What

between the Papists and the Reformers, at the Diet of Spire, was exactly this: "You shall not teach religion in any other way than as the Pope permits. There shall not be any way of salvation offered save through the church and its sacraments. What popes and councils have settled shall not be controverted, nor appealed from their tribunals to the word of God. The human conscience shall not be free; it shall wear the yoke and the chain still, and rebellion shall be punished with dungeons and fire." Protestantism asserted the contrary of all this, and we have lived to see the day when that assertion is made good. The condition of the world, as respects religious truth and religious freedom is what "Catholicity" declare it should not be, what Protestantism declared it should be. The freedom thus asserted and thus won may have been abused; it is none the less a grand achievement. The activity in religious thought and life thus superinduced may not always be in the directions or with the results most to be desired; yet how much better is it even so, than a dead and rotting formalism!

We look upon human freedom in general, intellectual developement, social and political progress, as incidental to the main work of Protestantism. Dr. Ewer scoffs at those who claim these as proofs that Protestantism has not failed. He says the intellectual awakening of Europe began long before Luther, and would leave his reader to infer that " Catholicity" has been its special friend and promoter. He is very careful to keep out of view the fact that this intellectual awakening occurred as a revolt against Catholicity; that popes, and priests, and monks, and State-churches, whether Roman, Greek or Anglican, have always been its uncompromising foes; that, in that collision of the awakening intellect of Europe, Protestantism was born, and that while ever since, Catholicity and intellectual progress have been enemies, Protestantism and intellectual progress have been allies, with one spirit, one mind, one interest. The printing press is indeed older than Protestantism; but that does not make it any the less true that to Protestantism the press owes its freedom, and hence its noblest achievements, while between Catholicity and a free press there has been perpetual war. It is, besides, a remarkable fact that political liberty has prospered only in Protestant lands. In England itself the political freedom enjoyed is due, not to Anglicanism, but to Puritanism. The politically free States on the continent of Europe are the Protestant States. So far as Catholicity makes itself felt in the sphere of human progress at all, it is felt there only to hinder and repress. Protestantism may not always have been wise in its measures, but its tendencies have been invariably right. It has had its extremes and

abuses; but the principle at the heart of it has always been a conservator and a purifier, so that it has shown itself both able and willing to rectify its own mistakes.

We shall presently notice particulars in which we freely concede that Protestantism has not as yet realized all its aims, and shall try to indicate some of the reasons of this. That it has wrought a great work on the earth may be confidently claimed. It has completely changed the moral, social, political, and religious status of mankind. Just in the operation of those principles which enter into it, of freedom of conscience, loyalty to the divine Word, and zeal for human salvation, it has already done much to remedy the mischief of spiritual and political tyranny, and to establish among men that kingdom which is "righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." In the department of religious activity we might say much of its achievements. Faults there are, as in all human work; but it is none the less certain that it is in the Protestant method of work that religion. is made the great power it is. The emphatic words of Professor Saint Hilaire, the brilliant French writer, may illustrate one view of this:

I have travelled much in the North and the South, and have been much struck by one fact. Wherever the Bible is not the corner stone of education, of society, of life in general, there is no literature for children, none for the people at large. Look at Spain, Italy, France itself, every land, in short, in which the Bible is not read. There is no reading for the child, none for the working man. In Germany, in England, on the contrary, we find a mass of popular and juvenile Christian literature, in which the national genius is reflected as in a mirror. . . This is the juvenile and popular literature which I cannot but covet in behalf of my native land, accustomed as she is for two centuries to reign over Europe in the empire of mind, thanks to her immortal phalanx of great writers, to whom one art alone is lacking, that of speaking to the young and popular mind, and of reaching it by frequent appeals to the heart.

This may stand as one instance of the way in which the Protestant principle works, illustrating the rest. To doubt of the vast and beneficient forces combined, not only in the churches and ministry of Protestantism, but in the ever multiplying forms of auxiliary labor, or to look upon these as aspects of a failing cause, and of a work futile and contemptible, is to expose a degree of shallowness in both observation and reflection which one cannot contemplate without amazement.

It is time, however, that we passed to another branch of our general subject. The charges made against Protestantism would never

