, save the God who is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." Both before and since his time, it has been the custom to gather from the world about us what intimations it discloses of deity: this is called natural religion; then to add to this portrait the details that are found in the Bible, often placing proof texts from Leviticus or Ecclesiastes on the same level with those taken from the Gospels or the writings of Paul. The result is that the distinctive Christian conception of God in the face of Jesus Christ is obscured by other, and sometimes altogether incongruous, representations of him. Luther insisted that the Alpha and the Omega 82 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION of our knowledge of the God with whom w^e have to do for our salvation is Jesus Christ. "Begin by applying thy skill and study to Christ; there also let them con- tinue fixed, and if thine own thoughts, or reason, or some one else guide and direct thee otherwise, only close thine eyes and say: I must and will know of no other God, save in my Lord Christ. See, there is open to me my Father's heart, wdll, and work, and I know him. It is the only way of transacting with God, that one make no self-prompted approach; and the true stair or bridge by wdiich one may pass to heaven, that one remain below here and keep close to this flesh and blood, ay, to the words and letters that proceed from his mouth, by which in the tenderest way he leads us up to the Father, so that we find and feel no wrath or dreadful form, but pure comfort and joy and peace." Luther's stress is always on the historic Christ. "Try not to see even Jesus in glory until you have seen him crucified," he wrote to Melanchthon. This meant a recovery of the deity of Jesus. To be sure, the Church, then as now, always called him divine, and assented to the truth that in him all the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in bodily form; but it nullified that doctrine by predicating of God many un-Christianlike characteristics, so that, in fact, for the Church he was not the fullness but a fraction of the Godhead. Luther insisted that in Christ "God has entirely emptied him- self and kept nothing wdiich he could have given us." To believe this is to think of God always in terms of Christ, never to picture him as loving, or forgiving. THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 83 or electing, or punishing, or rewarding, in any way incompatible with, or unlike, Christ's love and forgive- ness and election and punishment and rewarding of tliose with whom he dealt in the days of his flesh. Luther thought lightly of speculative attempts to set forth the mode of our Lord's incarnation; the doctrine of the two natures in one Person he prized only when given a practical religious interpretation. He much preferred such moving phrases as "Christ the mirror of the Father's heart towards us." Although he cor- dially accepted the doctrine of the Trinity, he disliked the word as not Biblical and much colder than the per- sonal word, "God." And God was to him invariably God in Christ, the Father he trusted in the Son, and whose Spirit dwelt within him, the Source of life and liljerty. The Church of our age stilT suffers from un-Christlike representations of God. What we need is not less but far greater stress upon the deity of the historic Jesus. In his name we repudiate as sheer idolatry anything imputed to God, in this or any other world, that is not entirely harmonious with God's self-disclosure in the Son of his love. In his name we devote ourselves to embody in our characters and in every institution and group in human society, homes, commercial enterprises, nations, the mind that was in Christ, that God may be all in all. The wellspring of our confidence and joy is that in Christ we find the Lord of heaven and earth, the God of whom and through whom and unto whom are all things, made indisputably plain. As Luther himself 84 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION put it : "For if we are certain of this : that what Jesus thinks^ speaks, and wills, the Father also wills, then I defy all that may fight against me. For here in Christ have I the Father^s heart and will." In the years immediately following his hold act in nailing his Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Luther often signed himself, "Brother Mar- tin Eleutherius,'^ playing upon the similarity in sound between the German "Luther" and the Greek word, eleutheros, meaning free. As Brother Martin "Free- man" he stands endeared in our memories in the glori- ous liberty of a son of God whose constraining and emancipating love he found in the Son, Jesus Christ. THE INFLUENCE OF THE EEFORMATION BY FREDERICK W. LOETSCHER, Ph.D., D.D. Some decades ago a supposedly genuine and previ- ously unknown picture of Martin Luther was found in an old church in the city of Leipzig. It represents the Eeformer as he was in the year 1532, when the main w^ork of his life had been accomplished. The por- trait is not authentic, but its double inscription is quite suggestive. The Latin title, translated, reads, "Doctor Martin Luther, Eestorer of the Liberty of the Gospel," Above the title are two flaming suns, with the legend, "The Voice of God the True Light." It would be hard to frame two formulas of like brevity that would more adequately express the genius of the man and the char- acter of his achievement. For Luther gave back to the western world evangelical liberty through the Christ of Holy Scripture. There are doubtless other points of view from which this mighty revolution in the thought and life of the sixteenth century may be considered. By the Eoman Catholic it is still regarded as merely one of many revolts against the authority of the one and only true Church. Others find in this great movement little more than an endeavor to readjust the political situation in the Europe of Charles V, Leo X, Henry VIII, and 85 86 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION Francis I. A whole school of modern historians would have us believe that this ej)och-making event was due chiefly to the social and economic conditions of that age. And indeed, when we consider the variety and the magnitude of the issues involved, it is not strange that even after the lapse of three centuries there should still be room for debate as to the significance of the Eeforma- tion and its place in the history of human progress. But there can be little dispute about one fact, and that fundamental and decisive : Though Ave may not be pre- pared to say that the Eeformation has given us the final presentation of Christianity, we must admit that the movement proceeded primarily from a new and bet- ter understanding of evangelical truth and that it pro- duced a new and freer life throughout the western world. First of all, then, let us look at some of the character- istic effects of the Eeformation on our distinctively re- ligious life. Principal Fairbairn once said, "Mans thought of God, of the cause and end alike of his own being and of the universe, is his most commanding thought; make it and you make the man." The history of religion is sufficient proof of this statement. There have been, we may sa}^, four generic answers to the question concern- ing man's relation to God. Paganism, chronologically the oldest and still one of the most important attempts to solve this problem, teaches that God is immanent in the works of his hands in such wise that he may be worshiped in the creature. The Infinite exists only in the finite, and hence divine honor may be given alike THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 87 to animate and inanimate objects. Islam is the con- tradictory opposite of this view : There is and can be no communion between God and man. Hence fatalism, with its blind submission to the iron decrees of necessity, becomes the crowning glory of the devout Mohammedan. Then in the Middle Ages the Latin Church with her fully developed hierarchy, proclaimed the absolute need of the human priesthood; God transacts with man only through the proper dispensers of the sacraments. Eomanism puts the Church between God and his peo- ple as an indispensable medium of communication. As earl}^ as the third century Cyprian had ventured the assertion that outside of the Church there is no salva- tion ; Thomas Aquinas and Boniface VIII, at the height of the papal supremacy, made submission to the Eoman pontiff a condition of eternal life. Over against these three types of religious theory and practice, Protestant- ism places a principle of its own, as profound as it is far-reaching in its consequences. It does not, like every form of paganism, confound God and his creation; it does not, like Islam, separate God from his children; it does not, like Eomanism, require a human mediator or visible church for the transaction of all business between God and the sinner; but it declares that God, highly exalted though he is above all finite existence, can and does enter into immediate communion with his people. The true Church is the congregation of saints, the company of believers, who, through Christ and the Holy Spirit, can go directly to God himself and abide 88 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION in constant fellowship with him as the infinite and eternal Father. How did the Reformation come to make this con- tribution to our religious freedom? The gift came, as is commonly the case in similar crises, through a man, a man specially prepared to be a prophet of the Lord to his day and generation. No doubt some of the later leaders, especially Calvin in the Eeformed Church, gave more adequate expression to the new spiritual ideas and values, but to Mlartin Luther belongs the unique honor of being not only the commanding originating genius, but also the popular hero of the struggle for evangelical liberty. In his experience, better than anywhere else in that day, we see writ large the formative principles of the Eeformation. His life, in that springtide of religious revival, was an epitome of the whole move- ment. Born a peasant's son, and trained in home and school and university in the traditional piety of the closing decades of the fifteenth century, Luther was peculiarly sensitive to religious impressions of all kinds. He was precisely the sort of youth who would follow the famil- iar path that led to the monastry as the best nursery of sainthood. "Oh, when will you ever become pious," he asked himself, "and do enough, that you may obtain a gracious God?" It was a faithful question, the very form of which involved him in those intense spiritual struggles that made his life in the Erfurt convent first of all a faithful transcript of the hopes and fears of the preceding millennium of monastic history, but then THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 89 also the dynamic illustration of those three creative ideas that were destined to bring forth the new evangel- icalism. The first was the truth which his followers soon pro- claimed as the article of a standing or a falling Church — justification by faith alone. The future Reformer had exhausted every means of the monastic discipline to attain peace of conscience, but all in vain. "If ever a monk gained heaven by his monkery/^ he later testified, "I must have done so. All the brethren who knew me will bear me witness. For I should have martyred myself, if I had kept it up longer, with watching, pray- ing, reading, and other labors." He finally secured the sense of the forgiveness of his sins when, by simple trust in Christ and acceptance of the mercy of God promised in the gospel, he won, on the battle field of his own soul, his new conviction that saving faith is what he called "a believing in God, which means that I put my trust in him, give myself up to thinking that I can have dealings with him, and believe without any doubt that he will be and do to me according to the things said of him." In the light of this discovery he at once brushed aside many of the sophistries and much of the rubbish of the outworn scholasticism. Then, in 1519, in the memorable debate with Eck, the champion of the medieval traditions, he was driven to take another momentous step. His opponent cleverly forced him to confess that the famous Council of Constance that had condemned John Huss to death had made a