CHAPTER IV
1. Zwinglianism we do not discuss separately, since after a short lease of power it rapidly lost in importance. Arminianism, the dogmatic peculiarity of which consisted in the repudiation of the doctrine of predestination in its strict form, and which also repudiated worldly asceticism, was organized as a sect only in Holland (and the United States). In this chapter it is without interest to us, or has only the negative interest of having been the religion of the merchant patricians in Holland (see below). In dogma it resembled the Anglican Church and most of the Methodist denominations. Its Erastian position (i.e. upholding the sovereignty of the State even in Church matters) was, however, common to all the authorities with purely political interests: the Long Parliament in England, Elizabeth, the Dutch States-General, and, above all, Oldenbamereldt.
2. On the development of the concept of Puritanism see, above all, Sanford, Studies and Reflections of the Great Rebellion, p. 65 f. When we use the expression it is always in the sense which it took on in the popular speech of the seventeenth century, to mean the ascetically inclined religious movements in Holland and England without distinction of Church organization or dogma, thus including Independents, Congregationalists, Baptists, Mennonites, and Quakers.
3. This has been badly misunderstood in the discussion of these questions. Especially Sombart, but also Brentano, continually cite the ethical writers (mostly those of whom they have heard through me) as codifications of rules of conduct without ever asking which of them were supported by psychologically effective religious motivations.
4. I hardly need to emphasize that this sketch, so far as it is concerned solely with the field of dogma, falls back everywhere on the formulations of the literature of the history of the Church and of doctrine. It makes no claim whatever to originality. Naturally I have attempted, so far as possible, to acquaint myself with the sources for the history of the Reformation. But to ignore in the process the intensive and acute theological research of many decades, instead of, as is quite indispensable, allowing oneself to be led from it to the sources, would have been presumption indeed. I must hope that the necessary brevity of the sketch has not led to incorrect formulations, and that I have at least avoided important misunderstandings of fact. The discussion contributes something new for those familiar with theological literature only in the sense that the whole is, of course, considered from the point of view of our problem. For that reason many of the most important points, for instance the rational character of this asceticism and its significance for modem life, have naturally not been emphasized by theological writers.
This aspect, and in general the sociological side, has, since the appearance of this study, been systematically studied in the work of E. Troeltsch, mentioned above, whose Gerhard und Melanchthon, as well as numerous reviews in the Gött. Gel. Anz., contained several preliminary studies to his great work. For reasons of space the references have not included everything which has been used, but for the most part only those works which that part of the text follows, or which are directly relevant to it. These are often older authors, where our problems have seemed closer to them. The insufficient pecuniary resources of German libraries have meant that in the provinces the most important source materials or studies could only be had from Berlin or other large libraries on loan for very short periods. This is the case with Voet, Baxter, Tymermans, Wesley, all the Methodist, Baptist, and Quaker authors, and many others of the earlier writers not contained in the Corpus Reformatorum. For any thorough study the use of English and American libraries is almost indispensable. But for the following sketch it was necessary (and possible) to be content with material available in Germany. In America recently the characteristic tendency to deny their own sectarian origins has led many university libraries to provide little or nothing new of that sort of literature. It is an aspect of the general tendency to the secularization of American life which will in a short time have dissolved the traditional national character and changed the significance of many of the fundamental institutions of the country completely and finally. It is now necessary to fall back on the small orthodox sectarian colleges.
