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There is, however, one cardinal omission throughout, which, were it indeed a legal prosecution which was being conducted, would necessarily result in a nonsuit. There is no attempt whatever to define the word Protestant itself, which is, of course, the keystone of the whole argument. Nor is this omission an oversight. It has been deliberately adopted in such a way as to mislead the ordinary reader, and to disguise the fact that the word has not merely several different significations in theology and literature generally, but that it is employed in more than one sense in the prosecuting article itself. We will endeavour to make good this omission, as briefly as may be.

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There is, first of all, the only strict and exact historical use of the word, whereby it denotes those German princes, nobles, clergy, burghers and others who, on April 29, 1529, lodged their Protest against the condemnation of Luther by the Diet of Speyer, and appealed thence to a free General Council. So far as the word can be regarded as a 'trademark,' only these persons and their direct representatives by succession or affinity of doctrine have a clear right to its use. That circumstance restricts its most legitimate application to Lutheran Germany, with a possible extension to Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, but in strictness it excludes all other countries and communities. Nor is this a mere technical quibble, for as a fact the word 'Protestant' was used until quite recent times in Germany as distinct from 'Reformed 'a title confined to the Calvinist and Zuinglian societies; while even now it has undergone a further change of meaning, and while Evangelical' is the official designation of the new syncretist communion, made up of a fusion of Lutherans and Calvinists, and set up as the State Church in Prussia, the word 'Protestant' is now claimed as peculiarly their own by the propagandists of free thought, insomuch that when the Luther Monument was unveiled at Worms on June 25, 1868, all those of the speakers who explicitly described themselves as 'Protestants' seized the opportunity to assail the fundamental doctrines of Christianity itself. A little later, Professor Bluntschli of Heidelberg, President of the ProtestantenVerein,' speaking as an unwelcome guest at the Old Catholic Congress in Cologne on S. Matthew's Day, September 21, 1872, asserted that no agreement in dogma or worship is possible for mankind, not even amongst Protestants themselves, but only in moral and ethical life; and that 'every attempt to formulate the truth is merely relative, and cannot be absolute;' explaining that in making these statements he

was expressing the matured opinions of all German Protestants. It is plain, then, that the foreign use of the word is not of much help to the Reviewer's cause, nor will it mend matters if the venue be transferred to Great Britain. Nay, the difficulties rather increase, because of the much wider area over which the use of the disputed term extends. There is Mr. Spurgeon's Protestantism, for example, a perfectly genuine and unimpeachable article of its kind; and there is Mr. Voysey's, equally entitled to the name, but emphatically denying and decrying every specific item of Mr. Spurgeon's creed as sheer blasphemy; while Mr. Bradlaugh, in turn, doubtless views Mr. Voysey as a reactionary conservative. There are the Protestantisms of the Spectator, of the Record, of the Pall Mall Gazette, of the National Reformer, of the Standard, and of the Daily News, all radically diverse from each other, but equally justified, so far as any non-Lutherans can be, in claiming to be authentic; while nothing would be easier than to set down the names of a bewildering number of hotly rival and contradictory sects, all bearing the same ticket. Nor does the puzzle end even at this point. In Elizabeth's days, just as 'Protestant' and 'Reformed' were opposed and contrasted on the Continent, so 'Protestant' and 'Puritan' began to be similarly contrasted in England, and this phraseology came into such general usage that not only did Charles I., on certain coins of his, pose as champion of the 'Protestant Religion,' but actually Archbishop Laud— the bugbear to this day of all anti-sacerdotalists-described himself on the scaffold itself as a Protestant, and the word was used within living memory-perhaps is used still-in Ireland by members of the (lately) Established Episcopal Church there, to distinguish themselves not merely from Roman Catholics, but from Presbyterians and other Dissenters. If this last-named nuance of the chameleon-like word be what the Reviewer means, he merely answers his question with the question itself.

It is obvious enough, as matter of history, that there has never been any intimate relation of an official character between the Church of England and German Lutheranism. That Luther's powerful genius influenced the Reformation everywhere, even in those forms of it against which he waged ceaseless war, and which did battle against him in their turn, is indisputable; and thus his teaching is, to some small extent, traceable in the Anglican formularies, though far less than Archbishop Laurence imagined, or than the Quarterly Reviewer even now alleges. The truth is that the party which

