Part 23

§ 175.2. =The Attitude of Catholicism toward Protestantism.=--Every Catholic bishop has still on assuming office to take the oath, _Hæreticos pro posse persequar_. The Jesuits, restored in A.D. 1814, soon pervaded every section with their intolerant spirit. The huge lie that Protestantism is in matters of State as well as of church essentially revolutionary, while Catholicism is the bulwark of the State against revolution and democracy, was affirmed with such audacity that even Protestant statesmen believed it. The Roman Jesuit Perrone (§ 191, 9) taught the Catholic youth in a controversial Italian catechism that “they should feel a creeping horror come over them at the mere mention of the word Protestantism, more even than when a murderous attack was made upon them, for Protestantism and its defenders are in the religious and moral world just the same as the plague and plague-stricken are in the physical world, and in all lands Protestants are the scum of all that is vile and immoral,” etc. In a pastoral of A.D. 1855, Von Ketteler, Bishop of Mainz, compared the Germans, who by the Reformation rent the unity of the church, to the Jews who crucified the Messiah. Romish prelates have vied with one another in their abuse of Protestants and Protestantism. In A.D. 1881, Leo XIII. speaking of the spread of Russian nihilism, charged Protestant missionaries with spreading the dominion of the prince of darkness. Prof. Hohoff of Paderborn, in his “Hist. Studies on Protestantism and Socialism,” Paderb., 1881, reiterated the accusation: “Yes, it is so, Protestantism has begotten atheism, materialism, scepticism, nihilism. The Reformation was the murderer of all science, the greatest foe of culture and learning, and the falsifier of all history.... Melanchthon’s _Loci_ may be styled the most unscientific production in the domain of dogmatics.... Yes, the Reformation has proved a prime source of superstition, a step backward in the history of civilization.... The Catholic church has been the champion of conscience, reason, and freedom.... No one is thoroughly capable of judging historical facts without prejudice as the believing Catholic Christian.”--But while the vast majority of Catholic writers thus abuse Protestantism, others like Seltmann of Eberswald seek to win over to the ranks of the Romish church those who can be befooled by fair speeches. The “Protestant” correspondents in Seltmann’s periodical write under the cloak of anonymity.--In Spain the Reformation was long attributed to the Augustinians, who were jealous of the Dominicans as the only dispensers of indulgences, and to Luther’s desire to marry; but the poet Nuñez de Arca in his “_Vision de Fray Martin_,” attributed it to the corruption of the church and papacy of its time, and regarded with sympathy the spiritual struggles of the reformer. Though as a good Catholic he concludes his poem with the ban of the church against Luther, he yet describes him as a just and well-deserving man.

§ 175.3. =Romish Controversy.=--In the beginning of A.D. 1872 the Waldensian Professor Sciarelli published as a challenge the thesis that the Apostle Peter never set foot in Rome, and Pius IX. with childlike simplicity gave his consent to a public disputation, which came off at Rome on 9th and 10th February. Three Protestant champions, with Sciarelli at their head, were confronted by three Catholics, headed by Fabiani, before 125 auditors admitted by ticket. Both sides claimed the victory; but the shorthand reports were more widely read through Italy than could be agreeable to the papal court.

§ 175.4. =Roman Catholic Union Schemes.=--While American Protestant missionaries strove zealously for the conversion of the schismatical Eastern Churches, Rome with equal diligence but little success endeavoured to win over these and the orthodox Greeks to her own communion. There was great joy over the conversion of the =Bulgarians= to Romanism in A.D. 1860. Taking advantage of a national movement for the restoration of a patriarchate independent of Constantinople (§ 207, 3), some French Jesuits succeeded in persuading a small number of malcontents to agree to a union with Rome. In 1861 the pope consecrated an old Bulgarian priest, Jos. Sokolski, archbishop of the united Bulgarian church. Very soon, however, he and almost all his followers returned to their allegiance to the Greek Orthodox church. Leo XIII. in his _encyclical_ of A.D. 1880, by giving conspicuous honour to Cyril and Methodius, and uttering kind sentiments about the Christian church in the East, and conferring high rank on dignitaries of the Eastern church, seeks to smooth the way for a union of the two great churches.