5. On Calvin and Calvinism, besides the fundamental work of Kampschulte, the best source of information is the discussion of Erick Marcks (in his Coligny). Campbell, The Puritans in Holland, England, and America (2 vols.), is not always critical and unprejudiced. A strongly partisan anti-Calvinistic study is Pierson, Studien over Johan Calvijn. For the development in Holland compare, besides Motley, the Dutch classics, especially Groen van Prinsterer, Geschiedenis v.h. Vaderland; La Hollande et l'influence de Calvin (1864); Le parti anti-revolutionnaire et confessionnel dans l'eglise des P.B. (1860) (for modern Holland); further, above all, Fruin's Tien jaren mit den tachtigjarigen oorlog, and especially Naber, Calvinist of Libertijntsch. Also W. J. F. Nuyens, Gesch. der kerkel. an pol. geschillen in de Rep. d. Ver. Prov. (Amsterdam, 1886); A. Köhler, Die Mederl. re: Kirche (Erlangen, 1856), for the nineteenth century. For France, besides Polenz, now Baird, Rise of the Huguenots. For England, besides Carlyle, Macaulay, Masson, and, last but not least, Ranke, above all, now the various works of Gardiner and Firth. Further, Taylor, A Retrospect of the Religious Life in England (1854), and the excellent book of Weingarten, Die englischen Revolutionskirchen. Then the article on the English Moralists by E. Troeltsch in the Realenzyklöpadie für protestanhsche Theologie und Kirche, third edition, and of course his Soziallehren. Also E. Bernstein's excellent essay in the Geschichte des Sozialismus (Stuttgart, 1895, I, p. 50 ff.). The best bibliography (over seven thousand titles) is in Dexter, Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years (principally, though not exclusively, questions of Church organization). The book is very much better than Price (History of Nonconformism), Skeats, and others. For Scotland see, among others, Sack, Die Kirche von Schottland (1844), and the literature on John Knox. For the American colonies the outstanding work is Doyle, The English in America. Further, Daniel Wait Howe, The Puritan Republic; J. Brown, The Pilgrim Fathers of New England and their Puritan Successors (third edition, Revell). Further references will be given later.
For the differences of doctrine the following presentation is especially indebted to Schneckenburger's lectures cited above. Ritschl's fundamental work, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtferhgung und Versöhnung (references to Vol. III of third edition), in its mixture of historical method with judgments of value, shows the marked peculiarities of the author, who with all his fine acuteness of logic does not always give the reader the certainty of objectivity. Where, for instance, he differs from Schneckenburger's interpretation I am often doubtful of his correctness, however little I presume to have an opinion of my own. Further, what he selects out of the great variety of religious ideas and feelings as the Lutheran doctrine often seems to be determined by his own preconceptions. It is what Ritschl himself conceives to be of permanent value in Lutheranism. It is Lutheranism as Ritschl would have had it, not always as it was. That the works of Karl Müller, Seeberg, and others have everywhere been made use of it is unnecessary to mention particularly. If in the following I have condemned the reader as well as myself to the penitence of a malignant growth of footnotes, it has been done in order to give especially the non-theological reader an opportunity to check up the validity of this sketch by the suggestion of related lines of thought.
6. In the following discussion we are not primarily interested in the origin, antecedents, or history of these ascetic movements, but take their doctrines as given in a state of full development.
7. For the following discussion I may here say definitely that we are not studying the personal views of Calvin, but Calvinism, and that in the form to which it had evolved by the end of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth centuries in the great areas where it had a decisive influence and which were at the same time the home of capitalistic culture. For the present, Germany is neglected entirely, since pure Calvinism never dominated large areas here. Reformed is, of course, by no means identical with Calvinistic.
8. Even the Declaration agreed upon between the University of Cambridge and the Archbishop of Canterbury on the 7th Article of the Anglican Confession, the so-called Lambeth Article of 1595, which (contrary to the official version) expressly held that there was also predestination to eternal death, was not ratified by the Queen. The Radicals (as in Hanserd Knolly's Confession) laid special emphasis on the express predestination to death (not only the admission of damnation, as the milder doctrine would have it).
9. Westminster Confession, fifth official edition, London, 1717. Compare the Savoy and the (American) Hanserd Knolly's Declarations. On predestination and the Huguenots see, among others Polenz, I, pp. 545 ff.
10. On Milton's theology see the essay of Eibach in the Theol. Studien und Kritiken, 1879. Macaulay's essay on it, on the occasion of Sumner's translation of the Doctrina Christiana, rediscovered in 1823 (Tauchnitz edition, 185, pp. I ff.), is superficial. For more detail see the somewhat too schematic six-volume English work of Masson, and the German biography of Milton by Stern which rests upon it. Milton early began to grow away from the doctrine of predestination in the form of the double decree, and reached a wholly free Christianity in his old age. In his freedom from the tendencies of his own time he may in a certain sense be compared to Sebastian Franck. Only Milton was a practical and positive person, Franck predominantly critical. Milton is a Puritan only in the broader sense of the rational organization of his life in the world in accordance with the divine will, which formed the permanent inheritance of later times from Calvinism. Franck could be called a Puritan in much the same sense. Both, as isolated figures, must remain outside our investigation.
