The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

The word in the spirit, the spirit in the word, the body in the idea, the idea
in the body, the visible in the invisible, and this again in that, the human
and natural in the divine and supernatural, and these latter elements again
in the former--this is what she aims at, and this it is she has. As the
Romish Church represents mere rest and stability, the Reformed mere
unrest and mobility, and both are consequently defective in development
and in history in the highest sense of those terns, the Lutheran Church, on
the other hand, has in it the true germ of historical life, which constantly
expands itself toward a higher perfection. In the Romish Church the life of
history dries up, in the Reformed it is comminuted; in the one it compacts
itself to a mummy, in the other it dissipates itself into atoms. There is a
Lutheran Church, but there are only Calvinistic or Reformed Churches." 108
"The Lutheran Church in its distinctive character," says a Reformed
writer, 109 "can tolerate no sects. The number of the Reformed sects is
prodigious, literally innumerable. In Edinburgh alone there are sixteen of
them, in Glasgow twenty-six. It seems as if the production of these sects,
which shoot up as mushrooms in the soil of the Reformed Church, were
necessary to the preservation of her life and health. They have all
proceeded from the same principle, and have only striven to carry it out
more logically, and she is therefore bound to recognize them as her
genuine children. The Lutheran Church is like the trunk of a great tree,
from which the useless branches have been cut off, and into which a noble
scion (justification by faith) has been grafted. It is one complete, wellarranged,
closely compacted church, which unsparingly removes all wild
growths and pernicious off-shoots, (sects.) The Reformed Church has cut
down the tree to the root, (the Holy Scriptures,) and from that healthy root
springs up a wide thicket. The dying out of one of the twigs only leaves
ampler nourishment for the others." The most powerful conservative
influences within the Reformed Churches have, in fact, invariably been
connected more or less immediately with the Lutheran Church. With her
principles is bound up the only hope of Protestant unity.
108 Wiggers, i. 96.
109 Goebel, 176.