of God to
all men; the Reformed system emphasizes predestination; which, by
selecting some, excludes the others. As the theologians describe it,
Lutheranism is Christocentric, Reform is theocentric.*
*Calvin, like Luther, read theology through Augustine and without
his ecclesiology, but from an altogether opposite point of view. Luther
started with the anthropology and advanced from below upwards; Calvin
started with the theology and moved from above downwards. Hence his
determinative idea was not justification by faith, but God and His
sovereignty, or the sole and all-efficiency of His gracious will.-Ibid.,
page 162.

A third principle relates to the means of grace. Here we have less
difficulty in discerning the line of cleavage which separates us from
Rome on the one hand and from the rest of Protestantism on the other
hand.

The Lutheran Confession regards the word of God as the means of grace.
The Sacraments also are means of grace, not _ex opere operato_, but
because of the word. They are the visible word, or the individualized
Gospel. Hence, it is correct to say that the word, in the Lutheran
system, is the means of grace. This is doubtless news to many of our
brethren of other faiths, who think of us only as extreme
sacramentarians, and have looked upon us for centuries as
Crypto-Romanists. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was only
by an accident that the emphasis of polemical discussion in the
sixteenth century was laid upon the sacramental question, where it never
belonged.

In her doctrine of the means of grace, the Lutheran Church differs _toto
coelo_ from Rome. It is not the Church which, through its authority and
its institutions, makes the means of grace effective; but it is through
the means of grace that the Church is created and made both a product
and an instrument of the Holy Ghost.

On this doctrine our church differs not only in theory but also in
practice from many of our Protestant brethren. In some of their original
confessional statements the Reformed churches declared that the Spirit
of God required no means of grace, since He worked immediately and
directly. They claimed that the corporeal could not carry the spiritual,
and that the finite could not be made the bearer of the infinite. Over
against these hyperspiritual views our Church believes that through the
word and the sacraments the Holy Ghost effectively offers to the sinner
the gifts of salvation.

There are othe