11. "Hic est fides summus gradus; credere Deum esse clementum, qui tam paucos salvat, justum, qui sua voluntate nos damnabiles facit" is the text of the famous passage in De servo arbitrio.
12. The truth is that both Luther and Calvin believed fundamentally in a double God (see Ritschl's remarks in Geschichte des Pietismus and Kostlin, Gott in Realenzyklopadie Jiir protestantische Theologie und Kirche, third edition), the gracious and kindly Father of the New Testament, who dominates the first books of the Institutio Christiana, and behind him the Deus absconditus as an arbitrary despot. For Luther, the God of the New Testament kept the upper hand, because he avoided reflection on metaphysical questions as useless and dangerous, while for Calvin the idea of a transcendental God won out. In the popular development of Calvinism, it is true, this idea could not be maintained, but what took his place was not the Heavenly Father of the New Testament but the Jehovah of the Old.
13. Compare on the following: Scheibe, Calvins Prädestinationslehre (Halle, 1897). On Calvinistic theology in general, Heppe, Dogmatik der evangelisch-reformierten Kirche (Elberfeld, 1861).
14. Corpus Reformatorum, LXXVII, pp. 186 ff.
15. The preceding exposition of the Calvinistic doctrine can be found in much the same form as here given, for instance in Hoornbeek's Theologia practica (Utrecht, 1663), L. II, c. I; de predestinatione, the section stands characteristically directly under the heading De Deo. The Biblical foundation for it is principally the first chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians. It is unnecessary for us here to analyse the various inconsistent attempts to combine with the predestination and providence of God the responsibility and free will of the individual. They began as early as in Augustine's first attempt to develop the doctrine.
16. "The deepest community (with God) is found not in institutions or corporations or churches, but in the secrets of a solitary heart", as Dowden puts the essential point in his fine book Puritan and Anglican (p. 234). This deep spiritual loneliness of the individual applied as well to the Jansenists of Port Royal, who were also predestinationists.
17. "Contra qui huiusmodi coetum [namely a Church which maintains a pure doctrine, sacraments, and Church discipline] contemnunt . . . salutis suae certi esse non possunt; et qui in illo contemtu perseverat electus non est." Olevian, De subst. fad., p. 222.
18. "It is said that God sent His Son to save the human race, but that was not His purpose, He only wished to help a few out of their degradation--I say unto you that God died only for the elect" (sermon held in 1609 at Broek, near Rogge, Wtenbogaert, II, p. 9. Compare Nuyens, op. cit., II, p. 232). The explanation of the role of Christ is also confused in Hanserd Knolly's Confession. It is everywhere assumed that God did not need His instrumentality.
19. Entzauberung der Welt. On this process see the other essays in my Sociology of World Religions. The peculiar position of the old Hebrew ethic, as compared with the closely related ethics of Egypt and Babylon, and its development after the time of the prophets, rested as is shown there, entirely on this fundamental fact, the rejection of sacramental magic as a road to salvation.
20. Similarly the most consistent doctrine held that baptism was required by positive ordinance, but was not necessary to salvation. For that reason the strictly Puritan Scotch and English Independents were able to maintain the principle that children of obvious reprobates should not be baptized (for instance, children of drunkards). An adult who desired to be baptized, but was not yet ripe for the communion the Synod of Edam of 1586 (Art. 32, 1) recommended should be baptized only if his conduct were blameless, and he should have placed his desires sonder superstitie.
21. This negative attitude toward all sensuous culture is, as Dowden, op. cit., shows, a very fundamental element of Puritanism.
