Dr. Philip Schaff, than whom there is no abler or more renowned biblical scholar in the New World, has in a recent paper in the New York Herald defended Dr. Briggs. That journal aptly says: In his paper, he defines in the most trenchant language, the apparent inconsistency of the New York Presbytery in practically avowing, eighteen months ago, the same principle for which Dr. Briggs, it declares, must now stand trial. He declares that the American Presbyterian Church has herself materially changed the Westminster Confession of a hundred years ago, and that this spirit of revision pervades the whole Christian world. Finally, he asserts that, as the theory of verbal inspiration of the Scriptures is not in the Westminster Confession of Faith, it cannot be demanded from any Presbyterian minister or professor, and warns churchmen that any attempt by the General Assembly to enforce an extra Scriptural and extra Confessional theory upon the Church will create a split worse than that of 1837. The Herald observes that:—

“Dr. Schaff’s international fame as a church historian and theologian will compel the greatest respect from not alone the ministers of the Presbyterian church, but also from the clergy of all Christian churches.

As early as 1845, he was tried for heresy in this country, and acquitted. In 1854, he represented the American German churches at the Ecclesiastical Diet at Frankfort, and received the degree of D. D. from the University at Berlin. In 1870, he accepted the chair of sacred literature in the Union Theological Seminary of this city. He is a member of the Leipsic Historical, the Netherland, and other historical and literary societies in this country and in Europe, and is one of the founders and honorary secretary of the American Branch of the Evangelical Alliance. In 1871, he was one of the Alliance delegates to the Emperor of Russia to plead for the religious liberty of his subjects in the Baltic Provinces.

He was president of the American Bible Revision Committee, which was appointed in 1871 at the request of the English committee, and in 1875 was sent to England to arrange for the co-operation and publication of the Anglo-American edition. The same year he attended officially the conferences of the Old Catholics, Greeks and Protestants at Bonn, to promote Christian unity.

Dr. Schaff was first president of the American Society of Church History, and is the author of a great number of historical and exegetical works, both in English and German, the latter having been translated into English.”

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Since writing the above the Assembly at Detroit has voted against the confirmation of Dr. Briggs by 440 against 59; thus, from a numerical point of view, Dr. Briggs is in the minority. This is by no means surprising, and I regard it greatly to the credit of the Assembly that, while they hold to the severe doctrines popularly known as Calvinism, they repudiate all the great liberal scholars who refuse to believe and teach conceptions of God which were unquestioningly accepted in a former age, but which the enlightenment of the present century shrinks from with unutterable horror. Unless Dr. Briggs proves a dishonest man and recants he must leave Union Theological Seminary, if that institution remains in the Presbyterian fellowship.

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