oward a kingdom of God on earth and in heaven.

The Protestant way of salvation was through "experimental religion."
This meant the appropriation as a personal experience of the truths of
human guilt and divine mercy. A man must not only believe but intensely
feel that he was wholly guilty before God and in danger of everlasting
damnation. He must then have a vivid appreciation that Christ out of
pure love had died for him, and that on this ground alone God offered him
pardon and salvation. This offer he must consciously accept, with
emotions of profound remorse for his wrong-doing, gratitude for his
deliverance, and absolute dependence upon divine grace for help against
future sin and for final reception to an endless heaven.

To attain this experience was the aim and goal of the religious man,
under all the more strenuous forms of Protestantism. Until it was
reached, all good actions, all fair traits of character, were worthless.
Without it there was no escape from the unquenchable fire. If it came as
a genuine experience, it was the passage from death unto life. But as
there was great possibility of self-deception in the matter, the mind was
constantly thrown back on self-examination, and in sensitive natures
there was often an alternation of terrors and transports.

This experience of saving faith, of experimental religion, must be
translated for us into very different language and symbols from those
which our ancestors used before we can have any sympathy with it.
Perhaps the truest account of the matter for us is something like this:
the Christian theology was a system of myths, which had grown out of
facts of human experience. The initial fact was a good man whose love
went out to bad men, and woke in them a sense of their own wrong along
with a new joy and hope. From this centre the influence spread in
widening circles, and was gradually transformed in the expression,--mixed
too with earlier notions, with crudities, with sophistications,--until
Justice and Love and Punishment and Forgiveness were personified and
dramatized and a whole cloud-world of fancy built up. Already in the age
of the Reformation the human intellect was sapping the foundations of the
structure. But the religious imagination was still intensely
susceptible, and when the moral sense was sharply awakened by the
reformers both within and without the Catholic church, it fell back on
the imagination as its familiar ally, and clothed