We have previously had occasion to imply, that the Protestant reformation of the sixteenth century contained both an intellectual and a spiritual element.(658) The attempt to reconcile these has been the problem of protestant theology in Germany ever since. The intellectual element, so far as it was literary, soon passed into the hands of lay scholars:(659) the spiritual became a life rather than a doctrine, and the polemic or dogmatic aspect of the intellectual movement alone was left. The time from the passing of the Formula of Concord and the Synod of Dort(660) to the beginning of the eighteenth century, a period nearly corresponding with the seventeenth century, was in Germany an age of dogmatic theology. It was scholasticism revived, with the difference that the only source for the data of argument was the Scripture, not philosophy. But there was an equal absence of inquiry into first principles, an equal appeal to authority for the grounds of belief, and equal activity within these prescribed limits. It was marked, as among the contemporary puritans in England, by the most extreme view of biblical inspiration.(661) Not only was the distinction of law and gospel overlooked, and the historic and providential development in revelation forgotten; but Scripture was supposed to be in all respects a guide for the present, as well as a record of the past. Infallible inspiration was attributed to the authors of the sacred books, not merely in reference to the religious instruction which formed the appropriate matter of the supernatural revelation, but in reference also to the allusions to collateral subjects, such as natural science, or politics; and not merely to the matter, but to the smallest details of the language of the books.