§ 175.5. =Greek Orthodox Union Schemes.=--In A.D. 1867 the Archbishop of Canterbury addressed a letter to the Patriarch of Constantinople and the whole Eastern church, to open the way to a common understanding and union of the churches, sending a modern Greek translation of the Book of Common Prayer, and asking their assistance at the consecration of an Anglican church at Constantinople. The patriarch Gregorius [Gregory] granted this request, and answered the letter in a friendly manner, passing over the Anglican’s warnings against superstitious additions to the doctrine, _e.g._ mariolatry, but characterizing all the contrary doctrines of the Thirty-nine Articles as “very modern.” At the same time vigorous measures were being taken with a similar object by members of the Russian and of the Anglican churches. In 1870 Professor Overbeck of Halle undertook to act as intermediary in these negotiations. He had in 1865 published, in answer to the papal encyclical with syllabus of December 8th, 1864 (§ 185, 2), a tract with the motto _Ex oriente lux_, in which he placed the claims of the Orthodox eastern church before the Roman Catholic as well as Protestant. On the opening of the Vatican Council in 1869 he advocated in a pamphlet the breaking up of the papal church and the formation of Catholic national churches. In North America Professor Bjerring, of the Catholic seminary for priests at Baltimore, took the same position. In March, 1871, he went to St. Petersburg, was there ordained as an Orthodox priest, and on his return to New York instituted a Sunday service in the English language according to the Greek rite. Of any further advance in this direction of union nothing is known.

§ 175.6. =Old Catholic Union Schemes.=--Döllinger (§ 191, 5) in A.D. 1871 was hopeful of a union not only with the Greek, but also with the Anglican church, and similar hopes were entertained in England and Russia, and distinguished representatives of both communions took part in the Old Catholic congresses (§ 190, 1). On the invitation of Döllinger, as president of the committee commissioned by the Freiburg Congress of A.D. 1874 to treat about union with the Anglican church, forty friends of union from Germany, England, Denmark, France, Russia, Greece, and America met in conference at Bonn. After a lively debate the cleft between East and West was bridged over by a compromise treating the _filioque_ as an unnecessary addition to the Nicene symbol, and asserting that, however desirable a mutual understanding on doctrinal questions might be, existing differences in constitution, discipline, and worship presented no bar to union. The Catholics presented the Anglicans with fourteen theses essential to union, in which the anti-Protestant doctrines were for the most part toned down, but transubstantiation distinctly asserted. Subsequent conferences never got beyond these preliminaries. It was, however, agreed that, in case of necessity, Anglicans and Old Catholics might dispense the supper to one another.

§ 175.7. =Conversions.=--The most famous converts of the century were Hurter, the biographer of Innocent III., the Countess Ida von Hahn-Hahn, writer of religious romances, Gfroerer [Gfrörer], the church historian, the radical Hegelian Daumer, the historian of ante-tridentine theology Hugo Lämmer, and Dr. Ed. Preuss, who had written against the immaculate conception and for criminal conduct had to flee the country. In A.D. 1844 Carl Haas, a Protestant pastor, went over to the Romish church, but the two new dogmas of Pius IX. led him to study the works of Luther. He now returned to the Lutheran church, vindicating his procedure in a treatise entitled, “To Rome, and from Rome back again to Wittenberg, 1881.” Also the Mecklenburg Lutheran pastor, Dr. A. Hager, who, after his conversion, had undertaken the editorship of an ultramontane newspaper in Breslau in 1873, was obliged in a few years to resign the appointment. His return to the evangelical church was being talked about, when he suddenly died in 1883, after having received the last sacrament in the Catholic church. The climax of abuse of Luther and the Lutheran church was reached by the Hanoverian Evers, who had gone over in 1880; in all his scandalous and vituperative writings he describes himself on the title page as “formerly Lutheran pastor.” His mud-throwing, however, was carried so far, that even the ultramontane _Köln. Volkszeitung_ was constrained to advise him to write more decently.