mistake. The admission had terrified him, but he stood immov- 90 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION ably firm on the second great principle of his new-found freedom: the supremacy of Holy Scripture above all ecclesiastical traditions. The bitter controversies that followed led him to assert the third fundamental prin- ciple of Protestantism, which now completed the doc- trine of the universal priesthood of believers, namely, that every Christian is in duty bound to exercise his right of private judgment in his interpretation of the Word of God. In quick succession in the year 1520, lie published epoch-making treatises that illustrated in the boldest fashion the consequences of these three fruitful ideas : justification by faith alone, the supreme authority of the Word of God, and the right of individual interpre- tation of the Scriptures. Soon his experience of re- ligious freedom was sealed for himself and for a host of followers by three mighty deeds. The first was his burning of the papal bull of excommunication, together with a copy of the canon law of the Church. The second was his even more dramatic testimony at the Diet of Worms, where, summoned at the peril of life to answer for himself, he confounded his enemies and achieved a signal triumph for evangelical liberty by his immortal words : ^'Unless I am refuted by testimonies of the Scriptures or by clear arguments (since I believe neither the pope nor the councils alone, they having often erred and contradicted themselves), I am captivated by the Holy Scriptures quoted by me, and my conscience is bound by the Word of God; I cannot and will not recant anything since it is unsafe to do aught against one's con- science." And then, to crown his victory, he wrought THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 91 the greatest labor of his life, the work that revealed the noblest powers of his religious genius : he gave his fellow countrymen a translation of the Bible from the original languages into German, and thus helped to secure for them their own emancipation from the dominance of the Eoman Catholic Church in western Europe. Meanwhile Zwingli, in German Switzerland, and later, in the second generation of the Eeformers, Calvin in France and French Switzerland, Cranmer in England, Knox in Scotland, and a host of fellow laborers in the other lands of Europe, made themselves heirs of this spiritual legacy of the Wittenberg leader. Within a few years the evangelical cause blossomed and bore fruit, as with the swiftness and luxuriance of a tropical plant, in its own characteristic confessions, theological systems, church organizations, discipline, cultus, and life. From that day to this Protestantism, in spite of all its defects and its many reverses, has kept on producing seed after its own kind. Its three creative ideas have never ceased to exert their beneficent influence in behalf of the free- dom wherewith Christ has made us free. Some years ago, when a new highway was made in London, a number of old buildings were cleared away, leaving the ground beneath exposed for months to the sun and air. Presently a remarkable sight drew men of science to the scene. Some portions of that soil had not felt the breath of spring since that far-off day when the banks of the Thames echoed the tread of the Eoman legions. But now all sorts of strange flowers sprang up. Many of these were unknown in England. They were 92 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION evidently plants which those first conquerors from the mainland had brought over with them before the Chris- tian era began. Buried under the mass of brick and stone, lying as if in the sleep of death during all those centuries, those seeds needed only the light and warmth of a summer's sun to make them disclose their latent life and beauty. "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again — The eternal years of God are hers," and the three basal principles of the Protestant Eef orma- tion often as they have been buried beneath the errors and misconceptions and prejudices of men, have ever manifested anew their indestructible vitality and power to bless the race with the truth and grace of the gospel of Christ, whether in the Pietism of the seventeenth cen- tury, or in the evangelical revival and the great awaken- ing of the eighteenth century, or in the world-wide Christian missions of the nineteenth and twentieth cen- turies. That every believer is a priest, who, having direct access to God and being capable of transacting with God for himself, because he is justified by faith alone, can feed his soul on the life-giving Word and interpret the sacred revelation for himself — this is the very essence of evangelical liberty, and for this boon we are indebted, in the good providence of God, to the Eeformers of the sixteenth century. Let us look next at the influence of the Eeformation upon our civil and political life. Our historic phrase, "Church and State," aptly indi- THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 93 cates the position of honor and power held by the medieval popes in their age-long struggle for supremacy over the German emperors and the kings of Latin Chris- tendom. Gregory the Great and Gregory VII clothed the idea of papal absolutism with ilesh and blood, and Innocent III, not shrinking from the title, "Vicar of God,^' made his will supreme throughout Europe from Constantinople to Iceland. Under him and some of his ablest successors the despotism of the Church in the religious realm was equaled only by its despotism in the political realm. As the Christian was taught that he existed only for the Church, so all peoples and their rulers were deemed subjects of the bishop of Eome as God's vicegerent on earth. In the political as in the spiritual emancipation of Europe in the sixteenth century Luther was the pioneer. The trammels of the traditional scholasticism could not be broken without shattering at the same time the ecclesiastical fetters that bound the nations in help- less submission to the Eoman Curia. From the very first, therefore, German patriotism rallied to the aid of German piety in the fight for deliverance from the yoke of the Italian oppressor. But the 'most thorough and effective work in this sphere was done by Calvin and the Calvinistic churches. To be sure, the}^, too, carried the treasure of civil and political liberty in earthen vessels. We cannot forget the burning of Servetus, or the drowning of the Swiss Anabaptists, or the persecutions of the Eoman Catholics in England, or the exiling of Eoger Williams from 94 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION Massachusetts Bay Colony. Truly, state toleration of religious dissent lias been a plant of slow growth. But we must insist that we ought not to judge a system by what it has in common with its predecessors, but at least mainly by that which distinguishes it from these. N'ow Calvin's principles of ecclesiastical polity were such that they necessarily tended toward the establishment of an ampler civil liberty. He demanded autonomy for the Church, that is, the right of the Christian congre- gation to govern itself under the sole headship of Christ. He proclaimed the parity of the clergy against the pre- latical hierarchy, and thus mightily furthered the prin- ciple of democracy in the Church. , Above all, he secured an adequate participation of the laity in the government and discipline of the Church, and thus gave free play to that representative principle that has made Calvinism the mother of political liberties in most of those lands of the western world which enjoy these blessings. Ban- croft has well said, ^'The fanatic for Calvinism was a fanatic for liberty, for in the moral warfare for free- dom, his creed was a part of his army, and his most faithful ally in battle." It is not strange, therefore, that in three of the most notable revolutions of the modern period it has been Protestantism, and especially the Eeformed section of it, that has brought liberty to honor. There was first of all the memorable throwing off of the Spanish des- potism by the Netherlands, with the heroic defense of Leyden as the turning point in the conflict. Would you know the secret of this marvelous endurance crowned THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 95 with final victory ? Yoii may find it in that Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and the perseverance of the saints^ which, it has been said, "lifted the individual above pope and prelate, and priest and presbyter above Catholic Church and National Church, and General Synod above indulgences, remissions, and absolutions from fellow mortals, and brought him into immediate dependence upon God." Then came the "Glorious Eevo- lution" of 1G88 in England, when the Stuart despotism was finally supplanted by more liberal constitutional government in the land which had already become the mother of parliaments, and which, in the Westminster Confession, had given classic expression to the secret of its greater freedom: "God alone is lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in any thing con- trary to his Word, or beside it, in matters of faith or worship." And what shall we say of our own Eevolu- tion ? De Tocqueville gives us a suitable answer : "The greatest part of British America was peopled by men who after having shaken off the authority of the pope, acknowledged no other religious supremacy. They brought with them into the new world a form of Chris- tianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion." The roll of honor in the great struggle includes especially Congre- gationalists, Presbyterians, Eeformed Lutherans, and Baptists: the Puritans in New England; more numer- ous, tlie Scotch-Irish in the middle colonies; the vai'ious Dutch, German, and French constituencies, notably 96 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION those of Calvinistic antecedents, scattered along the sea- board. Certainly we of the Presbyterian name may take just pride in the testimony given by Mr. Inglis, the Tory rector of Trinity Church, New York: "I do not know one Presbyterian minister, nor have I been able, after strict inquiry, to hear of any, who did not, by preaching and every effort in their power, promote all the measures of the Continental Congress, however ex- travagant." The rector, indeed, is not quite accurate. For it appears that there were two Presbyterian min- isters in the Synod of N"ew England who were charged with being Tories. But if the whole truth is to be told, we must add that of these two clergymen one was sus- pended and the other was deposed. To-day the fate of democracy throughout the world seems to be trembling in the balance. We who are the heirs of the Eeformed faith and its political traditions cannot but believe that whatever territorial adjustments may have to be made at the close of this world war, the principles that throughout their history have fostered government of the people, by the people, and for the people, will have a still nobler part to play in the future than they have played in the past. The traveler in the valley of the Chamonix is im- pressed with the fertility of the whole region. He does not know the secret of this rich verdure, until he learns about the many streams that flow down Mount Blanc, rising with its snow-capped peak fifteen thousand feet above the level of the sea. As we look abroad over the world to-da}^ we see here and there — alas! not every- THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 97 where — some nations in the enjoyment of a rich measure of civil and political liberty. We may not understand the reason for the differences, till we discover in what relation the peoples stand to those majestic mountain heights of revealed truth from which, as from the very throne of God, has flowed a river of water of life, bear- ing its largesses of blessing to the valleys. The right use of full evangelical freedom must needs lead to the possession and enjoyment of complete civil and political liberty. Let us briefly consider, in the third place, the influ- ence of the Eeformation on the intellectual life of the world. Here again the Eeformation marks a new epoch, the beginning of what with good reason we call ^^the modern period." We do not forget in this connection the services rendered in their