e
movements have been somehow wanting in driving power, and so, when all
these qualifications are made, evangelical Protestantism has resulted in
a pretty clearly recognizable type. The representative members of the
representative evangelical churches all had a religious experience; some
of them had been converted after much waiting at the anxious seat, or
long kneeling at the altar rail; others of them had been brought through
Christian teaching to the confession of their faith, but all of them
were thereby reborn. They were the product of a theology which taught
them their lost estate, offered them for their acceptance a mediatorial
and atoning Christ, assured them that through their faith their
salvation would be assured, and counselled them to look to their own
inner lives for the issue of all this in a distinct sense of spiritual
peace and well-being. If they doubted or questioned they were answered
with proof-texts; for their spiritual sustenance they were given the
services of their churches where preaching was generally central, and
exhorted to grow in grace and knowledge through prayer and much reading
of their Bible.

_The Individual Experience of the Believer the Keystone of Evangelical
Protestantism. Its Openness to Disturbing Forces_

Now fine and good as all this was it was, as the event proved, not big
enough to answer all the needs of the soul, nor strong enough to meet
the challenge of forces which were a half century ago shaping themselves
toward the almost entire recasting of great regions of human thought. It
was, to begin with, unexpectedly weak in itself. Evangelical
Protestantism, as has been noted, throws upon the members of Protestant
churches a larger burden of individual responsibility than does the
Catholic Church. The typical evangelical Protestant has had little to
sustain him in his religious life save his sense of reconciliation with
God, from whom possibly he never vitally thought himself to have been
estranged, and a consequent spiritual peace.

His church promises him nothing except teaching, inspiration,
comradeship, an occasion for the confession of his faith and some
opportunity for service. His ministers are only such as he; they may
exhort but they dare not absolve. He is greatly dependent, then, for his
sense of the reality of religion upon his own spiritual states. If he is
spiritually sensitive and not too much troubled by doubt, if he
possesses a considerable capacity for