Luther always declared that he accepted the doctrine, and nothing but the doctrine, of the ancient Church on the Person of Christ. ' No one can deny,' he says, ' that we hold, believe, sir^g, and confess all things in correspondence with the Apostles' Creed, that we make nothing new therein, nor add anything thereto, and in this way we belong to the old Church, and are one with it.' The Schnialkald Articles and the Augsburg Confession begin with stating over again the doctrines of the Old Catholic Church, founding on the Nicene Creed, and quoting Ambrose and Augustine ; and Luther's contention always was that, if the sophistry of the Schoolmen could be cleared away, the old doctrines of the ancient Church would stand forth in their original purity. When he spoke of the Scholastic Theology as sophistry, he attached a definite meaning to the word. He meant not merely that the Schoolmen played with the outsides of doctrines, and asked and solved innumer- able trivial questions, but also that the imposing edifice they erected was hollow within, and had nothing to do with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He maintained that in the heart of the sjstem there was, instead of the God whom Jesus had revealed, the abstract entity of pagan philosophy, an unknown deity — for God could never be revealed by meta- physics. All this sophistry he swept away, and then declared that he stood on the ground occupied by the theologians of the ancient Church, whose faith was rooted in the triune God, and in belief in Jesus Christ the Revealer of God. The old theology had nothing to do with Mariolatry or with saint-worship ; it revered the triune God and Jesus Christ, His Son, the Saviour of mankind. Moreover, Luther believed, and rightly believed, that for the Fathers of the ancient Church, the theological doctrines in which they expressed their conceptions about God and the Person of Christ were no dead formulas, but were the expression of a living Christian experience. Luther took the old dogmas, and made them live again in an age in which it seemed as if they had lost all their vitality and had degenerated into mere dead doctrines on which the intellect could sharpen itself, but which were out of all relation to the practical religious life of men. That is to say, in other words, Luther gave to theology a religious interest, and this was a recovery of something which had been lost. Mediaival theology had little sense of religion. Religious phenomena, like the appearance of St. Francis and the existence of the 'Brethren,' were not taken into serious consideration by theologians. The Summa of Thomas Aquinas gives little insight into the deep and genuine religious experience of the writer, and gets no inspiration there. The efforts of the Schoolmen were directed solely to the exposi- tion of the philosophical implications of traditional doctrines ; they ignored the relation to actual religious life in the Church, apart from which theology becomes unreal. Probably it re- quires a succession of religious geniuses to maintain the right connexion between theology and contemporary religious ex-
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perience, and it is the opinion of Ad. Harnack that the Church had no genius between Augustine and Luther. No one reahzed that a supreme utterance of faith like St. Bernard's hymn —
' Jesus, our only joy be Thou,
As Thou our prize wilt be ; Jesus, be Thou our glory now,
And through eternity ' — and such experience as finds expression there, formed any part of the material of theology. And so theology missed its oppor- tunities of serving the Church. Had theology undertaken the task of understanding and interpreting words like these, it would have cleared the path to new truth, and set pious souls free. As it was, for want of its proper food, theology languished, and simple saints, though at times soaring on the wings of faith, still carried their crutches lovingly about with them. They still believed m an exclusive priesthood, in magical sacramental grace, in prayers to saints, and works of merit and Papal dis- pensations. Even the ' Brethren ' who, all through the Middle Ages, pointedly ignored the ecclesiastical system and obstinately put to all who tried to force doctrines upon them the question, 'Where did Christ teach that?' were strangely without any impulse to state -a theology of their own. For centuries the breath of pure devotion to Christ never fertilized the learning of the schools, and no genius arose — no great churchman in whom personal religion was the inspiration of a mind at once critical and constructive. Not till Staupitz, on his visit to Luther's convent, recommended the old German theology of Tauler to the youthful scholar-monk, did the secret of Christian piety once more find lodgment in the soul of a religious genius, who saw how to make the thoughts of faith supreme through- out the whole sphere of religion — in church life, in ritual and theology, as well as in the lonely heart. Through Luther came the rediscovery that there was theological material in the living experience of Christian souls. And since in the Christian soul Christ is always enthroned, this amounted to a rediscovery of the place of Christ in theology. Directing itself thus to experience, theology realized that its important task is not to give the metaphysical assurances about Christ's Person with which the Schoolmen laboriously occupied themselves, but to explain the nature of His saving work which makes believers hail Him as Lord.