day by the famous medieval schools that flourished here and there under the fostering care of some worthy emperor, bishop, or abbot. Xor may we fail to mention the great debt the Eeformers themselves owed to the universities in which they were privileged, almost without exception, to imbibe the spirit of the new learning that had already begun to undermine the tra- ditional curriculum and give the student a fresh in- terest in, and appreciation of, the ancient classics, the world of nature, and the present life. But after all, the vigor, the boldness, the critical acumen, and the ethical earnestness of the new intellectual life of Europe was due primarily to the fact that the leading Eeform- ers, not content with the purely humanistic studies, put 98 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION themselves under the influence of that truth which not only makes the mind free hut also stimulates it to the highest development, the truth that makes all things new to him who receives it. As never before in the history of the w^orld, the Bible became the Book of books. It was quickly translated into many of the languages of Europe. A single puljlisher at Wittenberg printed and sold within forty years about one hundred copies of Luther's version. A champion of Eoman Catholicism complained that this German "New Testament was so much multiplied and spread by printing that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth." And of our own equally famous King James' Bible Taine has declared, "JSTever has a people been so deeply imbued by a foreign book, or let it penetrate so far into its manners and writings, its imagination, and its language." The pulpit, meeting the greatly extended needs of the people, returned again to the best traditions in its history and Colet in London, Luther in Wittenl)erg, Zwingli in Zurich, Calvin in Geneva, (Ecolampadius in Basel, used the expository method of preaching the gos- pel. The ministry magnified its teaching function, and the educational value of its work was incalcuhible. Especially was this the case in the later stages of the Eeformation, when each denomination — often, no doubt, with more zeal than wisdom and charity — gave special THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 99 attention to the peculiarities of its highly articulated confession of faith. Then, too, the minute study of the Scriptures and the controversial necessities of the day brought forth several new sciences — Biblical geography, archaeology, and chronology — together with the much abused but quite indispensable discipline of textual and historical criti- cism, without which, indeed, Protestantism could not have come to the birth, and without which it cannot live. Presently the circle of intellectual interests expanded to embrace the whole realm of the natural sciences. In the free and stimulating atmosphere of Protestantism men sought afresh to master the secrets of nature by learning how to obey her laws. The inductive method of investigation was popularized, and, literally, a new world was opened to view. Necessity became the mother of invention. In Holland, we hear for the first time of the thermometer, tlie telescope, and the microscope; in Ital}^, of Torricelli's barometer; in Germany, of Guericke's air pump. In Scotland, Napier applied logarithms to shorten mathematical operations ; in Eng- land, Harvey demonstrated the circulation of the blood and N"ewton deduced the laws of gravitation. Eomer measured the velocity of light; Kepler formulated the laws of the planetary motions; Horrocks for the first time observed the transit of Venus and Halley foretold the return of a comet. In the realm of theoretical specu- lation Descartes, trained in a Jesuit college, but dis- satisfied with the results, of scholasticism, inaugurated. 100 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION in the more congenial atmospliere of Protestant Hol- land, a new method of philosophic inquiry and earned for himself the title, "the father of modern philosophy." No doubt the Church in all her branches has much to be ashamed of and sorry for both before and since the Eeformation, in her attitude toward men of science as well as toward many vain pretenders to knowledge. But, on the other hand, scientists of every name ought never to forget that among the forces that have con- tributed to their freedom in investigation the Eeforma- tion was one of the most important. The whole history of modern education emphasizes the contribution of Protestantism to our intellectual life. Nothing was more characteristic of the outward mani- festations of the awakening of the sixteenth century than its devotion to the cause of learning. Melanch- thon well deserved his title, Praeceptor Germaniae. At Zurich, Zwingli organized the Carolinum, the predeces- sor of the modern university of that city. Calvin, an- other born teacher, founded the celebrated Academy of Geneva. Knox, in the "First Book of Discipline,'' gave directions for the instruction of the youth in liberal learning as well as in distinctively religious studies. In our own land the true genius of the Protestant Churches has ever been manifested in their policy of building and endowing not cathedrals but colleges, and to this day these oldest daughters of the Church are keeping them- selves well in the van of intellectual progress. But in this connection the greatest honor is due the Eeformers, in that by their labors they made necessary and possible THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 101 a system of general or popular education, a system which, with reference to its influence in our own coun- try, a distinguished authority has called "the most im- portant and creative of our distinctly American ideas." Bancroft has called Calvin its founder; doubtless, it would be more accurate to call him its grandfather; for the system came to us indirectly from Geneva by way of Scotland and Holland. Suffice it to say that if we wish to understand either the worth or the per- petuity of the best elements of our American civilization we must ever gratefully remember that the men who laid the foundations of our institutions were reared in the noblest traditions of the Eeformation concerning a well-educated ministry and an intelligent, self-reliant citizenry. Lastly let us look at the influence of the Eeforma- tion on our moral life. History knows nothing of any advancements in morals apart from new religious inspirations and sanctions. Likewise true Christian morality is but the efflorescence and fruitage of the root principles of our evangelical religion. We should naturally expect, therefore, that a deeply spiritual movement, such as the Eeformation, would produce its own characteristic type of piety. As a matter of fact Protestantism has created and main- tained the highest ideal of moral excellence known to us, an ideal that reveals its superiority the moment it is brought into comparison with some of our other his- toric ideals. Take, for instance, the typical worthy of the Greco- 102 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION Eoman worlds whom Aristotle has portrayed for ns in his picture of the "magnanimous" or "great-souled" man. He had, no doubt, his admirable traits ; he had a sense of honor, cherished noble ambitions for his own development, and if need was, could endure hardness with Stoic fortitude. But he was proud, self-satisfied, absorbed in his own interests, capable of looking with lofty disdain upon those less fortunate than himself, utterly destitute of such virtues as humility, forbear- ance, sympathy, and charity. It is an outworn ideal. Protestantism can never be satisfied with it. Then in the Middle Ages the Latin and the Greek Churches popularized the ascetic ideal. The monk was the true saint. Flight from the world was the highest inoral achievement. This conception, too, still has charms for many a contemplative soul, and as we see the ideal embodied in such lives as those of Anselm of Canterbur}^, Francis of Assisi, or Bernard of Clairvaux, or in so widely read and helpful a book of devotion as "The Imitation of Christ," by Thomas a Kempis, we cannot but admire the intense longing for holiness, the passionate self-abnegation, the eager devotion to the unseen and eternal. But taken as a whole the ascetic life is too narrow to be a true reflection of the mind of Christ, and we cannot but praise the Eeformers for emancipating their followers from the fetters of monas- tic vows. The hermit of the desert and the begging friar represent an outworn ideal of manhood. N'or does the merely utilitarian ethic of many a modern j^ri^idential philosopher satisfy us. Some of THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 103 Benjamin Franklin's maxims, for instance, ^^A stitch in time saves nine/' or "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush/' are useful enough as hints for the young reader; but no Protestant can accept them as an ade- quate interpretation of duty; they lack spiritual vision and power. Over against all such fragmentary and imperfect ideals the Eeformers have taught us to put the New Testament teachings concerning sainthood and service. As early as 1520 Luther showed that the holy man is not the recluse in the monastery, but he who, accepting his providentally given place and task and relationships, does the divine will with the sincere desire of glorifying God. The disposition, the motive in the innermost re- cesses of the heart, life's aim and purpose — these, not outward circumstances and conditions, determine moral values. Our commonest toil, our humblest service, may be transfigured and transformed by the spirit of true worship. Doubtless, some of the social aspects of the Christian ideal have had to wait for our own day for a more adequate recognition, but the influence of the Eeformation, upon ethical theory and practice alike, has been profound and pervasive. Especially is this the case within the Eeformed Churches, which from the first were marked by a higher appreciation of the moral necessities of the age and by greater attention to the matter of Church discipline. To be sure, there was often an undue interference with the rights of conscience, and there is some basis for the charge that Puritanism, at least, cared little for the 104 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION aesthetic values of life. But the critic of the Calvinistic ethic and of the Eeformed tj^pe of piety has still to wait for a presentation of Christianity that can produce men and women of nobler conceptions of duty and higher attainments in morals. For a generation whose sense of the divine presence in human life had become dim, Immanuel Kant did well to make his readers rise with him from the "Thou shalt" of their own consciences to the thought of God as the Lawgiver. But more impres- sive and potent was the appeal of the great Genevan who, beginning with the sovereign majesty of the thrice- holy God, and lifting all our life to the face of the Eternal, made the revealed "Thou shalt" of the divine Lawgiver — as much an enabling act as a command — echo in the silent depths o£ the heart of the true wor- shiper. In his noble paraphrase of the gi'eat word of the Apostle Paul, Wordsworth has given us the secret of the stern yet joyous piety of those who have caught the spirit of the leaders of the Eeformation : One edeqiiate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists — one only; an assured belief That the procession of our fate, howe'er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power; Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good. Upon us in this distant land and time the ends of the ages have come. In no other country of the world do the various streams of our Protestantism commingle THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 105 as they do within our borders. Ours is the high duty, the blessed privilege, of fostering the sense of historic continuity and solidarity by which alone we can esti- mate at their true value, and use in their just propor- tion, the diverse elements that have made our modern world what it is. And if we, by reason of our excessive denominationalism and the lack of efficient cooperation amouo- the Churches, must bear the chief burden of the reproach of our Protestantism as a devisive principle in our modern