The Protestant denial of the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which followed as a direct logical result of the reformers’ doctrine of justification by faith, had consequences for morality no less positive than those that followed the denial of the Catholic teaching of the meritoriousness of the ascetic life.
It is undoubtedly true that the doctrine of purgatory, conceived as part of a system of future rewards and punishments, has exerted on the whole an influence favorable to morality. But the institution lends itself easily to misuse. In the Middle Ages the doctrine of indulgences was applied to souls in purgatory, and the shortening of the period of their suffering there made dependent not alone upon the prayers of their friends on earth, but often practically upon the payment of sums of money, designated as alms to the poor or gifts to the Church. The forgiveness of sins was thus too often made a commercial transaction. Thus the doctrine of purgatory, beyond controversy, contributed essentially to that despiritualizing of religion and that deadening in wide circles of the moral sense which characterized the later medieval period and which, through inevitable reaction, helped to provoke the Protestant revolt.
The effect upon morals of the abolition of purgatory by the reformers was immediate and far-reaching. Many specific duties were at once dropped from the moral code. Prayers for the dead ceased to be a pious duty; they were not even morally permissible. Furthermore, the performance of such good works as the making of pilgrimages and the giving of alms for the benefit of souls in purgatory not only ceased to be regarded as meritorious, but came to be looked upon as positively wrong. Besides these direct ethical consequences of the abolition of purgatory there were indirect ethical results which we shall notice in another connection.[719]
Effects of the religious reform upon the virtue of toleration[720]
Ultimately the Reformation, largely through the outworkings of the principle of the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, was destined to foster the growth of the important virtue of toleration. But throughout the first three centuries of Protestantism, owing mainly to the great emphasis laid by the reformers on the doctrine of the supreme ethical value of correctness of religious belief, this principle of the right of private judgment exerted little appreciable influence upon the moral evolution. Holding fast to the doctrine of the criminality of wrong belief, the new Church like the old was necessarily intolerant. It regarded heresy with dread, looked upon toleration as a fault, and, whenever circumstances favored, engaged in persistent and unrelenting persecution to maintain uniformity of religious belief. It was not till late in the modern period that religious toleration came generally to be recognized by the Protestant conscience as a virtuous disposition of supreme worth.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE MORAL EVOLUTION SINCE THE INCOMING OF DEMOCRACY: THE NEW SOCIAL AND INTERNATIONAL CONSCIENCE
I. Forces determining the Trend of the Ethical Movement
The incoming of democracy
Of all the forces which since the rise of Christianity have given fresh impulse to the ethical movement inaugurated by the new religion, none has exerted a greater influence than modern democracy. This is so because in its essential spirit democracy is at one with Christianity. It is merely “a principle which continues ... over a wider range of institutions the same principle as Christianity introduced.”[721] It extends the Christian principle of equality from the spiritual to the political, the social, and the economic domain. It makes all men equal before Cæsar as well as before God.
And like Christianity, democracy extends the range of persons who are brothers until not only all classes within the same state but all peoples and races are included. “In the democratic union of nations,” in the words of Lecky, “we find the last and highest expression of the Christian ideal of the brotherhood of mankind.”[722]