Human co-operation in the work of salvation came to be designated Synergism. The Protestant historian of dogma mentioned above points out “that, by his adoption of Synergism, Melanchthon forsook both the Lutheran tradition and his own earlier standpoint.” The assumption of an unconditional Divine predestination, such as we find it advocated by Luther, Zwingli, Bucer, Calvin and others, was here “for the first time thrown overboard by one of the Protestant leaders.”[1157] The same author, after commenting on Melanchthon’s new exposition of justification and the law in relation to the Gospel, declares that here, too, Melanchthon had exploited “only a part of Luther’s thought and had distorted some of the most precious truths we owe to the Reformation.”[1158] This same charge we not seldom hear brought against Melanchthon by up-to-date Protestant theologians. In the school of Albert Ritschl it is, for instance, usual to say that he narrowed the ideas of Luther, particularly in his conception of faith and of the Church. The truth is that Melanchthon really did throw overboard certain radical views which had been cherished by Luther, particularly in his early days. The faith which is required for salvation he comes more and more to take as faith in all the articles of revelation, and not so much as a mere faith and confidence in the forgiveness of sins and personal salvation; “the first place is accorded no longer to trust but to doctrine,”[1159] though, as will appear immediately, he did not feel quite sure of his position. In his conception of the Church, too, he was more disposed to see “an empirical reality and to insist on its doctrinal side,”[1160] instead of looking on the Church, as Luther did, viz. as the “invisible band of all who confess the Gospel.”[1161] Johannes Haussleiter, the Protestant editor of the Disputations held under Melanchthon from 1546 onwards, thus feels justified in saying that, “it was in Melanchthon’s school that the transition was effected ... from a living confession born of faith and moulded with the assistance of theology, to a firm, hard and rigid law of doctrine.... This, from the point of view of history, spelt retrogression.... If it was possible for such a thing to occur at Wittenberg one generation after Luther’s ringing testimony in favour of the freedom of a Christian Man, what might not be feared for the future?”[1162]