Christianity, it behooves us to return for inspiration and guidance, as did the fathers in their day, to that same Christ in whom alone all contradictions are reconciled. And here, too, "History is the handmaid of Providence, the priestess of truth, the mother of wisdom." We must get back to that same Christ whom the Eeformers by a fresh study of the Bible interpreted with such power and such beneficent consequences to their clay and generation. Through that same Scripture we must rise to a higher unity of the faith that is in Christ Jesus. The highest spot in southern Europe is the place where Switzerland, Austria, and Italy meet. At the very summit, ten thousand feet above the sea, there is a plain granite shaft. On the plains below the armies of these nations have often met in bloody battles. But up yonder, all is peace and serenity. It is even so with our sadly distracted Protestantism. As we contend in the lowlands of our faith, we lose the true perspective and dissipate much vital force in aimless strife. But as we ascend to the heights of revealed truth, and 106 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION especially as we draw near to Him who is the Truth and try to do his manifested will, we enter into fellow- ship with all who by faith and hope and love commune with him who is our Peace. THE SEEVICE IN THE FIRST METHODIST CHUECH, EEV. H. C. BUEGIN, PASTOE The Moderator of the General Assembly, Eev. J. Wilbur Chapman, D.D., presided. The addresses were delivered by William E. Farmer, D.D., Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis in the Western Theological Seminary, Pitts- burgh, and William McKibbin, D.D., LL.D., President of Lane Theological Seminary, Cincinnati. THE EEFOEMATIOISr AND HUMANISM BY WILLIAM R. FARMER, D.D. Our interest in the Eeformation is not the detached curious interest of the antiquary, but rather that of the historian. There is a more or less clear consciousness of the unity Avhich underlies all the varied movements of the centuries. We look back over the four hundred years which have elapsed since Luther nailed up his Theses on the Wittenberg church door, and know that the spirit which then uttered itself in the language of the sixteenth century and under the conditions provided by the world of that time was an immortal spirit. The task to which he and his followers gave themselves was at bottom one with the work to which we also are called, and to-day we seek again to define the nature of that task, not merely for the sake of an intellectual interest in what they did, but rather because it is only by know- ing the meaning of their work that we can understand the obligation which rests upon ourselves. What then was the Eeformation? The answer to that question will depend in some degree upon the angle from which it is viewed. To some it has pre- sented itself chiefly as a great political movement, to others as in the main a profound modification of the structure of society based upon changed conceptions of 109 110 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION social and personal ethics : and still others have con- sidered it as merely one of the phases of the Eenaissance, having its inner meaning not in itself but in that larger movement of which it was a part. Doubtless we are to recognize in each of these conceptions some part of the truth, but none of them takes us to the heart of the matter. For whatever may have been the bearing of the Eeformation upon the political and social structure of Europe, it was in its essence not a political, or a social, or even an ecclesiastical movement, but a re- ligious movement. It consisted essentially in a rediscov- ery of the right relation of a man to his G-od, and an attempt to express that fundamental truth in the terms of theological formula and ecclesiastical organization. Our concern at this moment is with certain implica- tions of the two main doctrines of the Eeformation, the doctrine of the supreme authority of the Scriptures, and the doctrine of justification by faith. At the heart of these two central articles of the Eeformed theology lies a principle which is in a sense more vital to religion than either of them, a principle of which the Eeform- ers themselves were clearly aware, and it is a striking illustration of the irony of history that we should find some difficulty in allowing it to have its full constructive value in the religious life of our own day. I refer to the principle of the validity of individual human experi- ence in the apprehension of spiritual truth, and propose to consider two examples of the operation of this prin- ciple in the work of the two chief leaders of the Ee- formation, John Calvin and Martin Luther. The one THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 111 illustrates tlie principle as it was implied in the attitude of the Reformers to the Scripture, and the other exhibits it as the very heart of the doctrine of justification by faith. The common conception of John Calvin represents him as primarily a theologian, mainly concerned with the systematic and logical statement of the intellectual content of the Eeformed faith. He is thought of as a splendid, or terrible, example of the pontifical rigidities of the theological mind, if we may so adapt a fine phrase of John Euskin. He was the father of Calvinism, the supreme achievement of logic relentlessly applied to the elusive realities of the spiritual life. But, in fact, John Calvin was not at heart either a theologian or an ecclesiastical statesman, but a man of letters, and it is only as we recognize this element in his character that we can rightly appreciate one of the most important contributions wdiich he made to the Eeformation. Calvin's work falls into three main divisions. As a theologian, he formulated, in "Institutes of the Chris- tian Eeligion," the system of doctrine which bears his name; as a statesman, he organized the political and social structure of the city of Geneva ; and as an in- terpreter of Scripture, he wrote a series of commentaries covering the greater part of the Old and N"ew Testa- ments, in which he applied for the first time the sound principles of interpretation upon which the best modern exegesis is based. Of these three departments of his great work as a reformer it was the last in which he found himself most at home, and here chiefly he illus- 112 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION trates the principle which has ah'eady been indicated as the vital principle of the Eeformation, the principle of the validity of hnman experience, as over against insti- tutional authorit}^, in the apprehension of spiritual truth. In order to appreciate rightly the significance of Cal- vin's work as an interpreter, we must consider his rela- tion to the intellectual world in which he lived, the world of the Eenaissance. Greek scholars, driven out of Constantinople by the Mohammedans in 1453, had found refuge in the cities of Italy, carrying with them their household gods — the Greek language, Greek liter- ature, Greek culture in general. Under their influence the study of the classics became the intellectual fashion of the day. The barren exercises of abstract logic which formed the content of scholasticism gave place to a new interest in the treasures of the past. From the great universities all over Europe men flocked to northern Italy, to learn Greek, to live for a while in the vital air of the new day, and to carry back to France, Germany, England, something of the spirit of the New Learning. It was more than a new learning; it was a new concep- tion of life, a new point of view, a new standard of value. The novelty of it lay in the tremendous empha- sis it laid upon humanity. The Greek classics are the records of human experience, and it is the truth and significance of their content, even more than the perfec- tion of their form, which have made them immortal. It was natural that the Ncav Learning, as it spread through France and Germany, should be named ^'Humanism,'' THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION ■ 113 and that the men who devoted themselves to it^ held its point of view, accepted its estimates of value and its interpretation of life, were known as "Humanists." And the heart of Humanism is the recognition of the value of human experience as a guide in the search for truth because it is the one immediate reality with which the mind is confronted as it enters upon that quest. Now Calvin was a Humanist before he was a Ee- former. In his youth he "went beyond those of his own age," in the new scholarship of Humanism, and the first book which he published was a learned commentary on the De dementia of Seneca. It was from the point of view of a Humanist that he interpreted the Scrip- tures. In the introduction of his commentary on The Psalms he says that he considers himself especially com- petent to interpret this part of Scripture because his experience has been in many respects similar to that of David. The significance of this statement lies in its implication that The Psalms are first of all records of human experience, and that their divine authority is mediated through their human reality. The same con- ception underlies all his exegetical work, and exercises a determining influence on its principles and methods. Thus we see that in John Calvin Humanism became a potent factor in the Eeformation, and perhaps it is not too much to say that we are to find here the source of that statement in the Westminster Confession which makes personal experience, and not ecclesiastical author- ity, the ground of our acceptance of the Scriptures as divine and authoritative. 414 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION So miicli for the principle of the validity of personal experience as an element in the attitude of the Eeform- ers toward the Scripture. Let us now consider the operation of the same jjrinciple in the other cardinal doctrine of the Eeformation, justification by faith, as set forth by its chief apostle, Martin Luther. Luther was not a Humanist in the same sense in which we apply that term to Calvin, although he was more or less influenced by that movement as were all thinking men of his time. He remained, to a greater degree than almost any other of the Eeformers, under the influence of the older modes of thought. But in .another and perhaps even a deeper sense he was a Humanist nevertheless, in that the cardinal principles of Humanism, the authority of personal experience, was for him also supreme. We may say that whereas Calvin became a Humanist, Luther was a Humanist from his birth, being endowed by nature with a spirit so vigor- ous and ardent that all his deeper experience had a vividness which guaranteed for him its reality and made it the guiding and controlling influence of his life. His 1^ religion was not a religion of authority but a religion of experience. For its great central truth, the justifica- tion of the individual by faith in Jesus Christ, was an experience before it was a doctrine, and its truth as a doctrine was based upon its reality as a personal experi- ence. It was this confidence in his own experience as a guide, this steadfast obedience to his own heavenly vision, which made him strong to stand alone before the combined power of the empire and the papacy and THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 115 solemnly declare that he could do no otherwise. It is not surprising that the Epistle to the Galatians had such a fascination for Luther. Certainly none could appreciate better than he the spirit and the significance of a document in which Paul affirms the validity of his own experience, bases upon it all his theology so that his theology is indeed but the interpretation of it, and his apostleship his response to its imperative command. It seems to be clear, then, that Protestantism is, in its ^ oivigin and in its essence, a ^^religion of experience." Through Calvin and Luther, and in different forms and varying degree through Erasmus "the Prince of Human- ists," Melanchthon, John Colet, and many others, who were influenced by Humanism, the cardinal principle of that movement became a cardinal principle of the Ee- formation also, so that we may almost say that Pro- ^ testant Christianity is Humanism raised to its highest power, Humanism with its face toward God. And as we are celebrating in this year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventeen the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Protestantism, we should celebrate it not merely by a historical retrospect and retelling of the things that happened then, but by a reaffirmation of the great principle which constituted the inner spirit of those events, a renewal of our allegiance to that prin- ciple as it operates in the individual and in the race, and a deepening and strengthening of our faith that in the tremendous experience of this hour we shall some- how come upon a new revelation, a clearer and truer vision of the face of God. THE REFOEMATION AND SOME VITAL x\ND CONSTEUCTIVE ELEMENTS OF MODERN LIFE BY WILLIAM McKIBBIN, D.D., LL.D. The Eeformation was a tremendous disclosure of power: intellectual, spiritual, and organific. It was destructive and constructive, tearing down and build- ing up. No realm of human thought or action escaped its influence. It found almost all Europe in the grasp of a power- ful ecclesiastical despotism, styling itself the Church of Christ, the only divinely appointed channel of sal- vation. Its head was the bishop of Rome, ex officio, held to be the vicar of Christ on earth. It had formulated a vast body of teachings covering every institution, every relationship of human life, and every function of the human spirit. At the heart of this great body of doctrine were the great essential and saving truths which had constituted the historic faith of the Church from the beginning, but these basal beliefs were over- laid and superseded by traditions and rites of human origin, which precluded the mass of the people, and a large proportion of the clergy, from any intelligent apprehension of their meaning or radical experience of their power in character and conduct. 