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

ight of men, within the Lutheran Church, and bearing her hallowed name,
to teach what they please in the face of her testimony, know not the nature
of the right they claim, nor of the Church, whose very life involves her
refusal to have fellowship with them in their error. It is not the right of
private judgment which makes or marks a man Lutheran. A man may have
the right to judge, and be a simpleton, as he may have the right to get rich,
yet may remain a beggar. It is the judgment he reaches in exercising that
right which determines what he is. By his abuse of the "inalienable rights
of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," a man may make himself a
miserable slave. The right of property belongs as much to the man who
makes himself a beggar as to the man who has become a millionaire.
Rights, in themselves, give nothing, and cannot change the nature of
things. The right to gather, gathers nothing; and if, under this right, the man
gathers wood, hay, stubble, neither the right nor its exercise makes them
into gold, silver, and precious stones. The Church will not put any violence
upon him who chooses to gather what will not endure the fire; but she will
not accept them as jewels, nor permit her children to be cheated with them.
The right of private judgment and the right of Church discipline are coordinate
and harmonious rights, essential to the prevention, each of the
abuse of the other. To uphold either intelligently, is to uphold both. In
maintaining, therefore, as Protestants, the right and duty of men, in the
exercise of private judgment, to form their own convictions, unfettered by
civil penalties in the State, or by inquisitorial powers in the Church, we
maintain, also, the right and duty of the Church to shield herself from
corruption in doctrine by setting forth the truth in her Confession, by
faithfully controverting heresy, by personal warning to those that err, and,
finally, with the contumacious, by rejecting them from her communion, till,
through grace, they are led to see and renounce the falsehood, for which
they claimed the name of truth.
Intelligent fidelity to the Confessions an essential object
of theological training.
The faith of the Church, drawn from the rule by the just exercise of
private judgment, illumined by the Holy Ghost, has been tested and
developed in three ways: First, by science;