the blessedness of love beamed down upon them, found no mercy?

Hence Schmied said: "Let us first put away the idols in our hearts,
through the preaching of the Divine Word, before we begin to rattle on
the outside. Pictures are the staves of the weak, which we dare not
take away, until we have given them strength to walk without. Paul too
did not assail the gods and statues of the Athenians, but strove to
erect in their hearts a temple to the invisible God, convinced that
then idolatry would fall away of itself. In general, we ought not to
provoke anger without necessity; and not everything that happens
amongst us springs from a pure love of the truth. Such things work
injuriously in the Confederacy. We are told the Confederates should not
be our God. But yet they are Christian people, and for that reason we
ought to spare them."

Who, in our times, will not approve of this mild speech? And to what do
the Protestants of this 19th century owe it, that they can hold these
views peacefully? that no faith of the letter drives them to a
renunciation of innocent feelings, to unrighteous, repulsive severity,
and to a stiff and wanton tyranny of creeds, such as meets us in the
17th century? To the progress of science alone--science, which teaches
how to distinguish between the letter and the spirit--science, which
the coward only fears, which he, who knows her not, only can
calumniate.

But how very far in the rear was such science in Zwingli's age!
Philology, history, an enlarged knowledge of nature and geography--what
light have they not since furnished for the explanation of the Holy
Scriptures! With what wonderful rapidity the results of scientific
investigation, universally intelligible, are poured out by an
unfettered press among the multitude! Questions must now be started,
_can not be kept back_, on which nobody then, or at least a very few,
ever thought; and if three centuries ago a knowledge of grammar only
was needed for the interpretation of Scripture, there is now need of
philosophy also.

Still, in a book designed for general information, we cannot enter
deeply into what is scientific. It is enough to shew plainly, that
Zwingli must not be judged by the ideas of our age, if in the
discussion about images he opposed his friend Schmied.

In the noble feelings of the latter he shared, but surpassed Lim, in a
just appreciation of the age and its immediate wants, and in the
logical carrying out of a well-weighe