§ 177.1. =The Evangelical Union.=--Circumstances favoured this movement. Both in the Lutheran and in the Reformed church comparatively little stress was laid upon distinctive confessional doctrines, and pietism and rationalism, for different reasons, had taught the relative unimportance of dogma. And so a general accord was given to the king’s proposal, at the Reformation centenary of A.D. 1817, to fortify the Protestant church by means of a =Union= of Lutherans and Calvinists. The new Book of Common Order of A.D. 1822, in the preparation of which the pious king, Frederick William III., had himself taken part, was indeed condemned by many as too high-church, even Catholicizing in its tendency. A revised edition in A.D. 1829, giving a wider choice of formularies, was legally authorized, and the union became an accomplished fact. There now existed in Prussia an evangelical national church with a common government and liturgy, embracing within it three different sections: a Lutheran, and a Reformed, which held to their distinctive doctrines, though not regarding these as a cause of separation, and a real union party, which completely abandoned the points of difference. But more and more the union became identified with doctrinal indifferentism and slighting of all church symbols, and those in whom the church feeling still prevailed were driven into opposition to the union (§ 193). The example of Prussia in sacking the union of the two churches was followed by Nassau, Baden, Rhenish Bavaria, Anhalt, and to some extent in Hesse (§§ 194, 196).