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“Sacramentalism is not simply nice,” said William D. Dinges, a religious studies professor at the Catholic University of America, about the Catholic rites.

Anglicanism has always been about the attempt—sometimes successful, sometimes less so—to find a via media, or middle way, between stricter sacramentalism of Roman Catholicism and stricter scriptural literalism of other Protestant denominations.

Soon, very soon, the men who protested against formalism and sacramentalism were fiercely denounced as "troublers of Israel."

In spite of the fact that in a few of its later representatives Gnosticism assumed a more refined and spiritual aspect, and even produced blossoms of a true and beautiful piety, it is fundamentally and essentially an unstable religious syncretism, a religion in which the determining forces were a fantastic oriental imagination and a sacramentalism which degenerated into the wildest superstitions, a weak dualism fluctuating unsteadily between asceticism and libertinism.

This and two later creedal statements are included in the Book of Concord of 1580 and supply the Lutheran answers to almost every spiritual problem the Christian soul is prone to�Anti-Trinitarianism, humanism, Pelagianism, synergism, determinism, Manichaeism, spiritualism, enthusiasm, sacerdotalism, sacramentalism, mysticism, asceticism, perfectionism, antinomianism, chiliasm, apocalypticism, Donatism, Novatianism, etc.