world of Jonathan
Edwards was much the same as the world of John Calvin and the world of
1850 apparently much the same as the world of Jonathan Edwards. There
was, of course, an immense difference in the mechanism with which men
were working but an unexpectedly small difference in their ruling ideas.

_The Readjustments of Christian Faith More Far-reaching in the Last
Fifty Years Than for a Thousand Years Before; Science Releases the
Challenging Forces_

We should not, of course, underestimate the contribution of the
Reformation to the breaking up of the old order. It left the theologies
more substantially unchanged than Protestantism has usually supposed,
but it did mark the rise of changed attitudes toward authority. The
reformers themselves did not accept without protest the spirit they
released. They imposed new authorities and obediences upon their
churches; they distrusted individual initiative in spiritual things and
the more democratic forms of church organization. John Calvin sought in
his Institutes to vindicate the law-abiding character of his new gospel;
Luther turned bitterly against the German peasants in their demand for a
most moderate measure of social justice; the Anglican leaders exiled the
Pilgrims; the Puritan drove the Quaker out of Boston through an
instinctive distrust of inward illumination as a safe guide for faith
and religious enthusiasm as a sound basis for a new commonwealth. But
the spirit was out of the bottle and could not be put back.

The right of the individual to make his own religious inquiries and
reach his own religious conclusions was little in evidence for almost
two hundred years after the Reformation, partly because the reactions of
the post-Reformation period made the faithful generally content to rest
in what had already been secured, partly because traditional authority
was still strong, and very greatly because there was neither in history,
philosophy nor science new material upon which the mind might exercise
itself. We may take 1859, almost exactly two hundred years after the
final readjustments of the Reformation period, as the point of departure
for the forces which have so greatly modified our outlook upon our
world and our understanding of ourselves; not that the date is
clean-cut, for we see now how many things had already begun to change
before Darwin and the Origin of Species.

Darwin's great achievement is to have suggested the formula in which
science and