off from Luther, whose friendship he retained despite every diversity. More than an Aristotelian philosopher the humanistic Melanchthon doubtless was, but he yet brought forth from Aristotle and antiquity the principles both by which his own thought was teleologically determined, and by which a fruitful discipline for the sciences was reached. From Melanchthon we must date a new epoch in dogmatic thought it was his great merit to have redeemed it from scholastic character by his rich infusion of elements mystical and pietistic, experiential and rational, scriptural and personal.

Now, without saying more, we affirm that, while it may be perfectly true that disinclination to look in the face the spiritual greatness of the Reformers, and supine indifference to the necessity for the Reformation, may be only too characteristic of our time, modern thought is, in its sanest manifestations, by no means forgetful that the truths and principles they brought into view live and move and give. being to the world of to-day. It recognizes the great defect of the Reformation to have been its leaving the real reign of dogma or speculative theology, untouched-its leaving, that is to say, opinions, definitions, and formulas of newer but hardly more fruitful type still reigning over faith. It sees the final triumph over scholasticism as yet to come. It admits that, in its speculative connections, the Reformation can be viewed only as a very mixed result, whose beneficial side is seen in the way it made men fundamentally think. It sees Christianity to have been left by the new scholasticism, too much as veritable dogma-all too little a thing of faith and love and character under the free impulse of a true idealism. It acknowledges how great need such scholasticism had of the admonition in "Faust"

"Das Pergament, ist das der heil'ge Bronnen,
Woraus ein Trunk den Durst auf ewig stillt?
Erquickung hast du nicht gewonnen,
Wenn Sie dir nicht aus eigner Seele quillt."

"Parchment and books-are they the holy springs
A drink from which thy thirst forever stills?

To inspiration hast thou not attained,

Except from thine own soul it freely wells."

It sees, in fact, how the thought of faith, and of the justification which it brought, was allowed to obscure for men's minds the Christ of faith, even while it welcomes such faith as did then flourish as against the craving of the Middle Ages for the ineffable vision. It understands how dry and unfertile the Lutheran theory of justification by faith seems to the schematizing view of reason, but how real and true to the religious feeling was yet Luther's passionate proclamation of it. It perceives how the spiritual movement of the sixteenth century is a thing to be welcomed, because of the cleansing and renewing force it carried for the church universal, and in spite of the schism it involved. To be welcomed, even if any choose to say—

"Never came reformation in a flood

With such a heady currance, scouring faults." For we shall soon see what ethical force it brought into play in the world of that time. But first let it be said that modern thought regards as a strange and arbitrary exclusion Harnack's treatment of Calvinism and Arminianism, when he makes the Reformation in reality an exit (Wirklich ein Ausgang) of the history of dogma. It recognizes the undue emphasis, the too exclusive stress, laid by the Reformation on the purely subjective aspect of its great principle, and the grievous disposition it showed to sever the inner from that which is outward, to set the spiritual over against the natural, as though grace had come to destroy rather than perfect nature. The pernicious effects of its excessive absorption with the subjective consciousness of salvation, to the neglect of the objective interests of Christianity, have been growingly apparent to modern thought, as itself but too conscious of wrestlings with the infinite subjectivity or self-occupation of this late time.

The secret of the superiority of the Reforming peoples we cannot but find in their inherited moral force plus the spirit of science.

Now it is seen how it was through the Reformation that the world, even the religious world, learned that the service which can be rendered by life and literature, by science and art, by politics and philosophy, is a service which must be one of perfect freedom-organic freedom of adjustment. It is further seen how all that is richest in subsequent culture is due to Protestantism having, despite the lack at times of the philosophy of what it was doing, never relinquished this principle of freedom of investigation. Yet it would be a lamentably inadequate thing merely to say, with Professor Paulsen, that the Reformation helped to bring release to the modern spirit from supernaturalism, and contributed to the bringing about of the secularization of modern times. As if the Reformation had not also been a leading men back from the secularization of a worldly church towards original purity of faith! As if it had not borne anything of more primary significance for religion, life, and ethics, than his admission implies! Of course, there were the freeing from medieval supernaturalism and the tendency towards secularization, but the theological thought of our time does not suffer itself to forget the sense of personal responsibility to God and of personal communion with-Him, free, immediate, spiritual, won by the Reformation-with which, in fact, the Reformation began; nor the new hopes of higher life, to be realized here and now, which were then liberated, even though it admits a Christian community on earth to have been much less a Reformational ideal than it should have been; nor the theological interest that marked the era, with its teachings about the universal priesthood and private judgment or spiritual certitude on the basis of the Christian conscious

ness.

Just as little does it forget the way in which Catholicism, as a whole, or in its institutional aspect, denied to individual members the immediacy of relation to God which it yet claimed for itself, and entailed a woful abdication of that conscience which is man's crown. The revival of ethical interest which marks the Reformational era is not to be mistaken. It was, no doubt, unfortunate, in respect of such looseness of morals as then prevailed, that so much stress was laid on the intellectual aspect of faith. The evil effects of Luther's teaching were acknowledged by himself, for his rigid insistence on faith, and faith only, was of a kind that easily lent itself to moral perversion. No unsatisfactoriness or imperfection of the moral effects of the Reformation can make this quickening of ethical interest any less real. Men began to feel that all things were theirs, theirs to be used in the world that here and now is, and that in such using of them-without ascetic taint or bias-all the ends of moral life are satisfied. The inwardness of faith or spiritual redemption taught men another mode of triumph over the world than an outward sprinkling from it. The spring or motive-power of this quickened ethical interest was clearly religious, but it none the less really achieved, in its abjuration of the lordship of the universal church over conscience, an independent significance for the moral life in the view of the Christian religion.

Now the thought of to-day sees that the faith begotten of the Reformational spirit could not but, as Döllinger declared, purify the European atmosphere, impel the mind on to new courses, and promote a rich scientific and literary life. It perceives what a groundless notion is that of those who have in modern times taken the Protestantism, which is the outcome of that Reformation by which the faith was saved, to be anti-dogmatic in principle, as though the reserved right of perpetual investigation were a denial

that there is anything positive and ascertainable to investigate. Certainly Protestantism, as individualistic in thought, lies apart from dogma in its assertion of the independence of conscience; but what has just been said must be taken as true of Protestantism even before it passes into a method. Protestantism has not set the seal of its consecration on the principle of individuality without knowing that the liberty it has inaugurated is liberty to make for religious truth, order, and progress, in making for which true liberty alone can live. In this respect for the principle of individuality, it forms a striking antithesis to Catholicism, which has elected to plant itself at the antipodes of such liberty, and has really usurped the place of the revelation alike of history and of conscience.

But now, why should it be so hard to see that Reformation, in principle introduced in the sixteenth century, is not a thing done once for all, but something to be always and forever repeated in the renewing energies of Christianity? Why should our Protestant churches care so much for church domination, and not care more for truth? While the reconstructive powers of the movement were far less conspicuous than its restorative energies, we can at least be abidingly grateful for it as the underlying springwhence have flowed all subsequent efforts to realize a true, because spiritual, universality, in the higher unity of a system whose center of gravity moves not from the freedom of the Christian spirit. We are nowise troubled when it is said that the secret of the strength of Protestantism lies in its name. For no nobler stand could have been made by its founders than that which welcomed death sooner than believe a lie. Small indeed are the souls that cannot see the spiritual greatness involved in the dead set they made against papal indulgences and priestly pretensions of every sort. We can recognize that Protestantism, however it may be said to live in its protest, can be no