§ 175.8. The Mortara affair of A.D. 1858 attracted special attention. The eight-year old son of the Jew Mortara of Bologna was violently taken from his parents to Rome because his Christian nurse said that two years before, during a dangerous illness, she had baptized him. The church answered the entreaties of the parents and the universal outcry by saying that the sacrament had an indelible character, and that the pope could not change the law. Again in A.D. 1864, the ten-year old Jewish boy, Joseph Coën, apprentice weaver in Rome, was decoyed by a priest to his cloister and there persuaded to receive baptism. In vain his mother, the Jewish community, and even the French ambassador, urged his restoration; and when, in A.D. 1870, the temporal power of the pope was overthrown, the lad, now sixteen years old, had himself become such a fanatical Catholic that he refused to have anything to do with his mother as an unbeliever.

§ 175.9. In the Tyrol in A.D. 1830 there were numerous conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism (§ 198, 1). A Catholic priest in Baden, Henhöfer of Mühlhausen, influenced by the writings of Sailer and Boos, went over to the Lutheran church in A.D. 1823, and continued down to his death in A.D. 1862 a vigorous opponent of the prevailing rationalism. Count Leopold von Seldnitzsky, formerly Prince-Bishop of Breslau, felt obliged in 1840, in consequence of the conscientious objections he had to perform his official duties toward church and state during the ecclesiastico-political controversies of 1830 (§ 193, 1), to resign his appointments. He was subsequently led in A.D. 1863, through reading the Scriptures and Luther’s works, after a sore struggle, to join the evangelical Church. He devoted all his means to the founding of Protestant educational institutions at Berlin and Breslau. He died in A.D. 1871, in his eighty-fourth year. The proclamation by the Vatican of the dogma of infallibility drove many pious and earnest Catholics out of the Romish communion. Of these Carl von Richthofen, Canon of Breslau, engages our special interest. Son of a pious Lutheran mother, and trained up under Gossner’s mild spiritual direction (§ 187, 2), his gentle and deeply religious nature had attached itself to the Roman Catholic church of his father only under the illusion that the Romish doctrine of justification was not wholly irreconcilable with the evangelical doctrine. He at first submitted to but soon renounced the Vatican decree; was excommunicated by Archbishop Förster, voluntarily resigned his emoluments; joined the Old Catholics in A.D. 1873, and the separated Old Lutherans in A.D. 1875. In the following year he died a painful death from the explosion of a petroleum lamp.--Upon the whole Rome has made most converts in America and England; and she has suffered losses more or less severe in France, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Bohemia.

§ 175.10. =The Luther Centenary, A.D. 1883.=--The celebration of Luther’s birth was carried out with great enthusiasm throughout all Germany, more than a thousand tracts on Luther and the Reformation were published, statues were erected, special services were held in all Lutheran churches, high schools, and universities, and brilliant demonstrations were made at Jena, Worms, Wittenberg, and Eisleben. There were founded at Kiel a Luther-house, at Worms and at the Wartburg Luther libraries, in Leipzig and Berlin Luther churches. At Eisleben a bronze statue of the reformer was solemnly unveiled representing his tearing the papal bull with his right hand and pressing the Bible to his heart with his left. Another noble monument was raised by the munificence of the emperor by the issuing during this year of the first volume of pastor Knaake’s critical edition of Luther’s works. A “German Luther Institute” aims at assisting children of the poorer clergy and teachers, and a “Reformation History Society” has undertaken the task of issuing popular tracts on the persons, events and principles of that and the succeeding period based upon original documents. Protestants of all lands, with the exception of the English high-church party, contributed liberally; the Americans had a copy of the great Luther statue of the Worms monument (§ 178, 1) made and erected in Washington. Even in Italy the liberal press eulogised Luther, while the ultramontanes loaded his memory with unmeasured calumny and reproach. The threatened counter-demonstrations of German ultramontanes fell quite flat and harmless. The =Zwingli Centenary= of January 1st, A.D. 1884, was celebrated with enthusiasm throughout the Reformed church, especially in Switzerland. On the other hand, the celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Wiclif’s death on December 31st, 1884, created comparatively little interest.

