at the same time with those of the men, but separately, and without the power of making rules.

In order that ministers may have the tender sympathy and counsel of those, who by their experience in religion, are qualified for that service, the monthly meetings are advised to select such, from both sexes, under the denomination of elders. These, together with the approved ministers, have meetings peculiar to themselves, called "meetings of ministers and elders;" in which they have an opportunity of exciting each other to the discharge of their respective duties, and of extending advice to those who may appear to need it, without needless exposure. Such meetings are generally held within the compass of each monthly, quarterly, and yearly meeting. They are conducted by rules prescribed by the yearly meeting, and have no authority to make any alterations of, or additions to the discipline. The members of the select meeting, as it is often called, unite with their brethren in the meetings for discipline, and are equally amenable to the latter for their conduct.

Those who believe themselves required to speak in meetings for worship, are not immediately acknowledged as ministers by their monthly meetings; but time is taken for judgment, that the meeting may be satisfied of their call and qualification. It also sometimes happens that such, as are not approved, obtrude themselves as ministers, to the grief of their brethren. But much forbearance is used towards these, before the disapprobation of the meeting is publicly expressed.

In order that the yearly meeting may be properly represented during its recess, there is a body called the Meeting for Sufferings, or Representative Committee, composed of a certain number of members appointed by each quarterly meeting. It is the business of this meeting to receive and record the account of sufferings from refusal to pay fines and other military demands, sent up annually from the quarterly meetings; to distribute useful religious books; to advise or assist our members who may incline to publish any manuscript or work tending to promote the cause of truth, or the benefit of society; and in general to act on behalf of the yearly meeting in any case where the welfare of the body may render it needful. It keeps a record of its proceedings, which is annually laid before the yearly meeting. Except this meeting and the meeting of ministers and elders, all our members have a right to attend the meetings of business, and to take part in the proceedings; and they are encouraged to do so. We have no chairman or moderator, and the duty of the clerks is limited to recording the proceedings. We decide no ques

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HISTORY OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS.

tion by vote, but by what appears to be the sense of the meeting. In matters which elicit a difference of sentiment, personal and censorious remarks are discouraged, and care is taken to exercise a spirit of condescension and brotherly love. Thus it often occurs in our meetings, that deference to the views and feelings of a few consistent members will prevent the body from adopting a measure in which there is otherwise great unanimity.

The Yearly Meetings of New York, Genessee, Baltimore, Ohio, and Indiana, hold an epistolary correspondence with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, according to ancient practice. But the Yearly Meeting of London has declined this intercourse since the separation in 1827.

GERMAN REFORMED CHURCH.

BY LEWIS MAYER, D. D.,

YORK, PA.

THE German Reformed Church, as its name imports, comprises that portion of the family of reformed churches who speak the German language and their descendants, and as such is distinguished from the French Reformed, the Dutch Reformed, &c. It embraces the reformed churches of Germany and of the German part of Switzerland, and their brethren and descendants in other countries, particularly in the United States of America.

The founder of this church was ULRIC ZWINGLI, a native of Switzerland. He was born on the 1st day of January, 1484, at Wildhaus, a village of the ancient county of Tokkenburg, then a dependency of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Gall, under the guardianship of the canton of Schweitz, but, since 1803, included in the new canton of St. Gall.

About the time of Zwingli's birth, the people of Tokkenburg had effected their emancipation from the condition of serfs to the saintly abbey, and now breathed the air of freedom in all its delightful freshness; and the future reformer, inhaling the same enlivening air from his infancy, and growing up to manhood under its influence, became the champion of liberty, in all the forms in which the human mind is by nature free.

Possessing talents of a high order, and cultivated by the best education which the times could afford, and a lofty genius could attain; taught, at the same time, by the Spirit of God, and guided by him into a knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus: Zwingli rose upon the world a burning and shining light, and showed to bewildered men, groping in the darkness of a long night, the way to God, whose mercy they sought, and the path to heaven, for which they sighed. Dark clouds often intercepted the light; but its beams burst forth again in their wonted brightness; the truth prevailed, superstition gave way, and the church arose in her strength, the fetters falling from her

hands, and occupied the place which God had assigned her as the bride of his Son, and the parent of true piety and virtue.

