The distance between the spirit of Latin and that of Teutonic Christianity, and, also, it should be noted, the distance between the twelfth century and the sixteenth may be seen in the two appeals of Abelard and Luther. Peter Abelard, a great and pathetic and only a little less than a heroic figure, was a Protestant, and in the best sense of the term, a free thinker, three hundred years before the Renaissance and four hundred years before Luther. Accused of heresy by the saintly but censorious and bigoted Bernard, and brought to trial before a tribunal carefully packed by his relentless and unscrupulous adversary, Abelard, despairing of a fair hearing, refused to defend himself and appealed to the Pope. Another monk charged with heresy four hundred years later, inferior to Abelard in clearness and energy of thought but of more heroic moral fibre, before the most august assemblage Europe could gather, closed his defence with the undying words, "It is not safe for a man to do aught against his conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me, Amen."
Abelard appeals to the Pope, Luther to his conscience. That is the supreme contrast between Latin and Teutonic Christianity.
- American Christianity.
Since the revolt of the Teutonic peoples, the most remarkable phenomenon of Christian history has been the growth of a branch of Teutonic Christianity under the novel political and social conditions of the new world.
This has been a transplantation of Christianity quite as significant as any of its transplantations in the past, and the new soil has produced just as unmistakably new a growth.
Doubtless none of the great phases of Christianity in the past knew themselves to be new. Neither Greek nor Latin Christianity was conscious of any departure from primitive Christianity. Indeed, to this day, in their conception of the history of the Church, they persist in impressing their own type on that primitive and undeveloped type.
Teutonic Christianity took centuries to come to clear consciousness of itself and of its irreconcilability with Latin Christianity. It is not wonderful, therefore, that hitherto, as far as I am aware, American Christianity has been, if at all, very dimly and imperfectly conscious of the difference between its spirit and that of the Teutonic Christianity of the old world.
American Christianity has not yet arrived. It is only on the way. It has not yet found itself. It is not yet conscious of its own individuality, not yet self-reliant, independent. It is a youth, but a youth rapidly approaching manhood. Perhaps the characteristics that are unfolding themselves can be most clearly brought out by an attempt to show wherein it resembles, and wherein it differs from, each of the four great phases of Christianity which have just been under consideration.
a. American Christianity compared with Jewish.
Compared with Jewish Christianity, American Christianity resembles the latter in its simplicity of creed, its emphasis on the practical and ethical, and (to a distinct and growing degree) in its brotherliness and democratic equality.