power to decide and impose penalties belongs to the pastor and church council." (92.) Dr. Fry regards "the pastor and church council as the highest authority in all congregational matters." (98.) All of these tenets are corruptions of the Scriptural and evangelical doctrines as proclaimed again by Luther. Consistently developed, their terminus is Rome. However, in the atmosphere of American liberty, where State and Church are separated and the will of the former is not foisted on the latter, Romanistic tendencies cannot thrive, nor did they ever to any extent succeed in practise in the Lutheran Church, a Church whose fundamental articles are the doctrines of justification by faith alone and absolute spiritual freedom from every human authority. SYNERGISM. 135. Synergistic Teaching on Conversion.--In his _Confessional Principle_, 1911, Dr. T.B. Schmauk rejects Melanchthon's _aliqua causa discriminis in homine_, some kind of discriminating cause in man. Schmauk writes: "Several qualities and motives in Melanchthon's nature, including his humanist outlook on free will, and his tendency to emphasize the necessity of good works, contributed to inspire him with erroneous views, when the evangelical doctrine began to be wrought out more expansively, and led him to find the cause for the actual variation in the working of God's grace in man, its object. This subtle synergistic spirit attacks the very foundation of Lutheranism, flows out into almost every doctrine, and weakens the Church at every point. And it was practically this weakness which the great multitude of Melanchthon's scholars, who become the leaders of the generation of which we are speaking, absorbed, and which rendered it difficult to return, finally, and after years of struggle, to the solid ground once more recovered in the Formula of Concord." (611; _L. u. W._ 1912, 33.) Evidently, this is sound Lutheranism; and similar testimonies were occasionally heard within the General Council throughout its history. (_L. u. W._ 1904, 273: Rev. Rembe; 1917, 473: Rev. G.H. Schnur.) But it was the song of rare birds. The synergistic note was struck much more frequently and emphatically. For making his anti-synergistic utterances Schmauk was called to order by Dr. Gerberding. And in 1916 Schmauk himself opened the _Lutheran Church Review_ to L.S. Keyser, the zealous exponent of synergism within the General Synod, who wrote: "Faith's experience always includes the fact that, while the ability of faith is divinely conferred, the exercise of that ability is never coerced, but belongs to the domain of liberty.... The same is true of all volitions: the ability to will is divinely implanted; the act itself belongs to the sphere of freedom. The ability to repent is from God; the use of that ability belongs to man's liberty." "The Scriptures never command men to regenerate; they always put that category in the passive voice, 'Except any one be born again'; but the Bible again and again commands men to