unity of contemporaneous Catholicism
may lead us perhaps to underestimate the number of those in the Catholic
line who, having for one reason or another lost faith in their Church,
are now open to the appeal of the newer movements. For example, the
largest non-Catholic religious group of Poles in Detroit are
Russellites. There are on good authority between three and four thousand
of them.

_The Protestant Church Made Faith the Key to Salvation with Conversion
the Test for the Individual of the Reality of His Religious Experience_

If religion has been made real to the Catholic through the mediation of
his Church, Protestantism, seeking to recreate the apostolic Church, has
made the reality of religion a matter between the individual and his
God. And yet Protestantism has never dared commit itself to so simple a
phrasing of religion as this, nor to go on without authorities of its
own. Protestantism generally has substituted for the inclusive authority
of the Catholic Church the authority of its own creeds and fundamentally
the authority of the Bible. As far as creeds go Protestantism carried
over the content of Latin Christianity more largely than we have
generally recognized. Luther was in direct line with Augustine as
Augustine was in direct line with St. Paul, and Luther's fundamental
doctrine--justification by faith--was not so much a rewriting of ancient
creeds as a new way of validating their meaning for the individual.
Faith, in our common use of the term, has hardened down into an
intellectual acceptance of Protestant theologies, but certainly for St.
Paul and probably for Luther it was far more vital than this and far
more simple. It was rather a resting upon a delivering power, the
assurance of whose desire and willingness to deliver was found in the
New Testament. It was an end to struggle, a spiritual victory won
through surrender.

The Latin Catholic system had come to impose upon such tempers as
Luther's an unendurable amount of strain; it was too complex, too
demanding, and it failed to carry with it necessary elements of mental
and spiritual consent. (St. Paul had the same experience with his own
Judaism.) What Luther sought was a peace-bringing rightness with God. He
was typically and creatively one of William James' "divided souls" and
he found the solution for his fears, his struggles and his doubts in
simply taking for granted that a fight which he was not able to win for
himself had been won fo