The first principle of the German Reformed Church is contained in the proposition: "The Bible is above all human authority, and to it alone must every appeal be made." This principle Zwingli first announced in 1516, when he was yet pastor of the Church of Glarus; from it he went forth in all his subsequent investigations of religious truth, and in all his public instructions; and when he reformed the church, after his establishment in Zurich, he swept away from her ritual, as well as from her doctrinal system, all that the Bible did not authorize, either by an express warrant or by an implied one. The interpretation of the Bible he left, where God had left it, to the judgment and the conscience of every man who can apprehend the meaning of words, and compare one passage with another; and if the truth could not be ascertained in this way, he felt assured that neither the fathers, nor the Pope, nor a general council, could be trusted as interpreters of the sacred oracles; for these, he knew, had no better way.

The Reformed Church differed, at first, from the Lutheran in nothing but the single point only of the Lord's Supper. In the conference at Marburg in 1529, which had been procured by the Landgrave of Hesse for the purpose of healing the breach between the Saxon and the Swiss divines, and where Zwingli and Ecolampadius disputed with Melancthon and Luther, this was the only point on which they did not agree. Neither did they differ concerning the whole subject of the eucharist, but concerning only the import of the words, "This is my body," "This is my blood." Zwingli took them as a trope, and understood them to mean that the bread was a sign or figure of the Lord's body, and the wine of his blood. Luther insisted on a literal meaning, and contended that these words were the irrefragable testimony of the Lord himself, that his material body and blood were really present in and with the bread and wine, and were received, together with them, by the communicant; and to fix this notion, he maintained that, like the bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ were received, not by faith, but by the mouth; not by the believer only, but by every communicant.

The Reformed regarded this difference as unessential, and acknowledged their opponents as brethren in Christ, whom it was their duty to receive. Luther classed it with the essentials of Christianity, and would not admit that those who denied the real presence were Christians at all. Zwingli proffered his hand to Luther and besought him with tears to receive him as a Christian brother, saying that there

were no people in the world with whom he would delight more to have fraternal communion than those of Wittemberg. Luther spurned his hand and turned away. In her subsequent history, the Reformed Church often sought the same fraternity, and made some concessions for that object; but she was as often repelled; and her anxiety for a reunion subjected her to the epithet of Gern-Brüder, i. e. Would-bebrethren.

The doctrine of predestination, which at a later period became a prominent subject of controversy between the two churches, was held by all the reformers, unless Haller, the reformer of Berne, and Bullinger, Zwingli's successor in Zurich, be exceptions. Luther contended for it, in its rigid Augustinian form, in his tract De Servo Arbitrio. Melancthon also maintained it in the earlier editions of his Loci Communes Theologici, a system of divinity which long continued to be the text-book of theological students in the Lutheran church. Controversy on this subject between theologians of the two churches first arose in 1561, when Zanchius and Marbach, two divines of Strasburg, took opposite sides; and such was still the prevailing sentiment of that period, that this strife could be composed by submitting to the contending parties, as the terms of peace, an ambiguous form of words, which each might interpret as he pleased. Long after this time, Melancthon's theory of synergism, or co-operation of the human will with divine grace in the sinner's conversion, was condemned as heresy in the Lutheran Church; and in the synergistic controversy between the Philipists, or followers of Melancthon, and the rigid Lutherans, while the former ascribed to the human will a power to co-operate with the Holy Spirit in the act of conversion, the latter not only denied this power, but maintained in all its rigour the Augustinian doctrine of absolute predestination. (See Plank's Gesch. der Protestantischen Theologie, Bd. III. p. 805, &c.)

A third cause of difference, which became, at a later period, a subject of controversy between the two churches, was the use of certain religious rites and institutions which to the Reformed appeared to favour superstition, while the Lutherans regarded them all as tolerable, and some of them as useful. Such were the use of images in the churches, the distinguishing vestments of the clergy, private confession of sins and absolution, the use of the wafer in the Lord's Supper, lay-baptism, exorcism of the evil spirit previous to baptism, altars, baptismal fonts, &c. Most of these usages have been laid aside, and are now unknown in the Lutheran Church in this country. Little now remains to distinguish the two churches; they recognise each other