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LECTURE VII.
THE TIME OF FREEDOM AND THE PERIOD OF NEOLOGY
(1718 A.D. 1812 A.D.).
i .
CONSEQUENCES OF THE NEW TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION
IN SWEDEN. PARALLEL MOVEMENTS ON THE
CONTINENT AND IN ENGLAND. ENGLAND FORTU
NATE IN NOT ACCEPTING THE LAMBETH ARTICLES.
In my last lecture I explained how the dangers of in
difference and disintegration apprehended from syn
cretism led to a tightening of the terms of subscription in
the Church of Sweden, and to a narrowing of its whole
system by what we should call a strict Act of Uniformity.
It seemed inevitable at the time that the
"
Book of
Concord," including the "Formula Concordise," should
become a standard of the Church, though happily it was
not set on the same level as the Augsburg Confession.
But, none the less, this tightening of the system was in
many respects a misfortune. It was part of a tendency
which was felt almost equally by Lutherans and Calvinists,
and in England as well as on the Continent a tendency
to measure the soundness of the position of a Church one-
sidedly and almost exclusively by the supposed
"
purity
"
of its doctrine, and to think comparatively little of the fruits
of the Spirit as a test by which it should be tried. Men
were apparently unable to distinguish between the truths
of revelation and those which were acquired by laborious
and hazardous inference, between the dogma necessary to
the existence of a Church and the doctrine which might
be advisable or permissible in catechizing, lecturing, or
preaching; nay, they were apt as the Roman Church
had so disastrously done in the case of the doctrine of
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