22. The expression individualism includes the most heterogeneous things imaginable. What is here understood by it will, I hope, be clear from the following discussion. In another sense of the word, Lutheranism has been called individualistic, because it does not attempt any ascetic regulation of life. In yet another quite different sense the word is used for example, by Dietrich Schafer when in his study, "Zur Beurteilung des Wormser Konkordats", Abh. d Berl. Akad. (l905), he calls the Middle Ages the era of pronounced individuality because, for the events relevant for the historian, irrational factors then had a significance which they do not possess to-day. He is right, but so perhaps are also those whom he attacks in his remarks, for they mean something quite different, when they speak of individuality and individualism. Jacob Burchhardt's brilliant ideas are to-day at least partly out of date, and a thorough analysis of these concepts in historical terms would at the present time be highly valuable to science. Quite the opposite is, of course, true when the play impulse causes certain historians to define the concept in such a way as to enable them to use it as a label for any epoch of history they please.
23. And in a similar, though naturally less sharp, contrast to the later Catholic doctrine. The deep pessimism of Pascal, which also rests on the doctrine of predestination, is, on the other hand, of Jansenist origin, and the resulting individualism of renunciation by no means agrees with the official Catholic position. See the study by Honigsheim on the French Jansenists, referred to in Chap. III, note 10.
24. The same holds for the Jansenists.
25. Bailey, Praxis pietatis (Gennan edition, Leipzig, 1724), p. 187. Also P. J. Spener in his Theologische Bedenken (according to third edition, Halle, 1712) adopts a similar standpoint. A friend seldom gives advice for the glory of God, but generally for mundane (though not necessarily egotistical) reasons. "He [the knowing man] is blind in no man's cause, but best sighted in his own. He confines himself to the circle of his own affairs and thrusts not his fingers into needless fires. He sees the falseness of it [the world] and therefore learns to trust himself ever, others so far as not to be damaged by their disappointment" is the philosophy of Thomas Adarns (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. l l). Bailey (Praxis pietatis, p. 176) further recommends every morning before going out among people to imagine oneself going into a wild forest full of dangers, and to pray God for the "cloak of foresight and righteousness". This feeling is characteristic of all the ascetic denominations without exception, and in the case of many Pietists led directly to a sort of hermit's life within the world. Even Spangenberg in the (Moravian) Idea fides fratum, p. 382, calls attention with emphasis to Jeremiah 17:5: "Cursed is the man who trusteth in man." To grasp the peculiar misanthropy of this attitude, note also Hoornbeek's remarks (Theologia practica, I, p. 882) on the duty to love one's enemy: "Denique hoc magis nos ulcisimur, quo proximum, inultum nobis, tradimus ultori Deo--Quo quis plus se ulscitur, eo minus id pro ipso agit Deus." It is the same transfer of vengeance that is found in the parts of the Old Testament written after the exile; a subtle intensification and refinement of the spirit of revenge compared to the older "eye for an eye". On brotherly love, see below, note 34.
26. Of course the confessional did not have only that effect. The explanations, for instance, of Muthmann, Z. Rel. Psych., I, Heft 2, p. 65, are too simple for such a highly complex psychological problem as the confessional.
27. This is a fact which is of especial importance for the interpretation of the psychological basis of Calvinistic social organizations. They all rest on spiritually individualistic, rational motives. The individual never enters emotionally into them. The glory of God and one's own salvation always remain above the threshold of consciousness. This accounts for certain characteristic features of the social organization of peoples with a Puritan past even to-day.
28. The fundamentally anti-authoritarian tendency of the doctrine, which at bottom undermined every responsibility for ethical conduct or spiritual salvation on the part of Church or State as useless, led again and again to its proscription, as, for instance, by the States-General of the Netherlands. The result was always the formation of conventicles (as after 1614).
29. On Bunyan compare the biography of Froude in the English Men of Letters series, also Macaulay's superficial sketch (Miscel. Works, II, p. 227). Bunyan was indifferent to the denominational distinctions within Calvinism, but was himself a strict Calvinistic Baptist.
