The Protestant of to-day does not usually realize how different the Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was from that which he sees around him. Protestantism has mellowed and absorbed values and interests which it would once have repudiated as irrelevant to the tremendous drama of salvation. Take mediæval Catholicism, with its ideal of a Church-directed society, its doctrines of sin and redemption, its belief in another world overshadowing this one, its strain of asceticism, and remove the sacramental power of the Church, and you have early Protestantism before you. Instead of fleeing the world and its temptations, the Christian was ordered to live in it like a sentinel on his guard. He was not to set his heart on creaturely comforts nor love the things and interests of this life overmuch, but rather to trample them underfoot while gazing upwards. No wonder that the early Protestants were a stern people; they were a community of secular monks. They had the joy of union with God and assured redemption from sin, but this world was not their true home. Whereas the Mediæval Church had tempered the asceticism of historical Christianity by the distinction between what was imposed upon clergy and what was demanded of the laity, Protestantism was unable to continue this distinction because all believers were priests. All had to come up to the same high standard or risk damnation. This exaltation has in large measure departed from Protestantism, and we who { 203} have grown into a mellower idea of salvation are inclined to judge this set of ideals as narrow and even morbid. We forget that puritanism was the expression of an ascetic religious view of the world.
It was in the sphere of church government that Protestantism made its great changes by attempting to return to the polity of the early associational form of Christianity. The more radical forms of Protestantism, especially, inaugurated a movement in the direction of what we now call democracy. There can be little doubt, in fact, that these waves of religious individualism assisted the growth of democratic and republican forms of government. This influence was unplanned and relatively accidental because religious individualism was more concerned with the right to worship according to the dictates of conscience than with political rights. But man is a psychological whole, and so a reform along one line is bound to affect other phases of life.