II. Protestantism in General.[526]

§ 176. RATIONALISM AND PIETISM.

At the beginning of the century rationalism was generally prevalent, but philosophy and literature soon weakened its foundations, and the war of independence moved the hearts of the people toward the faith of their fathers. Pietism entered the lists against rationalism, and the Halle controversy of A.D. 1830 marked the crisis of the struggle. The rationalists were compelled to make appeal to the people by popular agitators. During A.D. 1840 they managed to found several “free churches,” which, however, had for the most part but a short and unprosperous existence. They were more successful in A.D. 1860 with the _Protestantenverein_ as the instrument of their propaganda (§ 180).

§ 176.1. The old =Rationalism= was attacked by the disciples of Hegel and Schelling, and in A.D. 1834 Röhr of Weimar found Hase of Jena as keen an opponent as any pietist or orthodox controversialist. That recognised leader of the old rationalists had coolly attempted to substitute a new and rational form of doctrine, worship, and constitution for the antiquated formularies of the Reformation, and drew down upon himself the rebuke even of those who sympathized with him in his doctrinal views.--In A.D. 1817 Claus Harms of Kiel, on the occasion of the Reformation centenary, opened an attack upon those who had fallen away from the faith of their fathers, by the publication of ninety-five new theses, recalling attention to Luther’s almost forgotten doctrines. In A.D. 1827 Aug. Hahn in an academical discussion at Leipzig maintained that the rationalists should be expelled from the church, and Hengstenberg started his _Evangelische Kirchenzeitung_. The jurist Von Gerlach in A.D. 1830 charged Gesenius and Wegscheider of Halle with open contempt of Christian truth, and called for State interference. In all parts of Germany, amid the opposition of scientific theologians and the scorn of philosophers, pietism made way against rationalism, so that even men of culture regarded it as a reproach to be reckoned among the rationalists. Unbelief, however, was widespread among the masses. When Sintenis, preacher in Magdeburg in A.D. 1840, declared the worship of Christ superstitious, and was reprimanded by the consistory, his neighbours, the pastors Uhlich and König, founded the society of the “Friends of Light,” whose assembly at Köthen then was attended by thousands of clergymen and laymen. In one of these assemblies in A.D. 1844, Wislicenus of Halle, by starting the question, Whether the Scriptures or the reason is to be regarded as the standard of faith? shattered the illusion that rationalism still occupied the platform of the church and Scripture. The left wing of the school of Schleiermacher took offence at the severe measures demanded by Hengstenberg and his party, and in 1846 issued in Berlin a manifesto with eighty-eight signatures against the paper pope of antiquated Reformation confessions and the inquisitorial proceedings of the _Kirchenzeitung_ party, as inimical to all liberty of faith and conscience, wishing only to maintain firm hold of the truth that Jesus Christ is yesterday, to-day, and for ever the one and only ground of salvation. The Friends of Light, combining with the German Catholics and the Young Hegelians, founded Free churches at Halle, Königsberg, and many other places. Their services and sermons void of religion, in which the Bible, the living Christ, and latterly even the personal God, had no place, but only the naked worship of humanity, had temporary vitality imparted them by the revolutionary movements of A.D. 1848. This gave the State an excuse, long wished for, to interfere, and soon scarcely a trace of their churches was to be found.

