Psalms, in like manner, were nothing but acts of faith and affiance, whereby a man, crushed down with all kinds of evils, inward and outward, rose up and claimed that relation to God which His covenant had given him, and shook off the sins into which he had fallen through forgetting it. Still these, properly speaking, were acts of trust in a Mediator; they were recognitions of one to whom the suppliant himself was related, who was a bond between him and the absolute God, in whom alone he could dare to call upon Him. Therefore all these justifications were foretastes and anticipations of that justification which the Son of God made for all who would trust in Him, when, having offered up His body as a sacrifice, He rose again from the dead. To announce this work as accomplished; to tell men that they became righteous by believing it, and so entering into union with their Lord and Master-this was, Luther believed, the great end of St. Paul's life. He believed also that it was his own appointed office. It was the business of the preacher in every age to tell men this truth simply, using the direct personal language of the Bible, instead of the formal and dogmatic language of the schools. But not the man only was bearing witness of this principle. The Creed was preaching it, the Sacraments were preaching it, and the truly instructed doctor would find in these the deepest wisdom, and would labour that they might carry that home practically and in effect to men, which he could only utter in words. This, it seems to me, is Lutheranism according to Luther; and in this Lutheranism lies the germ of all the doctrines which peculiarly belong to the Reformation, though it might be the work of other minds than his distinctly to evolve them.

VOL. I.

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2. The principal of these is that which Luther proclaimed with so much vehemence in his controversy with Erasmus, but which yet, it is quite evident, could not have been as habitually present to his mind as it was to that of the Genevan Reformer, John Calvin. The idea of an object to which a man might look, and in which he might rest, took precedence of all others in the heart and reason of Luther. Unless when he were driven to it by some dogma like that of Erasmus, which seemed to him to threaten the revival of all Papal contrivances for the reconciliation of man, he troubled himself little about the origin of those feelings and acts, whereby a man apprehends Him who offers himself to his faith and hope. It is clear, however, not only from this treatise of Luther, but from the very character of his doctrine, that this question must suggest itself, and that it must receive some such solution as he and Calvin found for it. The idea of an absolute will, with which man must be brought into reconciliation by a Mediator, lay at the base of all Luther's thoughts. Any man, fixedly meditating upon those thoughts and the results to which they had led, must have asked himself: But who devised this whole scheme of reconciliation and redemption? Who is it that leads men to avail themselves of it? Who is it that determines the operations of their minds, and the consequences to which they shall lead? Such questions had at all times occupied the schools. Augustine, who appeared to have determined them in the same way as Calvin, had ever been regarded as one of their highest oracles. The difference was the same in this case as in the last : * De Servo Arbitrio.

the principle that man is to look up to God as the direct source of his acts, and thoughts, and purposes, was presented to the faith of men in the real language of Scripture, and not to the understandings of men in the abstract language of the schools. Those who apprehended their relation to Christ were to speak of themselves as the elect people of God, just as Samuel, or David, or the Israelites did, and to believe that they would have been miserable and accursed if God had not elected them. They were not to trouble themselves with questions about the will, or to seek any other reason for their blessedness than that it was God's good pleasure to give it them. On the other hand, this belief was to be the conclusive barrier against all impostures of Romish priests, those impostures being attempts to persuade men that they must seek by their own efforts to win a position, which ought to be received as the gift of God. This, I think, is the Calvinistic side of Protestantism. To some it may appear that I have given to it, as well as to the doctrine of justification, too little of a scholastic character; that I have spoken of it too much as something that opposed itself to the logical systems of the previous age, whereas Calvin as well as Melanchthon and some of the German Reformers, were remarkable for their devotion to logic. Nevertheless, I believe that I am right. How the scholastic tendencies of the Reformation afterward developed themselves, I may have occasion to explain presently. Here I will only remark that the Reformers who had been trained by the schoolmen would of course preserve many of their characteristics; that men with a strong bias for dialectics may often be those who are led to feel most

strongly the want of what is practical and popular, and to seek out a practical and popular language; and that, in fact, those who have commented most, either in the way of praise or blame, upon the scholastic qualities which appear in the controversial writings of the Reformers, have yet always contended also that the Reformation itself was an appeal to the feelings and sympathies of common men.

3. If then the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith be the first, and the doctrine of election, as formally asserted by Calvin, the second, I think most persons will agree with me in considering a certain peculiar estimate of the Scriptures the third characteristic of Reformation theology. But there are one or two questions connected with this point. No one acquainted with the writings of the Reformers would say that they were more scrupulous in their treatment of their Canon of Scripture than the doctors who preceded them. Luther's language about the Epistle of St. James and the book of Revelation, though it may have been retracted in his later days, would be conclusive against such an opinion, even if there were nothing similar in the writings of his contemporaries. Neither can it be said that either Luther or Calvin regarded the Bible as a book from which persons without any previous initiation, would, as a matter of course, derive light and teaching. They rather looked upon it as a divine witness to men already engaged in a conscious struggle with their evil nature, respecting the character of that struggle, and the means whereby they could obtain deliverance out of it. Such at least, I conceive, was the view most present to the mind of the German Reformer; the Bible was

especially the preacher's book, out of which he was to tell men how those of the same flesh and blood with themselves had fought the battle with the world and the flesh and the devil before them, and what manner of strength and help God had vouchsafed them in it. At the same time, it was a fixed and permanent authority, which mounted above all the notions and experiences of particular minds, and enabled them, even in defiance of such notions and experiences, to discover solid grounds of peace and comfort. It is manifest then that veneration for the Bible, high place as it held in Luther's mind, was subordinate to his zeal in asserting the doctrine of Justification. He looked upon the Bible mainly as the witness for that doctrine, and because it was such a witness he loved it with all his heart, and would have given up his life that men might in their own language hear what it said. The same, though in a less degree, must have been true of Calvin; the Bible was the witness to him of the divine Election; on that account mainly it was precious to him, and no diligence that could be employed in studying and expounding it were thrown away. But if the Scripture were valuable as the announcement of one or other of these great ideas or principles, was it not in itself a great idea or principle that there was such a book as a Bible, a book speaking directly to the conscience of men, a fixed and permanent utterance of the divine will? To some (I should think to Zuinglius) this seemed the cardinal idea of the Reformation, to which other ideas were subordinate. At all events there was a body which gradually began to be separated by important peculiarities from the other