30. It is tempting to refer to the undoubted importance for the social character of Reformed Christianity of the necessity for salvation following from the Calvinistic idea of "incorporation into the body of Christ" (Calvin, Institutes, III, II, 10), of reception into a community conforming to the divine prescriptions. From our point of view however, the centre of the problem is somewhat different. That doctrinal tenet could have been developed in a Church of purely institutional character (anstaltmässig), and, as is well known, this did happen. But in itself it did not possess the psychological force to awaken the initiative to form such communities nor to imbue them with the power which Calvinism possessed. Its tendency to form a community worked itself out very largely in the world outside the Church organizations ordained by God. Here the belief that the Christian proved (see below) his state of grace by action in majorem Dei gloriam was decisive, and the sharp condemnation of idolatry of the flesh and of all dependence on personal relations to other men was bound unperceived to direct this energy into the field of objective (impersonal) activity. The Christian who took the proof of his state of grace seriously acted in the service of God's ends, and these could only be impersonal. Every purely emotional, that is not rationally motivated, personal relation of man to man easily fell in the Puritan, as in every ascetic ethic under the suspicion of idolatry of the flesh. In addition to what has already been said, this is clearly enough shown for the case of friendship by the following warning: "It is an irrational act and not fit for a rational creature to love any one farther than reason will allow us. . . . It very often taketh up men's minds so as to hinder their love of God" (Baxter, Christian Directory, IV, p. 253). We shall meet such arguments again and again.
The Calvinist was fascinated by the idea that God in creating the world, including the order of society, must have willed things to be objectively purposeful as a means of adding to His glory, not the flesh for its own sake, but the organization of the things of the flesh under His will. The active energies of the elect, liberated by the doctrine of predestination, thus flowed into the struggle to rationalize the world. Especially the idea that the public welfare, or as Baxter (Christian Directory, IV, p. 262) puts it, quite in the sense of later liberal rationalism, "The good of the many" (with a somewhat forced reference to Romans 9:3), was to be preferred to any personal or private good of the individual, followed, although not in itself new, for Puritanism from the repudiation of idolatry of the flesh. The traditional American objection to performing personal service is probably connected, besides the other important causes resulting from democratic feelings, at least indirectly with that tradition. Similarly, the relative immunity of formerly Puritan peoples to Caesarism, and, in general, the subjectively free attitude of the English to their great statesmen as compared with many things which we have experienced since 1878 in Germany positively and negatively. On the one hand, there is a greater willingness to give the great man his due, but, on the other, a repudiation of an hysterical idolization of him and of the naive idea that political obedience could be due anyone from thankfulness. On the sinfulness of the belief in authority, which is only permissible in the form of an impersonal authority, the Scriptures, as well as of an excessive devotion to even the most holy and virtuous of men, since that might interfere with obedience to God, see Baxter, Christian Directory (second edition, 1678), I, p. 56. The political consequences of the renunciation of idolatry of the flesh and the principle which was first applied only to the Church but later to life in general, that God alone should rule, do not belong in this investigation.
31. Of the relation between dogmatic and practical psychological consequence we shall often have to speak. That the two are not identical it is hardly necessary to remark.
32. Social, used of course without any of the implications attached to the modern sense of the word, meaning simply activity within the Church, politics, or any other social organization.
33. "Good works performed for any other purpose than the glory of God are sinful" (If anserd Knolly's Confession, chap. xvi).
34. What such an impersonality of brotherly love, resulting from the orientation of life solely to God's will, means in the field of religious group life itself may be well illustrated by the attitude of the China Inland Mission and the International Missionaries Alliance (see Warneck, Gesch. d. prot. Missionären, pp. 99, l l l). At tremendous expense an army of missionaries was fitted out, for instance one thousand for China alone, in order by itinerant preaching to offer the Gospel to all the heathen in a strictly literal sense, since Christ had commanded it and made His second coming dependent on it. Whether these heathen should be converted to Christianity and thus attain salvation, even whether they could understand the language in which the missionary preached, was a matter of small importance and could be left to God, Who alone could control such things. According to Hudson Taylor (see Warneck, op. cit.), China has about fifty million families; one thousand missionaries could each reach fifty families per day (!) or the Gospel could be presented to all the Chinese in less than three years. It is precisely the same manner in which, for instance, Calvinism carried out its Church discipline. The end was not the salvation of those subject to it, which was the affair of God alone (in practice their own) and could not be in any way influenced by the means at the disposal of the Church, but simply the increase of God's glory. Calvinism as such is not responsible for those feats of missionary zeal, since they rest on an interdenominational basis. Calvin himself denied the duty of sending missions to the heathen since a further expansion of the Church is unius Dei opus. Nevertheless, they obviously originate in the ideas, running through the whole Puritan ethic according to which the duty to love one's neighbour is satisfied by fulfilling God's commandments to increase His glory. The neighbour thereby receives all that is due him, and anything further is God's affair. Humanity in relation to one's neighbour has, so to speak, died out. That is indicated by the most various circumstances.
