The widely comprehensive study of the history of theology and of dogma on which, as it was pursued during last generation, we have to congratulate ourselves, was not as a whole regulated so much as it ought to have been by regard to those points of Church history which were fitted to direct it, and this defect makes itself felt particularly in the manner of apprehending and interpreting the theology of the Reformers. When once we depart from that method of treating Church history, which proceeds upon the theory that in the changes and in the advances of theological science the logically necessary development of thought must be traced, we have no longer any other point of view left to us than that which makes the religious and scientific experiences of the theological subject to form the sufficient basis for his particular theological views. For second or third class men this standard may suffice: for by it the individual’s development will be dependent on the position of the Church as he finds it. But such a standard, as it is customarily resorted to, is not sufficient for an understanding of the theology of the Reformation. The individual subjects, Luther, Zwingli, Melanchthon, Calvin, are indeed recognised by us as reformers precisely by this feature, that they set themselves against the course of the Church and of theology as it had been going on up to their time, and so were not dominated by it. But we, for our part, cannot so appreciate them, as if they had put themselves in an attitude of contrariety to the tendency of the Catholic Church itself which had come down to them in history. For in that case we ourselves should not be able to distinguish between their dignity and that of their contemporaries,—the Anabaptists,—Schwenkfeld,—Faustus Socinus,—and we should at the very outset be conceding the justice of the Roman Catholic criticism, that the fathers of the evangelical churches were heretics just as much as these founders of sects and leaders of schools. But we are satisfied (without going further into the matter) that the Reformers as such neither had any wish to found a new religion, nor, as matter of fact, did they found new churches, as if they believed that up to their time their religious tendency had not been at all operative in the Western Church. Nor yet do we consider the Reformers in the light of prophets, as if they brought religious knowledge and the ordinances of the Church to a degree of perfection that had not been objectively possible before their time: for the Reformers expressly repudiated, so far as they were concerned, the claim to that effect made by the leaders of the Anabaptists. To what historical circumstances must we attribute it then, that the Church-Reformers as such should have kept the ground of the Church, and that they should have confounded it neither with that of the sects nor with that of the schools? In virtue of what principle was it that, in breaking loose from the Church in its Romish form, they did not also complete their separation from the Catholicity of the Church? The answer to these questions will not have been sufficiently given by pointing out the intention of the Reformers to maintain current the idea of the universal Church. For the Anabaptists also, and the Socinians after their fashion, share this intention, and yet the distinctive marks to which each of these parties in its own way brings back the idea of the Church run completely counter to the doctrine that up till then had been current or implicitly taken for granted. The question amounts, therefore, to this,—Whether the Reformers also, in accordance with a traditional maxim, which was not altogether rejected even by their opponents, maintained the ground of the universal Church even after the Roman ecclesiastical power had cast them out as heretics? In fine, it amounts to this,—whether in this respect they actually are distinguished from the efforts of the Socinians and Anabaptists, seemingly analogous yet combated by them, or whether, together with these, they are to be ranked in one and the same class.

22. The Reformation could not have got beyond her first movements of life in Germany and Switzerland, if in these countries the pretension of the Roman Church, that she alone is the Christian community, had held good with unmitigated significance and strength. The power of the Pope and of the bishops would in that case have suppressed the Reformation by the same means and with the same result in these lands also, just as actually was the case in Italy. It was possible to carry out the Reformation in Germany and in Switzerland only because since the fifteenth century the consequences of the downfall of the papal power in these countries had entailed a preponderance of the State over the Church, based upon the State’s generally recognised right of advocacy for the Church.² While this right had by Gregory VII. been degraded into the unconditional duty of submission on the part of the State to the power of the Church, its public currency since the Babylonian captivity of the popes, since the schism and reforming councils had again approximated to that standard according to which the relation of State to Church had been treated in the Byzantine and Frankish periods of the Roman Empire. As advocate of the Church, the Roman Emperor figured in the chief place; but the states of the Roman Empire belonging to the German nation participated each according to its share in the rights of that position. While, accordingly, the Empire was generally recognised at the period of the Reformation as being the Christian community, in the wider meaning of that expression, the division of political power amongst the large number of states of the Empire rendered possible, in virtue of the assertion by these of rights over the Church, the agitation and propagation of particular religious views, which the latter by virtue of her constitution excluded. The Reformers, without exception, adhered to the Christian Society they found in the Roman Empire; the Anabaptists, on the contrary, entirely repudiated it, and sought to establish, as the Christian one, an altogether new order of society. Now, the Roman Empire had from a very early period been distinguished as a Christian society by a distinctive feature that more properly belongs to a church, namely, by the imposition of a dogmatic creed. The imperial edict of Gratianus, Valentinianus, and Theodosius De summa Trinitate et fide Catholica of the year 380 (the first in the Justinian codex), which was still the unchanged basis of public law at the time of the Reformation, treats as Catholic Christians all those persons who share the profession of Damasus, Bishop of Rome, respecting the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, and brands all others with the name of heretics, regarding them as exposed to the wrath of God, as well as to temporal punishment at the pleasure of the Emperor. The Reformers did not divest themselves of this, the mark that distinguished the Empire as the Christian community: for though they sought to bring about changes in the then existing ecclesiastical order, as well as in that view of the scheme of salvation which was current in their time, they never disputed the doctrine of the Trinity. The very omission of that doctrine from the oldest text-books—from Melanchthon’s Loci Communes and from Farel’s Sommaire (published originally in 1524), far from implying any repudiation of it, rather indicates an intention to leave unaltered and untouched in the reconstruction of the practical doctrines of salvation a doctrine they looked upon as sacred, an unshaken mystery of the Christian faith. In fact the public Confessions—those of Augsburg and Smalkald, for example—expressly declare acceptance of the Nicene doctrine. Not only did the Reformers continue consciously and deliberately to be catholic in virtue of this: their strict conformity with the principles of the Christian religion, so far as these had been avowed by the Roman Empire, also made it possible for princes and rulers, as such, to tolerate them, to protect them, and even to make common cause with them. Such co-operation between the authorities and the Reformers on the basis of Christianity that the Roman Empire offered, also secured to the latter their continued claim to be members of the universal Church—a claim which is more than once put forward in the Confession of Augsburg. For, apart from the Roman Empire, no universal Christian church then existed; and the Empire, by having fixed upon what was to be regarded as the distinctive test of Catholic Christianity, had given to all who answered that test a certificate of membership in the Christian Church. Both points are conveyed in the project of an œcumenical council, a project under the protection of which the Reformation established itself so securely that it could no longer be rolled back when the council itself actually came to be held. For in the case of the Reformers the appeal to a general council was equivalent to a continued claim to have part in the universal Church as embodied in the Roman Empire, their renunciation of the Pope’s authority notwithstanding; and the promise obtained from the Emperor at the close of the Diet of Spires (1526), to the effect that he would cause the religious controversy to be settled by a council, actually concedes in a provisional manner to the Reformation full rights within the Church, so long as the states of the Empire so comported themselves as they could answer to God and the Emperor: thus at once entirely suspending the binding character of all such developments of dogma as up to that time had not been confirmed by any general council with the Emperor’s approval. It may well be granted that this principle upon which the controversy in the Western Church was to be settled was a legal fiction; for the imperial power brought itself to submit to it only because the political situation was unfavourable; and the reforming party also, as soon as it had gained a firm footing and had acquired all the forms of a church constitution, refused to accept the conditions under which alone a general council of the Church could have been convened in the ordinary way. At the same time we must remember that it was also in virtue of a legal fiction that Constantine, for example, in his time received into the Roman Empire the new religion of Christ, while contrasting it as the old religion with the heretical sects. As, at all events, the history of the Reformation, in spite of its various political vicissitudes, was dominated by this half-churchly principle of law until, by the religious peace of Augsburg, it acquired positive political rights of its own in the Empire; the result of its course was, that the same regard to the position of the Church in history which regulated Luther’s undertaking,—and after his peculiar fashion that of Zwingli also,—pervaded as a characteristic and fundamentally important element all their reforms of the Church. However deeply one may feel the imperfection and partial erroneousness of the constitution of the churches of the Reformation, it is still true, above every other thing that can be said with regard to the Reformers, that in their reconstruction of the Church they gave a position so decisively important to the religious influences—especially to the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments (which were always considered as the ultimate divinely appointed bases of the Church), precisely in order that they might thereby get something to set over against the specifically state character of the Romish Church. At the same time they thoroughly and effectually maintained the comprehensive character of the Church as against the essentially sectarian character of the Anabaptist organization and the essentially school character of that of the Socinians. For their whole doctrine of the plan of salvation, as well as their many diverse efforts at a church constitution with the help of the state, are dominated by the thought that the whole is before the parts, and that the individual comes to possess faith and to be in a state of salvation only as a member of the Church; while Anabaptists, and Socinians, would have the church they aim at to consist of the aggregate of actively holy persons, or of those acquainted with the saving doctrines of Christ. What other interpretation can we put upon that fundamental position of Luther—that God bestows the Holy Spirit only through the Word and Sacraments—than as meaning that faith and Christian life are inconceivable except within that religious society which is always in existence previous to any manifestation of individual life, and which is always actively operative in those her essential features, wherever the individual attains unto faith? But a similar meaning is conveyed by the practical principle, under the guidance of which Zwingli placed his whole undertaking,—the principle, namely, that the political authority in Zurich was the authorized representative of the Christian Church, and that therefore the ordinances of that authority in the interests of Christian religion, regarding soundness of public teaching, simplicity of worship, salutary discipline of the individual, must be obeyed. But these ordinances commended themselves to the sense of the Church as a whole, because they were in accordance with Scripture. The community of believers, therefore, the body intrusted with God’s Word and Sacraments, was, in Luther’s view (although he could not like Zwingli regard it as a body exercising civil rights), neither a visionary imagination nor a new sectarian product of his own making; on the contrary, it stood forth as the imperishable kernel of the imperial Church that had become historical,—to a part in which the Reformers had and maintained their right at the very time when they took in hand to give force to the fundamental characteristics of that Church against the adventitious deformations that had taken place in her doctrines and life.

It must at once be admitted that the Reformers themselves hardly ever expressed a clear consciousness of the fact that, by their recognition of the doctrine of the Trinity, they were holding the legal standing ground given them by the Roman Empire. They only knew that in virtue of this confession they were maintaining the ground of the Catholic Church.³ Neither can it be doubted that the said doctrine was originally accepted by the Reformers in virtue of Church tradition, and not in virtue of the specific authority of Scripture. It was their constantly widening separation from the Romish Church that first made it necessary for them to base this doctrine also on Scripture as soon as its defence (chiefly on account of Michael Servetus’s denial) came to be a work of special importance to them. But then, as Servetus disputed the use made by the Church of the notion hypostasis or person, precisely because these words are foreign to the Bible, the Reformers could not help conceding a measure of doctrinal authority to the Church on this point, though in a carefully restricted and guarded way.⁴ This view, however, leans towards that tendency which led George Calixtus, at a later period, to declare the consensus of the first five centuries of the Christian Church to be authoritative for the interpretation of Scripture. The fact is, that the Reformers, in their doctrine of the person of Christ and of the Trinity, followed this consensus, in the first instance, because they still kept their footing on the ground of the Catholic Church as recognised by the Roman Empire. But it was a mistaken and useless attempt on the part of Calixtus to seek to impose that standard as a rule of primary value upon the Lutheran Church; for that Church had already for a whole century emancipated her dogmatic consciousness from resting on a fictitious harmony of ecclesiastical tradition, even although the task of interpreting Scripture by Scripture did not admit at that time of being thoroughly carried out.

If, however, the Reformers originally did not fully calculate the political importance to the Reformation of their adherence to the doctrine of the Trinity, the authorities at least who attached themselves to the Reformation movement were very distinctly aware of the rights and duties which pertained to them in virtue of the public law of the Empire. The evangelical authorities of Geneva and of Berne gave most distinct evidence of this when, with express reference to the edict of Gratian, and to subsequent imperial edicts against heretics, they sentenced to death Michael Servetus (1553) and Valentine Gentilis (1556) for having denied the doctrine of the Trinity.⁵ It was the same consideration that led the Elector of Saxony to imprison Johannes Campanus, who, in 1530, had made himself notorious in Wittemberg by controverting the doctrine of the Trinity; for the statements said to have been made by him at the same time regarding the cessation of sin in converted persons, and the needlessness of the law to such, although they betray an Anabaptist tendency, would not have sufficed to bring down on him such punishment.⁶ Conversely, the supreme power in Zurich gave in 1528 striking evidence that, in spite of its sympathy with the Reformation, it was still Catholic when it caused to be beheaded for læsa majestas one Max Weerli of Thurgau (a district under the same government with Zurich), who, adopting the epithet habitually used by the Romish Church, had characterized as heretics the “gracious lords” of Zurich.⁷ The theologians Calvin, Melanchthon, and Beza indeed base the right of punishing anti-Trinitarians upon a general obligation which the civil magistrate owes to the Church; appealing to examples taken from the Old Testament, and laying no stress on the positive law of the Empire. It cannot, however, be doubted that their general proposition is framed upon the positive law, and that the proofs drawn from the Old Testament are conclusive only to those whose sphere of vision has been already prescribed for them by the imperial enactment. And, under certain circumstances, the theological supporters of the Reformed Church in Switzerland, when their impugned orthodoxy required to be defended, could persuade themselves to put it expressly under the protection of Gratian’s edict. An example of this is found in the preface to the Second Helvetic Confession, which was published in 1556, while the process against Gentilis was pending.⁸ But since the Reformed Churches could not prove themselves to be orthodox by the standard of the Romish Church, although they could do so by that of the Roman Empire, they accordingly separate the anti-Trinitarians as heretics from themselves, on the ground that they went beyond the rights of Christian society, so far as this was at all recognised as the basis of the universal Church, as distinguished from the narrower circle of that of Rome.

