efore 1864, declined
to accept even all of the twenty-one doctrinal articles as Scriptural
and fundamental. 3. After as well as before 1864 they justified their
deviations by referring to, and interpreting, the phrase "fundamental
doctrines" as a limitation of their subscription to the Augsburg
Confession. Dr. Spaeth: "Again and again it was openly declared that a
strict and faithful adherence to the Confession, as fundamental in all
its doctrinal statements, was 'irrational, unscriptural, and
un-Lutheran.' (_Luth. Observer_, Nov. 17, 1865.) The demand was made
that Lutherans should no longer insist upon such points as fundamental
'about which the ablest theologians and most devout Christians have not
been entirely agreed.... Sooner than yield on this point we would see
the Church perish.' (_Lutheran Observer_, Dec. 1, 1865.)" (2, 113.)

71. York Resolution.--Granting that the York Amendment, in a measure,
marked a step forward, the so-called York Resolution, quoted above, was
more than a step backward. It neutralized the Amendment, and practically
identified Synod with the theology of the Platform. Indirectly it
rejected the Lutheran doctrines of the real presence, absolution, and
the Sabbath. In brief, the York convention had betrayed the cause of
Lutheran confessionalism--a fact which only very gradually dawned on the
conservatives. Dr. Spaeth, quoting Krauth of September 10, 1868, who in
the _Lutheran and Missionary_, April 14, 1864, a month prior to the
convention of the General Synod in York, had declared that the Eleventh
Article of the Augsburg Confession "is not fundamental, and never has
been so regarded by the Lutheran Church, in any part of the world,"
says: "The Pennsylvania Synod, with that charity [blindness] which
believeth all things, regarded the subsequent resolutions of the General
Synod [at York] professedly in vindication of the Augsburg Confession as
earnest and the token of a better mind. Taken in the meaning of those
who offered them, they would have been[?] such a token. The after-events
showed that they were designed by the majority as an adroit piece of
thimble-rig. Passed in their earliest form in the Pittsburgh Synod to
counteract the Definite Platform [but not its theology], these
resolutions were so modified [the changes are of no theological import]
by the General Synod as to be, in the sense it put into them
[historically no other sense was possible], the Definite Platform itself
in a n