Protestantism had its ethical, political, economic and doctrinal sides. It was not merely a religious movement. Had it been so, it might more readily have run its course as a reform movement within the institutional life of the time. Had the Northern nations possessed greater power in the councils of the Church, it is just possible that the change would have been brought about without the occurrence of an open rupture. But the Church was too centralized and too rich to escape conflict with the growing nationalism. For our present purpose, however, this larger social setting of Protestantism is not important. What we wish to study is the religious tendencies covered by this term. What advance did they contain? What was the weakness of the movement?
The setting of Protestantism was entirely supernaturalistic. So far as the fundamental doctrinal assumptions are concerned, there is practically no difference between Catholic and Protestant. Protestantism represented a reform, and not a revolution. Or, to put it more deeply, human nature is such that the real revolutions take centuries of growth and come like the thief in the night. The modern scientific view of the world is revolutionary in the philosophical and true sense of the term; while the sharp sectarian conflict is only a battle over secondary things. Since it has so commonly been assumed that the Protestant reformation represented a decisive break with the outlook of the Middle Ages and somehow marked a milestone in man's intellectual progress, it may be worth while to consider whether such really was the case. A disinterested study { 200} of the reformation must, I feel sure, convince the student that the crisis in the Church was concerned more with matters of theological doctrine and church polity than with the ideas underlying Christianity. It brought no essential change in the inherited and firmly entrenched tale of the past. The puritan poet, Milton, sings of "man's first disobedience" in much the way that St. Augustine would have done. The weapons of the great advance had not yet been forged. We are the ones who will be called upon to face the vision of the New Spiritual World and to be faithful to its demands upon our loyalty and integrity. "The defection of the Protestants from the Roman Catholic Church," writes Professor Robinson, "is not connected with any decisive intellectual revision. Such ardent emphasis has been constantly placed upon the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism by representatives of both parties that the close intellectual resemblance of the two systems, indeed their identity in nine parts out of ten, has tended to escape us. The early Protestants, of course, accepted, as did the Catholics, the whole patristic outlook on the world; their historical perspective was similar, their notions of the origin of man, of the Bible, with its types, prophecies and miracles, of heaven and hell, of demons and angels, are all identical.... Early Protestantism is, from an intellectual standpoint, essentially a phase of mediæval history."