Thus, to mention a remnant of that atmosphere, in the field of charity of the Reformed Church, which in certain respects is justly famous, the Amsterdam orphans, with (in the twentieth century!) their coats and trousers divided vertically into a black and a red, or a red and a green half, a sort of fool's costume, and brought in parade formation to church, formed, for the feelings of the past, a highly uplifting spectacle. It served the glory of God precisely to the extent that all personal and human feelings were necessarily insulted by it. And so, as we shall see later, even in all the details of private life. Naturally all that signified only a tendency and we shall later ourselves have to make certain qualifications. But as one very important tendency of this ascetic faith, it was necessary to point it out here.
35. In all these respects the ethic of Port Royal, although predestinationist, takes quite a different standpoint on account of its mystical and otherworldly orientation, which is in so far Catholic (see Honigsheim, op. Clt.).
36. Hundeshagen (Beitr. z. Kirchenverfassungsgesch. u. Kirchenpolitik, 1864, I, p. 37) takes the view, since often repeated, that predestination was a dogma of the theologians, not a popular doctrine. But that is only true if the people is identified with the mass of the uneducated lower classes. Even then it has only limited validity. Köhler (op. cit.) found that in the forties of the nineteenth century just those masses (meaning the petite bourgeoisie of Holland) were thoroughly imbued with predestination. Anyone who denied the double decree was to them a heretic and a condemned soul. He himself was asked about the time of his rebirth (in the sense of predestination). Da Costa and the separation of de Kock were greatly influenced by it. Not only Cromwell, in whose case Zeller (Das Theologische System Zwinglis, p. 17) has already shown the effects of the dogma most effectively, but also his army knew very well what it was about. Moreover, the canons of the synods of Dordrecht and Westminster were national questions of the first importance. Cromwell's tryers and ejectors admitted only believers in predestination, and Baxter (Life, I, p. 72), although he was otherwise its opponent, considers its effect on the quality of the clergy to be important. That the Reformed Pietists, the members of the English and Dutch conventicles, should not have understood the doctrine is quite impossible. It was precisely what drove them together to seek the certainty of salvation. What significance the doctrine of predestination does or does not have when it remains a dogma of the theologians is shown by perfectly orthodox Catholicism, to which it was by no means strange as an esoteric doctrine under various forms. What is important is that the idea of the individual's obligation to consider himself of the elect and prove it to himself was always denied. Compare for the Catholic doctrine, for instance, A. Van Wyck, Tract. de predestinatione (Cologne, 1708). To what extent Pascal's doctrine of predestination was correct, we cannot inquire here.
Hundeshagen, who dislikes the doctrine, evidently gets his impressions primarily from German sources. His antipathy is based on the purely deductive opinion that it necessarily leads to moral fatalism and antinomianism. This opinion has already been refuted by Zeller, op. cit. That such a result was possible cannot, of course, be denied. Both Melanchthon and Wesley speak of it. But it is characteristic that in both cases it is combined with an emotional religion of faith. For them, lacking the rational idea of proof, this consequence was in fact not unnatural.
The same consequences appeared in Islam. But why? Because the Mohammedan idea was that of predetermination, not predestination, and was applied to fate in this world, not in the next. In consequence the most important thing, the proof of the believer in predestination, played no part in Islam. Thus only the fearlessness of the warrior (as in the case of moira) could result, but there were no consequences for rationalization of life; there was no religious motivation for them. See the (Heidelberg) theological dissertation of F. Ullrich, Die Vorherbestimmungslehre im Islam u. Christenheit, 1900. The modifications of the doctrine which came in practice, for instance Baxter, did not disturb it in essence so long as the idea that the election of God, and its proof, fell upon the concrete individual, was not shaken. Finally, and above all, all the great men of Puritanism (in the broadest sense) took their departure from this doctrine, whose terrible seriousness deeply influenced their youthful development. Milton like, in declining order it is true, Baxter, and, still later, the free-thinker Franklin. Their later emancipation from its strict interpretation is directly parallel to the development which the religious movement as a whole underwent in the same direction. And all the great religious revivals, at least in Holland, and most of those in England, took it up again.
