As the Middle Ages advanced the new-born human genius which constituted their culture grew daily more playful, curious, and ornate. It was naturally in the countries formerly pagan that this new paganism principally flourished. Religion began in certain quarters to be taken philosophically; its relation to life began to be understood, that it was a poetic expression of need, hope, and ignorance. Here prodigious vested interests and vested illusions of every sort made dangerous the path of sincerity. Genuine moral and religious impulses could not be easily dissociated from a system of thought and discipline with which for a thousand years they had been intimately interwoven. Scepticism, instead of seeming, what it naturally is, a moral force, a tendency to sincerity, economy, and fine adjustment of life and mind to experience—scepticism seemed a temptation and a danger. This situation, which still prevails in a certain measure, strikingly shows into how artificial a posture Christianity has thrown the mind. If scepticism, under such circumstances, by chance penetrated among the clergy, it was not favourable to consistency of life, and it was the more certain to penetrate among them in that their ranks, in a fat and unscrupulous age, would naturally be largely recruited by men without conscience or ideal ambitions. It became accordingly necessary to reform something; either the gay world to suit the Church’s primitive austerity and asceticism, or the Church to suit the world’s profane and general interests. The latter task was more or less consciously undertaken by the humanists who would have abated the clergy’s wealth and irrational authority, advanced polite learning, and, while of course retaining Christianity—for why should an ancestral religion be changed?—would have retained it as a form of paganism, as an ornament and poetic expression of human life. This movement, had it not been overwhelmed by the fanatical Reformation and the fanatical reaction against it, would doubtless have met with many a check from the Church’s sincere zealots; but it could have overcome them and, had it been allowed to fight reason’s battle with reason’s weapons, would ultimately have led to general enlightenment without dividing Christendom, kindling venomous religious and national passions, or vitiating philosophy.
The Reformation and counter-reformation.
It was not humanism, however, that was destined to restrain and soften the Church, completing by critical reflection that paganisation of Christianity which had taken place at the beginning instinctively and of necessity. There was now another force in the field, the virgin conscience and wilfulness of the Teutonic races, sincerely attached to what they had assimilated in Christianity and now awakening to the fact that they inwardly abhorred and rejected the rest. This situation, in so uncritical an age, could be interpreted as a return to primitive Christianity, though this had been in truth, as we may now perceive, utterly opposed to the Teutonic spirit. Accordingly, the humanistic movement was crossed and obscured by another, specifically religious and ostensibly more Christian than the Church. Controversies followed, as puerile as they were bloody; for it was not to be expected that the peoples once forming the Roman Empire were going to surrender their ancestral religion without a struggle and without resisting this new barbarian invasion into their imaginations and their souls. They might have suffered their Christianised paganism to fade with time; worldly prosperity and arts might have weaned them gradually from their supernaturalism, and science from their myths; but how were they to abandon at once all their traditions, when challenged to do so by a foreign supernaturalism so much poorer and cruder than their own? What happened was that they intrenched themselves in their system, cut themselves off from the genial influences that might have rendered it innocuous, and became sectaries, like their opponents. Enlightenment was only to come after a recrudescence of madness and by the mutual slaughter of a fresh crop of illusions, usurpations, and tyrannies.
Protestantism an expression of character.
It would be easy to write, in a satirical vein, the history of Protestant dogma. Its history was foreseen from the beginning by intelligent observers. It consisted in a gradual and inevitable descent into a pious scepticism. The attempt to cling to various intermediate positions on the inclined plane that slopes down from ancient revelation to private experience can succeed only for a time and where local influences limit speculative freedom. You must slide smilingly down to the bottom or, in horror at that eventuality, creep up again and reach out pathetically for a resting-place at the top. To insist on this rather obvious situation, as exhibited for instance in the Anglican Church, would be to thresh straw and to study in Protestantism only its feeble and accidental side. Its true essence is not constituted by the Christian dogmas that at a given moment it chances to retain, but by the spirit in which it constantly challenges the others, by the expression it gives to personal integrity, to faith in conscience, to human instinct courageously meeting the world. It rebels, for instance, against the Catholic system of measurable sins and merits, with rewards and punishments legally adjusted and controlled by priestly as well as by divine prerogative. Such a supernatural mechanism seems to an independent and uncowed nature a profanation and an imposture. Away, it says, with all intermediaries between the soul and God, with all meddlesome priestcraft and all mechanical salvation. Salvation shall be by faith alone, that is, by an attitude and sentiment private to the spirit, by an inner co-operation of man with the world. The Church shall be invisible, constituted by all those who possess this necessary faith and by no others. It really follows from this, although the conclusion may not be immediately drawn, that religion is not an adjustment to other facts or powers, or to other possibilities, than those met with in daily life and in surrounding nature, but is rather a spiritual adjustment to natural life, an insight into its principles, by which a man learns to identify himself with the cosmic power and to share its multifarious business no less than its ulterior security and calm.
It has the spirit of life.
Protestantism, in this perfectly instinctive trustfulness and self-assertion, is not only prior to Christianity but more primitive than reason and even than man. The plants and animals, if they could speak, would express their attitude to their destiny in the Protestant fashion. “He that formed us,” they would say, “lives and energises within us. He has sealed a covenant with us, to stand by us if we are faithful and strenuous in following the suggestions he whispers in our hearts. With fidelity to ourselves and, what is the same thing, to him, we are bound to prosper and to have life more and more abundantly for ever.” This attitude, where it concerns religion, involves two corollaries: first, what in accordance with Hebrew precedent may be called symbolically faith in God, that is, confidence in one’s own impulse and destiny, a confidence which the world in the end is sure to reward; and second, abomination of all contrary religious tenets and practices—of asceticism, for instance, because it denies the will; of idolatry and myth, because they render divinity concrete rather than relative to inner cravings and essentially responsive; finally of tradition and institutional authority, because these likewise jeopardise the soul’s experimental development as, in profound isolation, she wrestles with reality and with her own inspiration.
and of courage.
In thus meeting the world the soul without experience shows a fine courage proportionate to its own vigour. We may well imagine that lions and porpoises have a more masculine assurance that God is on their side than ever visits the breast of antelope or jelly-fish. This assurance, when put to the test in adventurous living, becomes in a strong and high-bred creature a refusal to be defeated, a gallant determination to hold the last ditch and hope for the best in spite of appearances. It is a part of Protestantism to be austere, energetic, unwearied in some laborious task. The end and profit are not so much regarded as the mere habit of self-control and practical devotion and steadiness. The point is to accomplish something, no matter particularly what; so that Protestants show on this ground some respect even for an artist when he has once achieved success. A certain experience of ill fortune is only a stimulus to this fidelity. So great is the antecedent trust in the world that the world, as it appears at first blush, may be confidently defied.
but the voice of inexperience.