on
of the Protestants from the Roman Catholic Church," writes Professor
Robinson, "is not connected with any decisive intellectual revision.
Such ardent emphasis has been constantly placed upon the differences
between Protestantism and Catholicism by representatives of both
parties that the close intellectual resemblance of the two systems,
indeed their identity in nine parts out of ten, has tended to escape
us. The early Protestants, of course, accepted, as did the Catholics,
the whole patristic outlook on the world; their historical perspective
was similar, their notions of the origin of man, of the Bible, with its
types, prophecies and miracles, of heaven and hell, of demons and
angels, are all identical.... Early Protestantism is, from an
intellectual standpoint, essentially a phase of mediaeval history."

But when we look at Protestantism as a social and religious movement
rather than an intellectual movement, we see that it stood for certain
relatively new emphases which did indicate a breaking loose from
mediaevalism. Many sincere men felt the need for a deeper, more
personal assurance of salvation than that {201} offered by the
traditional, substantial sacraments of the Church. Religion seemed to
them a more personal affair than it had overtly come to be. By means
of an act of faith, the individual hoped to secure a new relation to
God in which his sins were forgiven and salvation attained. Salvation
thus became a more internal act than it had been, and particularly one
in which the ecclesiastical institution played a far less important
part. The new tendency emphasized the individual and personal as
against the institutional and formal. Catholicism had inherited too
much ritualistic and magical trapping to harmonize completely with the
keen ethical sense of the younger and simpler people who were growing
to adulthood.

A new movement is on the defensive and, when too completely estranged
from the institutions of which it is a reform, almost inevitably tends
to be narrow and intense. Now Protestantism was essentially an
emphasis on the soul's salvation by meeting certain requirements of a
doctrinal and ethical type, and so it tended to drop those functions
and relations which the Mediaeval Church included within its scope. It
is this clear-cut intensification of one factor and the exclusion of
others which we must bear in mind when we compare the early Protestant
sects with the Catholic Church of the