37. As is true in such a striking way of the basic atmosphere of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
38. This question meant less to the later Lutheran, even apart
from the doctrine of predestination, than to the Calvinist. Not because he was less interested in the salvation of his soul, but because, in the form which the Lutheran Church had taken, its character as an institution for salvation (Heilsanstalt) came to the fore. The individual thus felt himself to be an object of its care and dependent on it. The problem was first raised within Lutheranism characteristically enough through the Pietist movement. The question of certainty of salvation itself has however, for every non-sacramental religion of salvation, whether Buddhism, Jainism, or anything else, been absolutely fundamental; that must not be forgotten. It has been the origin of all psychological drives of a purely religious character.
39. Thus expressly in the letter to Bucer, Corp. Ref: 29, p. 883 f. Compare with that again Scheibe, op. cit., p. 30.
40.The Westminster Confession (XVIII, p. 2) also assures the elect of indubitable certainty of grace, although with all our activity we remain useless servants and the struggle against evil lasts one's whole life long. But even the chosen one often has to struggle long and hard to attain the certainty which the consciousness of having done his duty gives him and of which a true believer will never entirely be deprived.
41. The orthodox Calvinistic doctrine referred to faith and the consciousness of community with God in the sacraments, and mentioned the "other fruits of the Spirit" only incidentally. See the passages in Heppe, op. cit., p. 425. Calvin himself most emphatically denied that works were indications of favour before God, although he, like the Lutherans, considered them the fruits of belief (Institutes., Vol. III, Chapter 2, Section 37-38). The actual development to the proof of faith through works, which is characteristic of asceticism, is parallel to a gradual modification of the doctrines of Calvin. As with Luther, the true Church was first marked off primarily by purity of doctrine and sacraments, but later the disciplinia came to be placed on an equal footing with the other two. This development may be followed in the passages given by Heppe, op. cit., pp. 194-5, as well as in the manner in which Church members were acquired in the Netherlands by the end of the sixteenth century (express subjection by agreement to Church discipline as the principal prerequisite).
42. For example, Olevian, De substantia faderis gratuiti inter Deum et electos (1585), p. 257; Heidegger, Corpus Theologia, XXIV, p. 87; and other passages in Heppe, Dogmatik der ev. ref: Kirche (1861), p. 425.
43. On this point see the remarks of Schneckenburger, op. cit., p. 48.
44. Thus, for example, in Baxter the distinction between mortal and venial sin reappears in a truly Catholic sense. The former is a sign of the lack of grace which can only be attained by the conversion of one's whole life. The latter is not incompatible with grace.
45. As held in many different shades by Baxter, Bailey, Sedgwick, Hoornbeek. Further see examples given by Schneckenburger, op. cit., p. 262.
46. The conception of the state of grace as a sort of social estate (somewhat like that of the ascetics of the early Church) is very common. See for instance Schortinghuis, Het innige Christendom (1740 proscribed by the States-General)!
47. Thus, as we shall see later, in countless passages, especially the conclusion, of Baxter's Christian Directory. This recommendation of worldly activity as a means of overcoming one's own feeling of moral inferiority is reminiscent of Pascal's psychological interpretation of the impulse of acquisition and ascetic activity as means to deceive oneself about one's own moral worthlessness. For him the belief in predestination and the conviction of the original sinfulness of everything pertaining to the flesh resulted only in renunciation of the world and the recommendation of contemplation as the sole means of lightening the burden of sin and attaining certainty of salvation. Of the orthodox Catholic and the Jansenist versions of the idea of calling an acute analysis has been made by Dr. Paul Honigsheim in the dissertation cited above (part of a larger study, which it is hoped will be continued). The Jansenists lacked every trace of a connection between certainty of salvation and worldly activity. Their concept of calling has, even more strongly than the Lutheran or even the orthodox Catholic, the sense of acceptance of the situation in life in which one finds oneself, motivated not only, as in Catholicism by the social order, but also by the voice of one's own conscience (Honigsheim, op. cit., pp. 139 ff.).