When I speak of the final result of the experiment of pure Protestantism, it must be distinctly understood that I do not suppose those who are called Protestants in Germany, in Holland, in Switzerland, to have lost the blessings which they possessed before the Reformation, or those which were claimed for them then. I mean, merely, that the systems called Lutheranism, Calvinism, Zuinglianism, have had their day, and that the time of their extinction is at hand. No persons are more alive to this fact than Germans. Hence their eagerness to consolidate the professors of these systems into an “Evangelical Church;” hence their desire to reconcile the ideas of the Eucharist prevailing among the Lutheran and the “Reformed,” by mutual concessions; hence their willingness to tolerate, for a time, subjection to the State, if it will but deliver them from a sectarian position. The existence of such feelings must be a sufficient proof to all who are not themselves spellbound by some system, that the descendants of the Reformers are not deserted by the Head of the Church, and that He may be preparing for them blessings which the great men of the sixteenth century sighed for, but were unable to attain. I will not anticipate the latter portion of my book by explaining what these blessings are, or how they may operate as a cure for the evils under which Germany was groaning long before the Reformers arose to help her and purify her. Still less will I enter upon the practical question, by what means these blessings may be recovered. One thing is clear; those who think and feel the unfortunate ecclesiastical position of Protestant Germany, are also the most determined not to abandon the principles of the Reformation. Some who may have been affected by Austrian or Bavarian influences may dream of recovering the position in which they were before Luther appeared; but all men who are really in earnest, and who know what they mean, will repel such a thought as at once a folly and a sin. The idea that there must be a progress and not a retrogression is one, which the German mind is full of, and which I should be very sorry to drive out of it. The only question is, about the nature of the progress. Beginning in the spirit, the Reformation has, in the most grievous sense, been made perfect in the flesh. Its principles have found no clothing but one of system, which has stifled them; or one of a State organization, which stifles the minds and energies of those who profess them. The progress Protestants should desire is surely one towards an organization, which shall not be an artificial but a vital expression of that which is the faith of the nation. If it should be found that the ecclesiastical organization which Germany once possessed, though corrupted and deadened by the denial of Christ’s direct superintendence over it, is of this vital character, the recovery of it will not be less a growth than the acquisition of some newer one would be. Nay, it will be far more a growth; for the one will belong to the proper history of the land; the other will be some fantastic dress, fashioned like the institutions of Napoleon, according to the maxims of an age, and therefore an intolerable burden to all who look beyond it, and feel they have a portion in their fathers and in their posterity. Their Protestantism will make the old Catholicism new and living; the Catholicism which possesses this quickening element will, by degrees, extinguish the Romanist counterfeit of it; the States, which no civil arrangements have been able to consolidate, will become one through their unity of faith, and the words of the poet will be fulfilled, that wherever his tongue is spoken, and God in Heaven praised in it, there the German will find his fatherland.