Some of the Best of Krauth

As a fun exercise, I went over to Pastor Weedon's blog and typed "Krauth" in the search box. Now, all in one place ladies and gentlemen, here are some of the highlights from the quotes Pr. Weedon has posted:

"She [the Church] should lead men, not to the least faith, the least holiness which makes salvation possible, but to the very highest - she should not encourage the religion whose root is a selfish fear of hell, a selfish craving for heaven, but she should plant that religion to which pure truth is dear for its own sake, which longs for the fullest illumination, which desires not the easy road, but the sure one." -- C. P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 191

"It is not charity to bear with others because the differences between us are trifling; it is charity to bear with them although the differences are great. Charity does not cover error; because error is the daughter of sin, and charity is the daughter of God. Charity covers errorists so far as she may without palliating their errors, for the errorist, as a man, is God's child." -- C. P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 143

"A Church which contends for nothing has either lost the truth, or has ceased to love it." -- C. P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 1147

"The sin is really in the condition of the will. The sin done is but phenomenal to the real sin." -- C. P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 453

"It is vastly more important, then, to know what the Reformation retained than what it overthrew; for the overthrow of error, though often an indispensable prerequisite to the establishment of truth, is not truth itself; it may clear the foundation, simply to substitute one error for another, perhaps a greater for a less." -- C. P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 202

"The private opinions of individuals, however influential, can in no sense establish or remove one word of the Creed of the Church. Any man who, on any pretense, gives ecclesiastical authority to private opinions, is robbing the Church of her freedom. She is to be held responsible for no doctrines which she has not officially declared to be her own." -- C. P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 265

"It is a great mistake to suppose that our Evangelical Protestant Church is bound by consistency to hold a view simply because Luther held it. Her faith is not brought to the touchstone of Luther's private opinion, but his private opinion is to be tested by her confessed faith, when the question is, What is genuinely Lutheran?" -- C. P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 265

"Man offers to God; this is sacrifice. God gives back to man; this is sacrament. The oblation, or thing offered, supplies both sacrifice and sacrament, but with this difference, that under the Old Dispensation, God received part and man received part; under the New, God receives all and gives back all: Jesus Christ, in His own divine person, makes that complete which was narrowed under the Old Covenant by the necessarily limitations of mere matter." -- C. P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 591

"Rights, in themselves, give nothing, and cannot change the nature of things. The right to gather, gathers nothing; and if, under this right, the man gathers wood, hay, stubble, neither the right nor its exercise makes them into gold, silver, and precious stones. The Church will not put any violence upon him who chooses to gather what will not endure the fire; but she will not accept them as jewels, nor permit her children to be cheated by them. The right of private judgment and the right of Church discipline are co-ordinate and harmonious rights, essential to the prevention and abuse of the other. To uphold either intelligently is to uphold both. In maintaining, therefore, as Protestants, the right and duty of men, in the exercise of private judgment, to form their own convictions, unfettered by civil penalties in the State, or by inquisitorial powers in the Church, we maintain, also, the right and duty of the Church to shield herself from corruption in doctrine by setting forth the truth in Confession, by faithfully combating heresy, by personal warning to those that err, and, finally, with the contumacious, by rejecting them from her communion, till, through grace, they are led to see and renounce the falsehood, for which they claimed the name of truth." -- C. P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 175

"Death is so tenaciously allied to sin that only God can separate them." -- C. P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 411

"God's own appointments limit us, but do not limit Him." -- C.P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 431

"There is no power in man, in his reason or in his will, none in education, none in the whole store of the visible, or the intellectual, or moral world, which can repair this fatal defect [having no true love, faith, or fear of God], and render him God's reverent, loving, and trusting child." -- Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 390

"A regenerate man is always justified, a justified man is always regenerated; and unless a man be both, he is neither." -- Krauth, The Conservation Reformation, p. 419

"We do not interpret God's word by the Creed, neither do we interpret the Creed by God's Word, but interpreting both independently, by the laws of language, and finding that they teach one and the same truth, we heartily acknowledge the Confession as a true exhibition of the faith of the Rule - a true witness to the one, pure, and unchanging faith of the Christian Church, and freely make it our own Confession, as truly as if it had been now first uttered by our lips, or had first gone forth from our hands." -- Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 169

"The faith of the Church now is identical with what it was in the Apostolic time, but the relation of identity does not preclude growth - it only excludes changes of identity. That faith must always be its essential self - whether as a babe receiving milk, or as a man enjoying strong meat. In a word, the advances are wrought, not by change in the Church's faith, but by the perpetual activity of that faith, a faith which because it is incapable of change itself, assimilates more and more to it the consciousness of the Church, her system of doctrine, her language, and her life." -- Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 270

"The mightiest weapon which the Reformation employed against Rome was, not Rome's errors, but Rome's truths. It professed to make no new discoveries, to find no unheard-of interpretations but taking the Scriptures in that very sense to which the greatest of her writers had assented, uncovering the law and the gospel of God which she retained, applying them as her most distinguished and most honored teachers had applied them, though she made them of none effect by her traditions, the Reformation took into its heart the life-stream of sixteen centuries, and came forth in the stature and strength of a Christianity, grown from infancy in the primitive ages, to the ripened manhood of that maturer period. There was no fear of truth, simply because Rome held it, and no disposition to embrace error, because it might be employed with advantage to Rome's injury.... They allowed no authority but the Word of God, but they listened respectfully to the witness of believers of all time." --Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 203