This argument would have made no impression on Luther, since he bluntly denied free-will in the moral order and regarded human nature as so radically depraved by original sin as to be incapable of coöperating with divine grace. In fact he compared man to a “log, stick or stone.” This view was shared by Amsdorf, Flacius, and others, whereas Osiander and Butzer admitted that “inherent righteousness” is at least a partial factor in justification. Melanchthon, in an endeavor to reconcile the contradictions of this discordant system, unwittingly gave rise to the so-called Synergist dispute. When Pfeffinger(834) undertook the defence of free-will, many Lutheran theologians, especially of the University of Jena, boldly attacked the log-stick-and-stone theory(835) and tried to force their adversaries to admit that man is able to coöperate with grace. The “Half-Melanchthonians,” as they were called, succeeded in smuggling Synergism into the “Book of Torgau;”(836) but before the “Formulary of Concord” was finally printed in the monastery of Bergen, near Magdeburg (A. D. 1577), the strict Lutherans had eliminated that article as heterodox and substituted for it the log-stick-and-stone theory as it appears in the official symbols of the Lutheran Church. In the Syncretist dispute, and through the efforts of the Pietists, this harsh teaching was afterwards moderated. But what probably contributed most to the crumbling of the system was the rapid growth of Socinianism and Rationalism among the Lutherans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To-day, with the exception of a small band of “orthodox” Lutherans in Saxony and the United States, Protestants no longer hold the log-stick-and-stone theory. The school of Luther proclaimed it as the distinguishing tenet of Protestantism, as “the criterion of a standing or falling church,”(837)—and by this criterion the Lutheran Church has indeed fallen. Common sense has led modern Protestants to admit that contrition and penance are quite as necessary for justification as faith, an opinion which, in the words of Dorner,(838) “comes dangerously near the Catholic system.” In Scandinavia, according to Dr. Krogh-Tonning,(839) the Lutheran Church has experienced a “quiet reformation” and now unconsciously defends the Catholic doctrine of justification.(840) β) As the sufficiency of the Bible without Tradition is the formal principle of “orthodox” Protestantism, so justification by faith alone may be said to be its material principle. The absurdity of the Lutheran position is evident from the fact that these two principles are mutually destructive. So far from teaching justification by faith alone, the Bible inculcates the exact contrary, while its sufficiency as the source of faith could be proved from its own pages, if at all, only by a vicious circle.(841) Thus the whole Protestant system is based on contradiction.