between their confessional spirit and the
syncretism of the union. In 1857 the Evangelical Alliance met at Berlin
in order to strengthen the unionist principles, and to testify against
these Pharisees. Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians--sects
connected by nothing but a common hatred of Catholicism--were greeted
by the union divines as bone of their bone, and welcome allies in the
contest with an exclusive Lutheranism and with Rome. The confusion in
the minds of the people was increased by this spectacle. The union
already implied that the dogma of the Lord's Supper, on which Lutherans
and Calvinists disagree, was uncertain, and therefore not essential. The
alliance of so many denominations added baptism to the list of things
about which nothing is positively known. The author of this measure was
Bunsen, who was full of the idea of uniting all Protestant sects in a
union against the Catholic Church and catholicising tendencies.

For the last fifteen years there has been an active agitation for the
improvement of the Church among the Protestant divines. The first
question that occupies and divides them is that of Church government and
the royal Episcopate, which many deem the chief cause of the
ecclesiastical decay. The late King of Prussia, a zealous and
enlightened friend of the Protestant Church, declared that "the
territorial system and the Episcopal authority of the sovereign are of
such a nature that either of them would alone be enough to kill the
Church if the Church was mortal," and that he longed to be able to
abdicate his rights into the hands of the bishops. In other countries,
as in Baden, a new system has been devised, which transfers political
constitutionalism to the Church, and makes it a community, not of those
who believe in Christ, but, in the words of the Government organ, of
those who believe in a moral order. Hopes were entertained that the
introduction of Synods would be an improvement, and in 1856 and 1857 a
beginning was made at Berlin; but it was found that the existence of
great evils and disorders in the Church, which had been a secret of the
initiated, would be published to the world, and that government by
majorities, the ecclesiastical democracy which was Bunsen's ideal, would
soon destroy every vestige of Christianity.

In their doctrinal and theological literature resides at the present day
the strength and the renown of the Protestants; for a scientific
Protestant theology exists