THE PROTESTANT SYSTEM.
The great leaders of the Protestant Reforma tion insisted upon the necessity of higher edu cation for the clergy at the universities, This was natural, as they believed in an established Church supported by the State, and strongly emphasized the duty of its ministers to inculcate sound doctrine, which necessitates special theo logical training. The Baptist thinkers, who contended for freedom of conscience, liberty of prophesying, and complete separation of Church and State, put the emphasis so strongly upon experience and conduct as to make doctrinal agreement a matter of secondary importance, and the education of a special clerical class seem undesirable. It was fortunate that the prevailing tendencies made a home for Protes tant theology at the great centres of intellectual life. The theological curriculum at the uni versifies was changed in several respects, par ticularly by the greater attention given to the biblical studies, the importance attached to the Hebrew and Greek texts, and the more or less determined abandonment of the allegorical method of interpretation. Other Lutheran uni versities modeled their course upon that pre scribed by Luther and Melanchthon at 'Witten berg. Between 1529 and 1563 this system was introduced at Marburg, Tubingen, Leipzig, Konigsberg, Greifswald, Heidelberg, ,Jena, Ros tock, Upsala, and Copenhagen. Similar courses of theological study were established by Beza at Lausanne, by Calvin at Geneva, and theological schools at Nimes, Sedan, Saumur, and Mon tauban followed the same methods. In Holland the University of Leyden (founded 1575) became the centre of Protestant theology. The Free Church in Scotland established three divinity halls at Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Glasgow, and the theological education at the Universities of Saint Andrews, Aberdeen, and Glasgow was like wise modified in character. Cambridge, under the teachings of Erasmus, Tyndale, and Latimer, became the foremost exponent of the new theo logical as well as humanistic teaching, and Vermigli at Oxford expounded Protestant prin ciples of exegesis.
If the theological education of the Reforma tion period was chiefly characterized by the greater attention paid to the Bible, and a certain movement of thought away from Catholic dogma, its most marked peculiarity in the im mediately succeeding period was the inculcation of Protestant dogma, on which a growing em phasis was placed. In Germany the type of teaching represented by Flacius proved more acceptable than that of Melanchthon and his followers, and Calovius bore off the victory over Calixtus and the Helmstedt school. The great
est service rendered by Flacius was the atten tion he and the other Magdeburg Centuriators paid to the history of the Church. New centres of theological study were created at Giessen, Kiel, Dorpat, Lund, Groningen, and Utrecht. In Holland the orthodox tendencies prevailing at the Synod of Dort were offset by the influence of Scaliger and Grotius. In the French schools Cameron, Amyrault, and Louis Cappel main tained a more liberal type of thought. The ex patriation of the Huguenots left only Montauban as a Protestant school. In England the theo logical education was less affected by exagger ated doctrine concerning the Bible than was the case in Germany, Switzerland, and Holland. The colonies were long supplied by ministers who had had their training in European universities. A professorship in divinity was established at llarvard in 1638, and a similar provision was made at Yale in 1740.
A new direction was given to. theological edu cation by the Pietist movement. At Halle a university was founded in 1694, where it was possible for Speller and Francke to exemplify their principles. They maintained that the Christian minister must himself have a pro found religious experience, that he should not be bound by an oath to teach in accordance with man-made creeds, but that he should pro claim the word of God contained in the Scrip tures. The influence of English Quakerism with its doctrine of the inner light and its protest against a hireling ministry is unmistakable. In the seminarium ministerii ecclesiastici estab lished at Halle in 1714 Francke endeavored to give to converted men desirous to serve as preachers such a knowledge of the Bible and such an acquaintance with the practical duties of the pastor as to fit them to be true spiritual leaders. While the demand for a spiritual crisis rather than a normal growth of religious ex perience could not be carried out in a State Church and had a tendency to foster self-decep tion. the break with dogmatism and the centring of interest upon the practical aspect of the min istry, the training of the man rather than the elaboration of his doctrine, bore permanent re sults. The appeal to Christian consciousness and the disregard for the letter led to biblical criticism,' as is seen in Dippel, Edelmann, Michaelis, Zinzendorf, and Semler, and a new estimate of the history of the Church, doing more justice to the heretical bodies, was intro duced by Gottfried Arnold.