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have engaged even temporary attention in the degree they did, if there had not been something in the existing state of facts to lend them an apparent authentication. There are certain admissions that should be frankly made; facts in the history and present status of Protestantism that should neither be evaded nor concealed. They contain a most important lesson, and if to bring them forward in any mere dispute upon the question whether Protestantism or Catholicity has most failed, is to study them from a point of view quite too low, as an admonition to Protestants themselves they cannot be too earnestly studied. If Dr. Ewer had treated them in this way, it would have been a service indeed to the cause of truth and of piety. Protestantism has not failed, but Protestants have committed grave faults, the practical consequences of which lend to its enemies these weapons of assault. Special forms of Protestantism may even be conceded to have disappointed expectation, and in their development assumed directions very unlike what was contemplated. The Lutheranism of Germany, the Puritanism of New England exhibit at least offshoots of tendency and influence which, could they have been foreseen, would have been a sorrow and an amazement to the true-minded and true-hearted originators of this grandest movement of modern times. Protestant zeal has not always been zeal with knowledge, and it is undoubtedly true that if the old ecclesiasticism tended to inertness. and spiritual death, the free thought and free action of the antagonist system have, as might have been expected, not always shown the sanctity of a pure Christian motive, nor the wisdom of a sound Christian prudence. Beyond question, besides, the workers in the Protestant field have reason to scrutinize well their methods, and to ask themselves why it is that with so much reached and done there remains still so much more that is out of reach and undone. Thoughts, and queries, and suggestions, coming up in a Christian convention held in New York, while Dr. Ewer's sermons were in process of delivery, were interpreted by him as yielding to him, wholly, the main points in his allegation against Protestantism. His last sermon in the series, accordingly was a flourish of trumpets upon this note. We believe that the tone of remarks at such conventions is often mistaken and misleading. Crude thoughts are put forward in a crude way; generalizations attempted upon a most narrow and superficial observation of facts, and censorious criticisms prompted sometimes by overmuch zeal, sometimes by personal jealousies or ambitions. We trust that such gatherings render to the general cause an important service; yet no one can doubt that this service would be far more important and more valuable, if those who direct in them were men better informed and

better prepared to undertake a true diagnosis, and propose the true remedy. If we attempt to offer here two or three suggestions as to the causes of those partial failures in Protestantism which its staunchest adherents most keenly deplore, we wish to be understood as putting them forward only as suggestions, and with a consciousness that to other minds another class of causes will very likely present themselves as more radical and more influential.

I. The first which we name is lack of fidelity to first principles. No system of truth, and no intellectual or religious movement should be held responsible save for those practical results to which its own principles lead. If those principles are misapprehended, poisoned or perverted, or if professed adherents, following their development to a certain point, stop short because finding their own prejudices or preferences in collision with them, and thus the movement branches into directions never proposed by its originators, or in other respects becomes stunted and ineffectual, the fault must be made to rest where it belongs, and that will not be with the movement itself, or with its principles. So when such facts appear, they become reasons, not for discarding the movement as essentially false, but for returning to its first principles, reaffirming afresh its radical elements, and renewing the effort in the line of its original setting out.

Now, we need not hesitate to admit that so far as the Rationalism of Germany is concerned, it had its origin in the bosom of Protestantism. We may even acquit very many, at least, of its most active promoters of any design to destroy the foundations of human faith, and also of positive irreverence for those inspired Scriptures which, nevertheless, they have "handled" so "deceitfully." Their sad and mischievous error lay in misconceiving wholly the relations of reason to faith, and misinterpreting the providential design in that freedom which had, in the directing of great events, been ensured to the human intellect. The right of each man to interpret the Scriptures for himself, was construed as a right for each to sit in judgment on them, and when the ecclesiastical tribunal had been discarded, arrogant reason erected one of its own. That principle which lives at the very heart of Protestantism was forgotten or denied, that the word of God must itself try and prove everything; that word of God was treated as no longer "the law and the testimony" according to which all teachers must speak, if there be any light in them, and the human judgment exalted into the place of supremacy. This was not Protestantism, nor was it any legitimate birth of Protestantism. When, as Hurst says, "fledgling theologians would come home from the University, and read aloud to the family-group the notes of lectures

which they had heard during the last semester, the aged pair, looking up in wonder, might well say, 'the good and great doctors of our Reformation never taught such things as these.' And when their sons would answer, 'Oh, the world has grown much wiser since their day,' they revealed the evil thought in which, not in the devout yet sturdy faith of the Reformers, Rationalism was born." There is reason to believe, moreover, that many of the Rationalists themselves, carried away by some theory of interpretation, were scarcely aware of their own errors. Schenkel was taken by surprise when his "Character of Jesus" was denounced as rationalistic, and seems not to have been aware that in this work he had belied his former more evangelical record. Had the German theologians stood firm by the three grand principles of Protestantism, especially that which asserts the supremacy of the word of God, they would never have wandered into Rationalism.

Like things might be said of rationalistic development in this country. It is quite possible that the free-thinking of New England is a reaction from the strictness of the early Puritanism, and the intolerant spirit which the founders of New England, contrary to their own principles, manifested, may have had much to do in provoking the intellectual revolt of a later day. This is just what has happened to Catholicity, as represented both in Romanism and Anglicanism. The oppressions and vices of the French priesthood must be regarded as the real creators of the Voltaire school of infidelity, while English Rationalism is that opposite extreme which the extreme of highchurch pretensions has begotten. The historian, Froude, one of the leading English liberals, is the son of that Froude who was the friend and co-worker of Newman and Pusey. Whether it be a truth or an error that is pressed to such an extreme, whether it be that the original principle of a movement is wrong and but carried out to its logical results, or is right but disregarded, in either case a like state of facts may arise. The true philosophy, however, is not to denounce alike true and false first principles, or infer their falsity from their abuse, but ascertain their real nature, and if true, stand by them.

There is another particular in which this want of fidelity to first principles appears, and which we must not pass without notice. When Protestantism broke away from the Papacy, it did not, as it ought, break away wholly. That mischievous doctrine which is at the foundation of the whole system of Papal usurpation, that the church has a certain power of legislation in matters of practice if not in matters of faith, was most unhappily retained. There are few intelligent