Coelestis palmam triumphi,
Nobis veniam non deneges peccati.
In the same spirit he and his associates edited the first great Protestant work on Church history—the Magdeburg Centuries (1559-74, in thirteen folio volumes). The first Protestants had no more idea of surrendering the history of the Church to the champions of the Roman Catholic Church, than of giving up to them the New Testament. They held that down through all the ages ran a double current of pure Christianity and scholastic perversion of that, and that the Reformation succeeds to the former as the Tridentine Church to the latter. This especially as regards the great central point in controversy, the part of grace and of merit in the justification of the sinner. And they found the proof of this continuity especially in the devotions of the early Church. They found themselves in that great prayer of the Franciscan monk, which the Roman Missal puts into the mouth of her holiest members as they gather around the bier of the dead:
Quid sum miser tunc dicturus,
Quem patronum rogaturus,
Quum vix justus sit securus?
Rex tremendae majestatis,
Qui salvandos salvas gratis,
Salve me, fons pietatis!
“Whenever in the Middle Ages,” says Albrecht Ritschl, “devotion, so far as it has found articulate expression, rises to the level of the thought that the value of the Christian life, even where it is fruitful of good works, is grounded not upon these as human merits, but upon the mercy of God ... then the same line of thought is entered upon as that in which the religious consciousness common to Luther and Zwingli was able to break through the connection which had subsisted between Catholic doctrine and the Church institutions for the application of salvation.... Whenever even the Church of Rome places herself in the attitude of prayer, it is inevitable that in the expression of her religious discernment, in thanksgiving and petition, all the benefits of salvation should be referred to God or to Christ; the daily need for new grace, accordingly, is not expressed in the form of a claim based upon merits, but in the form of reliance upon God.”[26]