"The Reformation is a work which well deserves its name, because it builded up as well as pulled down, and presented the church with a new fabric as well as demolished the old."
As a matter of fact, it did not do what Dr. Milner here claims for it. It is quite evident that it did not destroy "the old fabric," by which he means the Roman Catholic church, for that church is still in existence today. It stands foursquare to all the winds that blow upon it, and today has a wider influence than it possessed when the "Reformers" first assailed it; for what it lost in northern Europe it certainly has regained in the New World.
Dr. D'Aubigne says:
"The Reformation was quite the opposite of a revolt, it was the establishment of the principles of primitive Christianity; it is a regenerative movement with respect to all that was destined to revive a conservative movement as regards all that will exist forever."
It was this claim made for the "Reformation" that led me into that investigation of the subject which resulted in the conclusion that the "Reformation," so-called, did not re-establish primitive Christianity.
M. Guizot, in his History of Civilization, says:
"The friends and partisans of the Reformation have endeavored to account for it by the desire of effectually reforming the abuses of the church. They have represented it as a redress of religious grievances, as an enterprise conceived and executed with the sole design of re-constituting the church in its primitive purity."
M. Guizot does not allow that claim.
It seems to me a problem easy of solution as to whether this revolution of the sixteenth century restored primitive Christianity or not; and the method by which that solution can be attained would be by comparing the doctrines of Protestant Christendom with the doctrines of primitive Christianity. Protestants, you must understand, claim that in consequence of gross abuses which entered the church in the early centuries of its existence, the spirit of the gospel was departed from, the church government was corrupted, and by engrafting upon Christianity pagan rites, pagan ceremonies and pagan philosophy, the fair face of Christianity was defaced by these innovations. It is claimed by Protestants that the movement led by Martin Luther, Melancthon and Zwingle, and after them by Calvin, Knox and others, got rid of the pagan rites and ceremonies fastened upon Christianity and restored it to its primitive forms and to its primitive simplicity and purity. The way to prove whether that be true or false is to compare the teachings of Protestantism with primitive Christianity.
I shall not take occasion to enter into a consideration of primitive Christianity in any great detail for, I take it, that this audience is well informed upon that subject, and only a general and brief review of the leading features of primitive Christianity will be necessary for the comparison I propose.