Such was the historical position in which originally Luther and Zwingli essayed the reformation of the Church; the former by regulating and renovating the religious and moral relations of the Christian life by means of a right understanding of the doctrine of the sinner’s justification in Christ, the latter by introducing more immediately into the Church of Zurich the authority of the Word of God as alone operative towards the Church’s faith and life. In declaring themselves to have kept within the limits of the Christian fellowship of the Roman Empire, from which the Anabaptists were withdrawing themselves in their sectarian effort towards the formation of a community of actual saints; in re-introducing into Christian life the Church’s original scheme of salvation in accordance with the principles of the Gospel, they felt within themselves that they were acting in the spirit of the “Catholic Church.” As matter of fact, however, it was not merely in an ideal sense that they held the priority of the Church to every saving manifestation in individual persons; they actually established, as the practical standard in accordance with which the religious life of the Church should be constantly renewed, simply that thought in accordance with which the self-estimate of the most conspicuous characters of the middle ages was formed, and in which, as a whole, the loftiest and purest piety of the mediæval Church finds expression—the thought, namely, that with the Christian, whether he be conscious of relative perfection or of relative imperfection, grace alone, and not merit, is the ground of his acceptance with God.

23. What Luther’s thought of justification by faith practically meant, is made clear by Chemnitz’s testimony and by Luther’s own explanations in those sermons and tracts which date from the time previous to the beginning of the controversy about absolution. The preference I give to these last above all other writings of Luther, I found upon the fact that he suffered himself to be led by the attacks of his adversaries to a change of form in his position that is not immaterial to the proper apprehension of the question. Chemnitz’s testimony⁹ ought, however, to be placed in the foreground, because it is in every respect classical, and because it gives us the most adequate means of fully ascertaining the range of Luther’s view. He says, “The main point of controversy at present agitated between us and the papists relates to the good works or new obedience of the regenerate; whether, namely, the regenerate are justified through that renewal which the Holy Ghost works in them, and by means of the good works which proceed from that renewal: in other words, whether the newness, virtues, or good works of the regenerate are the things in virtue of which they can stand at the judgment of God, for the sake of which God is propitiated and made gracious, upon which they can lean, and in which they can trust when the hard question comes to be answered, whether we be the children of God, and have been accepted to everlasting life.” Chemnitz then points out that Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans, attributes to Abraham justification by faith; even while representing him as regenerate and adorned with good works. “If, accordingly, in true repentance faith lays hold of and appropriates to itself Christ’s satisfaction, then has it something which it can oppose to the law’s accusations at the bar of God, and so bring it to pass that we be declared just. It is indeed also true that believers through their renewing by the Holy Ghost have an actual righteousness; but inasmuch as that righteousness has only commenced in this life, inasmuch as it is imperfect and still impure by reason of the flesh, we cannot stand in God’s judgment with it, nor on its account does God pronounce us to be righteous.”

Now, Luther’s sermons, belonging to the years 1515-1517, in which the thought of justification through faith attains to clear statement, are, so far, perfectly correct in this respect, that Luther constantly bears in mind the fact that he is speaking to the Christian Church, and not to a miscellaneous number of sinners who require first to be converted. On this account it is that he represents the assurance of justification by faith as the religious regulating principle of the entire life of the Christian in its subjective phases,—a principle which pervades the whole course of it,—never as a mere phenomenon which ought to manifest itself at the close of the work of conversion in the sinner. For, properly speaking, those sermons have nothing to do—do not concern themselves at all—with the conversion of sinners. Luther, accordingly, fairly takes for granted in them that his hearers are really striving after and attaining unto good works; rebuking at the same time, however, such confidence in valuing these and such superficiality in the estimate of sin as is sure to pervade the whole Christian life and to mar its worth towards God. When people regard only their outward sins, and make no account of sinful concupiscence, as being venial, they are prone to believe themselves acceptable in virtue of their individual good works, and to think they may put confidence in them, although these become really null through pride. But it is all the other way. No one, not even the most perfect, can be free from the fear of hell. The fear of the just is at all times a mixture of holy and of slavish fear, but they attain ever more and more unto the former, until they come at last to fear nothing but God.¹⁰ While the work-righteous do not fulfil the law in the spirit, for in their hearts, at least, they have sin and concupiscence; the saints, in like manner, have their secret sins (which have only begun to be subdued through grace) plainly revealed before their eyes; they cannot, therefore, pride themselves on their external works.¹¹ These indications of the imperfection of the good works of the regenerate, were systematically developed and theologically established by Luther in his Resolutionen über die dreizehn Sätze gegen Eck of the year 1519.¹² In this tract he appeals first of all to the declarations of Scripture (1 John i. 8; Isa. lxiv. 6; Eccl. vii. 20; Rom. vii. 15; Gal. v. 17; Ps. cxliii. 2); then rejects the idea of venial sin as inapplicable in judging of the case in hand; and declares that even though sin be forgiven in baptism, it still remains as concupiscence, and assuredly not as an indifferent thing; it must still be struggled against and overcome; further declaring that the contrary doctrine implies a dualistic theory of the relation between body and soul.

Since, accordingly, even in the works of the regenerate, God’s law still remains unfulfilled; since, further, it is impossible by one’s own efforts to gain acceptance with God, the believer is pointed to the way of finding acceptance through Christ’s mediation. He fulfilled the law which we had been able only to break, and He makes us sharers in His fulfilment of it, covering us, like the mother bird, with His wings (Matt. xxiii. 37), so that even we, by His fulfilment of it, fulfil the law. “The more we do, work, strive, we only increase the unrest of the soul which we are seeking to quell. That unrest can effectually be stilled only by the knowledge of God’s grace and mercy freely manifested to us in Christ, and of the merits of Christ imputed to us. The law having been fulfilled by Christ, it is no longer needful that we should fulfil it (that is, of course, for our justification); all that is required is, that we should cling to the fulfiller of the law, and become like Him, for Christ is righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.”¹³ The manner of that justification through Christ, on which the regenerate must base their assurance of salvation, had already been clearly defined as being by imputation in a Disputation vom freien Willen of the year 1516.¹⁴ “The righteousness of believers is solely of God’s imputation, as we read in the 32d Psalm, ‘Blessed is the man to whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity.’ Hence every saint, as we see from Col. iii. 3, 4, is consciously a sinner, but unconsciously righteous; sinner in actuality, but righteous in hope; in himself a sinner, but righteous by the imputation of the merciful God.”

By means of this thought of the righteousness of Christ applied by the solemn sentence of God to believers, and imputed to them for good, the practical end of comforting the troubled conscience is gained. If it is the case that one who has been born again of the Holy Ghost has power indeed to do good works, and gradually to gain the victory over his own sins, while yet, by reason of the imperfectness of his attainment, he can base neither upon it nor upon his state of regeneration his assurance of salvation, then he must fall back upon the value in God’s sight of Christ’s perfect righteousness, which as having been wrought for our benefit—with a view to the purchase of the forgiveness of sins to the Church—is by God’s grace imputed to each individual believer as the ground of his acceptance. The stand-point and the main elements of this religious self-estimate are just those which we find in the cases of Bernard, of Staupitz, and of Wessel. Luther’s view varies from the views of these men in the following minor details. First of all, Luther constantly looks at the comparative imperfection of the works of believers, while his mediæval antecedents directed their attention chiefly to the relative perfection of such works wrought in the believer by grace, although bidding men disregard their meritorious value. This difference has reference only to the practical application of the one thought which lies at the foundation in both cases, and which, according to the circumstances of individuals, and the prevailing ethical tendencies of the age, is always calculated to counteract alike self-righteousness and scrupulosity in the consciousness of salvation. That Luther always fixed his attention on the latter antithesis, was the natural outcome of his own personal needs; but he must also, at the same time, in doing so, have met with a certain disposition in his contemporaries, that dissatisfaction with self which is the indispensable prerequisite of all religious reformation. The other detail in which Luther differs from his other mediæval predecessors can be explained as follows:—While they as well as Luther trusted in God’s grace as the principle of the religious life, they were able to satisfy themselves with a general view of it, representing to themselves the good works of the regenerate (perfect in their kind), as in continuity and congruity with grace. But as Luther invariably viewed good works in the light of their imperfection, and therefore in their incongruity with the grace of God, he naturally required a more concrete view of God’s grace as the counterpoise of imperfect works. This he found in the development of the thought of justification through Christ.

But our apprehension of the matter by Luther’s help would be incomplete were we to disregard the following feature in his view. Even in his earliest utterances he maintains that the faith of the regenerate is not merely the receptive organ for the appropriation of justification through Christ, but is at the same time also the active instrument of all Christian life and action. Faith is the earnest of “Christ in us,” as well as of “Christ for us.” “Where faith is in the heart, there in like measure is Christ also present, on whom we trust in that faith; but where Christ is present, all can be won.” Faith attains what the law enjoins. As righteousness brings forth good works, so Christ through faith sufficeth thee that thou mayest be just. Then thou livest, doest, sufferest, not for thyself, but for Christ; wherefore is nothing thine—everything is Christ’s alone. The righteousness that is of faith is indeed bestowed without works, yet still it is given with a view to works; it is a living power, and cannot therefore remain inactive.”¹⁵ This view is not insisted on merely for the purpose of guarding against the mistaken inference that the inclination to continuance in sin might possibly be conjoined with faith in Christ’s merit.¹⁶ Luther needed this twofold view of faith also in order to secure for the moral works of the regenerate that unconstrainedness, the absence of which betokens effort after work-righteousness. The becoming attitude of the regenerate person is accordingly distinguished from effort after work-righteousness, by his trust in Christ, in such a manner that faith supplies to him, not merely the assurance of his salvation, but also the spontaneous impulse to well-doing.¹⁷ In the period preceding the Reformation controversy, Luther was just as firm in invariably representing the imputed righteousness of Christ as preceding the imparted righteousness, as he is in distinguishing between the two ideas.¹⁸ So that we must not lay any special stress upon the fact that occasionally there occurs a deflection into the Catholic usage of language; as, for example, when justificatio in spiritu is identified with vivificatio novi hominis, but is distinguished from the forgiveness of sins which precedes it; or when on one occasion even the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is made to depend upon its actual infusion.¹⁹

24. If it seem desirable or necessary, in order to bring out more clearly Luther’s thought about justification by faith, to compare it with some feature of Roman Catholic Christianity, then we must cite, not the Romish doctrine of justification, but rather the sacrament of penance. For as the evangelical act of faith in his justification through Christ establishes the believer’s assurance of salvation against the abiding consciousness of sinful imperfection, in like manner in that sacrament the joint actions of the penitent and the priest serve to procure for the believer who has fallen from grace the forgiveness of his sins—that divine sentence of acquittal which restores him to the state of grace. Luther’s attack on indulgences led directly to a controversy about the deeper bearings of the sacrament of penance,—to which sacrament the institution of indulgences is in fact only an appendage; and the overthrow of the sacrament of penance which Luther achieved in the course of the controversy, consists simply of logical deductions from his practical fundamental principle of justification by faith, which he ever resorted to as regulative, even at the period when he still, for a short time, continued to leave unassailed the traditional sacramental praxis in its outward forms. But if now the sacrament of penance is an integral part of the very life of the Church,²⁰ the analogy, the opposition, the concurrence of the Lutheran thought of justification by faith, becomes unintelligible if one does not always represent it to one’s self as a practical experience of the living member of the Church of Christ. It is when they come to consider the form of the sacrament of penance that the polemical divines of the Romish Church might be able to recover from their astonishment on finding that the evangelical system of doctrine maintains a free judgment on God’s part—the pronouncing of sinners to be righteous—to be the antecedent ground of their regeneration, or, in other words, the determining principle of their real transformation into children of God. For in the sacrament of penance also the restitution of righteousness in the case of the believer who has relapsed into sin, is, ostensibly at least, the result of absolution pronounced by the priest as God’s representative. In other words, the judgment pronounced—that the sinner is no more a sinner—is in point of time made to precede that infusio gratiæ justificantis which is expected to follow. Now, in the praxis of the sacrament of penance the contritio which precedes absolution is made to appear as the proper work of the penitent, in order that he may be predisposed to receive grace. Of course the theory has never conceded that hereby a meritum de congruo is acquired which obtains grace as a reward; and Melanchthon’s criticism²¹ directed against that view is uncalled for; nay, rather the Catholic doctrine distinctly asserts that contrition is produced by antecedent grace. Practically, however, the procedure prescribed in the sacrament of penance leads penitents not to bring their repentance from a consciousness of grace, but to regulate it by the law; and those who are earnestly minded will be led by such a standard, and by the exhortation to bring into consideration every separate sin, to a degree of self-introspection and of detestatio peccatorum, which is aimless in itself, simply in order to attain to the due measure of disposedness for gratia justificans. Luther’s exposition is directed against this tendency insomuch that he raises the value of absolution and of faith in absolution above the striving after a mechanical completeness of contritio.²² Even while still holding by the Catholic sacrament of penance, he declares himself to this effect: If assurance of the forgiveness of our sins depended on our sense of the completeness of our repentance, we should by that road draw ever nearer to despair and not to assurance. When, therefore, a sinner is distressed in his conscience, believing himself to be tainted with all evil, what he must do is to repose faith in the priest’s sentence of absolution, inasmuch as the priest has by commission and authority of Christ power to absolve. In connexion with this matter, Luther accentuates very strongly the principle that it is always faith in Christ which justifies, and that the sacraments, as Augustine says, are effectual, not because they are received, but because they are received in faith; that repentance is not so necessary as faith; that one had better not think of resorting to this sacrament of penance unless he be sure of his faith; and that it is abused if the priest is unable to establish the faith of the penitent. The importance here attributed to faith is, from the circumstances of the case, very far from meaning that the process of absolution is to be regarded as merely a reflex of subjective elevation of spirit; for here faith is reposed upon Christ’s sentence of absolution received through the priest, and thus upon the power of the keys given by Christ to His Church: hereby it is indirectly referred to all that Christ has done in founding the Church. If, now, anticipating a little, we remember how, in the pietistic form of Lutheranism, we anew find men in the position of inquiring whether their faith be sufficiently strong, and whether, in order to certainty of forgiveness, a deliberate continuousness and particular shade of sorrow be required, not only is it indubitable that Luther’s view is just as much opposed to the pietistic as to the common Catholic misrepresentation of contritio, as a feeling that is to be deliberately worked up; it is also manifest that sound consciousness of his standing within the Church excluded the possibility of such pietistic questionings, so far as Luther was concerned. He who belongs to the Church as an active member of it, even though he may on the Catholic theory have fallen from grace by mortal sin, needs only, through the revival of his faith, to lay hold of that free gift of the forgiveness of sins, or of absolution, which is lodged with the Church as the abiding fruit of Christ’s obedience, and which is applied to individuals by his ministers, or even by any individual Christian man whatsoever.²³

