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

vague for a thinker, too dull to inspire enthusiasm. They speak and write
of it, as if they were with difficulty repressing a yawn. But Hallam is not
guilty of mere listlessness in his treatment of theological topics. He is a
partisan, and a very ill-informed one.
Especially is his account of the Reformation and of Luther full of
ignorance and full of prejudice. He seems to have prepared his mind for a
just estimate of Luther by reading, with intense admiration, Bossuet's
"Variations," though, as he tells us, with great impartiality, "It would not be
just probably to give Bossuet credit in every part of that powerful
delineation of Luther's theological tenets." He charges on the writings of
Luther, previous to 1520, various “Antinomian paradoxes," but yet he has
the candor to say: "It must not be supposed for a moment that Luther,
whose soul was penetrated with a fervent piety, and whose integrity, as
well as purity of life, are unquestioned, could mean to give any
encouragement to a licentious disregard of moral virtue, which he valued
as in itself lovely before God as well as man, though in the technical style
of his theology he might deny its proper obligation. But his temper led him
to follow up any proposition of Scripture to every consequence that might
seem to result from its literal meaning."
"Every solution of the conduct of the reformers must be nugatory
except one, that they were men absorbed by the conviction that they were
fighting the battle of God."--"It is hardly correct to say of Luther, that he
erected his system on the ruins of Popery, for it was rather the growth and
expansion in his mind of one positive dogma, justification by faith, in the
sense in which he took it, (which can be easily shown to have preceded the
dispute about indulgence,) that broke down and crushed successively the
various doctrines of the Romish Church." 73
73 Literature of Europe, vol. i., p. 166. Hallam, putting a different construction from Le Clerc on some theological
expressions, adds: "But of course my practice in these nice questions is not great." Vol. ii., p. 41, n. After adjusting
in the text the comparative merits of half a dozen theologians, he says he has done it "in deference to common
reputation," "for I am wholly ignorant of the writings of all." Page 287.