Luther. In the last article of the Augsburg Confession, a document mainly inspired by him and afterward receiving his entire approbation, it is declared that the power of the keys (ecclesiastical power) "has reference only to eternal goods, is exercised only by the minister of the Word, and 'does not trouble itself with political administration. The political administration, on the other hand, is busied with every thing else but the Gospel. The magistrate protects, not souls, but bodies and temporal blessings." Such a statement of doctrine would be regarded as good Protestantism in the United States to-day. But Luther, who could so implicitly trust God to overthrow the papacy, could not trust him to organize the Reform Churches. He hastened to put them under the charge of the prince elector. He said: "Your highness, in your quality of guardian of youth and of all those who know not how to take care of themselves, should compel the inhabitants who desire neither pastors nor schools to receive these means of grace as they are compelled to work on the roads, on bridges, and such like services. The papal order being abolished, it is your duty to regulate these things. Commission, therefore, four persons to visit all the country; let two of them inquire into the tithes and Church property, and let two take charge of the doctrine, schools, churches, and pastors.'

The four visitors were appointed. They were Luther, Melancthon, Spalatin, and Thuring; and thus Germany had four popes in place of one-wise and pious popes, no doubt, but, in that country, three hundred and fifty years have passed without witnessing the dissolution of that unscriptural marriage between Church and state which Luther celebrated. The mistake of Romanism was to put the Church above the state. The mistake of Lutheranism was to put the state above the Church. The one error produces superstition, the other breeds skepticism; and perhaps, it yet remains to be seen which of these two errors is more fatal to Biblical Christianity.

During the period of his negative work Luther's views

of Church government were democratic in the extreme; Church autonomy, pure and simple, seemed to be the reformer's idea. Let his directions as to the mode of selecting a pastor illustrate. "First seek God by prayer," he says; "then being assembled together with all those whose hearts God has touched, choose, in the Lord's name, him or them whom you shall have acknowledged to be fitted for this ministry. After that let the chief men among you lay their hands on them and recommend them to the people and to the church." Such were Luther's directions to the Bohemian churches in 1523; and the first ecclesiastical constitution produced by the Lutherans briefly says, "Let the faithful assemble and choose their bishops and deacons. Each church should elect its own pastor." How strangely Baptistic all this sounds! But when Carlstadt had been, in this precise manner, elected pastor at Orlamund, Luther, at the order of the elector, hastened thither to depose his old companion in the Gospel, for no other reason than that Carlstadt was the better Protestant of the two. Assembling the town council and the church, Luther said, "Neither the elector nor the university is willing to recognize Carlstadt as your pastor." "If Carlstadt is not our pastor," replied the town treasurer, "St. Paul is a false teacher and your books are lies; for we have chosen him!" It was true. Not only did the apostle, but Luther's own books contradicted his prelatical assumptions-notwithstanding which Carlstadt was deposed and banished.

But the theory of a civil superintendency over the churches could not stop at such mild acts of discipline. If it be the state's function to protect the Church, it is the state's prerogative to protect by force, for the state has no other efficient means of accomplishing that end when opposition is present. A civil protectorate over the churches includes, necessarily, the subordinate ideas of intolerance. and persecution; and, although, under favorable circumstances, a state church may charitably endure the presence of a rival sect, yet to do so is to contradict her own assump

tion of orthodoxy and authority; and, in the course of history, it has generally been found that nothing but an exigency and an opportunity are required to induce her to reaffirm and vindicate both.

