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Christian faith , and the duty towards the Christian community can be united with what is due to men , who are valuable as well for personal character as for their learning , accomplishments , and deserts ; whether , as seems suited to the times , to constitute a Synod for the revision of the ecclesiastical creed ; and , finally , whether , as is advised , to think of erecting an office of supreme authority" ( Qu . a bench of bishops ?) < c in the evangelical church , instead of
the dissolved corpus evangelicorum , all this remains to be an object of long and deep consideration to the friends of the church of all conditions . " The professor Hengstenburg having found himself called upon to justify his appeal to government to put an end to the endeavours of the teachers of rationalism in opposition to Christianity and to the church , laid his defence on the ground of the right and duty of interference in the supreme power of the state . fi We maintain this , " he says , " on the principle that unity of
doctrine is an indispensable sign of an outward church , a principle which cannot be rejected without rejecting altogether an external and visible church ; for what remains when unity of doctrine is taken away but a chaotic body in which self-will prevails alone , destructive of all community ? a principle which has been held b y all Christian churches of all times without an exception as incontestable . But since the necessity of such unity cannot be denied , it follows that for every church there must exist a power
and an overseership" ( Qu . episcopal rule ?) " to preserve its unity . In the Church of Rome these are vested in the church itself . " " True , " says the Reviewer in the Allgem . Kirchen Zeitung in a strain of indignant declamation , " and we know how the duty was performed . There are witnesses which proclaim it aloud through every century to the end of time . They
are the crusades against the poor , good , kind-hearted Waldenses , the thousands who have been made to expiate their heresy with their lives in the burning pile in Spain , Portugal , India , America , Italy , Netherlands , France , and alas ! in our own beloved country , where among others the inquisitorial rage of a Conrad at Marburg alone delivered over eighty men to the flames ; the miserable victims which have been murdered or have died in
want and misery in the dark dungeons of the inquisition , upon the rack , or in consequence of its torments ; the destruction of John Huss , Jerom of Prague , and so many thousand others in Germany , especially in Bohemia ; the war of the Hussites , that of the Reformation , and the most frightful of all , the thirty years' war , " &c , &c , &c . " May the mercy of God save us in the nineteenth century , and all our posterity , from such dominion and overseership of our faith . "
A more dispassionate investigation of the question of compulsory uniformity has appeared from the pen of a man of great literary distinction , Bretschneider , in a letter to a statesman on the question , whether evangelical governments should enter into the strife against rationalism . Of rationalism he says , " that it is neither more nor less than the necessary and unceasing consequence of the advancing intellect and knowledge of the age , and the endeavour to bring this advance , which no man can ever arrest , into
harmony with the theology ; and thus to make the theology capable of being received by those whose mind is so constructed as to admit only the faith of rational conviction . " «* The appeal against it is made to the ruler as member of the church , as head of the state , or as head of the church , " As head of the evangelical church , it is said to be his duty to see that theological professors be appointed in the schools who will produce the doctrine of the church in conformity to its forms of faith . They must be prohibited to bring forward instead of this their own particular opinions , and if they
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State of Religions Opinion in Germany . 587
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1830, page 587, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2588/page/3/
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