But the recoil was far greater than the first movement. Paul Sabatier wrote (in 1913) that until 1870 Protestantism had enjoyed the esteem of thoughtful {738} men on account of its good sense, domestic and civic virtues and its openness to science and literary criticism. This high opinion, strengthened by the prestige of German thought, was shattered, says our authority, by the results of the Franco-Prussian war, its train of horrors, and the consequences to the victors, who raved of their superiority and attributed to Luther the result of Sedan.
The Great War loosed the tongues of all enemies of Luther. "Literary and philosophic Germany," said Denys Cochin in an interview, "prepared the evolution of the state and the cult of might. . . . The haughty and aristocratic reform of Luther both prepared and seconded the aberration."
[Sidenote: Paquier]
Paquier has written a book around the thesis: "Nothing in the present war would have been alien to Luther, for like all Germans of to-day, he was violent and faithless. The theory of Nietzsche is monstrous, but it is the logical conclusion of the religious revolution accomplished by Luther and of the philosophical revolution accomplished by Kant." He finds the causal nexus between Luther and Hindenburg in two important doctrines and several corollaries. First, the doctrine of justification by faith meant the disparagement of morality and the exaltation of the end at the expense of the means. Secondly, Luther deified the state. Finally, in his narrow patriotism, Luther is thought to have inspired the reckless deeds of his posterity.
On the other hand some French Protestants, notably Weiss, have sought to show that the modern doctrines of Prussia were not due to Luther but were an apostasy from him.
Practically all the older methods of interpreting the Reformation have survived to the present; to save space they must be noticed with the utmost brevity.
{739} [Sidenote: Protestants]
The Protestant scholars of the last sixty years have all, as far as they are worthy of serious notice, escaped from the crudely supernaturalistic point of view. Their temptation is now, in proportion as they are conservative, to read into the Reformation ideas of their own. Harnack [Sidenote: Harnack] sees in Luther, as he does in Christ and Paul and all other of his heroes, exactly his own German liberal Evangelical mind. He is inclined to admit that Luther was little help to the progress of science and enlightenment, that he did not absorb the cultural elements of his time nor recognize the right and duty of free research, but yet he thinks the Reformation more important than any other revolution since Paul simply because it restored the true, i.e. Pauline and Harnackian theology. Loisy's criticism of him is brilliant: "What would Luther have thought had his doctrine of salvation by faith been presented to him with the amendment 'independently of beliefs,' or with this amendment, 'faith in the merciful Father, for faith in the Son is foreign to the Gospel of Jesus'?" The same treatment of Mohammedanism, as that accorded by Harnack to Christianity would, as Loisy remarks, deduce from it the same humanitarian deism as that now fashionable at Berlin.
I should like to speak of the work of Below and Wernle, of Böhmer and Köhler, of Fisher and Walker and McGiffert, and of many other Protestant scholars, by which I have profited. But I can only mention one other Protestant tendency, that of some liberals who find the Reformation (quite naturally) too conservative for them. Laurent wrote in this sense in 1862-70, and he was followed by one of the most thoughtful of Protestant apologists, Charles Beard. [Sidenote: Beard] Beard saw in the Reformation the subjective form of religion over against the objectivity of Catholicism, and also, "the first great triumph of the scientific spirit"—the {740} Renaissance, in fact, applied to theology. And yet he found its work so imperfect and even hampering at the time he wrote (1883) that the chief purpose of his book was to advocate a new Reformation to bring Christianity in complete harmony with science.
[Sidenote: Philosophers]