it. With these changed or
weakened the evangelical appeal must either be given new character or
lose force. A system which began with the Fall on one side went on to
heaven and hell on the other and even heaven and hell were more
dependent upon ancient conceptions of the physical structure of the
world and the skies above it than the Church was willing to recognize.
The doctrine of eternal punishment particularly was open to ethical
challenge.

_Evangelical Protestantism the Outcome of the Whole Process_

Of course all this is rather an extreme statement of the situation fifty
years ago. The churches did not all agree in insisting upon a
conversion; some evangelic churches were beginning to place their
emphasis upon Christian nurture; they sought what is secured for the
emotionally twice-born through guided growth and a larger dependence
upon normal spiritual conditions, though they were at least one with
their brethren in believing that those who come into Christian
discipleship must in the end be greatly changed and conscious of the
change; they too must possess as an assurance of the reality of their
religious life a sense of peace and spiritual well-being.

The high Anglican Church approached the Latin Catholic Church in its
insistence upon sacramental regeneration. This wing of the Church
believed and believes still that baptism truly administered and the Holy
Communion also administered in proper form and accepted in due obedience
by priests belonging to some true succession, possess a mystic saving
power. Just why all this should be so they are perhaps not able to
explain to the satisfaction of any one save those who, for one reason or
another, believe it already. But those who cannot understand
sacramentarianism may dismiss it far too easily, for though there be
here danger of a mechanical formulism, the sacraments themselves may
become part of a spiritual discipline through which the lives of men and
women are so profoundly changed as in the most clear case of conversion,
manifesting often a spiritual beauty not to be found in any other
conception of Christian discipleship. Our differences here are not so
great as we suppose them.

There have always been liberal reactions within the Church herself,
tending either toward relaxation of discipline or the more rational and
simple statements of doctrine. What has been so far said would not be
true of Unitarianism and Universalism in the last century. But thes