§ 180.1. =The Protestant Assembly.=--The first general German Protestant Assembly, composed of 400 clerical and lay notabilities, met at Eisenach in A.D. 1865, under the presidency of the jurist Bluntschli of Heidelberg and the chief court preacher Schwarz of Gotha. A peculiar lustre was given to the meeting by the presence of Rothe of Heidelberg. Of special importance was Schwarz’s address on “The Limits of Doctrinal Freedom in Protestantism,” which he sought not in the confession, not in the authority of the letter of Scripture, not even in certain so called fundamental articles, but in the one religious moral truth of Christianity, the gospel of love and the divine fatherhood as Christ taught it, expounded it in his life and sealed it by his death. In Berlin, Osnabrück, and Leipzig, the churches were refused for services according to the _Protestantenverein_. In A.D. 1868 fifteen heads of families in Heidelberg petitioned the ecclesiastical council to grant them the use of one of the city churches where a believing clergyman might conduct service in the old orthodox fashion. This request was refused by fifty votes against four. Baumgarten denounced this intolerance, and declared that unless repudiated by the union it would be a most serious stain upon its reputation. In A.D. 1877 he publicly withdrew from the society. § 180.2. =The “_Protestantenverein_” Propaganda.=--The views of the union were spread by popular lectures and articles in newspapers and magazines. The “_Protestanten-Bibel_,” edited by Schmidt and Holtzendorff in A.D. 1872, of which an English translation has been published, giving the results of New Testament criticism, “laid the axe at the root of the dogmatics and confessionalism,” and proved that “we are still Christians though our conception of Christianity diverges in many points from that of the second century, and we proclaim a Christianity without miracles and in accordance with the modern theory of the universe.” The success of such efforts to spread the broad theology has been greatly over-estimated. Enthusiastic partisans of the union claimed to have the whole evangelical world at their back, while Holtzendorff boasted that they had all thoughtful Germans with them.