Although, however, Luther in his writings of the year 1518 that bear upon this subject, accepts the current forms of the sacrament of penance, in order to remodel that institution in the direction we have indicated, and to substitute for its mechanical unspirituality or aimless self-torture a purely religious regulation of the consciousness of salvation, still the tendency of the practical religious principle which he had set on foot lay, even at the beginning of the controversy, beyond the limits of that sacrament. Of the ninety-five theses directed against Tetzel, the two first run as follows:—“When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ says Do penance, etc., He means that the whole life of His faithful ones on earth ought to be a continual and unceasing penance.—And such language on His part neither can nor ought to be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, to confession and satisfaction, as those are exercised through the intervention of the priestly office.”²⁴ What leads him to this proposition is the practical uselessness of the distinction between mortal and venial sins;²⁵ the more immediate explanation of the meaning of that statement is to be found in the view taken of another matter connected with the sacrament of penance. It is asked—What is the condition upon which it is possible for a person who has fallen from grace to seek forgiveness at all in the sacrament of penance, when as a sinner he must be supposed to be quite incapable of seeking it? In answer to this, Luther affirms²⁶ that the sorrow of repentance, and grief, and despondency, on account of sin, presuppose the secret working of divine forgiveness and restoring grace. Even when God appears to condemn the man, He is beginning to declare him righteous; while He is wounding him, it is His will to heal him; whom He slays, him He makes alive. So that when man feels himself near unto condemnation, grace is already at work upon him, and while he apprehends an outpouring of wrath, the mercy of God is actually laying hold of him. Therefore, when tempted to despair, he must seek peace in the Church’s power of the keys, in order that by means of Christ’s promise, declared unto him by the priest, and by means of faith in that promise, he may attain to certainty of that forgiveness which really had been granted before the absolution was pronounced.

In all this, Luther seems to say nothing that is not implied in the Catholic doctrine, that repentance is a result of grace. But in reality this view goes directly in the teeth of the Catholic discipline, inasmuch as that view of the origin of repentance, which had previously been current only as a theory, is here brought to bear in a practical way. For one gains assurance of grace only by faith. If, therefore, repentance has its foundation and its value in grace, then it must proceed upon the faith that is conscious of that grace, and it cannot be regarded as a legal work. Now, herein the theoretically assumed antithesis between the state of sin and the state of grace in the penitent melts away. For if, on the one hand, the believer’s well-doing is defiled with sin, and that sin yet looks for forgiveness through the mercy of God,²⁷ then, on the other hand, the distress on account of sin shown by one who has fallen from grace, is really a proof of his gracious condition, and is elicited by a very distinct sense of the worth of that goodness to which sin is opposed. For, as Luther maintains in various utterances of the years 1517-1518, only that repentance is genuine which proceeds from love of righteousness and of God; for the repudiation of sin has force and genuineness only through the positive presence of its opposite; the penitence which flows from contemplation of particular sins, from legal fears, and from apprehension of future woe, only makes men hypocrites and greater sinners than before.²⁸

If, accordingly, Luther will have it that repentance be extended over the whole life, such an exhortation must apply to him who, being in a state of grace, continues in the love of God and of goodness even when he falls into sin; or who, at least, recovers it anon; who, accordingly, not merely leads a life of well-doing, as far as is possible for the continued imperfectness of this earthly life, but also duly repents of his sins. And here in these circumstances comes into action, as the religious regulating principle of practical life, the faith of justification through Christ—whether that justification be declared by a priest or by a brother; or whether it be appropriated in the immediate contemplation of the atoning work of Christ. For faith directed to these matters is the Christianly religious recognition of our dependence upon God in ethical respects. This faith, accordingly, on the one hand, appropriates the assurance of salvation to the man who is troubled with a sense of sin, and, on the other hand, secures him against self-righteousness, and against the tendency to think lightly of his faults, or to make small account of sin. Further, it is in itself the subjective motive for the doing of those good works to which the believer feels himself called in his redemption; and it nowhere is found in its genuine form without exerting this influence. But in order that this faith may operate easily, and, as it were, spontaneously, it is requisite that the believer, throughout the whole compass of his religious feeling and moral conduct, should feel himself to be within the Church, which, as founded by Christ, “is filled with the forgiveness of sins.” But it is not this subjective function of faith, as the power capable of producing good works, that is the real occasion and object of the divine sentence of justification; on the contrary, the objective ground of the justification of the believer thus living and acting within the Church, is the grace of God as it is effectual through Christ and his work of reconciliation; while faith is the organ by which the regenerate person falls back upon the grace of God, as made effectual by that mediatorial work, and becomes conscious within himself that that grace is available also for him. Objectively, this faith never exists in the life of the believer unaccompanied by the desire to produce good works, and a measure of capability to produce them; subjectively, however, when the believer by faith consciously seeks and finds the assurance of salvation in Christ, he altogether disregards the value of those works, whatsoever be the perfection or imperfection which he feels to belong to them.²⁹ This subjective separation and antithesis between faith and works, does not, however, mean that faith belongs to the understanding only, and works alone to the will, for faith also is an act of the will—an act of obedience to God. But in faith the will rests immediately upon what the grace of God has wrought and revealed; while in good works it goes forth into the world, following in them God’s purposes and commands. We shall see further on why in this connexion, thus understood, the thought of justification can be expressed only in the form of a divine sentence. Meanwhile, it is obvious that in the position described, the believer represents to himself God’s sentence only in such a way as to think of himself as the sinner who is the object of God’s declaration of justification. The synthetic judgment in this form will by and bye prove itself to be the necessary condition under which the thought of justification or forgiveness of sins solves the moral difficulty and hopeless logical contradiction which present themselves in real repentance as conceived of by Luther.

25. In his practically religious view of the believer’s justification through Christ, Zwingli coincides with Luther in such a way as to be at one with him in essential particulars, while the diversity of view which may be remarked as existing between them only confirms the identity of their religious tendency. If, indeed, one sets out with the intention of finding in the writings of the Reformers, in the first instance, a doctrine of justification, or even assumes that to be possible; or if our knowledge of the position of these two men as Reformers were to be held to be completed by an explanation and comparison of their theological systems merely, we could not maintain the assertion we have made against Schneckenburger,³⁰ Zeller, and Sigwart. In saying so much, I disregard the fact that the first of the three I have mentioned rests his proof of the divergence between the Lutheran and Reformed theological systems too much upon the sporadic use of very secondary authorities, without ever taking his bearings from the practical attitude within the Church assumed by the Reformers. The second is even so unfair as to bring Zwingli’s Theologoumena into comparison with the “Lutheran Dogmatic,” as that is to be learned from familiar text-books;³¹ while the third, by exaggerating Zwingli’s connexion with Picus of Mirandula, makes Zwingli’s reformation movement utterly unrecognisable. I quite agree with Schneckenburger in thinking that the doctrine of justification is neither the common palladium of the Lutheran and Reformed Confessions, nor the ultimate fundamental bond of union between them; for that doctrine, though indeed defined alike by both, is set forth in different connexions,—a circumstance which ought to be kept in view as not unimportant in our comparison of the two doctrinal systems. Since, however, systems of doctrine are not causes, but rather effects, of Church reformation, since the reformation of the Church arose rather out of a definitely expressed practical religious consciousness on the part of its leaders, whereby a change was wrought in the attitude of Christian communities, or bodies of men, towards the thing which up till then had been understood by the name of Church, our verdict upon the identity or diversity in principle of the tasks undertaken by Luther and Zwingli will depend upon our answer to the question whether they are at one with each other in the view taken by them of that particular subjective religious principle which was the lever that set the Reformation in motion. In comparison with this, it will then seem a matter of secondary moment that these two men should have cherished and pursued different principles regarding the extent and method of the Church’s renovation, and regarding the division of theological doctrines, according to the several premisses that their special theological education and religious development afforded them, as well as according to the different local circumstances of their respective spheres of labour. With regard to this, I may venture to cite Hundeshagen’s masterly estimate of Zwingli,³² and take along with me the parallel between Luther and him there wrought out, in order to show, in accordance with my task, that Zwingli no otherwise than Luther makes the life of the believer within the Church to be religiously regulated by reference to the righteousness of Christ—to the reconciling efficacy of His life and death.

If we are to proceed rightly and truly in this matter, we cannot adopt that method which has been chosen by those who have hitherto treated of Zwingli’s theology, the method, namely, of culling from all possible writings of Zwingli detached passages about his idea of faith, about the relation of faith to the transeunt or immanent righteousness of Christ, about the meaning of Christ’s satisfaction, and about divine election, etc., and thereupon setting up the discrepancies that occur, as if they were radical departures from the teaching of Luther. Such procedure betrays the fundamental mistake into which those writers have fallen—the mistake of supposing that in the question before us what we have first to consider is a theological doctrine, and not the statement of the believer’s dominant verdict passed upon himself from a religious point of view. For theological doctrine will always of necessity represent the relation between the objective and subjective factors of justification in the shape of succession in time; the characteristic mark of a purely religious apprehension of the matter, on the contrary, is the simple realization as present of all objective factors in the subjective consciousness. Now, in order to discover this aspect of Zwingli’s idea of justification, we must restrict ourselves to the Auslegung und Gründe der 67 Schlussreden oder Artikel (1523); also the Commentarius de vera et falsa religione, taking along with these his sermon von göttlicher und menschlicher Gerechtigkeit (against Grebel and Manz, 1523). Now, those sixty-seven articles are quite a model of a Christian confession of faith, in giving such a view of all that Christ is to believers, as, while well arranged, is at the same time free from the trammels of theological system; this particular structure thus guarantees that, with regard to the question which at present occupies us, we shall find the religious point of view, as such, followed out. Upon the opening proposition that Christ, as the only Way to blessedness, constitutes the substance of the Gospel (1-5), follows that view of Christ which represents Him as the Head of the Church in which the Gospel is preached (6-16), as the sole High Priest and Mediator, whose sacrifice is not to be repeated, and whose honour is insulted by invocation of the saints (17-21); and, with the twenty-second article, that Christ is our righteousness, and that our righteousness is not founded upon works of our own, we reach the climax of the whole representation, which from that point proceeds to the criticism of particular ordinances, with special reference to abuses which had sprung up within the Church. In the mutual relation of the articles 19-22, Zwingli’s Auslegung develops the views which must be recognised as determining his place as a Reformer. In the Commentarius also, Zwingli, in his representation of the matter at present in hand, gives it the form of direct religious dealing with one’s-self, although the scientific aim of his book might have led him away on another track. After having explained the word religion, he defines God as the all-working First Cause of all things, investigates the position of man in relation to God, explains the thing religion in general, and then, in the locus de religione Christiana, lays hold of the relation of Christ to the believer as pignus gratiæ Dei, in such a manner as to show from a comparison between Christ’s worth and the wants of the believer, who is always hampered with sin, that practically Christ is to the believer the fully satisfying present ground of salvation. No exception can be taken to this view of the matter from the fact that the thought of Christ’s satisfaction is developed here as well as in the Auslegung; for this satisfaction is used merely to explain the principal fact, that the believer finds his salvation in Christ alone. That this is the practical bearing of Zwingli’s line of thought in the Schlussreden and in the Auslegung, is shown by the circumstance that Christ’s title as Head of the Church is treated before his title as Mediator of reconciliation. The latter title is thus taken up only in so far as it presents itself to the member of the Church, or to the member of Christ the Head.

