The panic caused by the revolutions of 1848 gave increased stimulus, by adding a political reaction to the religious. The extreme rationalist party had favoured the Revolution, and the school of Schleiermacher had supported the schemes for constitutional government. In the suppression of liberty which ensued for about ten years, the orthodox movement in theology united itself with the reaction in political. Absolute government was not merely a fact, but a doctrine. The theological reaction was no longer the spiritual aspiration of Germany seeking repose after doubt, but a political movement veiled under an ecclesiastical colour. The result has been, the creation of a Lutheran party far more extreme in its opinions than the one just described;—the political leader of which in the Prussian parliament was the jurist Stahl;(856)—intolerant towards other churches, suspicious of any independent associations for religious usefulness in its own, disowning pietism because of its unchurchlike character, and in its principles going back beyond the Reformation, discarding the subjective inward principle, and reposing on the objective authority of the church. Taking a political view of religion, it does not so much ask what is truth, but what the church asserts to be true. Though not offending popular prejudices by the introduction of Romish doctrines or rites, it really reposes on the Romish principle of a visible authoritative church with mystical powers, upholding a rigid sacramental theory and the doctrine of consubstantiation. Extending the sacramental efficacy to the ministerial office, and denying communion between God and the individual soul independently of the church as the element of communication.(857) Yet it contains many honoured names, and has produced many instructive works. The movement in English theology, which originated a generation ago in the panic caused by the liberal acts of the government which was introduced by the reform act,(858) offers a parallel; with the exception that the ecclesiastical principles then advocated had always had supporters in the English church, whereas they were nearly new in the Lutheran. The Lutheran movement too, only proposes to go back to the Reformation, the English ecclesiastical movement professed to go back to the early fathers. (41)