By clinging to its solid structure the religious innovations would have a chance of avoiding the conventicle system and the danger of its congregations falling asunder. The tendency to drift towards the State was also promoted by the opposition of the fanatical Anabaptists, for this sect was a menace to order in the congregations owing to its excesses and also to the pertinacity with which, following out Luther’s own teaching, it insisted on individualism and repudiated the “office” of the ministry. Not only did Luther, after the rise of the Anabaptists, emphasise the outward rather than the inward Word, but, for the same reason, he also laid much greater stress than formerly on the “office” and on the external representation of the Church’s members—invisibly united by the faith—by duly called officials. Thus, the Church, whose invisibility and spirituality Luther had been so fond of emphasising, became, in course of time, more and more a visible and concrete body, though remaining closely bound up with the State. Yet, even in Luther’s earlier views on the Church, certain indications pointed to the visible Church yet to come; indeed the ideas he retained from Catholic days were to prove stronger than he then anticipated. Of a statement contained in “_De servo arbitrio_” (1525), a book written after the rise of the Anabaptist subjectivism, Möhler justly remarks: “This passage views the clergy as the representatives of the Church which is thus quite visible; professing the faith of the invisible Church and expressing its mind, this Church has a definite doctrinal standpoint which she advocates through her clergy, and, which, as the dictum of the Saints, she regards as true and infallible. Hence the visible Church appears as the expression and facsimile of the invisible Church.”[1167] Already in his books against Alveld and Catharinus Luther was at pains to insist that the Church which he taught was a real community living on earth in the flesh, though not tied down to any definite place or persons.[1168] Wavering and confusion, here as elsewhere, characterise Luther’s teaching. We can understand how his Catholic opponents, for instance Staphylus, make much of the change from the visible to the invisible Church. Staphylus dubs those who persisted in advocating her invisibility, the “_Invisibiles_,” such being the followers of Flacius, Schwenckfeld and Osiander, and also the Anabaptists.[1169] It is a fact that Melanchthon, particularly in his later years, insists on the Church as an institution and on her visible nature more than Luther does. The centuriators defined the Church as “_cœtus visibilis_” and, after Chemnitz’s day (†1586), the Church of the Lutheran theologians is something quite visible, and is spoken of as an institution for the preservation and promotion of pure doctrine and of the means of grace which work by faith.[1170]