and universal significance."--Fairbairn, "The Place of Christ in Modern Theology," page 159. In the words of the Small Catechism, Luther still teaches our children this foundation doctrine of our Church: "I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, secured and delivered me from all sins, from death and from the power of the devil; not with silver and gold, but with His holy and precious blood, and with His innocent sufferings and death, in order that I might be His, live under Him in His kingdom, and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence and blessedness." But while we thus find in the Son of God and in His atoning work the foundation of the faith of our Church, many obstacles had been placed in the way of securing this redemption. Legalistic conditions made it impossible for the sinner to know that his sins had been taken away. It was here that the Lutheran Reformation pointed the way to a return to the simplicity of the Gospel by its Scriptural definition of justification. _Sola fide_, by faith alone, was the keynote of the Reformation. Be sure that you bring back _sola_ was Luther's admonition to his friends, who went to Augsburg while he himself remained at Coburg. Thus justification by faith became the material principle of Protestantism and a second foundation stone of Lutheranism. It is true that Calvin and the Reformed churches also accepted this principle, but they did not begin with it. Their system was based on the idea of the absoluteness of God. The Lutheran system emphasizes the love of God to all men; the Reformed system emphasizes predestination; which, by selecting some, excludes the others. As the theologians describe it, Lutheranism is Christocentric, Reform is theocentric.* *Calvin, like Luther, read theology through Augustine and without his ecclesiology, but from an altogether opposite point of view. Luther started with the anthropology and advanced from below upwards; Calvin started with the theology and moved from above downwards. Hence his determinative idea was not justification by faith, but God and His sovereignty, or the sole and all-efficiency of His gracious will.-Ibid., page 162. A third principle relates to the means of grace. Here we have less difficulty in discerning the line of cleavage which separates us from Rome on the one hand and from the rest of Protestantism on the other hand.