If now it has thus been shown that Zwingli undertakes to exhibit, in the very light in which Luther exhibits it, the subjective religious certainty of the believer that Christ is his righteousness, it ought not to be forgotten, on the other hand, that, as the obverse of this view, he undertakes in the Auslegung to refute the doctrine of the saints’ mediation. Such an attempt is never met with in this connexion in Luther’s writings. Here again one might perhaps begin to suspect a radical discrepancy of view between the two Reformers; all the more so, because it is well known that Herzog and Schweizer would fain make the divergence to consist in this—that Luther’s Reformation activity was determined by reaction against the Judaistic perversion of the Christian life through work-righteousness, while Zwingli’s, on the other hand, was determined by recoil from its paganistic perversion through saint-worship. Zwingli’s Auslegung, however, which ought to be the chief authority for this statement, gives no just ground for it; for he justifies his rejection of the cultus of the saints (which is based on the assumption of the meritorious character of their works before God) on the ground that there could not possibly be any such merit;³³ and on this matter his assertion differs in no respect from the fundamental principle that Luther had at heart. If accordingly his repudiation of saint-worship does not rank as co-ordinate with his repudiation of work-righteousness, but is subordinate to it, then Zwingli’s tendency to the former is seen to be only an accidental result elicited by special circumstances from a fundamental idea that was common to him with Luther.

Zwingli then proceeds to show³⁴ that we—believers like all other creatures—must despair of ever fulfilling the law regarded as the eternal and immutable will of God; for who that still lives in the flesh could possibly be so entirely at one with God as to have love to Him always and above all things? Of course, even the law is a sort of gospel, for it is only useful to us as enabling us to know the will of God in its requirements, but the Gospel, properly so called, is the tidings of God’s grace through Christ, who, as God-man Mediator, has fulfilled the law for us, endured the punishment which we had deserved, and appeased the wrath of God. If Christ, then, is our righteousness, and the pledge of God’s grace towards us, any merit in our works which are due to God is not to be spoken of—unless, indeed, we would have it that Christ died in vain. Nay, more, inasmuch as on nearer view we find that in all our good works there is imperfection and sin, we should, in the alarm of our consciences, be led to despair of our salvation, and to regard ourselves as outcasts from God’s presence, were we not enabled in faith, that is, in perfect confidence, to rely upon the fact that Christ has fulfilled the law for us, and borne all our work and all our wickedness, and that through the grace of which Christ is the pledge we are made righteous, and brought into a state of peace with God by faith. For renunciation of all claim to merit in ourselves is nothing more nor less than faith. “For that man should ascribe nothing to himself, but simply believe that all things are governed and ordered by the providence of God, can come only of an attitude of complete trust and self-surrender towards God; can come only of a firm assurance in faith that God is doing all things even when we do not see His hand. Such is faith, which grows and increases as soon as it has been sown; not that the increase is ours, but of God… . And the more faith grows, the more also does our activity in all good things grow; for the greater thy faith the fuller is the presence of God within thee—the greater also in thee is the working of everything that is good.”

This manner of describing faith by reference to the truth of God’s all-working providence, does not exclude the significance of Christ as a Saviour, but actually includes it, as in fact the means whereby that providence reaches its effect. “Christ is made unto us of God wisdom—wherefore each individual ought to keep to His way, and not devise a new one for himself. He is made unto us also righteousness, for no one may come to God who is not righteous, and neither can any man be righteous in himself. But Christ is righteous, and He is our Head; we are His members, and thus as members draw near to God, through the righteousness of the Head. He is also made our sanctification, for He has sanctified us with his own blood. He is also made our ransom, for He has redeemed us from the law, from the devil, and from sin… . Thus are we made free from the law—not in order that we may no longer do that which God commands and wills, but we are more and more set on fire with the love of God, … so that we now do what God wills… . The believer is thus redeemed from the law, in order that he may no longer fear its condemnation, … but he actually fulfils the commandments out of love, not by his own strength, but because God works in him the love, the resolution, and whatsoever good thing he does: and in all that he achieves he is well aware that it is not his work; and that whatever is accomplished is the work of God.”

Now, this attitude of the believer who is conscious of being a member of Christ, is entirely in accordance with Luther’s delineation of it, inasmuch as faith, which appropriates the righteousness of Christ, counteracts the anxiety of the conscience that has been awakened by the law’s demands (compare also iii. p. 195), and renounces all merit of works, which yet by the power of God do proceed from faith, through the Holy Ghost;³⁵ and the coincidence between Zwingli and Luther extends also to their manner of regarding pœnitentia as a work that is the proper business of the whole lifetime.³⁶ While Christ, on the one hand, represents pœnitentia as a common task incumbent on us all; and the Gospel, on the other hand, connects the forgiveness of sins with the atoning work of Christ, the two really coincide with one another, because that self-knowledge which leads us to despair over our sins, is just as much brought about in us by Christ as our assurance of God’s pity rests upon His work. As, however, we are never without sin, the Christian’s business of self-improvement must always be accompanied by self-examination and by the forgiveness of sins. Est ergo tota Christiani hominis vita pœnitentia: quando enim est, ut non peccemus? In contradistinction from this, the pœnitentia enjoined by the Pope, and usually performed at Easter, is pure hypocrisy—for it rests exactly upon ignorance of one’s own heart, and superficial views of sin, and ceases as soon as it has been gone through.³⁷

26. It is well known that the counter-reformation of the Romish Church was invariably, in the first instance, directed to the purpose of bringing back to the confessional those who had joined the evangelical Church. This shows that the Romish Church is aware that her power over the consciences of Christians is founded specially upon her sacrament of penance. The reformation of the Church, accordingly, was possible then, and is intelligible to us now, only by means of a clear perception of that religious consciousness of Christ’s significance, which, as an immediate and inevitable consequence, leads men to see the superfluity and hurtfulness of the Romish practice of penance. Zwingli, like Luther, was a reformer of the Church only in virtue of the fact that, in the thoughts which we have been tracing, he possessed a lever, by means of which he could overthrow and abolish the religious authority of the Romish priesthood, by means of the direct authority of Christ as Mediator of reconciliation, and as the Church’s Master. For this purpose his idea of God’s universal working in providence did not suffice him, useful though it had been found to be, for maintaining the religious dignity of Christ as against the futile worth of men’s own works and the mediation of saintly intercession, and characteristic though it be as a feature of his entire theology.³⁸ But Sigwart’s assertion is erroneous and misleading, when he says that the universal operation of God is the fundamental principle of the Zwinglian doctrinal system, and that Zwingli represents God as being the supreme good of the universe in the sense that from Him alone every good thing, all being and life, all faith and all blessedness, immediately do proceed.³⁹ For the idea of God’s universal activity is no specifically Christian idea, and however true it may be that in Zwingli’s employment of it it has a directly religious, and no merely philosophical significance, it still stands in no immediate or direct relation to the Christian Church. If, then, Zwingli is a Church-reformer, and if he constructed his religious system of doctrine in the interests of Church reform, we might naturally expect that as theologian also he would take up another attitude towards the doctrine of God than that which is attributed to him by Zeller and Sigwart. Those writers ought to have kept well in mind the words of Zwingli at the beginning of his locus de religione Christiana, in his Commentarius de vera et falsa religione (iii. p. 179): Habet hæc ætas ut eruditos multos, qui passim velut ex equo Trojano prosiliunt, ita multo plures qui se omnium censores faciunt; ac dum per impietatem renascens verbum accipere nolunt, pietatem tamen simulantes, falsis confictisque suspicionibus piorum aures implevit. Alii enim, dum strenue docemus, ut omnis fiducia in Deum patrem nostrum sit habenda, procaci suspicione prosiliunt, cavendum esse a nobis; omnem enim doctrinam nostram ad hoc tendere, ut Christum exterminemus, et Judæorum more, ut unum Deum credimus, sic unam solummodo personam credendam inducamus. Alii vero, dum propensius omnia Christo tribuimus, vereri se dicunt, ne nimis temere nimium ei tribuamus. Utrique tamen sic pronunciant, ut ipso judicio videas eos esse vel audacter ignaros vel scienter impios. From this it appears that the fact of God’s universal operation is with Zwingli the ultimate ground of salvation and the ultimate support of faith, only in so far as it includes in itself the Person and work of Christ as the definite and more proximate ground of salvation, and as the immediate object of faith: so that to him God’s universal operation is the ultimate first cause only as being the at once religious and scientific principle of the Christian’s view of the universe—only in so far as the almighty God is also the subject of that wise and righteous care and deliberate ordering of the entire universe, which is directed towards the design of bringing men into fellowship with God by means of His Son,—a fellowship unto which man was originally created.⁴⁰ The thought that the all-working God guarantees by His eternal election the salvation of men, is accordingly the principle of Zwingli’s theology only in so far as it is inseparably conjoined with the positive Church doctrine that the community of the elect has its being simply in Christ; but both these views are gained by means of that teleological view of human history which is dominated from the very beginning by the thought of Christ as divine. If, then, we find occasionally in the writings of Zwingli statements which are interpreted by Zeller and Sigwart to mean that “the election by God of the individual is the proper object of faith,” or, that “it is only election that justifies and blesses,” the view taken by those critics, that Zwingli therein of set purpose reduces to unimportance the significance of Christ,⁴¹ is, at the very outset, condemned by Zwingli himself, and, indeed, in no very complimentary terms.

The emphasis laid upon the thought of God’s universal operation with reference to the elect naturally leads to certain divergencies between Zwingli and Luther on other points; as, for example, in the view taken of the sacraments: but the concentration of religious consciousness on Christ’s righteousness, which characterized the Reformation movement, is not to be regarded as having been brought about by Zwingli and Luther by divergent methods, merely because the former strives to deepen the significance of Christ to the believer by pointing out the solidarity that exists between the all-working God and the Mediator of salvation. The assurance of justification by faith through Christ, as it is laid hold of by the believer who already has a standing in the Church, and is striving to do the will of God, is to both men alike the common lever by means of which they seek to achieve the reformation of the Church;⁴² for the Reformers coupled with that subjective assurance of salvation the fundamental view of the Church as being the fellowship of believers who have been sanctified by God; and, as a consequence from this view, repudiated the importance for the salvation of the individual traditionally ascribed to the Church’s legally constituted organs, as well as the authority conceded to them. That the Church was essentially the communion of saints or believers, was of course for the then Catholic Church indisputable, for it was the doctrine of the Apostles’ Creed; and the Reformers, in giving currency to this view of the Church’s constitution, kept strictly within the indubitable limits of ecclesiastical tradition. As, however, the peculiar shape which the polity of the Church had, as matter of fact, taken, had led to an impression that the congregation of the faithful existed only as a result of the clerical functions of government and of administration of the sacraments, men were at that time accustomed to understand by the Church (out of which salvation was impossible) that aggregate of constitutional rights and sacramental privileges which is lodged in certain representatives through whose instrumentality alone every saving privilege must be held, and all assurance of salvation regulated. But as the subjective consciousness of salvation was maintained in the Reformers, in reciprocal connexion with their idea of the Church as the fellowship of believers, considered as deriving its rules directly from Christ in entire independence of the sacramental authority of the priests, there naturally resulted a change also in the view they took of the means of grace, as these had hitherto been recognised within the Church; and with that change their attitude towards the existent instrumentalities of the Church as matter of fact became different. He who in faith lays hold of Christ as the decisive ground of salvation, as the sure counterpoise to all consciousness of abiding sin, as the religious principle that regulates all man’s striving after God, forthwith requires to be assured of fellowship with his fellows, who (just as he knows himself to have been) have been regenerated by the grace of God to be the people of Christ, but does not require the support of any Church mechanism, and much less a mechanism in which a privileged class, standing in the place of God, grants salvation to the laity. By showing the authority assumed by the clergy (more especially in the sacrament of penance) to be uncalled for and unjustifiable—by means of this positive view of the real nature of the Church—the Reformers achieved the Reformation; in other words, they so brought their followers to a right position of subjective certainty of salvation, that the original idea of the Church came at once to have a leading place amongst those that swayed their spirits.⁴³ And though in this train of leading thoughts the traditional practice of confession continued to be allowed by Luther, still it was practised with an altogether different significance, in such a way that the absolution was not intended to be a solemn sentence passed in the plenitude of divine authority, but simply that general announcement of the good news of salvation through Christ, upon whom all faith and all believing communion rests. But Zwingli also in the same direction, a few years afterwards, in his Schlussreden, resolved the sacrament of penance into the receiving of spiritual counsel and encouragement at the hand of those intrusted with the cure of souls, without departing from his own type of doctrine.

