e of the educated classes is the chief security
for the existence of the Protestant Church. If they were to take an
interest in matters of worship and doctrine, and to inform themselves as
to the present relation of theological science to the teaching of the
pulpit, the day of discovery and exposure would come, and confidence in
the Church would be at an end. The dishonesty of Luther in those very
things on which the Reformation depended could not be concealed from
them. In Prussia there was a conscientious clergyman who taught his
parishioners Greek, and then showed them all the passages, especially in
the Epistles of St. Paul, which were intentionally altered in the
translation. But one of the Protestant leaders impresses on the clergy
the danger of allowing the people to know that which ought to be kept a
secret among the learned. At most, he says, it may be necessary to admit
that the translation is not perspicuous. The danger of this discovery
does not, however, appear to be immediate, for no book is less familiar
to the laity than the Bible. "There is scarcely one Christian family in
a hundred," says Tholuck, "in which the Holy Scriptures are read." In
the midst of this general downfall of Christianity, in spite of the
great efforts of Protestants, some take refuge in the phrase of an
invisible Church, some in a Church of the future. Whilst there exists a
real, living, universal Church, with a settled system and means of
salvation, the invisible Church is offered in her stead, wrapped up in
the swaddling clothes of rhetoric, like the stone which Rhea gave her
husband instead of the child. In a novel of Jean Paul, a Swedish
clergyman is advised in the middle of winter to walk about with a bit of
orange-sugar in his mouth, in order to realise with all his senses the
sunny climes of the South. It requires as much imagination to realise
the Church by taking a "spiritual league" into one's mouth.

Another acknowledgment, that the Church has become estranged from the
people, and subsists only as a ruin of a past age, is the widely spread
hope of a new Pentecost. Eminent theologians speak of it as the only
conceivable salvation, though there is no such promise in Scripture, no
example in history of a similar desire. They rest their only hope in a
miracle, such as has not happened since the Apostles, and thereby
confess that, in the normal process of religious life by which Christ
has guided His Church till now, their caus