duty, imposed by Jesus himself, when he said: 'Judge righteous judgment.'[1] 'Judge righteous judgment' is, however, the duty imposed; and the duty is not, whatever many Protestants may seem to think, fulfilled if the judgment be wrong. But the duty of inwardly judging is the very entrance into the way and walk of Jesus.
Luther, then, made an inward verifying movement, the individual conscience, once more the base of operations; and he was right. But he did so to the following extent only. When he found the priest coming between the individual believer and his conscience, standing to him in the stead of conscience, he pushed the priest aside and brought the believer face to face with his conscience again. This explains, of course, his battle against the sale of indulgences and other abuses of the like kind; but it explains also his treatment of that cardinal point in the Catholic religious system, the mass. He substituted for it, as the cardinal point in the Protestant system, justification by faith. The miracle of Jesus Christ's atoning sacrifice, satisfying God's wrath, and taking off the curse from mankind, is the foundation both of the mass and of the famous Lutheran tenet. But, in the mass, the priest makes the miracle over again and applies its benefits to the believer. In the tenet of justification, the believer is himself in contact with the miracle of Christ's atonement, and applies Christ's merits to himself. The conscience is thus brought into direct communication with Christ's saving act; but this saving act is still taken,—just as popular religion conceived it, and as formal theology adopted it from popular religion,—as a miracle, the miracle of the Atonement. This popular and imperfect conception of the sense of Christ's death, and in general the whole in adequate criticism of the Bible involved in the Creeds, underwent at the Reformation no scrutiny and no change.