If, then, it is asked what was the leading principle of the Reformation, and of that entire phenomenon within the Church which arose from it—Protestantism to wit,—it is not at all sufficient to describe it with any such vague and bald formula as that it consisted in assigning value to the religious disposition, above every outward expression of it, and above every outward means of producing it.⁴⁴ For justifying faith, as the Reformers understood it, is a frame of mind that is essentially determined by regard to the historical (and thus objective) appearance of Christ. The peculiarity, however, of the Church-reformation achieved by Luther and Zwingli, is by no means at once expressed in that subjective consciousness of justification through Christ by faith, however perfectly and truly apprehended. We cannot hold it up as the principle of the Reformation and of Protestantism at all, unless we take it in its close reciprocal connexion with that objective conception of the Church which regards it as being before everything, and before all legal ordinances, the divinely-founded community of believers. In order to express accurately the one principle of the Church-reformation, we must take both these together in their inseparable connexion and reciprocal influence; on the one hand, the thought of the certainty of salvation in the individual believer—a certainty which is independent of and rises above all mentionable instrumentalities, being determined solely by Christ; and, on the other hand, the thought of the community of believers under Christ—a community appointed and foreordained by God. That this line of thought dominates the whole of Zwingli’s work as a Reformer is shown with all possible clearness in the outline of the Schlussreden, given above (p. 153), and in their Auslegung. Luther demonstrates the connexion of these two views to be the main point of his whole religious teaching by his fundamental propositions, to the effect that no one attains unto faith unless as having a standing in the Church by means of the Word of God, and that God has given this key of the kingdom of heaven to the community of believers.⁴⁵ With respect to the theory of the Reformation, the several schools of modern theology very naturally split at once. It is therefore perfectly unintelligible to me how a theologian who is avowedly defending Church-Protestantism, and striving against any degradation of the Church to the level of a school, such as is carried out by the extreme left and the extreme right, can fail to comprehend, in his view of the leading principles of the Reformation, the evangelical idea of the Church.⁴⁶ For that which is to be the chief thing in the final result must also be thought of in the first principle; otherwise it cannot be recognised as an end, but, at most, as only an incidental phenomenon. Of course one must in that case get rid of the apocryphal schema of two principles—the material and formal—whether of Protestantism or of Reformation theology; Dorner does not say very clearly whether it is to the former or the latter of these that the said principles belong. The two thoughts which he designates by that name serve as principles neither for the one nor for the other. The material principle of the Reformation and of Protestantism has been already named.⁴⁷ It is certainly of the utmost importance to it that it should be in harmony with Scripture; but not of so great importance that it should be in harmony with that exclusively, and have nothing to say to ecclesiastical tradition.⁴⁸ Even Zwingli’s accentuation of the exclusive authority of Scripture in the teaching of the Church, does not exclude the fact (which must unavoidably be assumed before we can historically understand the influence he exercised) that his interpretation of Scripture is both directly and indirectly dominated by influences of tradition. The exclusive recognition of Scripture as the source from which all knowledge of divine truth is to be derived, as above and against all tradition, is the fundamental position only of evangelical theology, which has its feet firmly planted on the ground of the Reformation Church; and it came to be wrought out in the course of the German Reformation as the sole rule for the Church only when all hope of compromise with the Romish Church was seen to be delusive. But then, again, neither is the doctrine of justification the fundamental principle of the Reformation theology either of Luther or of Zwingli. How is it possible (leaving other points out of sight) to deduce from that thought Luther’s doctrine of the Supper, or the stress which he laid upon it? Or how does this fit in with the asserted dominant position of that doctrine in his theology? Luther’s theological first principle is rather the thought of the abiding revelation of love as the essence of God in Christ; and this—as has been shown above (p. 159)—is the case with Zwingli also, subject of course to the modification which is produced by the introduction into all his teachings of the idea of God’s universal operation.

The partisans of a radical school-theology are naturally unable to discern how the reformation of Luther and Zwingli, that originated in considerations of religion, was determined by positive Church and Christian conditions. Those, on the other hand, who loudly proclaim the fact that they belong to the Lutheran Church, but in reality are attached only to the interests of a quasi-conservative party within that Church, are very strenuous in denying the identity of the Reformation activities of Luther and Zwingli, on account of the differences which separated them—differences which are to be found in subordinate details of the religious confession they uttered of their belief in justification through Christ by faith. This is not the place to correct all Stahl’s recent misrepresentations of Zwingli, made with the view of showing his total diversity from Luther; for the antitheses set up by Stahl⁴⁹ between the views of the two betray defective knowledge of Luther’s views, as well as prove that no fair and thorough-going study has been devoted to the works of Zwingli, whom he traduces. I limit myself to the following points, which bear more immediately upon the subject in hand. In the first place, it is not true, what Stahl affirms, that by the works, the merit of which he denies, Zwingli chiefly means ceremonial observances merely, and outward literal compliance with the law; and is by no means explicit in denying to those really good works which are wrought with pious intention, all merit and all share in procuring the salvation of the soul (p. 26). The 22d of the 67 Schlussreden sufficiently meets this slander; affirming, as it does, that the works we do as believers are so far good as they are Christ’s, while, so far as they are ours, they are neither right nor good. In the explanation of this article in the Auslegung, Zwingli refers to what he had said on the twentieth article; but in that he expresses himself with the utmost correctness upon the idea of merit. In the second place, it is not true, what Stahl asserts, that Zwingli hardly at all contemplates faith in its aspect as appropriation of the redemption wrought by Christ (p. 25). This assertion is contradicted by his exposition of the 19th and 20th articles throughout, by his locus de religione Christiana, in the Commentarius de vera et falsa religione, and by the article de remissione peccatorum, in the Expositio fidei Christianæ—his last work.⁵⁰ In the third place, it is not true, what Stahl asserts, that Zwingli himself never appropriated justification by faith in the sense in which it is now held by the Lutheran and Reformed Churches, and recognised by them as the kernel of the evangelical reformation, and that if a lively sense of the significance of justifying faith had ever been present with him, he could not afterwards, when he developed his doctrine of predestination, have denied to faith (as he has done) all share in the work of our salvation (p. 27). Stahl here refers to certain passages of the treatise de providentia Dei (iv. p. 122 sq.) which Zeller and Sigwart also apply in a similar way, of which we have spoken above (p. 154). In the tract referred to, Zwingli so speaks of the mutual relation between election and faith as to make it appear that faith is the result and pledge of election, and that the declarations concerning justification or salvation by faith are to be understood only of God’s election and grace.⁵¹ But this is very far from meaning that the value of Christ’s redeeming work is to be regarded as indifferent to faith, for not only is that work again and again brought into relation with faith throughout the course of the entire discussion, it is even conveyed in the passage we have quoted by the word liberalitas. But it did not need to be treated in a thoroughgoing way, for Zwingli was writing de providentia Dei, and not de satisfactione Christi. Moreover, even at the time when, as his critic would have it, he was elaborating his doctrine of predestination, Zwingli has fully met Stahl’s demand for a testimony on the subject of justification by faith in the above-cited passage from his expositio fidei. Further, the complaint raised against Zwingli—that by his thought of the universal operation of God he has excluded or lessened the importance of Christ’s redeeming work—is so effectually met in the passage already quoted from Zwingli (p. 153f), that Stahl himself cannot escape Zwingli’s own condemnation, to which I now expressly call the attention of all Stahl’s followers. To crown all this, Stahl, far from being Lutheran, is Arminian, when, in his rectification of Zwingli’s teaching, he adopts the principle that justification ought to be represented as being brought about by faith, for Luther just as much as Zwingli always represents it as brought about only by Christ through faith as a condition, which last is produced by the Spirit of God. A due understanding of Zwingli’s leading positions, moreover, leaves it open to no sort of doubt that he, just as much as Luther, in summing up the various elements of his subjective consciousness of salvation, apprehends Christ, who is our justification, with the historical features of His obedience and atoning passion. As he works out this thought only synthetically as a matter of religious consciousness, but never analytically as a doctrine of justification and reconciliation, we fail to find in his writings certain ideas which were needed to work out the doctrine dialectically; as, for example, the idea of the imputation to him who believes now, of Christ’s work finished once for all. But from this we ought not, like Sigwart (p. 157), to infer that Zwingli, when he speaks of Christ as our righteousness, invariably intends “Christ in us” as the ground of “actual righteousness.” And even supposing that such expressions did occasionally occur in Zwingli,⁵² he would not therein be different from Luther, who also, as Köstlin shows,⁵³ occasionally attributed justification to the Spirit of God operating in the believer.

It is certainly a noteworthy circumstance, and one that demands investigation, that Zwingli gives weight and prominence neither so frequently nor so strongly as Luther does to the thought of justification through Christ by faith. They who always test Zwingli by Luther as a standard, and who turn to the disadvantage of the former all his divergencies from the latter, are sure to take advantage of this circumstance also for their purpose, and if they cannot, like Melanchthon, go so far as to deny the essential agreement of both in their consciousness of justification, they will at least imagine, like Stahl (p. 22), that Zwingli borrowed those thoughts from Luther in a merely superficial way, and never really cherished any hearty regard for them. Along with this, they make the supposition that the tendency which Luther originally displayed towards work-righteousness, was the only form of piety that was possible within the Catholic Church of the West; and that Zwingli, accordingly, who never exerted himself so earnestly to establish a righteousness of his own, betrays a more superficial piety than does Luther, even when judged by the standard of the Catholic Church. But while this supposition implies in itself a pernicious mistake, we ought never to allow ourselves to forget that they were altogether special circumstances which led Luther so unweariedly to proclaim the comfort of troubled consciences in the good news of justification through Christ. It arose from the circumstance that Luther had pursued so long and so passionately the opposite course of seeking to make himself just with God through the merit of his ascetic (and therefore not even socially profitable) works. From his recollection of the energy with which he had sought to carry out this error of his monkish life, Luther derived a great part of that persistency, which he showed in laying so frequent and urgent stress on the consolation of the gospel and the method of its appropriation. Since Zwingli had not experienced in his own life the fruits of an error like Luther’s—an error with which his monkish profession, his nominalistic education, and his hypochondriac malady had much to do,—since Zwingli’s early life was not spent in struggles of conscience, arising from a false notion of piety, it was to be expected that he should manifest, in all his activity as a reformer and as a theologian, that balance of mind, even in the treatment of the various heads of doctrine, which elicits from the blind partisans of Luther charges of littleness of soul or of rationalism, but yet does not by any means prejudice the central significance of his consciousness of justification.

Stahl has suffered himself to make the assertion that Zwingli is on this point merely a superficial imitator of Luther (in spite of Zwingli’s well-known declarations to the contrary effect, upon his entire independence of Luther),⁵⁴ because Œcolampadius has asserted that he has Luther to thank for his views on justification. How utterly unlike the genuine orthodoxy of Luther is the modern Lutheran exclusiveness of Stahl and his school! The former did not feel secure in its Church-consciousness unless it was able to prove that all the articles of the evangelical faith had from the very beginning obtained currency within the Church; and that, accordingly, from the earliest times there had existed within the Church the tendency which was brought by Luther to determine the contest against Romanism. Even while their scholastic aims in theology were growing narrower, the older Lutherans always maintained this Catholic feeling. But now, forsooth, respect for Luther renders it necessary to assume that in the thought of justification through Christ by faith he propounded something that up to his time had been utterly unheard of! In that case Luther was merely the founder of a sect; and however accurate may have been his new and higher knowledge, he broke the continuity of the Church by it—and knowingly, too, if Stahl’s assumption be correct. But Luther himself was conscious of the contrary;⁵⁵ Stahl’s notion, therefore, that Luther was in his day the only source of true views upon justification, must be regarded as false.

But, over and above this, it has already been shown that a consciousness of the exclusive value of God’s grace may be traced from Augustine downward through the middle ages, and that this very consciousness was the immediate means of bringing about a reaction against ascetic work-righteousness during the closing decades of the fifteenth century. The influence of this conviction can be seen even in that popular feeling against monkery, which was widely diffused even previous to the Reformation, and which betokened religious earnestness, not a frivolous disposition. Even the cloister itself did not escape the influence of this revulsion. Luther notoriously was indebted to an old monk for the first consolatory reference to it in the midst of his struggles of conscience; and it was Staupitz, his patron, who aided him in further developing his views. It cannot be doubted that Zwingli also was brought to a similar conviction by tradition within the Church.⁵⁶ That conviction so derived was in his case, however, so identified with the exclusive authority of Scripture, that as soon as he gave himself up to the business of a Reformer he was able in the same breath to proclaim the dominion of Scripture over the Christian life, and the exclusive saving efficacy of Christ. Thus being saved the necessity of swinging to an opposite extreme in order to get rid of a gross error, and apprehend the proper basis of piety; and being able as a theologian to treat in a systematic manner, and to attribute due importance to all those parts of religious knowledge which escape Luther, it is easily seen why Zwingli was not always recurring anew, like Luther, to the consideration of the doctrine of justification through Christ. To put down and depreciate the one on account of his divergence from the other on the point we have indicated, betrays, therefore, not merely ignorance of the circumstances of the Reformation, and injustice in the appreciation of individuals; it betrays also that utter want of judgment which expects and demands mechanical uniformity in the spiritual life.⁵⁷

Still, it was not the appropriation of the traditional thought of justification solely through grace in Christ that made either Luther or Zwingli to be reformers of the Church. The fact that this thought could be traced all through the middle ages, up to Augustine, shows that they could not possibly have intended to break with the Western Church upon a fundamental point. But in order that the truth should become in the spirit of either of them a reforming fact, something more was necessary. For one thing, the conviction of justification by grace had to be established as scriptural; and with the help of Paul, and also by means of the idea of the reconciliation of the justice and mercy of God in Christ’s passion, it had to be put in decisive contrast against the value of good works, in order that the current doctrines of justification and merit might be refuted. And then the religious conviction of justification by grace—presupposing faith or confidence towards God—had to be put into reciprocal relation with the thought of the Church or community of believers, in order to root up those institutions which deprived the Church of her proper character as the community of believers. Thus far the Reformation denotes a specific stage in the Church’s development; and (inasmuch as the Church was in a great measure prevented by the authorities which were then in the ascendant, from yielding to this development) it implied a rupture with the previous stage. The Anabaptists and Socinians, on the other hand, broke with the historical Church in principle in separating themselves from the Christian fellowship of the Roman Empire. For the Anabaptists, instead of aiming at a community of persons set apart by God by His Word and by His Sacraments, aimed at the formation of a sect consisting of actively holy and sinless persons; while the Socinians, instead of the Church, aimed at the formation of a school of persons theologically of one mind upon the doctrine of Christ.⁵⁸ In order, then, specifically to distinguish the Church-work of Luther and of Zwingli from these shapes of radical and revolutionary reform,⁵⁹ I think I may venture to affirm that neither Zwingli nor Luther either discovered the thought which was the leading one with them as Reformers, or rediscovered it merely by study of the Bible, but that they imbibed it from a tradition current within the Church; and further, that the Reformation application of the religious consciousness as fixed only upon grace and upon Christ, to put aside all contrary institutions and school traditions, is quite within the limits of the Church character of Christianity; for it stands in reciprocal relation with the original and true idea of the Church as the community of persons set apart to holiness by God.

