entals are obtained by striking
from the Augustana everything that is objectionable to any Evangelical
Church and retaining the remainder as the substance of Protestantism.
All of the fundamental doctrines, Schmucker declared, are contained in
the ecumenical creeds; everything else is trans-fundamental, not
required by the General Synod for Christian union and communion. In his
sermon at the convention in Winchester, 1853, Schmucker maintained that
the essential, fundamental doctrines in which the General Synod demands
agreement, are "the cardinal doctrines of the Reformation, the points of
agreement between the different creeds of the sixteenth century,"
distinctive doctrines being points of non-essential, non-fundamental
difference. According to Schmucker the General Synod's motto,
"Uniformity in fundamentals and charity or liberty in non-fundamentals,"
never meant anything else than uniformity in the doctrines in which the
evangelical denominations agree, and liberty with respect to distinctive
tenets, also those of Lutheranism. In his _Lutheran Manual_ of 1855
Schmucker wrote: "The founders of the General Synod were men of
enlarged, liberal, and Scriptural views of the kingdom of Christ.
Convinced of the gradual abandonment of the whole mass of symbolical
books in Germany, as well as from the personal examination of them, of
their want of adaptedness to the age, they regarded it as the grand
vocation of the American Church, released by Providence from civil
servitude, to reconstruct her framework, assuming a more friendly
attitude toward sister churches, and so organizing as to promote
Scriptural union among Protestants, and to bring up our
church-institutions to the increased light of Biblical study and
Providential development. This enlightened, this millennial attitude of
the founders of the General Synod, the writer can confidently affirm,
from personal knowledge, having been well acquainted with the greater
part of them, and having been present at Baltimore in 1819, when the
formation of the Synod was, after ample discussion, resolved on; and at
Hagerstown, in 1820, when the Constitution was formed. But the
Constitution speaks for itself; for it invested the General Synod with
power to form a new Confession of Faith, and new catechisms, suited to
the progress of Biblical light and the developed views of the Church.
Subsequently it was believed that the necessities of the case would be
best met by the retention o