ng to her sanctions and her vision of a heavenly
kingdom, not of this world. She played her part, and she played it
greatly--that much we must avow, even while we point out her present
limitations--but the world has passed beyond her tutelage and runs
lithesomely and courageously into fields where she cannot bring herself
to follow. Thus is it, and thus has it always been--institutions and
ideas have their period of usefulness when they serve as organizing
centers for social tendencies; but the time inevitably comes when they
lose their creative power and are outgrown by the life which has made
them and is greater than they. And yet there is hope. Will the
dethroned monarch recognize the inevitableness of the massive
revolution which is surging round her and give up her outgrown
pretensions, willingly consenting to play a lesser role in full harmony
with the spirit of the time? Not yet will this voluntary abdication
come. But, some time in the future, the new loyalties will surely seep
into the Church and prepare it for the great sacrifice in which it will
find its saving service. Modernism can afford to wait patiently, for
time fights on its side.

{198}

CHAPTER XV

THE CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION--PROTESTANTISM

The rise of Protestantism was the consequence of many factors which
temporarily combined and worked in the same direction. There are those
who maintain that it was an unhappy accident, which threw back the
wheels of progress some hundreds of years. But those who bewail the
division of the Christian Church forget that division is a sign of
incompatible tendencies within a body not flexible enough to contain
them. Strife is irrational only when we cease to be realists. The
appearance of Protestantism in the sixteenth century is only one
instance among many of the inadequacy of any one institution to
comprehend the life of its time. Were we to call the roll of the
heresies of the past, the names which would appear upon the list would
be far more numerous than popular history records. Just because
Christians believed that they possessed a final truth they were
intolerant and persecuting. The natural desire of an institution to
maintain itself and its interests intact added its force to this
unfortunate characteristic. But the tragedy of the situation was, that
this final truth could not prove itself by an appeal to experience and
reason. It had, therefore, to resort to violence. The logic