But is not Methodism Christianity? And is it not better that the German Churches should rise in this form than not rise at all? Most certainly so, I reply, if that be the only alternative. But that is not the only alternative. Their resurrection may just as well take place, in the type of their own true, original, glorious life, as it is still to be found enshrined in their symbolical books. And whatever there may be that is good in Methodism, this life of the Reformation I affirm to be immeasurably more excellent and sound. Wesley was a small man as compared with Melancthon.107 Olshausen, with all his mysticism, is a commentator of the inmost sanctuary in comparison with Adam Clark.108 If the original, distinctive life of the Churches of the Reformation be not the object to be reached after, in the efforts that are made to build up the interests of German Christianity in this country, it were better to say so at once openly and plainly. If we must have Methodism, let us have it under its own proper title, and in its own proper shape. Why keep up the walls of denominational partition in such a case, with no distinctive spiritual being to uphold or protect? A sect without a soul has no right to live. Zeal for a separate denominational name that utters no separate religious idea is the very essence of sectarian bigotry and schism.
In opposing the Anxious Bench, I mean no disrespect, of course, to the many excellent men, in different Churches, who have given it their countenance. This has been done by some of the best ministers in the land, for whom I entertain the very highest regard. Not a few are to be found who themselves condemn their own former judgment in so doing; which does not imply surely any want of proper self-respect. The system of the Anxious Bench, in its full development, is one which these persons have always disapproved; only they have not considered this particular measure to be a part of the system. That this should be the case need not seem strange; for in the view of the measure here taken, it is supposed to be in its simple form, on the bright side of this system, and close upon the boundary that separates it from the territory of the truth. The tract exhibits the measure in this view, not as the origin of the system historically, not as necessarily conducting in all cases to worse things that lie beyond; but as constitutionally involving the principle of those worse things, under the least startling form, and legitimately opening the way for their introduction, if circumstances should permit. It would seem to show the correctness of this view, that while the answers to the tract protest against it, as a false and arbitrary classification, they all conform to it notwithstanding, in spite of themselves, in a practical way. They defend the use of the bench as the Thermopylae109 of New Measures; and their argument, such as it is, has just as much force to justify the system in full, as it has to justify this measure in particular. An effort is made, indeed, to mystify the subject, by dragging into connection with it interests of a different order altogether; but still it is plain enough that this is done with violence, and the controversy falls back always in the end to its proper limits.
The abuse of a thing, it is said, is no argument against its proper use; and therefore the object, in the present case, should be to reform and regulate rather than to abolish. To this I reply, the whole system contemplated in the tract is an abuse, from which it is of the utmost importance that the worship of the sanctuary, and the cause of revivals, should be rescued. Belonging as it does to this system then, and contributing to its support, the Anxious Bench is a nuisance that can never be fully abated except by its entire removal. Its tendencies, as shown in the tract, are decidedly bad without any compensation of a solid kind. It may be used with moderation; but it will stand still in the same relation to the system it represents, that moderate drinking holds to intemperance in its more advanced forms. Popery started, in the beginning, under forms apparently the most innocent and safe. What might seem to be, for instance, more rational and becoming than the sign of the cross, as used by christians, on all occasions in the early Church? And yet, when the corruptions of Rome were thrown off by the Protestant world in the sixteenth century, this and other similar forms were required to pass away with the general mass. And why is it that the sign of the cross as once used is now counted a dangerous superstition, not to be permitted among Protestants? Simply because it falls naturally over to that vast system of abuses, of which it forms a part in the Romish Church. Thus it represents that system, and furnishes a specimen of it constitutionally, under the most plausible shape. Such is the position of the Anxious Bench, as a particular measure, in the general case now under consideration. It is just as easy to conceive of a judicious and salutary use of the Anxious Bench; and I have no doubt at all but that the first has been owned and blessed of God full as extensively, to say the least, as this has ever been the case with the last.
J. W. N.
Mercersburg, Pa.,
Jan. 1844
95. [See the general introduction for a description of the New Measures. Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 196–201, describes Finney’s methods in more detail.]
96. [The Augsburg Confession, Latin Confessio Augustana, is the confession of the Lutheran Churches presented on June 25, 1530, in German and Latin, at the Diet of Augsburg to the emperor Charles V. It is the first of the great Protestant Confessions. The principal author was the Reformer Philipp Melanchthon. The Heidelberg Catechism, written in Heidelberg by Zacharius Ursinus and Caspar Olevianus, at the request of Elector Frederick III, ruler of the German province, the Palatinate, from 1559 to 1576. The Catechism was adopted by a Synod in Heidelberg and published in German with a preface by Frederick III, dated January 19, 1563.]
97. [Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531), educated at Bern, ordained a priest in 1506, and leader of the Swiss Reformation. See Gabler, Huldrych Zwingli. John Calvin (1509–64), French Reformer and architect of the Reformed branch of the Protestant Reformation. Among his many writings, his Institutes of the Christian Religion is considered definitive for much of the Reformed Church. See Muller, Unaccommodated Calvin.]
98. [Martin Luther (1483–1546), German friar, priest, and professor of theology who launched the Protestant Reformation. See Roland Bainton’s biography, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther, for an excellent introduction to one of the most influential individuals in the history of Christianity.]
99. [“Mechanical” would become an important metaphor for the mode of religion Nevin rejected. Its antonym was “organic,” by which Nevin meant in part the self-generating, self-organizing action of an organism, like a plant. See William B. Evans, general introduction to The Incarnate Word, xvii–xx, for an explanation of the “organicism” that influenced Mercersburg Theology; Layman summarizes Nevin’s implicit organicism in his pre-Mercersburg period in the general introduction to Born of Water and the Spirit, 17–18.]
100. [Perhaps a reference to Lutheran Observer and its contributors, most notably its editor Benjamin Kurtz. See Granquist, Lutherans in America.]
101. [These “writings” belong to a loosely allied and diverse “Mediating School” of German theology that sought to integrate traditional beliefs with the ideas of Schleiermacher and the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). For more on this school and its influence on American theology, see Aubert, The German Roots of Nineteenth-Century American Theology, 62–94; and Penzel, German Education of Christian Scholar Philip Schaff, 79–85.]
102. [Hermann Olshausen (1796–1839), a biblical scholar and professor at Berlin (1820), then Königsburg (1827) and Erlangen (1834), who embraced the grammatical