117 118 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION While basing its autliorit}^ upon tlie Scriptures, it silenced all appeal to them h}^ asserting itself to be the only infallible interpreter of their meaning. Arming itself with the power of the State, it relentless^ pursued with fire and sword, as well as with every spiritual anathema, any and all who dared to question its author- ity or challenge its teachings. Abounding in wealth, and possessing far-reaching political power, even to the absolution of subjects from their oaths of allegiance to their sovereigns, it exercised an influence over men in which an appeal was made to them by all the rewards and penalties of time and eternity. Leader after leader arose within its bounds, endued with the Spirit of God, protesting, in the name of reason and conscience and Scripture, against its corruptions in doctrine and life, and calling the Church back to the simplicity of apos- tolic teaching and the purity of apostolic ethics, only, after a brief period of popularity, to be terrified into recantation, consigned to the dungeon, the stake, or the scaffold, or driven into exile. Liberty for men's souls and bodies seemed hopeless under its iron rule. In 1453 Constantinople fell before the Turkish power, a disaster to Christendom seemingly irreparable, but destined to purify its faith and life, and to open up the way for great communions to come into existence, which should hold the ^ew Testament teach- ing and should enter upon a world-wide movement to carry the gospel, in its simplicity, to the nations. Plonks and scholars, flying westward from the rule of the conquerors, carried with them the manuscripts of THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 119 the Greek classics, and a complete literary apparatus for the study of the Greek language. In so doing they initiated in the western world a mighty intellectual movement, aptly termed the Eevival of Learning, which has continued with ever-increasing force, and ever- widening sweep, nntil the present hour. It opened to the scholars of the west not only the treasures of Greek literature hut also the veritahle text of the New Testa- ment in the original Greek. Thus papal and apostolic Christianity were brought face to face, and the startling contrast was revealed to the world. The issue between New Testament teaching and the traditions of men was sharply defined, and a contest which was radical and uncompromising was precipitated. The breaking out of hostilities in different places was due to different occasions, but the fundamental question upon which they all turned was the seat of authority in religion. As the debates proceeded it became more and more manifest to Protestant Christendom that the ax i^ to be laid at the root of every error in doctrine and morals and every ecclesiastical abuse, was the self- evidencing and self-interpreting Scripture of the Old and New Testaments, the fully inspired Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice. The clear perception and bold affirmation of this great truth unified the Eeformation, crystallizing Prot- estantism into a positive, coherent, and aggressive force, and arming it with a courage and method by which all Pome's errors might be exposed, and the will of God applied to all human conduct, religious or secular. 120 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION This great principle lies at the foundation of the ^ modern period, for the modern period is the child of the Eeformation. It is central to all the creeds of the Eeformation, and constitutes a vital element in the faith of all the Churches that are to-day living and regnant forces in the maintenance of the principles of civil and religious liberty, which have reached their highest expression in the United States of America. To this bar Churches and States, the learned and unlearned, all doctrines of men were summoned; as their findings harmonized with or diverged from its teachings they stood or fell. To use the language of the Westminster Confession : ^^The Supreme Judge, by whom all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be exam- ined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture." Rationalism, with its denial of the supernatural, and ecclesiasticism, with its denial to believers of direct access to Scripture and to God, have failed through all history to develop that form of modern life which has found expression in the freedom-loving peoples of the world. Modern life cannot stand upon any other founda- tion than that which has been laid: the motive and structural forces which have built up its most humane and prosperous forms cannot be discarded without the destruction of the fabrics which they erected. The assaults of modern destructive criticism have only dem- onstrated the impregnability of this great Eock upon THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 121 which civilization rests, and the inexhaustibility and transforming power of the streams which pour forth from this divinely opened fountain. Religion-, true or false, has been the gi-eatest of all social and political forces, and the religion of the Scriptures, incarnate in Jesus Christ, has been the source of the highest and best which has yet appeared in individual and associated life, and has fallen short only at the point at which men have abandoned or corrupted its teachings. The great creeds of the Eeformation, of which the Westminster Confession of Faith is the ripest, the most comprehensive, and the most systematic, arose in the effort to contravene, correct, or purify Eoman Catholic teaching, which covered the whole realm of faith and conduct, by the test of Holy Scripture, and were inevi- table and indispensable methods of safeguarding the Eeformation itself. The current and popular criticisms of these great documents, especially the Westminster Confession, as the product of a love for intellectual subtleties, and an emphasis upon trifling points of a faith that had lost its vitalizing power, are due to a super- ficial insight, which is blind to the strength of the convictions which they embodied, and the deadly environ- ment or "psychological climate" in which they were wrought out. As Professor Fisher says of the evolution of theological definiteness : "Theology arose in the Church as a means of self-defense. In resisting assail- ants, lines of circumvallation are required. These must be related to the positions taken by the attacking force.'' The Eeformation set a value upon the individual man 122 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION which has ceaselessly worked, and is still working, to- ward the overthrow of every despotism, political, social, economic, or religious, which has marred the souls and bodies of men, and for the great uplifts toward better intellectual, moral, and physical conditions among all classes, of which our own country is a conspicuous ex- ample. The death on the cross of the eternal Son of God for every man, of which the Scriptures, especially of the New Testament, are so full, set a value upon the indi- vidual man above all price, and forever forbade that his well-being, especially in the moral, affectional, and spiritual realms, should be sacrificed to any efficiency, industrial or otherwise, wdiich deals with the material development of society. The placing of the Bible in the hands of the people, and making it the daily study of the home, operated with tremendous power to arouse and maintain the sacredness of every human person- ality. What Eichard Henry Green, the English historian, says of Calvinism, may be said of the Eeformation, of which it was along certain lines the most highly devel- oped type: "It is in Calvinism that the modern world strikes its roots, for it was Calvinism that first revealed the worth and dignity of man. Called of God, and heir of heaven, the trader at his counter and the disrofer in his field suddenly rose into equality with the noble and the king." Nothing can sustain the institutions and ideals based upon the intrinsic pricelessness of a human personality THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 123 but the great convictions out of which they sprang and the great Book in which they are divinely attested. Modern materialistic evolution, which has plunged the world into fratricidal strife, is the victory of the strong over the weak, the destruction of the many that the few may revel in luxury and self-indulgence, and, when pushed to its logical and practical outcome, means "the survival of the greatest brutes." The modern period at its best estate builds upon the Eefprmation standard of values : "Destroy not thy brother for whom Christ died." Democracy will never win against autocracy unless in the power of the cross. Human brotherhood will never become anything more than an empty senti- mentality unless the Scriptural standard of values is applied to the individual units which make up that brotherhood. America under the inspiration of this standard of human worth has realized a religious and civic well- being which has put her in the forefront of the nations of the earth. True Americanism is Biblical principle applied to all social and political life, and if it abandons the great certitudes from which it has sprung, "Ichabod" will be written over all its greatness, and the world's brightest hope will vanish away. At this time when the principles of the Eeformation in the realm of human liberty are at issue tliroughout the world, and our own country has gone into the struggle to preserve for itself and the world these inesti- mable treasures, it is of supreme importance that the Church of the Eeformation, in all its branches, should 124 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION place its influence solidly behind the nation and the great alliance of which it is a member, that we may do for the world what our fathers did for us when they unfurled the banner of faith and freedom, and brought to birth in the throes of battle the great nation of which we are a part. THE SEEVICE IX THE FIEST PEESBYTERIAN CHUECH, SOUTH, WILLIAM M. ANDEE- SON, D.D., PASTOE. The retiring Moderator of the General Assembly, John A. Marquis, D.D., LL.D., President of Coe Col- lege, presided. The addresses were delivered by Andrew C. Zenos, D.D., LL.D., Professor of Historical Theology in the McCormick Theological Seminary, and William H. Black, D.D., LL.D., formerly Moderator of the Cum- berland Presbyterian Church, President of Missouri Eiver College. THE EEFOEMEES AS MEN