For Protestantism, if the truth must be told, took away from this world many things that were good and noble and beautiful and it added a great many others that were narrow and hateful and graceless. And instead of making the history of the human race simpler and more harmonious, it made it more complicated and less orderly. All that, however, was not so much the fault of the Reformation as of certain inherent weaknesses in the mental habits of most people.
They refuse to be hurried.
They cannot possibly keep up with the pace set by their leaders.
They are not lacking in good will. Eventually they will all cross the bridge that leads into the newly discovered territory. But they will do so in their own good time and bringing with them as much of the ancestral furniture as they can possibly carry.
As a result the Great Reform, which was to establish an entirely new relationship between the individual Christian and his God, which was to do away with all the prejudices and all the corruptions of a bygone era, became so thoroughly cluttered up with the medieval baggage of its trusted followers that it could move neither forward nor backward and soon looked for all the world like a replica of that papal establishment which it held in such great abhorrence.
For that is the great tragedy of the Protestant rebellion. It could not rise above the mean average of intelligence of the majority of its adherents.
And as a result the people of western and northern Europe did not progress as much as might have been expected.
Instead of a man who was supposed to be infallible, the Reformation gave the world a book which was held to be infallible.
Instead of one potentate who ruled supreme, there arose a thousand and one little potentates, each one of whom in his own way tried to rule supreme.
Instead of dividing all Christendom into two well defined halves, the ins and the outs, the faithful and the heretics, it created endless little groups of dissenters who had nothing in common but a most intense hatred for all those who failed to share their own opinions. Instead of establishing a reign of tolerance, it followed the example of the early Church and as soon as it had attained power and was firmly entrenched behind numberless catechisms, creeds and confessions, it declared bitter warfare upon those who dared to disagree with the officially established doctrines of the community in which they happened to live.