eech contradicts the Word of God, is detrimental to all
discipline and blasphemes God. Therefore I have sedulously made a
distinction, showing to what extent man has a free will to observe
outward discipline, also before regeneration," etc. (_C. R._ 9, 766.)
Instead of referring to his own early statements, which were liable to
misinterpretation more than anything that Luther had written,
Melanchthon disingenuously mentions Luther, whose real meaning he
misrepresents and probably had never fully grasped. The true reason why
Melanchthon charged Luther and his loyal adherents with Stoicism was his
own synergistic departure from the Lutheran doctrine of original sin and
of salvation by grace alone. Following Melanchthon, rationalizing
Synergists everywhere have always held that without abandoning Luther's
doctrine of original sin and of the _gratia sola_ there is no escape
from Calvinism.

In this point Reformed theologians agree with the Synergists, and have
therefore always claimed Luther as their ally. I. Mueller declared in
_Lutheri de Praedestionatione et Libero Arbitrio Doctrina_ of 1832: "As
to the chief point (_quod ad caput rei attinet_), Zwingli's view of
predestination is in harmony with Luther's _De Servo Arbitrio_." In his
_Zentraldogmen_ of 1854 Alexander Schweizer endeavored to prove that the
identical doctrine of predestination was originally the central dogma of
the Lutheran as well as of the Zwinglian reformation. "It is not so much
the dogma [of predestination] itself," said he (1, 445), "as its
position which is in dispute" among Lutherans and Calvinists. Schweizer
(1, 483) based his assertion on the false assumption "that the doctrines
of the captive will and of absolute predestination [denial of universal
grace] are two halves of the same ring." (Frank 1, 12. 118. 128; 4,
262.) Similar contentions were made in America by Schaff, Hodge, Shedd,
and other Reformed theologians.

As a matter of fact, however, also in the doctrine of predestination
Zwingli and Calvin were just as far and as fundamentally apart from
Luther as their entire rationalistic theology differed from the simple
and implicit Scripturalism of Luther. Frank truly says that the
agreement between Luther's doctrine and that of Zwingli and Calvin is
"only specious, _nur scheinbar_." (1, 118.) Tschackert remarks: "Whoever
[among the theologians before the _Formula of Concord_] was acquainted
with the facts could not but see that in this doc