I. Principles of the Reformation of Ethical Import
Principle of the self-sovereignty of the individual as the ultimate authority in morals
In its essential principle the Protestant Reformation was a protest against the principle of authority in the realm of the spirit. It proclaimed the right of individual judgment in matters of religion and morals. There was in this proclamation an ethical implication of revolutionary significance. It was a recognition of the truth “that duty in the last analysis is imposed upon the individual ... by himself; that there is no authority in moral matters more ultimate than a man’s rational conviction of what is best.”[716]
Of all the agencies which during recent times have been at work moralizing morality and creating for the moral life a permanent and indestructible basis in reason and conscience, this Protestant principle of the autonomy of the individual soul in the spiritual domain has been one of the most efficient and pervasive.
The principle of salvation by right belief
Though the chief significance of the Protestant revolution and its ultimate import for morality lay in this assertion of the self-sovereignty of the individual, still the full ethical consequences of this revolutionary principle did not become clearly manifest till after the lapse of more than three centuries.
Throughout the earlier periods of the Reformation era the moral evolution in Protestant lands was influenced less by the announcement of this principle than by that of certain other principles less fundamentally important, or by certain minor modifications effected by the reformers in the body of doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church.
Among these principles was that of salvation by faith, which meant practically salvation by right belief. This was no new principle in Christian theology. The Church had always insisted upon acceptance of the main articles of its creed as necessary to salvation. But by reason of the emphasis which had been placed upon the doctrine of the meritoriousness of works, many had come to believe, and to act upon the belief, that a man is justified by what he does. The assertion of the doctrine of justification through faith alone had important consequences for morality, since it implied the denial of the ethical value of works, which meant specifically the repudiation of the principles of asceticism, on which the monastic system rested, as well as the rejection of the doctrine of purgatory, which afforded basis and sanction for a considerable part of the moral code of the medieval Church.