§ 176.2. =Pietism= had not been wholly driven out of the evangelical church during the period of ecclesiastical impoverishment, but, purified from many eccentric excesses, and seeking refuge and support for the most part by attaching itself to the community of the Moravian Brethren, it had, even in Württemberg, established itself independently and in an essentially theosophical-chiliastic spirit. There too a kind of spiritualism was introduced by the physician and poet Justin Kerner of Weinsberg, and the philosopher Eschenmayer of Tübingen, with spirit revelations from above and below. Amid the religious movements of the beginning of the century Pietism gained a decided advantage. It took the form of a protest against the rationalism prevailing among the clergy. The earnest and devout sought spiritual nourishment at conventicles and so-called _Stunden_ addressed by laymen, mostly of the working class, well acquainted with Scripture and works in practical divinity. Persecuted by the irreligious mob, the rationalist clergy, and sometimes by the authorities, they by-and-by secured representatives among the younger clergy and in the university chairs, and carried on vigorous missions at home and abroad. This pietism was distinctly evangelical and Protestant. It did not oppose but endeavoured simply to restore the orthodoxy of the church confession. Yet it had many of the characteristics of the earlier pietism: over-estimation of the invisible to the disparagement of the visible church, of sanctification over justification, a tendency to chiliasm, etc.--Of no less importance in awakening the religious life throughout Germany, and especially in Switzerland, was the missionary activity of Madame de Krüdener of Riga. This lady, after many years of a gay life, forsook the world, and began in A.D. 1814 her travels through Europe, preaching repentance, proclaiming the gospel message in the prisons, the foolishness of the cross to the wise of this world, and to kings and princes the majesty of Christ as King of kings. Wherever she went she made careless sinners tremble, and drew around her crowds of the anxious and spiritually burdened of every sort and station. Honoured by some as a saint, prophetess, and wonder-worker, ridiculed by others as a fool, persecuted as a dangerous fanatic or deceiver, driven from one country to another, she died in the Crimea in A.D. 1824.[527]

§ 176.3. =The Königsberg Religious Movement, A.D. 1835-1842.=--The pious theosophist, J. H. Schönherr of Königsberg, starting from the two primitive substances, fire and water, developed a system of theosophy in which he solved the riddles of the theogony and cosmogony, of sin and redemption, and harmonized revelation with the results of natural science. At first influenced by these views, but from A.D. 1819 expressly dissenting from them, J. W. Ebel, pastor in the same city, gathered round him a group of earnest Christian men and women, Counts Kanitz and Finkenstein and their wives, Von Tippelskirch, afterwards preacher to the embassy at Rome, the theological professor H. Olshausen, the pastor Dr. Diestel, and the medical doctor Sachs. After some years Olshausen and Tippelskirch withdrew, and dissensions arose which gave opportunity to the ecclesiastical authorities to order an investigation. Ebel was charged with founding a sect in which impure practices were encouraged. He was suspended in A.D. 1835, and at the instigation of the consistory a criminal process was entered upon against him. Dr. Sachs, who had been expelled from the society, was the chief and almost only witness, but vague rumours were rife about mystic rites and midnight orgies. Ebel and Diestel were deposed in A.D. 1839, and pronounced incapable of holding any public office; and as a sect founder Ebel was sentenced to imprisonment in the common jail. On appeal to the court of Berlin, the deposition was confirmed, but all the rest of the sentence was quashed, and the parties were pronounced capable of holding any public offices except those of a spiritual kind. Two reasons were alleged for deposition:

1. That Ebel, though not from the pulpit or in the public instruction of the young, yet in private religious teaching, had inculcated his theosophical views.

2. That both of them as married men had given expression to opinions injurious to the purity of married life.

In general they were charged with spreading a doctrine which was in conflict with the principles of Christianity, and making such use of sexual relations as was fitted to awaken evil thoughts in the minds of hearers. Ebel was pronounced guiltless of sectarianism.--Kanitz wrote a book in defence, which represents Ebel and Diestel as martyrs to their pure Christian piety in an age hostile to every pietistic movement; whereas Von Wegnern, followed by Hepworth Dixon, in a romancing and frivolous style, lightly give currency to evil surmisings without offering any solid basis of proof. The whole affair still waits for a patient and unprejudiced investigation.[528]