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

in two senses. The Lutheran-Philippists, who took the more charitable
view, put the best construction on them, and were reluctant to abandon one
to whom the Church owed so much, and whom Luther had loved so
dearly. The Reformed put upon Melanchthon's words the construction
most favorable to themselves. The Crypto-Calvinists made them their
covert. The enemies of the Reformation appealed to them as proof that the
first principles and doctrines of the Reformers had been abandoned.
Whatever may be the meaning of Melanchthon's words in the disputed
cases, this much is certain, that they practically operated as if the worse
sense were the real one, and their mischievousness was not diminished but
aggravated by their obscurity and double meaning. They did the work of
avowed error, and yet could not be reached as candid error might. We
have twenty-eight large volumes of Melanchthon's writings--and at this
hour, impartial and learned men are not agreed as to what were his views
on some of the profoundest questions of Church doctrine, on which
Melanchthon was writing all his life.
III. 1560. A great centre of this controversy was furnished in the
PHILIPPIC CORPUS DOCTRINAE, 1560, to which the Philippists,
especially in the Electorate of Saxony, desired to give Confessional
authority, an effort which was resisted by the consistent Lutherans on the
ground that it contained very serious errors. It was in the unionistic part of
our Church, not the consistent part, that the tendency first appeared to put
forth bulky Confessions, and the necessity for the Book of Concord was
largely generated by the greatly larger Bodies of doctrine which were set
forth by the Philippists.
The Philippic or Meissen German Corpus of 1560, contained: 1. The
three General Creeds; 2. The Augsburg Confession from the Wittenberg
ed. 1553, enlarged and altered; 3. The Apology; 4. The Repetition of the
Augsburg Confession, written in 1551, to be sent to the Council of Trent;
5. The Loci Theologici; 6. The Examen Ordinandorum; 7. The Answer to
the idolatrous Articles of Bavaria; and 8. A Confutation of the Mahometan
Error of Servetus. The corresponding Latin Corpus of the same date,
contains all the writings embraced