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.
II. Some Important Moral Outcomes of the Sixteenth-Century Religious Reform
The reform movement reënforces the ethical tendencies of the Renaissance
Though the immediate results of the Reformation were disastrous to Humanism, the ultimate effect of the religious movement was to reënforce the true ethical tendencies of the intellectual revival. As we have seen, the thing of deepest import for morals in the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the announcement of the freedom and self-dependence of the individual spirit, since such self-sovereignty is the prerequisite of a true and vital morality. Likewise the essential proclamation of the Reformation was the autonomy of the individual in matters religious and moral. It is true that the reformers, though proclaiming liberty of conscience, the right of individual judgment, did not, as has already been said, at once recognize all the ethical implications of this principle. “The Reformation,” as Dr. Arnold truly observes, “was weak in that it never consciously grasped or applied the central idea of the Renaissance—the Hellenic idea of pursuing, in all lines of activity, the law and science, to use Plato’s words, of things as they really are.”[717]
But the assertion of the right of individual judgment in matters religious and moral was bound sooner or later to lead to the recognition of the duty of inquiry, of investigation of the law and science of things as they really are, and of absolute loyalty to the truth when found. The final outcome within the Church of this new mental attitude has been the “Higher Criticism,” which is simply the continuation by modern scholars within the reformed denominations of the scientific criticism of the Bible begun by the distinguished humanist Erasmus. In this remoter issue of the Reformation the essential oneness of its spirit with that of the Renaissance is revealed, and the ground for the assertion that the ultimate moral results of the religious reform were a reënforcement of the deepest ethical tendencies of the intellectual revival is disclosed.
Substitution of an inerrant Book for an inerrant Church