heran Church itself has almost disappeared. It subsists, not
in any definite reality, but only in the aspirations of certain divines
and jurists. The purpose of the union was to bring together, in
religious communion, the reigning family of Prussia, which had adopted
Calvinism in 1613, and the vast Lutheran majority among the people. It
was to be, in the words of the king, a merely ritual union, not an
amalgamation of dogmas. In some places there was resistance, which was
put down by military execution. Some thousands emigrated to America; but
the public press applauded the measures, and there was no general
indignation at their severity. The Lutherans justly perceived that the
union would promote religious indifference; but at the accession of the
late king there came a change; religious faith was once more sought
after, believing professors were appointed in almost all the German
universities, after the example of Prussia; Jena and Giessen alone
continued to be seats of Rationalism. As soon as theology had begun to
recover a more religious and Christian character, two very divergent
tendencies manifested themselves. Among the disciples of Schleiermacher
and of Neander a school of unionists arose who attempted a conciliatory
intermediate theology. At the same time a strictly Lutheran theology
flourished at the universities of Erlangen, Leipzig, Rostock, and
Dorpat, which sought to revive the doctrine of the sixteenth century,
clothed in the language of the nineteenth. But for men versed in
Scripture theology this was an impossible enterprise, and it was
abandoned by the divines to a number of parochial clergymen, who are
represented in literature by Rudelbach, and who claim to be the only
surviving Protestants whom Luther would acknowledge as his sons and the
heirs of his spirit.

The Lutheran divines and scholars formed the new Lutheran party,[337]
whose most illustrious lay champion was the celebrated Stahl. They
profess the Lutheran doctrine of justification, but reject the notion of
the invisible Church and the universal priesthood. Holding to the divine
institution of the offices of the Church, in opposition to the view
which refers them to the congregation, they are led to assume a
sacrament of orders, and to express opinions on ordination, sacraments,
and sacrifice, which involve them in the imputation of Puseyism, or even
of Catholicism. As they remain for the most part in the State Church,
there is an open war