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much worse in their practical tendency than those of Rome could ever be in any age short of the grossest barbarism , were enforced by the Reformers as the only conditions of salvation ; — it requires some calculation of the good effects which must result from
any sort of successful resistance to tyranny before we pronounce that Erasmus was wrong in doubting whether things were not changed for the worse ; n least for a long period of contests between rival systems of bigotry and intolerance . The seeds of the Reformation had been long sown ,
and only waited a favourable opportunity to produce the happiest fruits ; the harvest fell principally into the hands of a man who certainly very much accelerated its progress , but blighted main of its fairest prospects . As an overthrow er of an old church , no one was better fitted for his
situation ; as a founder of a new one , no one- worse : strenuously insisting in the one character , for the right of private judgment ; in the other , no violence seems to have been thought by him and several of his associates ^ as too great to be used in propagating their own dogmas . *
The wounded vanity of the Augustine friar + at the preference of another order , ( the Dominican , ) for the emolument of dispensing indulgences , perhaps stimulated his beneficial
exertions in the cause of religious liberty , against the Roman See ; but the same attachment to his order certainly led him to make the dogmas of St . Augustine t ( which had long been a source
* " Others abused fire , they water . Those that knew better thiug-s ought to have done better ; neither were they actuated by a good spirit , that could lead the wanderer into a ditch , instead of setting * him in the right way ; that could drown the infected , instead of trying" to heal him ; or burn the blind , instead of" restoring him to light . " Brandt ' s Hist . Reform . 1 . p . 57 .
• f I am aware of the doubt which Robertson has raised on this point , Hist . Charles V . Book ii . ; but giving all the weight which I think is due to his argument , it does not amount to any thing- like a refutation of the opinion which , as he observes , " almost all historians , Popish as well as Protestant , have admitted . "
X Brandt ' s Hist . Ref . II . p . ; Traitc de la Cause dn Peche , par D . Tolen , Cli . v . The extravagant pitch to which Beza and
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of controversy with the same Dominicans ) the foundations of his faith , and to defend so zealously , as the pillar of his creed , the doctrine that justification was by faith , and not by works ; and even , as his disciple Armsdorf expressed it , " that good works were an impediment to salvation . " * And thus was the Protestant
cause blasted in its infancy , by being indelibly impressed with the foul stain of doctrines , some of which ( pushed as they afterwards were to a higher pitch of extravagance by his associates arid successors ) 1 think we may safely
call as abhorrent to all just and consolotary notions of the Divine perfections , and as mischievous in their moral tendency , and in the way they were inculcated , as any which he overturned .
The Swiss churches had always been celebrated for the zeal with which they had followed up the tenets of the early Reformers , as methodized by Calvin , and afterwards explicitly defined by the Synod of Doit 3 and the spirit of bigoted attachment to
these dogmas was firmly rooted among the clergy at Basle , when the suspicion of Wetstein ^ s heterodoxy , whether well or ill founded , and the bold innovation which he meditated upon the sanctity of the received text , brought it into play , and aroused all the evil passions
of his orthodox brethren : but their persecutions were rendered doubly vexatious to him , by the circumstance of Frey , ( who had been his tutor and his friend , who had encouraged him in his undertakings , and had even stimulated him to think for himself on
disputed points of doctrine , ) being one of the first , in his character of Theological Professor , to join in the cry which was raised , and afterwards to declare himself his most violent and
inveterate enemy . His precise motives for this conduct it is not easy exactly to discover , but it is probable that the dread of censure , the certain difficulties and worldly inconveniences , to say theleast of them , which appeared
others carried this doctrine , was certainly afterwards opposed by the Lutherans ; but Luther himself " would not allow good works to be considered either as the cowditions or means of salvation , nor even as a preparation for receiving * it . " Maclean ^ Note Mosh . Eccl . Hist . II , p . 170 , * Moslieim , II . p . 172 ,
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£ 50 The Nonconformist . No . IX .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1819, page 250, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1771/page/38/
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