towards Christians of other communions, and cordially extended the hand of Christian fellowship to all whom he considered as holding the grand peculiarities of Christianity.

As a theological teacher, he was regarded as among the most accomplished and most successful of the day. Several of the greater lights of our American pulpit, some of whom still shine, while most of them have sunk in death, were trained for the ministry under his instruction and superintendence. Dr. Miller, who enjoyed the benefit of his lectures and of a most unreserved intercourse with him for a considerable time, even now in his old age, easily kindles into a glow of affectionate and grateful feeling, whenever his venerated teacher and friend happens to be the subject of conversation.

As the President of the College, Dr. Nisbet had to contend with many difficulties, some of which grew out of the fact that the institution was then just struggling into life, and others, perhaps, from his having been trained under the influence of foreign institutions. His fidelity in the discharge of duty, his devotion to the interests of literature and religion, in connection with the institution over which he was called to preside, it is believed that no one ever questioned; and if his career in this department of labor were less brilliant than his fame as a scholar and a divine might have led us to expect, it was doubtless to be referred chiefly to causes that were beyond his control. We now and then meet with some veteran who graduated with him, and if allusion is made to the fact, it is pretty sure to bring over his countenance a smile of exultation.

Dr. Nisbet, with his unrivalled powers of wit and sarcasm, had a warm, benevolent, generous heart. He was quick to listen to the tale of sorrow, and always on the alert to perform offices of kindness and goodwill. He could not brook the spirit of meanness or cunning; frank and generous himself, he looked with profound disapprobation on the least departure from stern integrity. To his friends he was always more than welcome; to his family he was everything. Nature and grace was each a liberal contributor both to his greatness and goodness. He was a great light in the firmament of exalted minds; but it was his love of truth and love of Christ that threw over his character its most hallowed and sublime attraction.

ART. XXXII.-THE LUTHERAN CONFESSION. 4

THE EVANGELICAL REVIEW. Edited by William Reynolds, Professor in Pennsylvania College. With the assistance of Dr. J. G. Morris, Prof. H. T. Schmidt, Rev. C. W. Schaeffer, and Rev. E. Greenwalt. Vol. I. No. 1. July, 1849. Gettysburg. Neinstedt.

WITH many others, we welcome the appearance of the new Quarterly here announced It is in all respects worthy of the very respectable auspices under which it is ushered into the world. Its outward appearance must command general admiration and respect; while the solid and substantial character of its contents, is such as to deserve and justify fully the care thus taken for their genteel representation. Without the show off any effort or undue pretension, the present number of the publication serves well to reveal a portion of the strength it has to rely upon for its support in time to come, and carries in it a fair guaranty that its work will be prosecuted with vigor and effect. The plan of the Review is liberal and judicious; its spirit is that of earnest faith, apparently, seeking to speak the truth in love; while the qualifications of its worthy and excellent editor, in particular, make it certain that it will be conducted wisely, to the credit of the Lutheran Church, and to the benefit, also, we trust, of the Church at large. We are glad to learn that it meets wide patronage and favor, and wish for it a still more extended prosperity in this way hereafter.

We welcome this Review, because its banner is unfurled in favor of true Lutheranism, in the bosom of the American German Church. It proposes, indeed, to make itself open and free ground, to a certain extent, for the exhibition and discussion of all the conflicting tendencies which enter at this time into what is sometimes denominated American Lutheranism as a whole; tendencies far enough aside, in some cases, as we all know, from the only true life of the Church as embodied in the Augsburg Confession. This, in the circumstances, may be all right and good. Still, it is not meant, of course, that the Review itself is to be indifferent to all these tendencies alike, or, what would be the same thing, alike favorable to them all, in its reigning char

acter and tone. It is understood to go decidedly for the standards, and the true historical life, of the Lutheran Church. This does not imply, indeed, that it is to make common cause with the stiff exclusive pedantry of the Altlutheraner, technically so styled; who come before us in the German Church, as a fair parallel to the similar petrifaction which is presented to our view in the pedantry of the Scotch Seceders. What lives must move. The Review proposes no substitution of dead men's bones for what was once their living spirit. But this spirit itself it will seek to understand and honor, with due regard to the wants of the Church as it now stands. It will not be ashamed of the Augsburg Confession. It will speak reverently, at least, even of the Form of Concord, as well as of the great and good men to whom it owes its origin. It will not dream of sundering the stream of Lutheranism from its human historical fountain in the sixteenth century, by the miserable fiction of an American Lutheranism in no living and inward connection with the Lutheranism of Europe; the name thus made to be everything, and the substance nothing. It will not stultify Luther himself, by professing to accept his creed and magnify his name, while the very core of all, his sacramental faith, without which his creed had for himself no meaning or force, is cast aside as a silly impertinence, deserving only of pity or contempt. The Review proposes to stand forth, in one word, as the representative of true bona fide Lutheranism, in the old sense, as it was held, for instance, by Melancthon, in the age of the Reformation, and as it is held now by many of the best and most learned men in Germany. This it proposes to do here on American ground, in full face of the unsacramental thinking with which it is surrounded on all sides, and in full view of the scorn, open or quiet, that is to be expected at its hands. In all this, as already said, we unfeignedly rejoice. We are glad that Lutheranism has found an organ, after so long a time, to plead its own cause before the American Church; and we are glad it has found an organ which promises to plead this cause so ably and well.

