nd in the Sacraments, the seals
of grace. It denies that justifying and saving faith is the mere trust
in these promises of God. It denies that faith in these promises alone
engenders divine assurance of pardon. It mistakes, as C. P. Krauth put
it, justification by sensation for justification by faith. (Spaeth 2,
35.) It holds that one cannot be assured of grace without certain
peculiar sensations, emotions, and feelings in his heart. It denies that
faith is purely a gift of God, and teaches that man must cooperate in
his own conversion. It insists that special measures must be resorted to
in order to frighten men into doing their share of conversion, and to
produce the emotional and neurotic conditions which warrant assurance of
grace. As such measures it prescribes emotional appeals, shrieking and
shouting in preaching and praying, special prayer-meetings, the anxious
bench, protracted meetings, camp-meetings, etc. Revivalism brands men as
spiritually dead and unconverted who, like Walther and Wyneken, base
their assurance of grace, not on alleged feelings and spiritual
experiences, but on the clear and unmistakable promises of God in His
Word and Sacraments. New-measurism condemns and ridicules the old
methods of catechetical instruction, doctrinal preaching, and of
administering the Sacraments as spiritually ineffective and productive
merely of head Christianity and dead orthodoxy. "Jist git the spirit
started," said a Methodist to C. P. Krauth, "and then it works like
smoke." "Very much like smoke, I guess," answered Krauth. (1,67.)
Indeed, Pelagianists, who believe that conversion is a mere outward
moral improvement, effected by man's own free will; Romanists, who teach
that man can and must by his own efforts and works earn the grace of
God; Arminians and Synergists, who believe in man's ability to cooperate
in his own conversion and salvation; Calvinists, who, denying universal
grace, base their insurance on special marks of grace in their own
hearts and lives; Reformedists and enthusiasts, who deny that Word and
Sacraments are the only means of grace, collative as well as operative;
Pietists, who insist that the terrors of conscience must be of a
peculiar nature and degree, and that faith must be accompanied by a
happiness and a sanctification of a special kind and measure before a
sinner may fully be assured of his pardon and conversion,--they all may
be, and, in fact, naturally are, in sympathy with one or the