only in Germany. The German Protestant Church
is emphatically a Church of theologians; they are its only authority,
and, through the princes, its supreme rulers. Its founder never really
divested himself of the character of a professor, and the Church has
never emancipated itself from the lecture-room: it teaches, and then
disappears. Its hymns are not real hymns, but versified theological
dissertations, or sermons in rhyme. Born of the union of princes with
professors, it retains the distinct likeness of both its parents, not
altogether harmoniously blended; and when it is accused of worldliness,
of paleness of thought, of being a police institution rather than a
Church, that is no more than to say that the child cannot deny its
parentage.

Theology has become believing in Germany, but it is very far from being
orthodox. No writer is true to the literal teaching of the symbolical
books, and for a hundred years the pure doctrine of the sixteenth
century has never been heard. No German divine could submit to the
authority of the early articles and formulas without hypocrisy and
violence to his conscience, and yet they have nothing else to appeal to.
That the doctrine of justification by faith only is the principal
substance of the symbolical writings, the centre of the antagonism
against the Catholic Church, all are agreed. The neo-Lutherans proclaim
it "the essence and treasure of the Reformation," "the doctrine of which
every man must have a clear and vivid comprehension who would know
anything of Christianity," "the banner which must be unfurled at least
once in every sermon," "the permanent death that gnaws the bones of
Catholics," "the standard by which the whole of the Gospel must be
interpreted, and every obscure passage explained," and yet this article
of a standing or falling Church, on the strength of which Protestants
call themselves evangelical, is accepted by scarcely one of their more
eminent divines, even among the Lutherans. The progress of biblical
studies is too great to admit of a return to the doctrine which has
been exploded by the advancement of religious learning. Dr. Doellinger
gives a list (p. 430) of the names of the leading theologians, by all of
whom it has been abandoned. Yet it was for the sake of this fundamental
and essential doctrine that the epistle of St. James was pronounced an
epistle of straw, that the Augsburg Confession declared it to have been
the belief of St Augustine, and that