ood, by our fellow Christians.

But our chief desire is to inspire our own young people with an
intelligent devotion to the faith of their fathers and to persuade them
of its conformity with historical, believing Christianity.

What is Lutheranism? How does it differ from Catholicism? How does it
differ from other forms of Protestantism?

The origin of Lutheranism we are accustomed to assign to the sixteenth
century. We associate it with the nailing of the 95 theses to the church
door at Wittenberg, or with Luther's defence at the Diet of Worms, or
with the Confession of the Evangelicals at Augsburg in 1530.

These events were indeed dramatic indications of a great change, but
they were only the culmination of a process that had been going on for
ages. It was a re-formation of the ancient Catholic Church and a return
to the original principles of the Gospel.

"The Church had become an enormous labyrinthine structure which included
all sorts of heterogeneous matters, the Gospel and holy water, the
universal priesthood and the pope on his throne, the Redeemer and Saint
Anna, and called it religion. Over against this vast accumulation of the
ages, against which many times ineffective protest had been made, the
Lutheran Reformation insisted on reducing religion to its simplest
terms, faith and the word of God."*
*Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums.

The traditional conception of the Church with all its apparatus and
claims of authority it repudiated, and in the few and simple statements
of the seventh article of the Augustana, it set forth its doctrine of
the Church:

"Also they teach, that One holy Church is to continue forever. The
Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly
taught and the Sacraments rightly administered. And to the true unity of
the Church, it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel
and the administration of the Sacraments."

This was the Lutheran position as against Rome.

But properly to understand our history we must also take account of
another movement with which our churches had to contend at the same time
that they were making their protest against Rome. This was a more
radical form of Protestantism which found its expression among what are
known as the Reformed Churches. It had its home in Switzerland, and made
its way along the Rhine to Germany, France and Holland. Through John
Knox it came to Scotland, and subsequently superseded Lutheranis