Full text: The national Church of Sweden

{18 
LECTURE VII. 
ThE TIME OF FREEDOM AND THE PERIOD OF NEeoLoGY 
(1718 A.D.—1812 A.D.). 
§ 1.—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 Concordiz,’”’ 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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