became dominant in the State under the Protector Somerset, and which formed the nucleus of the Puritan school on the return of the Marian exiles, was Zuinglo-Calvinist, and not Lutheran. The broadest and simplest proof of this historical fact lies in the important collection of documents published by the Parker Society, under the title of the Zürich Letters. That Zürich was the centre of Zuinglian teaching, as Geneva of Calvinist, and Wittenberg of Lutheran theology, is familiar to all; and that Zürich, then at open war with Wittenberg, should have been a sort of Mecca to the Edwardine and Marian Reformers, establishes at once their lack of sympathy with Lutheranism. Under Elizabeth, the influence of the Scottish Reformers and various other causes induced a development of the Calvinist element, and by the accession of James I. it had contrived to obtain the practical control of the Church of England, albeit it had not even then succeeded in its desired revision of her formularies. The letters of Bullinger, Traheron, and that of Edward VI. himself (doubtless composed for him by Cranmer), on Oct. 20, 1549, of Lady Jane Seymour, his cousin, and others in the Zürich Collection, make the consensus between the Reformers in England and in Zürich, by 1550 at any rate, unquestionable; and it is needless to do more than name Archbishops Whitgift, Grindal, Abbot, and Sandys, Bishops Bullingham, Aylmer, Parkhurst, Horne, and Pilkington, in proof of the influence of Calvinism in high places under Elizabeth and her successor. But one practical conclusion from these facts is, that as the foreign Zuinglians and Calvinists were not usually styled Protestants, and were even at war with the real Protestants of Germany, this title could not have been consistently adopted, and as a fact, was not adopted, by the Church of England at that time. One brief citation from Luther himself will set in a clearer light than any long digression his opinion of Zuinglianism: Blessed is the man that hath not stood in the council of the Sacramentarians, and hath not walked in the ways of the Zuinglians, nor sat in the seat of them at Zürich.' There is thus an historical dilemma of this kind before us: If the Church of England was a Protestant Church under the Tudors, it must then, ex vi termini, have rejected Calvinism and Zuinglianism; and as it has never, since the accession of the Stuarts, altered its formularies in favour of those opinions, it must be held to reject them still; and thus the Reviewer's argument, so far as it covers those forms of religious belief, falls to the ground. If, contrariwise, the indisputable fact be maintained that Zuinglianism and

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Calvinism were powerful factors in the English Church of the sixteenth century, then it had no right to the title Protestant, which at that time excluded those factors, and it has not acquired any subsequent right to assume it in virtue of nearer relations with Lutheranism.

'But,' an irate disputant may remark, 'this is all mere cobweb-spinning, and quibbling about a word, when there is. no doubt at all about the thing signified. By "Protestant" is meant all that body of Christian opinion which rejects the authority of the Papal Church, and refuses to accept Roman accretions on the purity of the Gospel; and no intelligent and honest man can deny that such is the avowed attitude of the Church of England.' Very good: we have no objection to argue out the matter on that footing. But a few preliminary questions need to be put to our challenger :-I. Where is the authority for such a definition of Protestantism, and what evidence can you adduce for its authenticity and exactness? 2. How are you justified in extending it so as to take in those whom its original owners, the signataries of the Confession of Augsburg, deliberately excluded? 3. How are you justified, contrariwise, in narrowing it so as to exclude those non-Christians in Germany, Holland, England, and America, who claim it as their title? 4. What do you make of the fact that, if your definition be accepted, it actually covers the whole Greek Church, which has repudiated the Papal claims for a thousand years, which rejects several Roman doctrines, such as those on Purgatory, Indulgences, image-worship, the Immaculate Conception, &c. as corruptions of the Gospel, but which, nevertheless, maintains every one of the specific tenets and practices which the Puritan school desires to make untenable within the Church of England?

For ourselves, we have no theoretical difficulty in accepting -out of deference to common parlance—the word 'Protestant’ when narrowed to the one meaning of non-Papal, though we must, in limine, say that with the world of designations to choose from, this particular one is not very happily chosen for the expression of the idea: especially when we consider that popular use employs it with equal inappropriateness to signify the negations of Agnosticism, and the system of the Swedish Christian, with Episcopacy for his platform, vestments and 'mass' for his worship, and Consubstantiation for his doctrine. But the practical difficulty about accepting it as an epithet of the Church of England is that those who so apply it mean very often to cover surreptitiously a great deal more ground than the one historical fact of our continuous 'protest "

against Roman error involves; and even when no such secret design exists, the very indefiniteness of the word, and the exceedingly bad company it has been keeping for a couple of centuries, make its adoption highly inexpedient, to say the very least; because not only would it be possible to introduce any amount of Rationalism into the Church of England under its shelter, but, as a practical fact, the attempt has been made to do so, and on precisely this very plea, several times within the last twenty years, as any one who pleases may ascertain by examining the documents connected with the Colenso, Essays and Reviews, and Voysey cases, while a more insidious effort has been made in the same direction by the abortive Occasional Sermons Bill, introduced with the view of throwing open Anglican pulpits to Nonconformists, free from the restraints of the ecclesiastical laws, and thus able to contradict and deprave with absolute impunity every formulary of the Church of England within her own congregation.

Hence, too, it is that men of keen intellect and robust faith are chary of committing themselves to so elastic and slippery a term. And it may be well to cite in illustration the words of one of the ablest and most philosophical thinkers of whom English literature can boast, and who, both as a layman and as one whose career was ended long before the outbreak of recent controversies, is free from the suspicion of modern theological partisanship:

'Our predecessors in legislation were not so irrational (not to say impious) as to form an operose ecclesiastical establishment, and even to render the State in some degree subservient to it, when their religion (if such it might be called) was nothing but a mere negation of some other, without any positive idea either of doctrine, discipline, worship or morals, in the scheme which they professed themselves, and which they imposed upon others, even under penalties and incapacities. So little idea had they at the Revolution of establishing Protestantism indefinitely, that they did not indefinitely tolerate it under that name. If mere dissent from the Church of Rome be a merit, he that dissents the most perfectly is the most meritorious, for many points we hold strongly with that Church. He that dissents throughout with that Church will dissent from the Church of England, and then it will be a part of his merit that he dissents with ourselves; a whimsical piece of merit for any set of men to establish. A man is certainly the most perfect Protestant who protests against the whole Christian religion. Whether a person's having no Christian religion be a title to favour, in exclusion to the largest description of Christians who hold all the doctrines of Christianity, though holding along with them some

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