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In 1501 a young student at Erfurt found a Bible.

Here Methodism began. Not the name of it, but the thing itself.—Bishop David S. Doggett.

One has also to take a definite position concerning the relation of history to the materials of belief.-Clarence A. Beckwith, "Realities of Christian Theology."

Methodism is not primarily a doctrinal system or a mode of life, but a moral and spiritual force that has wrought mightily during the last sixteen decades of human history. Springing forth from the established Church of England, it simply but strongly asserted its primitive and apostolic character as a renewal of Christianity.—Bishop John F. Hurst.

The Methodist Bishops were the first Protestant bishops, and Methodism the first Protestant Episcopal Church in the New World; and as Wesley had given it the Anglican Articles (omitting the seventeenth on Predestination), and the Liturgy wisely abridged, it became, both by its precedent of organization and its subsequent numerical importance, the real successor of the Anglican Church in America.-Abel Stevens, LL.D.

CHAPTER II.

HISTORY AND SPIRIT.

WITH a single exception the Twenty-Five Articles are older by two centuries than organized Methodism. They import into its theology the symbols of catholic Christianity and the Confessions of Protestantism in the years of its making. Their claims to veneration inhere in the sound and scriptural character of their contents and in the record of their long and honorable descent. They are apostolic; they are Nicene and Athanasian; in form and spirit, they closely follow the Augsburg Confession-the great militant voice of sixteenth century Protestantism—and through their immediate original, the Thirty-Nine Articles, they flow with the noblest life and thought of the English Reformation. The Wesleyan recension left them all but perfect for the uses they have served and are to serve as the symbol of Methodism.

Attention has been called to an apparent inconsistency in Mr. Wesley's churchmanship which assigned dogmatic Articles to the Methodist body in America, while the Methodism of England was left without a formal Confession.1 There need be no difficulty in

"In this country those Twenty-Five Articles have never been adopted as authoritative, and the vast majority of Methodists here hardly know of their existence. But the Notes and Fifty-Three Sermons of Wesley are named in all our

reconciling these acts. The American Articles hold. with the establishment of the Episcopacy in America, while the Connection in England was left to a presbyterial administration.

Mr. Wesley was an Anglican, and had faith in the historic unity of English Protestantism. In his view. the Thirty-Nine Articles met in England the confessional need of the Protestant cause, as the long-established religious character of the people "called Methodists" in the motherland put them beyond the need of the authority of the episcopal office. In America the case was different, every condition being formative. By unmistakable tokens also the Methodist Church was to take to the Protestantism of the New World substantially the same relation that the Church of Cranmer had sustained for two centuries to the Protestantism of England. It was to become in the West. the exponent of the Reformation derived by way of the Augsburg and Anglican Confessions. The Articles and the Episcopacy which stand equally upon the high ground of expediency fell to American Methodism as its birthright and its pledge of obligation. Bold as he was in all needful enterprises, Wesley would never have undertaken to formulate a Confes

trust-deeds as containing the recognized standard of doctrine to be observed by our ministers and maintained by the trustees of our chapels. No statement of faith prepared by our own or any 'Ecumenical' Conference could have any legal force or validity, though as a historical document it might possess both interest and value." (Dr. W. T. Davison, ExPresident British Wesleyan Conference, in Methodist Recorder, January, 1907.)

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sion out of hand, but historical and theological necessity impelled him to give to the Church in America. the chastened maximum of that statement which had been made in the fiery exigencies that gave Protestantism to the world. Those things which come of crucial times and world-dividing contests are not to be lightly set aside. Like the ark of the covenant, they become a condition of victory and a guarantee of peace. The Twenty-Five Articles are American Methodism's message to the future, the instrument by which she is to maintain her Protestant vantage and win her yet great Churchly victories.

A careful study of the history and contents of the Articles of Methodism will help to enlarge the theological vision, develop a catholic sympathy, increase reverence for the greatness and wisdom of the past, and furnish the student with effective arguments against present and future novelties in statement-making. It will show a series of tenets in which there is a minimum of dogmatism with a maximum of historical and self-proven statements-a document free from abstrusities and the nice descantings under which a multitude of so-called creeds have broken down. This study will comprehensively show that the Arti

"The theology of American Methodism is essentially that of the Anglican Church in all things which according to that Church and the general consent of Christianity are necessary to theological orthodoxy or the doctrines of grace, unless the entire omission of the historically equivocal Seventeenth Article on 'Predestination and Election' be considered an exception." (Stevens's "History of Methodism," Vol. II., page 206.)

cles are one of the chief authentications of the mission of Methodism. Fortunately the history is in no case involved or doubtful. Comparatively new light, too, has been thrown upon it, adding to the certitude of evidence in no wise insufficient, and making more certain paths already plain.

The year 1517 begins the history of Protestantism. It was in that year that Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church of Wittenburg, and thus brought on a contest which within a dozen years leavened all Germany with his doctrines. The Emperor, Charles V., placed him under ban as a heretic, and labored fruitlessly to bring him to terms. Being supported by the secular princes, and much more by his faith in God, Luther defied both Rome and the Emperor. Charles at length awoke to the realization that it was not Luther but the German people with whom he must deal. He accordingly, in 1530, convened a Diet of the Empire at Augsburg, a German city, and invited the Reformers to submit to it "a statement of their grievances and opinions relating to the faith.”

June 25, 1530, is a memorable day in the history of mankind. On that day what is known as the Augsburg Confession was read before the Diet of the Empire. Dr. Christian Bayer, the Chancellor of Saxony, was the reader, and the chronicle tells us that the reading was done in a voice so distinct that it was heard not only by the members of the Diet, but also by a vast multitude of people assembled without. Two copies of the writing had been made, one in German, another in Latin. The papal delegates desired that

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