OF THOUGHT AND ACTION BY ANDREW C. ZENOS, D.D., LLD. The man who is in the midst of some great labor rarely, if ever, thinks of the dim and distant future, and of his o^vn place in it. He certainly never pictures himself as the hero of a posterity that is placing laurel wreaths upon his brow. How far from the thought of the great Eeformers of the sixteenth century the idea tliat their words or their personalities would ever become tlie subjects of commemorative services ! How much farther the thought that in that new world of mythical dimensions and mysterious conditions, of which they had barely heard, a democracy would be built such as they were dreaming of in their best moments! How much farther still the anticipation that a Church would arise framed after the pattern of their ideals, a Church endeavoring in all respects to realize in its doctrine and organization the principles of the New Testament, and tliat they themselves would be given the credit of stimu- lating it into existence! Finally, how far beyond their conception was the thought that this Church expressing itself through its representatives, after the lapse of four full centuries, would devise and execute a service com- memorative of their work. Marvelous, indeed, is the 127 128 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION work of the Eeformer and unexpected the form and the time of his reward. But what is a reformer? There is too prevalent an impression in the mind of the average man that a reformer is a malcontent and an agitator^ a man dis- satisfied with existing conditions and bent on changing them. If it were necessary to correct this notion, one might point to the record of the men of whom we are now thinking. Surely they did not plead for change for the sake of change ; they were not restless spirits venting their love of adventure in dashing efforts to overthrow the existing order and establish a new order. They were scholars. Luther was a common professor in the uni- versity; Calvin was a philosopher and a writer before he found himself forced, against his will, to take the leadership of a disorganized community, and give it coherency and form. Zwingli, though drawn into the whirl of public life, and finding it more congenial to his nature than either Luther or Calvin, was not essen- tially anything more than a student and a clergyman. John Knox came farthest away from the line of scholar- ship, but he, too, loved the pursuit of knowledge and cared more for what was true than for the noise of battle and the smell of powder. Being scholars, the Eeformers were not malcontents by nature and tem- perament. It was stress of circumstances rather than a native love of change that drove them to denounce and attack existing conditions. Luther expressed the thought of them all when he said, years after the open break with the papacy, that had he known what it would THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 129 mean when he first launched upon the movement, "a team of ten oxen could not have dragged him into it" from his monastic retirement, his mystic meditations, and his quiet studies. And 3^et the Reformers were discontented with the conditions of their day. Every reformer, by the very nature of his aims and aspirations, is one who desires and endeavors to refashion the world ahout him; there- fore he is in a sense a malcontent. But between the agitator who glibly labels himself a reformer and a man of the type of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, or Knox, there is a vast gulf fixed. The former strikes right and left because he likes to see things topple over and fall in pieces; he is essentially a radical. The latter is essentially a conservative. He is more concerned to see the heart of good things saved from the corruption that is threatening it than merely to destroy the apparently useless things. The true reformer is aflame with zeal for the healthy and sound life of the spirit. He is hungry and thirsty, not for adventure but for the works of love. He hates what is eating out the life of men and women, but he loves men and women more than he hates anything. He forgets himself because his whole mental life is taken up and occupied with the highest welfare of others. Let us see how this character of the true reformer was realized in the lives and careers of those whose Avork we are commemorating. The group includes a large num- ber, each one of whom is worthy of the admiration and gratitude of the generations that have followed him. 130 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION But we must single out four as tlie leaders ; among these, most conspicuous b}^ reason of the initiative providenti- ally allotted to him, stands Martin Luther. Born in 1483, in what he calls a peasant's home, Luther developed a spiritual sensitiveness which, con- trary to his father's wishes, led him in early manhood to the religious life. This was at the time identified with the monastic system. Step by step, Luther came to realize the difference between the ideals put forth in the Bible and the corruption of the Church in his day. When the sale of indulgences by Johann Tetzel was undertaken in Saxony his sense of duty was stirred to the quick, and on that memorable October 31, 1517, he nailed his Ninety-five Theses as a declaration and a challenge. The Theses were ninety-five, but the theme is one. Men cannot be made just before God by works of any kind, but by faith alone. This was called the material principle of the Eeformation. When challenged to prove his contention, Luther first undertook to do so on general grounds. He found, how- ever, that this was a precarious position, and at the disputation held at Leipzig in 1519, he planted himself squarely on the Scriptures alone. If it could be proved from the Bible that he was wrong, he would recant, otherwise he must abide by the decision of the Word of God. The papacy tried excommunication upon him the very next year, but with no effect. Thus came into view the second great principle of the Eeformation — the sole authority of the Bible in religion. The next great step was the appeal to the State. At THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 131 the Diet of Worms in 1521 Luther was practically asked to accept the interpretation of the Bible by the Church. This he refused to do. He claimed the right for him- self and for every other individual to read the Bible and understand it in the light given by the Spirit of God. Thus the third, though commonly unrecognized and never fully realized, principle of the Eeformation became operative. For when Luther faced the diet with his immortal words : "Here I stand, otherwise I can- not, God help me," he gave expression to the most vital of all the principles that were to influence and mold Christian life from that day onward. Almost simultaneously in another portion of Europe the same conditions had led Ulrich Zwingli, pastor at Glarus, Switzerland, provoked by the same scandal of the sale of indulgences, to challenge the advocates of the system to a discussion. Either because of local con- ditions or because of the special methods he used, he did not at first attract so much attention as Luther, although his positions were much more radical. An effort to unite these two independent streams in one strong movement proved futile. But each gathered strength and moved along its own path. While that led by Luther gained steadily and occupied the imperial diets from 1521 to 1530, that led by Zwingli issued in a disruption and civil war in Switzerland, during which Zwingli lost his life in battle and the reforming party seemed to collapse. On the German side of the line, a stage was reached when in the Diet of Augsburg the Eeformers clearly 132 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION and definitely placed a constructive statement of their doctrinal views before the assembled princes. This was a great gain, but it did not satisfy the papal side and the years following increased the breadth of the chasm between the old and the new to such an extent that a war was inevitable. Fortunately, Luther died before the actual outbreak of hostilities. The struggle began with the war, commonly called the Smalkaldic, 1546-1547, and continued with some interruptions until 1555, when the Eeligious Peace of Augsburg gave Lutherans and Eomanists equal rights in the empire. Meanwhile, ten years before the outbreak of the Smalkaldic War, John Calvin made his appearance in Geneva. He was almost forcibly drawn into the strug- gle of Farel to revive and infuse permanent life into the Zwinglian movement. Born in France, in 1509, Calvin belonged to the constructive rather than to the pioneer stage of the great movement. But from the time of his arrival at Geneva in 1536 to the day of his death, in 1564, his genius and his, power were the controlling factors. He organized the government of the city upon the democratic plan, and the Church according to the Presbyterian polity; he reformed the morals and the social life of the community and gave to the world a new interpretation of Christianity. The human mind has produced three world systems and only three. It was given to Calvin to work out consistently upon Biblical grounds the most wholesome and successful system of the three. These systems may THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 133 be named in general the absolutistic, the individualistic, and the collectivistic. The absolutistic system logically means autocracy in the State, papacy in the Church, dogmatism in religious thought, and authority in philosophy. The individualistic system means anarchy in the body politic, irresponsible freedom in the Church, subjectiv- ism in religious thought, and agnosticism in philosophy. The collectivistic system is identified with democracy in the State, representative or presbyterian government in the Church, the authority of the spirit in religious thought, and scientific method in philosophy. The breadth and strength of this system as constructively presented to the world by Calvin have rendered it a universal, international, and ecumenical force, which is destined to control the life of mankind in the future even more completely than it has during the four cen- turies past. From Geneva John Knox, born in 1505, and four years the senior of Calvin, carried this new interpreta- tion to Scotland. Here conditions were ripe for a rapid and radical change in the thought and practice of the Church. Domestic, political, and social ferment had aligned the nobility and the people on one side against the clergy and the crown on the other. The struggle was unequal, though not without its episodes and stages. The old order was foredoomed to pass away and John Knox was the man providentially prepared to replace it by the new. In the year 15G0, as if in one day, the change was made, and the so-called Eeformed Church 134 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION was established. Thus the movement begun in Witten- berg forty-three years earlier reached its culmination in Edinburgh. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Knox, are the towering figures in the great army of men whose col- lective labors rise in the mind when the word, Eeforma- tion, is pronounced. What significance for the man who follows them at a distance of four hundred years is to be attached to the personalities and labors of these men? What does it mean to us that they lived and spoke, toiled and suf- fered, four centuries ago? The answer to these questions is rich and manifold. From among the thoughts that throng the mind, let us select a few for special consideration. First, the success given to the Reformers means the triumph of personality over conditions. These men lived and labored at a time when Nature, hard and exacting, had not as yet submitted to the dominance of man, her lord and master, to the degree that she has yielded since. The conditions w^ere crude and simple. Life was comparatively barren of the physical comforts to which the children of the twentieth cen- tury are so accustomed as to take them for granted. Becky Sharp says, "It would be easy — oh, so easy — to be good on five thousand pounds a year." Many men feel that it would be possible for them to work and to produce great world-moving thoughts if only they could be freed from the hard conditions of life, if only they could command the services of an army of stenographers and clerks and assistants, if only they could so arrange THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 135 their lives that they would not feel the annoyances of untoward or debasing environment, or the pinch of poverty, if only their minds could be emancipated from the necessity of thinking of what they shall eat and what they shall drink and w^herewithal they shall be clothed. There is no doubt that the physical life lies at the basis of sound intellectual w^ork. A sound body in nor- mally healthy condition is prerequisite to the best activities of the mind and spirit. But it is an error to think that the life of the spirit beats with strength proportionate to the physical elements upon which it is based and through which it must needs labor and express itself. The work of the Eeformers is a stand- ing rebuke to the materialistic spirit of an age in which the greed for money, with all the facilities it provides for all sorts of activities, has invaded the very citadel of the spiritual life, organized Christianity. Consider the conditions under which Luther and Zwingli and Knox achieved the triumph of the spirit. One goes to Edinburgh and examines with deepest interest that house on High Street in wdiich the fiery leader of the Scottish Eeformation rested himself during tlie periods of intermission between preaching at St. Gile's Cathe- dral, or visiting Mary at the Holyrood Palace, or con- sulting with the members of Parliament, and one is amazed at the simplicity and barrenness of the estab- lishment. Can it be that such a rich life was lived in such unhelpful surroundings? One goes to the Wart- burg and is shown the room in which Luther translated the New Testament into the rugged vernacular German 136 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION in which it survives to the present day, and one is fascinated by the quaint disposition of details and over- awed by the remembrance of the great ideas which once found their local habitation in the little room. But, on second thought, one is amazed that such power should have been associated with such insignificant out- ward concomitants. But amazement is not in place. The facts of the lives of these great souls should once and forever burn the conviction into our hearts that circumstances are nothing but plastic clay in the hands of the mighty spirit. When the inner man, whose springs of life are from God arises in his might, he is a Samson whom the cords of unfavorable conditions cannot restrain or hold bound. Of the four great Eeformers who are for the moment occupying our attention, not one lived to the full meas- ure of a well-rounded human life upon earth. If the psalmist's "threescore years and ten" be the typical life- time, then Luther came short by seven full years, Cal- vin by fifteen, Knox by three, and Zwingli by twenty- three, when he died in battle at the age of forty-seven. Eegardless of rules of hygiene, forgetful of everything but the task that was set before them, they were willing to spend and be spent. Unmindful of its passing, they kept the candle of life burning brightly, bent only on its shedding light as it burned in a benighted world. Their constitutions were undoubtedly injured by the hard strain put upon them through unceasing labors. If they were not called upon like those heroes of old to THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 137 "Meet the tyrant's brandished steel, The lion's gory mane," they were just as really conquerors over hardships and difficulties, before which few muster up the courage to stand. There is a social philosophy preached to-day according to which the ills of mankind are due to economic con- ditions. If these conditions were made ideal the mil- lennium would come automatically. Poverty is the cause of ignorance, disease, and sin. Eemove poverty and men would be lifted to a high intellectual level. Without for a moment minimizing the importance of rendering conditions as nearly ideal as possible, the course of the Reformers shows the need of redeemed personality before conditions can be changed. Luther is sometimes censured because in the peasants' uprising he did not throw his sympathy and influence on the side of the downtrodden peasants. On the face of it, it must be admitted that his conduct fails to measure up to the best Christian ideals of this later day. But con- sidered from the viewpoint of a true Christian philos- ophy, his instinct was accurate. It was necessary to have a people awakened to spiritual realities before industrial conditions could be adequately treated. "Seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." It was much more important to strike at the root of the tree than to deal with the trunk outwardly, much more effective to deal with the spiritual forces, unentangled with external conditions, than to lose the essence of things 138 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION in the effort to make applications in detail. The sal- vation of men not only may, but must, precede the change of conditions. The supreme need in reforma- tion is not the creation of conditions favorable to the change, but of characters that will create the condi- tions. Secondly, the Eeformers mean to us the triumph of personality over social mechanism, of spirit over insti- tutions, of freedom over efficiency. Great is the power of organization, and our day seems to have awakened to a consciousness of this profoundly significant fact in the world. Cooperation accomplishes vastly more than scattered individual effort. Teamwork, whether on the ball field, or as a coordinated movement on the battle front, assures victory over forces that are divided, no matter how far superior in other respects. A perfect machine, whether military or ecclesiastical, seems to be the goal of the ambition of large groups of men, and efficiency has been chosen as the motto — the magic wand to conjure with. To all of this a man of the present day would be purblind to say an unqualified nay. But one need not turn his eyes away from the origins of the New Testament to find due emphasis laid on thorough organization. The original preacher of co- operative movement in order to efficiency was the Apos- tle Paul. Eead his wonderful parable of the Body and the Members. "For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ." "They are many members, but one body." Nothing has been said in THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 139 behalf of efficiency by organized cooperation more com- pactly, more practically, and more forcibly, than has been said by the Apostle Paul in that matchless simile. But the difference between the apostle's plea for organized cooperation and the present-day anvil chorus on the same subject is that Paul was thinking of organi- zation designed to advance the life of the spirit. Modern advocates of cooperation have in mind economy and abundant results. We are in danger of enthroning a new goddess in our pantheon, the goddess of efficiency, and of falling down and worshiping her, irrespective of the cause or causes to be observed. The Eeformers with keen instinct had seized upon the supremacy of the spirit. They fought a battle against the most powerful organization that, up to their time, the world had ever allowed to be completed. The papal system, patterned after the model of Imperial Eome, had growm through centuries, fitting part into part, member into member, in complete and perfect subordination. Emperors from the days of Henry IV, who ignominiously bent his knees at Canossa, and through the days of Barbarossa and the greater Fred- erick II, had striven with all their might to break this papal power and had found it invincible. When a man grew overly ambitious, when the lust for power entered his heart, as it did into the Medici of Florence, all he had to do was to insinuate himself into this system, and to rise step by step to a seat of command. Thence he could control the world. When Eodrigo Borgia, the infamous Alexander VI, was elected to the papac}^ he 140 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION exclaimed, "Xow I am po23e, now I can rule the world." This wonderful mechanism bade fair to be the rock against which whosoever struck was destined to be dashed to pieces, and on whomsoever it fell, it seemed as if he must be ground to powder. John Huss, Jerome, and Savonarola were crushed by it. It was the ideal of efficiency as an organized institution. What should man do to it or with it? But no ! Luther and Calvin, Zwingli and Knox, proved that there is a greater power than that of the most compact machine the world has ever known — the power of the spirit, of the spirit of man possessed and controlled and directed by the Spirit of God. The incredible came to pass. The gigantic image was struck at the feet by the stone not hewn with hands, and the image crumbled and fell. A few men, and they work- ing independently, accomplished the miracle. Let no one point doubtfully to the more recent Mod- ernist movement in the Roman fold and claim that freedom is impotent against the efficient machine. The difficulty with Modernism was that it lacked the power of personality. It was not a movement for the freedom of the spirit as a product of evolution. Let Modern- ism revive as a movement of the spirit, let personality be placed at its center, and its warfare against ecclesi- astical machinery is bound to succeed. Are we asked how this is to be accomplished, when the machine by its inexorable operation automatically eliminates every disturbing factor? Our answer is, we do not know. The inevitable element in such conflicts and their issues THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 141 is the element of surprise. No one could have fore- seen that Luther and Calvin, Zwingli and Knox, would triumph where Wjclif and Huss and Savonarola had failed; yet that is precisely what happened. The ways of the Spirit are mysterious, hut his achievements are sure; and his victory is all the more certain because the path he follows is unpredictable. Let us be men of the Spirit, dauntless and strong, assured that the victory is ours if we faint not nor falter. Thirdly, the course of the Eeformers demonstrates the triumph of the fear of God over the fear of man, of the Spirit over tradition and statute. Luther and Zwingli, Calvin and Knox, are reputed men of courage to have dared what they did. But courage in their case was only another name for that holy fear of God which swallows all other fears. It is doubtful whether Luther's personal courage would have carried him as far as it did had it not been suffused and tempered by the regard he had for the will of God. Iron in its purity is hard, but it is brittle. Add to it certain other ingredients under high temperature and it becomes steel. Luther fac.ed the Diet of Worms on the afternoon of April 17, 1521. On the journey he had prepared himself as well as a man could, but as he gazed upon the assemblage of magnates his heart sank within him. When the ques- tion was put to him whether he would recant his views as contained in tlie l)Ooks he had published, of which copies had been provided, he answered in a low, almost inaudible voice: He seemed to be on the point of col- lapse. He said it w^as a serious question, and he ought 142 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION to have time to consider it. He was given until the next day. He went to his lodgings and engaged in prayer. The next day he faced the same assemblage. The same question was asked him. His natural timidity had disappeared. He had seen God — what terror could the fear of man have for him? John Knox's unflinching stand before Mary, Queen of Scots is very well known. It amjazed his contem- poraries. To him it was nothing more than the ordi- nary duty of a man who had learned to regard the will of God as the supreme rule of his conduct. This feature of the Eeformers' minds explains their attitude to the Bible on the one hand and to tradition on the other. The motto, "The Bible, the only religion of Protestants," has become so familiar in the present age that the difficulty of setting it forth and vindicating it is not easily realized. Yet it was inexpressibly hard to break the power of tradition and revert to the foun- tainhead