27. If the lever of the Reformation had been a doctrine of justification by faith, similar to that which we now possess fully wrought out, one might expect at least that the learned Melanchthon would have set it forth with peculiar completeness and in adequate dialectic relation with the doctrine of reconciliation. But this is not the case: he invariably treats the doctrine of Christ’s work, as such, not apart from the thought of justification, but usually simply hints at it, and takes it for granted, as the means of justification, as the object of faith, while his whole view is dominated by the Reformation fact of subjective consciousness of justification through Christ. Thus Melanchthon also almost always keeps in full view the historical basis of the sense of justification when stating the latter, and so regards remissio peccatorum, OR justificatio, OR reconciliatio, as the immediate effect of Christ’s work, just as much as the appeasing of the wrath of God and satisfaction for sin are so; while the doctrine subsequently developed (which is the prevalent one in the dogmatic text-books) assigns to the active and passive obedience of Christ an immediate effect only upon God, but upon man merely a mediate one. In harmony with this attitude are the expressions in the first edition of the loci theol. (C. R. xxi. pp. 155-158), to the effect that he who in obedience to the gospel puts faith in God is justified already, and that the grace with which God accepts Christ embraces all sanctified persons in Christ, and for Christ’s sake. We have a further indication of the churchly character of the consciousness of justification, in the remark that the faith which justifies, in other words, which appropriates justifying grace, is not possible nisi renovante et illuminante corda nostra Spiritu Dei (p. 162). The expression in the third edition of the loci theol. (1543) points in the same direction: Cum dicit, justificamur fide, vult te intueri filium Dei sedentem ad dexteram patris, mediatorem interpellantem pro nobis, et statuere quod tibi remittantur peccata, quod justus, i.e. acceptus reputeris seu pronuntieris propter illum ipsum filium, qui fuit victima (p. 743). It is one of the conditions of religious faith that what it contains in thought should be represented as present. Now Christ, as He is believed to be present, has the attributes of His exaltation; if, therefore, He is to be regarded at the same time as the Mediator of forgiveness of sins, this can be done only because the exalted Head of the Church, as its intercessor, continues to maintain the atoning efficacy of His sacrifice. Finally, Melanchthon occupies the same standing-ground as Luther and Zwingli, in respect that in conjunction with a rejection of the Romish sacrament of penance, he regards the whole Christian life, in so far as it is vetustatis nostræ mortificatio et renovatio spiritus, as being pœnitentia, so that also the negative side is subordinated to its principle on the positive side; for no real turning away of the soul from sin is conceivable unless produced by the working of God, and more especially by the Holy Ghost (pp. 215, 216; see also the second edition of the loci, p. 489).

These indications just as certainly convey the true idea of Luther’s point of view as they are unknown to the later theology of the Lutheran Church. Their judicious use would have led to the result of placing the Church (within which one is conscious of justification through Christ, and within which one does pœnitentia as the duty of the renewed man) in a position of priority to the salvation of individuals, and of bringing into immediate relation with the reconciling work of Christ. The theological thinking of Luther and Melanchthon, however, does not carry them so far. For Luther never gave himself to the business of framing a theological system; and the loci theol., with the loose concatenation of which even Melanchthon contented himself, can pass for a theological system only in a very improper sense of the word, for they are not dominated and arranged by the idea of a purpose in revelation. So far as either of them apprehended the task of framing a doctrine of justification, and thus, by means of a chronological order of conditions, try to account for the subjective consciousness, they restrict themselves to the doctrines de lege, de evangelio, de fidei efficacia, on which, however, also the doctrine de pœnitentia throws some stray lights. But the analysis, by means of these notions, of the consciousness of justification, implies an important change of the locus in which that Reformation question originally presented itself. For in the order of those ideas, fides justificans comes to be represented as the beginning in time of the new life; and the temporal process by means of which this result is brought about from previous causes, finds its place between the period of the state of sin and the period of the state of grace, just as this is properly the locus of the Catholic idea of justification. Now it was his apologetical relations to the position and purpose of this latter idea that led Luther to pursue the path in which Melanchthon followed him. In the controversy upon absolution and the sacrament of penance, Luther had defended his own practical consciousness of justification through Christ as a basis of Christian life in the Church, against that most influential institution of the Romish system. He had proved that in justification we must look away from our works, although it was taken for granted that the believer would perform them. The controversy afterwards extended to the question regarding the idea of justification. But as that idea referred his opponents directly back to the thought of good works, and as they supposed in the justification of the sinner an actual change of the individual with respect to his free-will by the grace of God, Luther conceded thus much to them, that he suited his own similarly designated conception of the subject as nearly as possible to their scheme merely giving a place of first importance to the consideration that justification by faith lays the foundation for the ability to produce good works, in such a manner that the pacification of the conscience that has been in trouble and pain on account of sin is at once achieved.

These points of antithesis and of analogy with the Romish doctrine of justification, connected themselves with the need for a manner of representing them that should be as popular and practical as possible. Both purposes were attained when the schema of the reciprocal relation between law and gospel was brought into the Reformation thought, and any reference away from the reconciliation through Christ that is pronounced in the gospel to the view and meaning of the historical process itself, and its necessary relations, was omitted. In none of the repeated expositions of the doctrine is it deliberately and directly brought into relation with the idea of the Church; at the same time, we ought not to forget Luther’s grand principle, that the gospel, as the immediate objective ground of justification by faith, has a strict relation with the Church of Christ, inasmuch as the Church is founded on that gospel. The same cannot be said without qualification of the law which normally presents itself in the form of the Mosaic decalogue, but which can also be traced in the natural consciousness of mankind. For, contained in it, the Reformers recognise the eternal will of God,—that ordering of the moral world which continues to be the same from beginning to end; and they raise this thought (which of course is not in itself a new one) to the dignity of a comprehensive standard for our moral and religious view of the universe. Still that naturalistic assumption does not influence the relations at present in question, and to consider the law as decalogue really removes little from the sphere of Christian life those processes of moral and religious life which resulted in connexion with the law; for even in the Old Testament there is recognised a connexion between law and gospel; and even at that epoch justification by faith in the promises is asserted. Now, as the true Church of God is considered to have existed from the moment that promises of salvation are recorded in the Bible narrative, the view of the Reformers is, that that change in men which they explain by reference to the working of law and gospel takes place within the Church. This confirms the Church basis for the course of justification and renovation of life which the Reformers directly set forth, although they do not close the series of representations which I have indicated in the above-mentioned way. I have found myself compelled to enter upon this investigation, not merely in order to bring out the historical state of the case, but also in order to show at the outset the spuriousness of a view of the Reformation doctrine which, by a narrower limitation of the definition of the Church, gives rise to the impression that one who is under the religious influence of the law must necessarily still be altogether unrelated to the number of those who are saved.

God’s word of revelation, then, throughout all the stages of its development, has consisted both of law and of gospel; of which the former includes all those precepts which God enjoins on mankind, bearing upon the honour and worship due to Himself, and also with a view to the maintenance of a duly ordered fellowship between man and man, with the express intention that men should gain eternal life by the literal fulfilment of these precepts. The gospel includes the promise of the grace and mercy of God, of forgiveness of sins and unmerited salvation through Christ, to men who, as sinners, vainly seek to attain everlasting life by means of the law. If, accordingly, law and gospel are, in respect of their matter, mutually opposed, they yet in respect of their form are closely connected with each other. For the law, although it cannot be fulfilled by the sinner, produces in him consciousness of his sin, alarm at the demerit of it, and despondency in the matter of his salvation, and disposes him to embrace the gospel by faith. The gospel, on the other hand, while it awakens faith, does not limit itself to the task of bestowing upon that faith forgiveness of sins through Christ, and, by assurance of this, pacifying the conscience. It proceeds further to bestow the gift of the Holy Ghost, in order that the soul may exhibit that reciprocity of love towards God which evinces itself in the fulfilling of the law. Although such fulfilment is of course always imperfect, it is still obligatory, because the law is of everlasting obligation; but, on account of its defectiveness, the acceptance even of the believer with God is based solely upon the righteousness of Christ, which, by his faith in its worth, is imputed to him as his own by the solemn judgment of God.

Now, although this genetic representation of justification by faith ultimately leads up to that attitude of the religious subjective consciousness which has been shown to be the motive power that produced the Reformation, it is yet worthy of remark that in the first instance the doctrine we have been sketching sets itself to explain the manner in which the sinner is made righteous; in other words, in form and tendency it approaches the Romish doctrine, which, while bearing the same name, is really so different. The Reformation doctrine is fully warranted in excluding all intermixture of merita de congruo and de condigno, for the former are impossible when the presupposition of sin is rightly understood; while neither of them is conceivable when the strictness of the divine judgment is kept in mind. Moreover, the conception of justification as actus forensis, as a sentence of God, is based not only on the testimony of Paul, but also on the necessity of providing that the life of the believer should be protected against the errors of self-righteousness on the one hand, and of the tendency to despair of salvation on the other. On this account the declaration of the sentence of acquittal must be ranked above regeneration by the Holy Ghost, and regarded as prior to it. Although, however, in these respects we must recognise an inner suitability and logicality in this view, we cannot extend the same praise to the assertion that through the gospel not only is forgiveness of sins bestowed, but also the Holy Ghost unto newness of life; or, in other words, that in the faith which appropriates justification is contained also the ability and inclination to well-doing. For it is merely asserted and proved by Bible-texts that the two results always go together; but then the statement of the doctrine by Luther and Melanchthon never enters on the consideration that even in justification, as such, there must be traced a telic reference to regeneration and the fulfilling of the law by faith, in order to secure a strict sequence of ideas in the doctrine. Instead of this, the two facts, though declared to be invariably conjoined, are regarded as altogether distinct in respect of the purposes which they serve. Justification is wrought in order that the believer’s conscience may be pacified; while the gift of the Holy Ghost, as the ability to produce good works, is conferred in order that God may be well pleased, or that His eternal law may be kept. As long as these two elements are not united in one thought, the doctrine of Luther and Melanchthon is incomplete, and fails fully to commend itself to men’s convictions as against the Romish doctrine, in which the idea of justificatio is directly framed in such a way as to satisfy at once man’s need, as also the demand of God’s law, by laying the foundation for the ability to produce meritorious works.

