of
revelation is the logic of the _auto da fe_. The logic of science is
the logic of tested {199} fact. Science can have hope of agreement;
theological religion has no right to such a hope.

Protestantism had its ethical, political, economic and doctrinal sides.
It was not merely a religious movement. Had it been so, it might more
readily have run its course as a reform movement within the
institutional life of the time. Had the Northern nations possessed
greater power in the councils of the Church, it is just possible that
the change would have been brought about without the occurrence of an
open rupture. But the Church was too centralized and too rich to
escape conflict with the growing nationalism. For our present purpose,
however, this larger social setting of Protestantism is not important.
What we wish to study is the religious tendencies covered by this term.
What advance did they contain? What was the weakness of the movement?

The setting of Protestantism was entirely supernaturalistic. So far as
the fundamental doctrinal assumptions are concerned, there is
practically no difference between Catholic and Protestant.
Protestantism represented a reform, and not a revolution. Or, to put
it more deeply, human nature is such that the real revolutions take
centuries of growth and come like the thief in the night. The modern
scientific view of the world is revolutionary in the philosophical and
true sense of the term; while the sharp sectarian conflict is only a
battle over secondary things. Since it has so commonly been assumed
that the Protestant reformation represented a decisive break with the
outlook of the Middle Ages and somehow marked a milestone in man's
intellectual progress, it may be worth while to consider whether such
really was the case. A disinterested study {200} of the reformation
must, I feel sure, convince the student that the crisis in the Church
was concerned more with matters of theological doctrine and church
polity than with the ideas underlying Christianity. It brought no
essential change in the inherited and firmly entrenched tale of the
past. The puritan poet, Milton, sings of "man's first disobedience" in
much the way that St. Augustine would have done. The weapons of the
great advance had not yet been forged. We are the ones who will be
called upon to face the vision of the New Spiritual World and to be
faithful to its demands upon our loyalty and integrity. "The defecti