of authority for light on faith and conduct. Tradition is a tremendous power. It accumulates force as it moves. It thickens and hardens every moment. It is like some evil habit which a man contracts and which he finds impossible to give up. Tradition is a pres- sure that prescribes the course of the individual and compels him to move within certain fixed bounds. It is an atmosphere that must be breathed, a stream that carries all upon its bosom. It requires strength to cut loose from any tradition. The tradition of the Medieval Church was stronger than ordinary traditions, because it came under the name and with the sanction of the THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 143 Word of God. To cut loose from tradition was first of */ all to realize that the will of God was something other than the body of precepts and maxims handed down by tradition in the Church. To realize this in one's own mind first, then to proclaim it in such a way that others should believe it — this required strength of character possible only to the man of the Spirit. Sabatier has given us a book in which he contrasts the religions of authority with the religion of the Spirit. So far as the Reformers were concerned, the authority they recognized was the sole authority of the Spirit. Being men, of the Spirit, they committed themselves to it absolutely and unconditionally. In the Bible they recognized the supreme expression of the will of the Spirit. The antithesis between Spirit and authority does not exist for those who commit themselves to the guidance of the Spirit. The triumph of the fear of God means the vindi- i^ cation of the venture of faith. In the realm of the Spirit true safety lies in taking risks. Faith is the key word of the Eeformation, in more than one sense. It is first the key word of its doctrinal system as given in the phrase, justification by faith. It is also the key word of the life of its leading spirits. Faith to them was more than a theological term. It was more even than the act of appropriating the offer of salvation from the hands of God. It was an act of commitment to the guidance of God. Like Abraham, the Reformers launched upon their bold course as travelers not know- 144 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION ing whither they went. Each of them might rightly have made his own the words of Paracelsus : "I go to prove my soul, I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive — ^what time, what circuit first, I ask not; but unless God send his hail Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow, In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird. In his good time." When Luther launched out upon this venture of faith there was no lack of indication that he would incur the apparently omnipotent hatred of the papacy. The grim examples of Huss and Savonarola lay before him like forbidding danger signals on the path. When Calvin committed himself to the new interpretation of Chris- tianity, Francis I was holding the reins of government in France with a stern determination to maintain the unity of his realm by suppressing the reformed views, even though he might to that end shed the blood of thousands of his best subjects. John Knox threw him- self into the movement in the face of the recent mar- tyrdom of Patrick Hamilton and George Wishart. Luther, Calvin, Knox, saw their way in those days of hail and sleet and stifling snow and blinding fireballs as birds see their trackless Ava}^ But they believed in the guidance of Him who directs the bird, and they arrived. So shall it be with the man of faith always and everywhere. He will arrive. Whether soon, in his own earthly lifetime, or later, when he himself has won THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 145 his victor's crown of gold, in God's good time he will arrive. Finalty, the holy fear of God as a principle of action for the individual led the Eeformers to a conception of the State in which theocracy and democracy blend into harmony and dethrone autocracy. Just as in the Church, under the full functioning of this fundamental reformation, the priest disappears, because every man becomes his own priest, so in the State, under the same conditions, the king is antiquated and ready to become an ornamental relic of bygone ideal, or to vanish utterly from life. True democracy, in which each citizen has realized his ideal relation to the Source of all authority, the voice of God in his conscience, is the real theocracy, the rule of God. And when this has been said, we come to the point where the labors of the Reformers affiliate with the preaching of Jesus regarding the Kingdom of God. Four hundred years lie between the Eeformers and ourselves. But their problems and ours are not essen- tially different. The chief fact of importance is that they found the key to the solution of the problems. That key resolves itself into two principles : First, that reformation is progress by reversion to and fulfillment of preexisting ideals; second, that the ideals underlying all sound progress have been given by God himself in his self-revelation in the Bible and Jesus Christ, his Son. The first shows the Eeformers to be true progressives. Progress is not to be found in reconstruction by demoli- tion. That is a purely mechanical process. True prog- 146 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION ress is a vital growth. It follows the law of life which always goes back to an already existing element full of potentialities and develops these out of it. It is the remnant that is saved in order to grow and fulfill the ideal. The second principle is even more important. All reformation must insist on conformity to the known will of God; and God has not left himself without tes- timony. Only as men realize that the supreme good is to be found in God's will as revealed in his Word will they be worthy successors of the Eeformers, who were themselves the successors of the apostles and prophets and of Jesus Christ. THE PEOTESTANT EEFORMATION AND THE CHEISTIAN LIFE WILLIAM H. BLACK, D.D„ LL.D. In a general way, the influence of the Eeformation may be stated as the achievements and the reactions of Protestantism. It must be clearly seen that Protestant- ism is not only an influence by direct action in carrying out the original impulse of the Reformation, but that its reactions upon itself, and upon others not directly concerned about the Eeformation, have been great. These, if we had time to trace them, could be shown in the influence of Protestantism upon the State, upon the social order, upon literature and art, upon indus- tries, and upon religion. Protestantism is not a dogma, or a theological theory,^ or a constructive principle of religious thinking; it is primarily a life. It is a life that is lived by faith in the Son of God. It may be expressed in the language of the Apostle Paul, as follows: "That life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God." The Eeformation shibboleth, "justifi- cation by faith," was not simply a theory of theology; it was preeminently a demand for a certain type of life, the life that is "just," and "just" because it is the expression of a vital faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. 147 148 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION Three things, therefore, follow with reference to the Protestant life. ^ 1. Protestantism is a really catholic life. It must be noted that the protest of the Eeformation was against a merely formal Christianity. It is not a life of legerde- main, i. e., by the laying on of hands, baptisms, con- fessions, and indulgences, but a life that begins in Christ and is lived for Christ. It touches all forms of life, civil, social, religious, intellectual, aesthetic, indus- trial, ecclesiastical. It would be interesting to take each of these and show the catholic form of the life ex- pressed in all these various relationships. The humani- ties were basal in the scholastic status which preceded the Reformation, and the universal human interest be- came paramount in the life of Protestantism. ^ 2. Protestantism is an idealistic life. Seated in the mind of Protestants as the ^^chiefest among ten thou- sand,'' the One "altogether lovely,'' is Jesus Christ. He is the matchless, the divine, the spiritual. Enthroned in the life, he is the determining cause of spiritual activity. He is, therefore, in Protestantism the very soul of government, religion, industry, knowledge, and art. "Whom not having seen ye love." It is the invisible; potential, ever-present Christ, who is the expression of hope and joy of the Protestant's life. If time allowed it would be interesting, also, to follow this into the de- tails of its application under Protestant influence. ^3. Protestantism is a democratic life. It aims to voice and articulate the spiritual longings, aspirations, and motives of Christ, and of all who have Christ formed THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 149 in their hearts, "the hope of glory." Luther's demo- cratic principles called for a vernacular translation of the Bible, so that the very language of the spiritual life should not be foreign and formal and cold, but native to the heart which experienced Christ's presence and power. Never in the history of the world had religion been brought so close to humanity and each individual stimulated to such self-assertion and self-expression as under the Protestant regime. It is an interesting thing to observe that for a thou- sand years Eome had tried to express the spiritual life and emotions through the Latin language but had failed. Heine makes this point clear. It required a Martin Luther and the Protestant Eeformation, and great lead- ers like Wyclif, Knox, Calvin, and Zwingli, to put the language of Hebrew prophets and of Christian apostles into the language of the people, thereby democratizing religion, revelation, and godly living. Freytag says that "there was no one to take Luther^s place" in Germany and that, therefore, the democracy of Luther never became seated in the German Empire. It is one of the tragedies of history that the birthplace of modern democracy has not been the place of its greatest victories. It is the marvel of history that America was not discovered until just at the time of the breaking out of the Eeformation, so that there was a field waiting in which the principles of the new vision might be worked out for the benefit of humanity. America became the Mecca of freedom for all peoples, kindreds, and tongues, and with the democratic religious 150 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION ideals of Protestantism, it became, therefore, the theater of the reconstruction of human thinking and human institutions. After the exemplification of Protestant democratic freedom had been worked into form in America, it spread to other nations, and the recent great democratic movements may be traced to the exemplari- ness of America. The war has shown in a most singular way that Germany is still under despotic power, that Austria-Hungary is not a government of the people, and that Turkey is under no movement for the restoration of the interests of humanity; but democracy has had a place in the sun in every nation that is fighting against these central powers. Britain, Belgium, France, Italy, Russia, and America, have moved with the greatest democracy in the planning and execution, and in the motive and end, of their terrific bombardments, sacri- fices, and achievements. The democracy of Protestantism needed this great war. England needed it in order to level the class dis- tinctions that prevailed; France needed it in order to the spiritualizing of her government, institutions, and life; Eussia needed it in order to break the power of the despotism which had held her for so long; America needed it in order to set her free from the dominance of economic and industrial ideals which were obscuring the spiritual forms native to her national beginnings. "None of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to him- self, but whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's." This great apostolic vision is having a new birth in these days of strife and blood. Date Due ;(^s>'■^, '^^^i^ t mm 1 i if^ •»6f.»<.^ '- r^^^^ ^^^^w^^* 1 ! ^i 3 '4jJ jl S -U! Mr 2 '40 AP'>? '45 jify - ^ , : c ', (\ W ' FE 19 '53 1 ^