When we compare with this style of doctrine Zwingli’s treatment of the question, we are met by the same difficulty, although in another form. Zwingli (Comm. de vera et falsa religione, Opp. iii. p. 191 sqq.), by connecting the ideas evangelium and poenitentia, adheres to the line of thought originally adopted by Luther, to the effect that the gospel, as the announcement of the reconciliation accomplished by Christ, and as the medium that conveys the power of the Holy Ghost, and awakens trust in the pardoning grace of God, also supplies at once the motive and the standard for the sinner’s self-knowledge; while also as preached by the most innocent of men it gives sufficient motive for a change in the whole tendency of life. This expresses exactly the external connexion that is implied in the association between justification and regeneration which Luther and Melanchthon also assert. He does not get beyond this mode of viewing the matter, even when he describes the new life as the condition under which alone the pacification of the conscience, which the gospel works, can take effect upon any one. Filium mittit, qui Dei justitiæ pro nobis satisfaciat, indubitatumque pignus salutis fiat. Verum ea lege, ut nova creatura simus, ut Christum induti ambulemus. Est ergo tota Christiani hominis vita pœnitentia; quando enim est, ut non peccemus? (p. 194.) For this condition is not derived from the direct object of faith, to wit the pacifying mercy of God. For this reason Zwingli presently adds the supplementary formula (p. 201), Quod Christiana religio nihil aliud est, quam firma spes in Deum per Christum Jesum et innocens vita ad exemplum Christi, quoad ipse donat, expressa—a formula in which the diversity of the motives of hope and of well-doing in the atoning work and in the example of Christ is unmistakably expressed. It is true that he immediately passes on to point out a closer connexion between the two, quod pœnitentia peccata non abluit, sed spes in Christum, quodque pœnitentia custodia est, ne in ea recidas, quæ damnavisti. Still he does not lay the chief emphasis on this thought, that a good walk serves as the means of sustaining one’s faith, for he immediately afterwards gives it out as a hard problem how to solve the antinomy, quod Christi redemtio cuncta possit et efficiat quæ ad salutem attinent, et contra tam constanter innocentia requiratur (p. 202). For they who are constantly laying stress upon faith in Christ seem to surrender the necessity of striving after moral excellence; while those whose thoughts are directed especially to the latter are apt to become doubtful as to what was the advantage of Christ and his work. Zwingli appeals to the actual experience of faith in order to meet this difficulty, and thus evades the necessity of a theoretical adjustment of the relation that has been spoken of. Nor do we find matters more fully explained in his later dissertation in the Christianæ fidei expositio (Opp. iv. p. 61 sqq.) Here he simply defines saving faith as being at the same time the disposition to perform good works. But this combination is merely asserted, not vindicated. At all events, the following is hardly sufficient: Fides a solo Dei spiritu est. Qui ergo fidem habent in omni opere ad Dei voluntatem velut ad archetypum spectant (p. 61). Fides enim cum spiritus divini sit adflatus, quomodo potest quiescere aut in otio desidere, quum spiritus ille jugis sit actio et operatio? Ubicunque ergo vera fides est, ibi et opus est non minus, quam ubi ignis isthic et calor est (p. 63). For inasmuch as faith had been at the outset defined as trust in God and Christ—in other words, as the faculty of resting on God’s omnipotence and mercy,—any additional reference to the work of the Divine Spirit in producing well-doing in the believer, however right it may be in itself, and however characteristic it may be of Zwingli’s special work as a reformer, is yet only a mere appendix to the primary definition of faith; and the necessity of the new thought cannot be inferred by deduction from our Christian intuitions.

By Luther’s sense of the disparity of his doctrine and of the need for bringing into closer connexion the two thoughts of justification and of renewal by the Holy Ghost, I think it is possible to explain the fact that in certain of his expressions Luther defined the idea of justification in a way identical with that which was subsequently elevated to the rank of a principle by Andreas Osiander. That Luther, previous to the year 1517, in spite of his chief accentuation of imputed righteousness, occasionally also gives expression in a way that was then customary to the idea of a real infusion of righteousness, has been already shown above (p. 139). These expressions reproduce themselves, too, even in the times of his reformation activity, and particularly are to be found in writings of the years 1519-22.⁶⁰ This chiefly arises from inaccurate consideration of those data of the subjective consciousness which at other times are carefully kept distinct from each other. We being in faith conscious of justification through Christ, and, at the same time, through faith possessors of the divine Spirit and of the love which fulfils the law, Luther brings the two together in such a way as to make justification or forgiveness of sins dependent upon the Spirit of God, which is in believers the efficient cause of actual goodness. It is only in the passage we have quoted below from the Exposition of the Psalms, that Luther approaches that objective mode of representation in which Osiander subsequently elaborated the thought. Although the controversy with Osiander that ensued shows that indefiniteness of doctrine, under certain circumstances, leads to important results, yet Luther’s episodical leaning, which he here displays to a scientific development of the thought of justification, which, in fact, overthrows his own special religious interest therein, proves also still more clearly that his mode of representation in connexion with the relation between law and gospel is at least incomplete. For this reason Luther was not able to free himself from the discrepancy, even when Melanchthon had an opportunity to correct that distorted view when it had been put forward by John Brenz. The latter had propounded, as against Melanchthon, the view fide justificari homines, quia fide accipiamus spiritum sanctum, ut postea justi esse possimus impletione legis, quam efficit spiritus sanctus. Against which Melanchthon⁶¹ affirms, in a letter dated May 1531, Ideo sola fide sumus justi, non quia sit radix (justitiæ), ut tu scribis, sed quia apprehendit Christum, propter quem sumus accepti, qualis sit illa novitas, etsi necessario sequi debet, sed non pacificat conscientiam. Ideo non dilectio, quæ est impletio legis, justificat, sed sola fides, non quia est perfectio quædam in nobis, sed tantum quia apprehendit Christum… . Quando haberet conscientia pacem et certam spem, si deberet sentire, quod tunc demum justi reputemur, cum illa novitas in nobis perfecta esset. Luther appended to this letter a note of his concurrence; but even that is accompanied by a hint of another tendency. He conceives that nulla sit in corde meo qualitas, quæ fides vel caritas vocetur, sed in loco ipsorum pono ipsum Christum et dico, hæc est justitia mea, ipse est qualitas et formalis, ut vocant, justitia mea, ut sic me liberem ab intuitu legis et operum, imo et ab intuitu objecti istius, Christi qui vel doctor vel donator intelligitur: sed volo ipsum mihi esse donum et doctrinam per se, ut omnia in ipso habeam. Sic dicit: ego sum via, veritas et vita; non dicit: ego do tibi viam, veritatem, et vitam, quasi extra me positus operetur in me. Talia in me debet esse, manere, et vivere. The striking thing in this declaration is not that Luther postulates such an immanence of Christ in believers—for he ceases to maintain the error of making the forgiveness of sins dependent on that,—but he separates himself from Melanchthon and approximates more closely to Osiander, inasmuch as he would fain pass over the intuition of the Christ of history, and thus treat as merely an initial stage of the believer’s consciousness, that has soon to be got over, that relationship between the believer and the historical appearance of Christ, which is justly described to be the abiding ground of the subjective consciousness of salvation.⁶² On this matter one may venture to apply to Luther what used to be said in the middle ages with reference to certain propositions of the Lombard: in hoc magister non tenetur!

Melanchthon had attempted to put upon a secure basis the actual fact of the co-existence of justification and good works in the believing subject, in the loci of 1535, by declaring the latter to be necessary to eternal life, although the believer’s destiny thereto is already fully guaranteed in his justification: Quos justificat, eosdem et glorificat. Itaque non datur vita æterna propter dignitatem bonorum operum, sed gratis propter Christum. Et tamen bona opera ita necessaria sunt ad vitam æternam, quia sequi reconciliationem necessario debent (C. R. xxi. p. 429). But this very utterance shows more clearly than ever the defect that has already been pointed out. If good works are necessary to salvation, then they can be thought of only as means or indispensable conditions thereto; but if they are only the accessories of justification, the alone ground of salvation, then they are just as little necessary for the one as for the other. This doctrine was maintained in its dialectical unprecision owing to the fact that in Melanchthon’s view the objective reference of the idea of justification never separated itself from the subjective. Viewing it from the subjective standpoint, he felt fully justified in allowing his disciple, Caspar Cruziger (1536), speaking of the fundamental religious experience, to say that penitence is the conditio sine qua non justificationis; and was able to acquiesce in the doctrine bona opera conditionem sine qua non esse justificationis. But yet when Conrad Cordatus took exception to this, applying as he did the above expressions to justification as God’s act (a thing we cannot wonder at in a theologian of the second generation, who from the first was conscious of having received only an objective doctrine), Melanchthon was in no position, owing to his sensitiveness, to adduce anything to clear this up.⁶³ At the same time, however, he took the warning; and, in consequence, neither maintained that formula nor reproduced the assertion of the necessity of good works for salvation in the edition of the Loci, 1543. In the Augsburg Interim of Charles v., the latter formula certainly made its appearance as a deliberate expression of Catholic doctrine; but when it was taken up in the Leipzig Interim of the Elector Maurice, such a sense of it was neutralized by the addition that “this in no way countenances the error that everlasting life is merited by the worthiness of our works.”⁶⁴ Yet this very addition placed the original thought in a more suspicious light than before. So that George Major and Justus Menius found that they had to face a general opposition when, on account of the frequent abuse of the doctrine of justification in the direction of Antinomianism, they had recourse to that very idea of good works.⁶⁵ It availed them nothing to make the qualification that they meant good works as means of salvation only in so far as by their means faith is maintained and protected from its own decay. While amongst those of the opposite side, Flacius, for example, gave expression to the still graver statement: instauratio aut renovatio est prorsus res separata a justificatione, and Amsdorf permitted himself his well-known absurdity of saying that good works are prejudicial to salvation, Melanchthon surrendered, as unaccustomed in the Church and easily capable of being misunderstood, the opposite formula which he had himself hit upon, and with entire self-satisfaction fell back upon the formula that we have justification and the inheritance of blessedness through and by Christ, and that good works are necessary by reason of immutable Divine command (C. R. viii. pp. 194-412). The formula concordiæ goes no further than this; and yet its assertion that final blessedness as well as justification depend solely upon faith, can hardly stand its ground when brought to the test of Scripture, to which itself appeals. The course of the vicissitudes and controversies that centre round this point accordingly shows that Melanchthon, even after he had attempted to indicate a closer relation between justification and moral renovation, stopped short at the vaguer formula, from want of dialectic power.

Yet another instance of want of precision is to be met with in the course of that phase of the doctrine of justification which is embraced by Luther and Melanchthon alike. The question comes to be asked, namely, At what period is he who (the troubles of his conscience about sin once ended) puts his trust in Christ objectively declared to be righteous by God? Upon this point Melanchthon, in a passage already cited (above, p. 173) from the first edition of the Loci, says: qui erectus voce evangelii credit Deo is jam justificatus est (C. R. xxi. p. 155). In the second edition it runs (p. 421): cum fide se mens erigit, donantur remissio peccatorum et reconciliatio. This can be understood in the same sense as the other. But, as shortly afterwards one reads, cum Deus remittit peccata simul donat nobis spiritum sanctum—rather is the thought brought into prominence that forgiveness of sins, or justification, as the act of God, is brought about at the moment when faith is wrought in each individual, and not previously in Christ’s work on behalf of all those who should believe. On this point Melanchthon throws no clear light, because he does not develop the doctrine of justification in connexion with the doctrine of reconciliation. As rather the subjective assurance of the benefits of justification, reconciliation and remission of sins is immediately secured in the intuition of Christ’s passion, he accordingly represents them objectively also as immediate effects of the passion of Christ. The benefits of redemption based thereupon must subsequently be appropriated in each case by the faith of the individual. Therefore, in the third edition of the Loci (p. 756) he says: justificamur in sanguine Christi, id est, placatur ira Dei per mortem filii. Sed hoc beneficium fide applicari oportet. But how is that view of the effect of the past passion of Christ intelligible at a time when we were without faith and did not even exist? There is missing here an intermediate thought which was discovered by Melanchthon no more than by Luther, and which indeed neither of them looked for, since they never allowed their theoretical reflection to work independently of their religious experience. So that by and by the other view comes into prominence, that justification takes place then first of all when the individual fulfils the condition of it in the possession of faith. But this thought was much later in becoming the prevailing doctrine of the Lutheran Church; only indeed after the effects of Christ’s passion upon God and upon man respectively had been so distinguished from each other, that only the effect upon the former was regarded as immediate, while the effect upon the latter was regarded as a mediate result of that prestation. But the formula that Christ at that time reconciled God with the sinful human race, and that God in consequence thereof imputes the righteousness of Christ at all times to those who perform the act of faith, is no doctrine of the Reformers. Neither, however, can the later doctrine be regarded as the true solution of the question proposed above. For, leaving out of sight the narrow and one-sided apprehension of the idea of reconciliation which is not contemplated by the Reformers, the doctrine involves itself in a contradiction which orthodox theologians have resolved only by a not very cogent distinction. They share with the Reformers the view that the justification of the individual comes before the bestowal of God’s Spirit. No one, however, can perform the act of faith except by the Holy Ghost. But if justification as the act of God is to follow upon the faith of the subject as a condition, then it must be assumed that God bestows upon the individual the Spirit, in order to the act of faith, before He justifies him. And this contradicts the view of the doctrine with which we had set out. In due time we shall see how the Lutheran theologians of the seventeenth century sought to escape this conclusion.

28. While the Reformers made justification in the course of conversion to proceed from the successive influence of law and of gospel upon the consciousness of the sinner, they were originally agreed on this point, that the Holy Ghost and faith are to be presupposed before the law can become effectual in producing repentance.⁶⁶ In substance this is identical with the thought which Luther had expressed in the form—that repentance, if it is to be distinguished from the hypocritical contritio in the penance of the Romish Church, must arise from love to what is good (see above, p. 143 f). The same thought is indirectly implied in the view expressed by Luther in 1516, that the gospel includes also the commanding and punishing will of God; that it alone interprets the law in its spiritual sense, and so attains to mortificatio or repentance. In the gospel the wrath of God is also made manifest (Rom. i. 18).⁶⁷ For no one can discern and lay to heart the wrath of God on account of sin, as expressed in Christ’s vicarious endurance of the punishment of sin, unless with very special faith he recognise at the same time the divine worth of Christ, which rendered it impossible that He should have deserved death, or have been overtaken by it in a merely incidental way. On logical, theological, and psychological grounds faith as a condition is indispensable to a due apprehension of the contritio that is to be gained from the law. The negation of sin by the will can be distinct and effectual only when it follows upon an affirmation of the value of goodness, its opposite. The work of the law in punishing and chastening the spirit is conceivable only as a consequence of the recognition of the absolute power of the lawgiver over the wellbeing of men. The transition from repudiation of sin to appropriation of God’s grace, is logical only when the spirit in contrition has already felt itself drawn by that power which is to be recognised as the only saving power. All this presupposes a degree of saving faith even as necessary to the due influence of the law in producing contritio. And it surely cannot be difficult to distinguish from this grade of faith the true and complete faith that accepts the forgiveness of sins through Christ. Our German Reformers, however, shrank from this task, certainly not to the advantage either of the doctrinal system or of the Church constitution that resulted from their activity.

