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

enowned among these earlier assaults were the "Christian Admonition"
by Ursinus, 1581, the Anhalt Opinion, 1581, the Reply of the Bremen
Preachers, 1581, Irenaeus' Examen, 1581, and Ambrose Wolff's History of
the Augsburg Confession, 1580. To these bitter libels, for they were little
else, the three great divines, Kirchner, Selneccer, and Chemnitz, by order
of the three Electors, of the Palatinate, Saxony, and Brandenburg, replied.
In 1599, appeared the Staffort Book (named from the place of its
publication,) in which the Margrave of Baden assigned his reasons for
rejecting the Formula of Concord. They were so convincing to his own
mind that he persecuted his Lutheran subjects for not seeing the force of
them. The Book was answered by the Würtemberg and Electoral-Saxon
theologians, in 1600-1602.
Several Roman Catholic writers also assailed the Formula. The most
renowned of these was Cardinal Bellarmin in his “Judgment on the Book
of Concord," Cologne, 1589. It now forms the Fourth Part of his work on
the Controversies of his time, the master-piece of the Romish Polemic of
the Sixteenth Century. It was answered by Hoe of Hoenegg (1605) and
others. In forming an estimate of the MERITS AND VALUE OF THE
FORMULA OF CONCORD, for which we have been prepared by the
glance taken at its history, the following facts may be worthy of
consideration:
Formula of Concord. Its merits and value.
I. The controversies which the Formula of Concord was meant to
settle, had produced incalculable mischief in the Church, and absolutely
needed settlement, if the Church were to be saved.
1. The time was one of mighty agitations and of strong convictions.
Every question involving doctrine was regarded with an intensity of
feeling, which a cold and skeptical age is unable to understand. God's least
word was something for which men would spend their years in battle,
would take joyfully the spoiling of their goods, would abandon their
homes for exile, and would ascend the scaffold. They resisted unto blood
on the division of a hair, if they believed the hair to belong to the head of
Truth.