Are we then Lutheran? Just as little as we have become Roman. As we stand in the bosom, externally, of the Reformed Church, we find in it, also, the only satisfactory resting place at

present, for our faith. With vast allowance, inwardly, in favor of others, conscientiously embosomed in a different confession, we feel that the Reformed principle, particularly as it comes to what seems to us to be its truest and best expression in the Heidelberg Catechism, is the only one in which we can fairly and fully acquiesce. We believe, indeed, that Lutheranisin and Reform, the two great phases of the Protestant faith, may be so brought together with mutual inward modification, that neither shall necessarily exclude the other, that each rather shall serve to make the other more perfect and complete; and we earnestly long for this union; but so long as the antithesis, which, in itself, thus far, has been real and not imaginary only, is not advanced to this inward solution and reconciliation, we are in principle Reformed, and not Lutheran. In particular, we are not able at all to accept Luther's idea of Christ's presence in the eucharist. With Calvin, and the Heidelberg Catechism, we hold the mys tery itself, and abhor the rationalistic frivolity by which it is now so commonly denied; but the mode of it we take to be such as fairly transcends all local images and signs. It is accomplished in the sphere of Christ's Spirit only, mirifically for faith.

Why, then, it may be asked, should we find such satisfaction in an enterprise, which has for its object expressly the vindication of Lutheranism, and that is likely to be so powerfully felt in its favor? The question is fair, and deserves a fair answer.

We look upon Lutheranism, in the present stadium of Christianity, as a necessary part of the constitution of Protestantism. Our idea of Protestantism is, that the two great confessions into which it was sundered from the start, the Lutheran and the Reformed, grew with inward necessity, out of the movement itself, carrying in themselves thus a relative reason and right, of the same general nature with what must be allowed in favor of the Reformation itself. In this respect, that first grand rent is, by no means, parallel with the sectarian divisions of the present time; for they are palpably, to a great extent, the product of mere selfwill, without any truly objective necessity, and as such, in the highest degree irrational. Protestantism includes in itself, two tendencies, both of which enter legitimately into its life; while cach, at the same time, seems to involve at last the destruction of

the other. This only shows, however, that the truth of it must hold at last, in some way, in such a union of these forces as shall make them to be one. The two original confessions come not thus by accident, but by the logical law, we may say, of the vast fact of Protestantism itself; with a necessity, however, which is not absolute, but only relative, and so interimistic, and which is destined, accordingly, in due time, to pass away in their inward amalgamation; a result which will involve, also, no doubt, a full conciliation of the Protestant principle, as a whole, not with Romanism as it now stands, but still with the deep truth of Catholicism, from which, by abuse, the Roman error springs. All which may our Blessed Lord hasten, in his own time and way. The case being thus, it is plain that Lutheranism can never give the full sense of the Protestant Church, by carrying out simply its own life in a separate and one-sided way; but it is just as plain, also, of course, that this is quite as little to be expected from the Reformed confession, under a like exclusive view. This seems to us to be well nigh a self-proving axiom, for such as have any true faith in the Reformation as God's work, and any true insight into the constitutional reason of the two confessions as its immediate and necessary product. We can have no patience with any man's pretended faith in this great movement, who can allow himself to think of either side of it, the Lutheran or the Reformed, as meaningless and false; and who can imagine thus, that the completion of Protestantism is to consist in the complete stultification of either interest, to make room for the wholesale glorification of the other, as naked and sole mistress of all truth in the case from the beginning. The Reformed Church can never fulfil its mission, either in theology or practical piety, without the Lutheran. Its perfection must stand in the end, not, of course, in passing over to the original Lutheran stand-point, nor yet in keeping up a perpetual war with it as Rome with Carthage; but still, just as little either in forgetting its existence, and pushing out pedantically the Reformed principle its own way, in full ignorance, or in full contempt, of the counterpoise it is bound to acknowledge on the opposite side. The only sufficient and rational adjustment of the antithesis which holds between the two confessions, is such as shall do justice to the full weight of the antithe