But when we look at Protestantism as a social and religious movement rather than an intellectual movement, we see that it stood for certain relatively new emphases which did indicate a breaking loose from mediævalism. Many sincere men felt the need for a deeper, more personal assurance of salvation than that { 201} offered by the traditional, substantial sacraments of the Church. Religion seemed to them a more personal affair than it had overtly come to be. By means of an act of faith, the individual hoped to secure a new relation to God in which his sins were forgiven and salvation attained. Salvation thus became a more internal act than it had been, and particularly one in which the ecclesiastical institution played a far less important part. The new tendency emphasized the individual and personal as against the institutional and formal. Catholicism had inherited too much ritualistic and magical trapping to harmonize completely with the keen ethical sense of the younger and simpler people who were growing to adulthood.
A new movement is on the defensive and, when too completely estranged from the institutions of which it is a reform, almost inevitably tends to be narrow and intense. Now Protestantism was essentially an emphasis on the soul's salvation by meeting certain requirements of a doctrinal and ethical type, and so it tended to drop those functions and relations which the Mediæval Church included within its scope. It is this clear-cut intensification of one factor and the exclusion of others which we must bear in mind when we compare the early Protestant sects with the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages.
Deep religious fervor easily leads to narrowness, especially when the spiritual values regarded as essential are subjective and rather formal. Because confessional Protestantism was as other-worldly as the Mediæval Church, it cut itself loose from aspects of life which might otherwise have mellowed it and saved it from formalism and hardness. We may laugh with { 202} Swift at the freaks of Jack, at his dourness and savagery, his strained interpretation of the scriptures and his lack of social tact, but we must, if we would be just, always bear in mind the outlook which Jack had inherited.