This unfavourable crisis is indicated very characteristically in Melanchthon’s Unterricht der Visitatoren (published in 1528, C. R. xxvi. pp. 51, 52), where we read, “Although some deem that nothing ought to be taught before faith, but that repentance should be allowed to follow as a result from faith, in order that our opponents may not be able to say that we are taking back our former doctrine, we must yet look at the matter thus; though repentance and the law belong to our common faith (for one must first believe that God is who threatens, commands, alarms), it is yet expedient for the common rude man that such parts of faith as these should still be allowed to pass under the names, command, law, fear, etc., in order that all the more distinctly they may understand the faith of Christ, which the apostles call justificantem fidem, in other words, the faith which makes righteous and wipes away sin,—a result which is not brought about by the faith of the commandment and of repentance, although the common man gets confused upon the word faith, and asks useless questions about it.” In this declaration of Melanchthon the original view of the need of faith as a condition in order that the law may work its due effect in contritio is expressly recognised as the right one. But in the teeth of this original doctrine of the Reformation an opposite view is taken, and the idea of faith receives its narrowest limitation as fides justificans; and this from no regard to truth, but simply from an accommodation to the understanding of theologically and religiously uneducated persons. John Agricola had raised his protest against this view of Melanchthon; remembering Luther’s repeatedly expressed principle, that conversion proceeds from love of righteousness;⁶⁸ the manner in which Melanchthon evaded this weighty consideration betrays as much superficiality in his observation of the phenomenon in question as personal feeling against the unwelcome adviser. Finally, Luther’s conciliatory decision in favour of Melanchthon proceeds with obvious arbitrariness, and yet even then he adheres to his opinion that in contritio a certain degree of faith is an indispensable condition. Now, why could not this fact, even though it did seem dangerous for “the common rude man,” be preserved in the theological doctrine? That this was not done, particularly that the last edition (1543) of Melanchthon’s Loci is purged of all the earlier traces of the thought, is another circumstance that has been attended with evil results to theology and the Lutheran Church.

In giving this direction to the Lutheran doctrine, Agricola himself in fact helped, in the year 1537, by maintaining the superfluousness of the law to the way of salvation in exaggerated and perverse deduction from his original view. As Luther, therefore, could not avoid misunderstanding Agricola, who himself was not master of the tendency of his thoughts, it is easily understood that Luther only settled himself firmer in his scheme of conversion as derived from law and gospel, and entirely abandoned the view that such an apprehension of the law as leads to repentance is itself conditioned by a certain measure of saving faith, even although the subject himself has no more consciousness of that than he has of the hidden prevenient grace of God (see above, p. 143). Where this is not presupposed the law either works not at all upon the sinner, or it leads him to that aimless and hypocritical penitence the exercise of which within the Romish Church Luther had hardly shaken himself free of. The history of the Lutheran Church proves the truth of both these alternatives. The moral crudity which was to be observed throughout her orthodox period in the mass of her members, was the inevitable result of a preaching of the law that was incorrect in theory, and therefore ineffective as a whole. On the other hand, the pietistic methodism of Halle, which at last began to take seriously the Lutheran doctrine of conversion, involved men either in hypocrisy or despair. But another weighty result of that view, which Luther and Melanchthon adopted against Agricola’s earlier remonstrances, is the dislocation of the various elements of the idea of the Church. Without dwelling long upon this I may say that the evangelical conception of the Church is distinguished from the Romish in so far as the latter asserts simply a causal connexion between the necessary parts of the idea of the Church, while the former asserts a relation dominated by the idea of a purpose. Thus, while on both hands the Church is acknowledged to be the community of believers, the Roman Catholic thought finds expression herein, that the community of believers is always and exclusively the product of the Church as a mechanism, of the clergy as opposed to the laity, of the ecclesia repræsentans. The evangelical thought—as it is hinted at in the Augsburg Confession and its Apology, as well as in the Smalkald manifesto de potestate papæ et jurisdictione episcoporum, and counts upon an educated understanding—amounts to this, that if the community of believers is the end of everything that goes by the name of Church, it is also the ground thereof, and that therefore the ministerium verbi, in so far as it necessarily belongs to the Church, is only an instrumentality in the community of believers. The commanding importance of this connexion of ideas was weakened, and a door was opened for unevangelical practices, when the Reformers in concreto abandoned the thought that the congregations before them were Christian, however incomplete might be their moral condition; and instead of this set out with the presupposition that they had to do with the “common rude man,” who first of all needed to be converted to Christianity, and from whom the logically correct and alone effective view of the conditions of conversion had to be carefully withheld. In this way the Reformers gave to the office of the ministerium verbi a preponderance over Christian congregations which really makes the ministri verbi divini to appear as the cause, and the community of believers as the result. For this reason the Lutheran pastorate is always exposed to the temptation to imitate the attitude of the Romish clergy to the people in defiance of the Augsburg Confession and of the truth.⁶⁹

29. Calvin’s able delineation of the thought of justification took a different direction from Luther’s and Melanchthon’s. Notwithstanding this, the practical religious apprehension of that thought within the sphere of his Church-influence is not different from that which has been traced as common to Luther and Zwingli.⁷⁰ It is, indeed, impossible that Luther himself could have stated the leading article of the standing and falling Church more accurately than that has been stated by the framers of the Heidelberg Catechism, disciples and followers of Calvin (Qu. 60-64). The other Confessions of Calvinistic origin, the Gallicana, Scoticana, Belgica, Helvetica posterior, are very far indeed from altering in any way the religious contents, and the religious and moral effect of the thought of justification;⁷¹ their specialty lies herein, that they all either directly follow the order of Calvin’s theological system, or, like the Gallican, at least have a regard to it. Only the last-mentioned formula bears the character of a confession of faith, the rest are in point of form treatises theologically reasoned out, corresponding in kind to the Lutheran formula concordiæ.

And yet Calvin’s doctrinal delineation, however puzzling may be the sequence of its ideas to him who has been accustomed to the traditionary doctrine of Luther and Melanchthon, as that is to be found in certain text-books, is determined precisely by a chief regard to the original reformation phenomenon of the subjective consciousness of justification. The order of the themes and the mode of their treatment in the Institutio religionis Christianæ (third edition, 1559), is dominated by the inquiry after the antecedents which must have existed without and within the Subject, in order that he may become conscious of justification through Christ alone, as Luther and Zwingli have described it. But the fundamental thought of the Reformation is, to adopt the formula of Chemnitz (p. 139), that the regenerate becomes conscious of his acceptance with God of his righteousness, not in virtue of his really good works; not in virtue of the newness of life that has been implanted in him by the Holy Ghost; but only in virtue of the perfect obedience of Christ, which, by faith, he lays hold of as the alone ground of salvation. This thought presupposes in Calvin’s view the doctrine of the atoning work of Christ (Lib. ii. cap. 15-17); the doctrine of the regeneration of the believer (Lib. iii. cap. 1-3); the doctrine of the active life of the regenerate (Lib. iii. cap. 6-11). While thus the doctrine of justification by faith (Lib. iii. cap. 12-17) only now is brought up for the first time, it accordingly stands related to that phenomenon of the subjective consciousness which only now admits of having its religious value and its truth accurately determined. This is but logical. For if the consciousness of justification through Christ is practically opposed to any false attribution of value to the good works of the believer and to his consciousness of regeneration that might possibly be made, these elements of the Christian consciousness must first of all be objectively fixed and ascertained before we can posit any negation of their value towards the divine sentence upon believers, by means of an explanation of the reference and significance of justifying faith. Only the question arises, in judging of the systematic arrangement of these doctrines that is aimed at, whether the idea of justification ought not to have been developed on its objective side previous to entering upon the consideration of subjective facts and phenomena of consciousness, particularly in connexion with the doctrine of Christ’s work? Calvin never raised this question; for his whole discussion of the satisfaction given by Christ and upon His merit, upon the forgiveness of sins and the righteousness procured by Him, is dominated, not by objective theological considerations, but by others of a subjective and religious character—viz., that Christ did all this for us, earned it for us, although the reference to this purpose is not objectively stated in any actual expression.

The third book of the Institutio begins with the remark that as long as Christ, the bestower of the benefits of redemption that have been designed for us, remains outside of us in historical objectivity, He exercises no saving influence upon us. The application of His redemption to us is, on the one hand, brought about by the Holy Ghost, and, on the other hand, it is appropriated by faith. This mutual relation between man’s receptivity and the divine working of Christ, in whom is contained the plenitude of the Holy Spirit, and who therefore does all things by the self-same Spirit, answers to the Pauline figure that Christ is our Head, and we who are engrafted into Him and clothed with Him are His members.⁷² In other words, all that is said about regeneration, new life, justification applies to the individual only in so far as he is considered to be a member of the Church, and as the Church of believers is considered to be prior to the experiences of individuals. It is true that Calvin in the last (1559) edition of the Institutio, to which I have been hitherto referring, avoids giving expression to the idea of the Church in this connexion, reserving it for later development in the fourth book. On the other hand, in the earlier editions, which in their arrangement follow the order of the Apostles’ Creed, and in the Catechismus Genevensis (1541), which exhibits the same arrangement, the article upon the Church precedes those upon forgiveness of sins, upon poenitentia and upon justificatio, in such a way as decisively to dominate their meaning. It is worth one’s while to convince one’s-self by reference to the passages cited below, from the first edition of 1536, how completely, how accurately, and also how independently, Calvin had appropriated to himself the leading thought of the Reformation.⁷³ In the Genevan Catechism, indeed, the connexion between the doctrine of Christ’s work and the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins that the individual needs, is even made closer by means of the intermediate idea of the Church than it is in Calvin’s systematic works. In it the Church is set forth as the intentional result of the death of Christ, while forgiveness of sins is represented as the fundamental benefit of redemption for the members of the Church.⁷⁴ In comparison with these earlier expressions, I cannot regard the mode of representation that is followed in the last edition of the Institutio as an improvement. Calvin, of course, by no means intends to abandon his presupposition of the Church in the doctrines of regeneration, etc., for in the third book he always avails himself only of the figurative expression Corpus Christi, and the connected figures of the caput and membra corporis. If other proof were necessary, it might be pointed out that faith is not only traced to the influence of the Holy Spirit, but also connected with the promise, with the gospel, with the ministerium evangelii (iii. 2, 29), which is not supposed to exist outside of the Church. Moreover, the idea of the treatment of the notion of the Church in the fourth book is so framed that every intelligent person recognises in it not only a continuation of the doctrines of the third book, but also the sphere in which regeneration, etc., find place.⁷⁵ And yet a man so acute and circumspect as Schneckenburger⁷⁶ has regarded that Unio mystica of the believer with Christ, which Calvin considers to be implied in faith, as a purely individual process just as it is in the Lutheran view, without recognising the reference to the idea of the Church that is conveyed in the above-mentioned passages which he himself quotes (see p. 193, note), although these supply a very important psychological and ethical commentary on the “ mystery.” This shows that by means of the arrangement of doctrine that has been adopted in the last edition of the Institutio—an arrangement which follows that of Melanchthon’s Loci theol. and of the Sententiæ of the Lombard—the true Church character of Calvin’s theology has been less adequately expressed than in the earlier treatment which followed the order of the Apostles’ Creed. We have already been reminded (p. 176) that Luther and Melanchthon also, after all, indirectly recognised the priority of the Church to the conversion and justification of the individual, in deducing these results from the influence of law and gospel. But Calvin’s doctrine must still be preferred to theirs, inasmuch as he, along with Zwingli (p. 156), directly and objectively postulates, as necessary to an understanding of the justification of the individual, the existence of the Church and the fellowship of the individual member of the Church with Christ the Head. Calvin’s exposition of the doctrine of Christ’s work is framed in view of this. The sequence of the offices executed by Christ as our Redeemer, as given by Calvin, is different from what it is according to the Lutherans: Prophet, King, High Priest.⁷⁷ This order proceeds on the assumption that Christ’s general title as Lord includes under it His high-priestly office;⁷⁸ and it is logically in accordance therewith that justification, as result of the sacerdotium Christi, can be understood only when Christ’s Lordship over the believer is presupposed in virtue of his incorporation with the Head of the Church. It is true that neither Calvin nor Zwingli has stated so clearly as Thomas Aquinas (p. 56) did, that it was as Head of the Church that Christ satisfied Divine justice and acquired that merit which extends to us so that our sins are forgiven; their meaning, however, points entirely in this direction. Both alike either were ignorant of or overlooked this position of Thomas; their analogous doctrine is plainly derived from a combination of the leading idea of the Epistles of Paul to the Colossians and Ephesians with that of the Epistles to the Galatians and Romans, a combination which was rendered necessary by the obligation that lay upon them to make an exhaustive use of Scripture in the construction of their theology.