Luther's ideas of toleration depended somewhat upon whose ox was gored. Defending himself before the archbishop of Treves, he said, "In what concerns the Word of God and the faith every Christian is as good a judge as the pope, though supported by a million councils, can be for him, for each man must live and die according to his belief." In his judgment upon the written petition made by the Suabian peasants, Luther said to the German princes: "As to the first article, you can not refuse them the free election of their pastors. They desire that these pastors should preach the Gospel to them. Authority may not interpose any prohibition upon this, seeing, indeed, that of right it should permit each man to teach and to believe that which to him seems good and fitting, whether it be Gospel or whether it be false." Roger Williams could not have said more. Yet, when the princes had denied the peasants these rights, and oppression had led to revolt in that much slandered "Peasant War," Luther counseled persecution with language and spirit as violent and unchristian as that of the pope. "Strike, stab, and kill who can!" he vociferated; and the Spanish Inquisition never witnessed madder cruelties than those that followed. Luther struck the scepter of malignant rule from the hand of Rome, but he picked up its broken fragments and wielded them. himself.

The doctrine of justification by faith alone ought to have led Luther directly to the theory of a converted Church membership. He confesses as much. In the shorter catechism he says: "Is then this visible Church a fellowship of those only who have been born again of the Holy Spirit? Such indeed it ought to be; but as in each individual there is yet much imperfection, so, also, in the visible Church, as a whole, there is much error and sin that remains to be

subdued by the Holy Ghost." He then proceeds to define the Visible Church. "The visible Church includes the collection of all those who have been baptized in the name ́of the triune God and bear the name of Christ. To them grace and life are offered, and their guilt is so much the greater if they remain in the death of sin or backslide." Simply to be baptized in the name of the triune God was, in his opinion, all that was necessary to Church membership.

His premises were correct. The wise and foolish virgins will mingle together, and unregenerate men will enter the Church; but on this account to sweep away a personal profession of the new life was unscriptural in the extreme, and made his conclusion most lame and impotent.

The truth is that, with the precedents of Rome still unconsciously influencing him, and with the constitution of a state Church before him, he could not insist upon a converted Church without tearing up his own system by the roots. The irresistible logic of the situation drove him to the end he reached.

In his argument in support of infant baptism his desperate emergency is again apparent. Feeling that faith, at all events, is indispensable to salvation, he says: "When the grace of baptism is offered to the child there is as little force or constraint used toward it as when the parents bestow other benefits upon it without first consulting its own will. The will of the parents or guardians is itself the will of the infant child." In his Table Talks his defense is

yet more labored. Faith comes by the word of God, when this is heard," he says, evidently referring to the language of St. Paul; "little children hear that word when they receive baptism, and therewith they receive, also, faith."

It is almost piteous to hear him who had so luminously exposed the sacramentarian and official salvation of Rome resorting to such shifts. The Catholics were consistent, at least. They put the efficacy of baptism in the priest who who administered it, and exhibited some texts which seemed

to support the doctrine. Luther discovered baptismal efficacy in the sponsor and the baptismal formula muttered in an unconscious infant's ear!

Upon the mode of baptism Luther's tergiversations are equally apparent. "Baptism," he says, "is a sign of both death and the resurrection. Being moved by this reason, I would have those that are to be baptized to be altogether dipped into the water, as the word doth express and the mystery doth signify." But in the situation in which he was placed the reformer's better opinion could not stand. Having lost sight of the idea of a converted Church membership, it became easy to sacrifice its symbol. Accordingly we find him who had so often affirmed that "whatever is without the Word of God is by that very fact against God" now saying, in the Shorter Catechism: "The mere water itself is of no consequence; and the mere external mode of application, whether by sprinkling or immersion, is a matter of no consequence."

Thus the many heads of Cochloeus go on uttering diverse things farther than we have time to follow.

He hotly denied transubstantiation, yet affirmed the real presence in the bread in a but slightly different manner, and held to his dogma so tenaciously that he struck down Zwingle's proffered hand of fraternity because that teacher insisted that the elements constituted a symbolic memorial only.

He sneered at the Romish confessional, and denounced it as a device of the devil. Yet he erected auricular confession in the new Church, binding the minister to secrecy, and making no difference between himself and Rome, except that what with Rome was a law, was, with Luther, a duty.

He repudiated the Roman ceremonies, masses, and holy days; yet, when it came to a settlement of the reform services, his own pen traced a new system of observances quite as unscriptural as those which he had abolished.

It would not be just to regard these remarkable incon