nowhere
employed for obtaining the signatures. At any rate, no instance is
recorded in which compulsion was used to secure its adoption. Moreover,
the campaign of public subscription, for which about two years were
allowed, was everywhere conducted on the principle that such only were
to be admitted to subscription as had read the _Formula_ and were in
complete agreement with its doctrinal contents. Yet it was probably true
that some, as Hutter assumes, signed with a bad conscience [Hutter:
"_Deinde esto: subscripserunt aliqui mala conscientia Formulae
Concordiae";_ Mueller, _Einleitung_, 115]; for among those who affixed
their names are quite a few of former Crypto-Calvinists--men who had
always found a way of escaping martyrdom, and, also in this instance,
may have preferred the retaining of their livings to following their
conviction. The fact is that no other confession can be mentioned in the
elaboration of which so much time, labor, and care was expended to bring
out clearly the divine truth, to convince every one of its complete
harmony with the Bible and the Lutheran symbols, and to hear and meet
all objections, as was the case with respect to the _Formula of
Concord_.

"In reply to the criticism [of the Calvinists in the _Neustadt
Admonition_, etc.] that it was unjust for only six theologians to write
a Confession for the whole Church, and that a General Synod should have
been held before the signing of the Confession, the Convention of
Quedlinburg, in 1583, declared it untrue that the _Formula of Concord_
had been composed by only six theologians, and reminded the critics how,
on the contrary, the articles had first been sent, a number of times, to
all the Lutheran churches in Germany; how, in order to consider them,
synods and conferences had been held on every side, and the articles had
been thoroughly tested, how criticisms had been made upon them; and how
the criticisms had been conscientiously taken in hand by a special
commission. The Quedlinburg Convention therefore declared in its minutes
that, indeed, 'such a frequent revision and testing of the _Christian
Book of Concord_, many times repeated, is a much greater work than if a
General Synod had been assembled respecting it to which every province
would have commissioned two or three theologians, who in the name of all
the rest would have helped to test and approve the book. For in that way
only one synod would have been held for the comparing and tes