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

2. The age was one of vast upheaval, and of rapid reconstruction. The
superstitions of centuries had been overthrown, and the temple of a pure
Scriptural faith was to be reared upon their ruins. Every man was a
polemic and a builder, eager to bear part in the wonderful work of the time.
It was an age of feverish excitement, and many passed through the
delirium of weak mind overwrought, and fancied their ravings,
inspirations. It was the age of antitheses, in which extravagances,by a law
of reaction, rose in hostile pairs. Two errors faced each other, and in their
conflict trampled down the faith which lay prostrate between them.
Extremists treated truth as if it were habitable only at one pole, and the
proof that the one pole was untenable at once involved to them the
necessity of going to the other.
3. The controversies which followed Luther's death, arrested the
internal development of the Church, and brought the processes of its more
perfect constitutional organizing almost to a close. The great living
doctrines, which made the Reformation, were in danger of losing all their
practical power in the absorption of men's minds in controversies. War, as
a necessary evil to avoid a greater, just war, as the preliminary to a pure
peace, is to be defended; but war, made a trade, treated as a good, pursued
for its own sake, and interminable, is the curse of curses, and much of the
controversy of the second half of the Sixteenth Century was making a
rapid transition to this type of strife. The Church was threatened with
schisms. Her glory was obscured. Her enemies mocked at her. Her
children were confounded and saddened. Weak ones were turned from her
communion, sometimes to Zurich, or Geneva, sometimes to Rome. Crafty
men crept in to make the Lutheran Church the protector of heresy. There
was danger that the age which the Conservative Reformation had glorified,
should see that grand work lost in the endless dissensions of embittered
factions. Hence it is that the peculiar characteristic of the Formula, on
which its necessity and value depend, goes so far in solving--what might
otherwise seem mysterious--that while the larger part of the Lutheran
Church received it with enthusiasm, some did not accept it., The reason is:
that while