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rical struggles and in the living Christian fadth of their composers ( though I must repeat , that it is not in the nature of these confessions that the source of the weakness of the authorities is to be sought ) ; she may think it right to bind her ministers by subscription to these Articles ; nothing of all this do we wish to depreciate ; still one cannot grant to its advocates that the
disorders observed in Germany evidenced the necessity of laying " some check and restraint upon the human mind , " nor that the binding force , the necessity of the subscription , the setting the letter of the symbol on the same level with its scriptural contents , can be regarded as the source of the spiritual blessing which the church enjoys . The former would too much resemble the controul which the Romish Church exerts over her members ;
the latter appears to involve too strange a confusion of the prevention of an evil with the existence of a good . The necessity of deterring the ministers of a church from the arbitrary aberrations of heresy , by binding them to human articles , and of thereby assuming the right to remove them when convicted of erroneous doctrines , may often , perhaps always , exist ; yet where it does exist , it presupposes an inclination to these heretical aberrations , and that in a degree proportionate to the apparent urgency of this necessity .
Such an inclination , however , in a considerable part of the clergy , is na healthy condition , nor one productive of blessing . Its suppression is but the prevention of a yet greater evil than actually exists within the system . The blessing , however , the blessing of doctrines delivered by enlightened and believing men , must be derived elsewhere ; from the spirit , namely , of grace and of prayer , which human forms can never give , but which they may by an unreasonable strictness hinder , though they cannot quench . When a church then so far confides that this spirit of grace and of truth , '
which is the Spirit of Christ , will illumine her teachers , if duly prepared and called , as to trust that such unscriptural , heretical aberrations , by which the basis of Christianity is shaken , should be but of rare occurrence ; she may , indeed , go too far in this originally noble confidence , and may find herself compelled by experience to return more decisively to the preventive means and rules comprised in the documents upon which she was founded : in no event , however , will she be tempted to look for blessing and prosperity from the establishment of the most definite verbal forms , from the erection
of symbols independent of immediate controversy , and from a mode of restraint which places the human form of the doctrine on an equality with the word of Scripture . Had she such expectations , it were evident that she trusted more in the human formula than in the Spirit of Christ . While she trusts in this , she will indeed not neglect those means of protection ; still she will make it her first aim to impart to her young clergy , by a genuine theological preparation , that spirit which preaches the same gospel under
forms , varying indeed , yet all within the limits of the word of Scripture , and which produces adherence to , and justification of , the doctrine , not after the letter , but after the spirit of the symbol : for ill were the state of any ecclesiastical authorities who should be unable to discern and to exhibit this spirit ; and lamentable the condition of any church , which , besides the legal fences against error , did not believe in a source from which the truth issues in such
a living stream , that error itself must progressively diminish , the administration of the law become continually more enlightened , the means of repression less and less necessary . Such belief , however , and such endeavours form the principles upon which the Evangelical-Churches of Germany acted . If they stumbled occasionally in this noble course , is that a sign they can
Untitled Article
524 Professor Sack ' s View of Religion in Germany .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1828, page 523, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2563/page/12/
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