Page:History of Freedom.djvu/391

 DÖLLINGER ON THE TEMPORAL POWER 347

Catholicism-were greeted by the union divines as bone of their bone, and welcome allies in the contest with an exclusive Lutheranism and with Rome. The confusion in the minds of the people was increased by this spectacle. The union already implied that the dogma of the Lord's Supper, on which Lutherans and Calvinists disagree, was uncertain, and therefore not essential. The alliance of so many denominations added baptism to the list ofl things about which nothing is positively kno\vn. The author of this measure was Bunsen, who was full of the idea of uniting all Protestant sects in a union against the Catholic Church and catholicising tendencies. For the last fifteen years there has been an active agitation for the improvement of the Church among the Protestant divines. The first question that occupies and divides them is that of Church government and the royal Episcopate, which many deem the chief cause of the ecclesiastical decay. The late King of Prussia, a zealous and enlightened friend of the Protestant Church, declared that" the territorial system and the Episcopal authority of the sovereign are of such a nature that either of them would alone be enough to kill the Church if the Church was mortal," and that he longed to be able to abdicate his rights into the hands of the bishops. In other countries, as in Baden, a new system has been devised, which transfers political constitutionalism to the Church, and makes it a community, not of those who believe in Christ, but, in the words of the Government organ, of those \vho believe in a moral order. Hopes were enter- tained that the introduction of Synods would be an im- provement, and in 1856 and 1857 a beginning was made at Berlin; but it was found that the existence of great evils and disorders in the Church, \vhich had been a secret of the initiated, \vould be published to the \vorld, and that government by majorities, the ecclesiastical democracy which \vas Bunsen's ideal, would soon destroy every vestige of Christianity. In their doctrinal and theological literature resides at the present day the strength and the renown of the