"in malice" though not "in mind"-"but in mind, be men?” Does he begin to think for himself about the revealed will of his heavenly Father? Forthwith not the guidance and admonition of an enlightened mother, but the terrors of an august personalized superstition are directed against him. They waken his fears and cripple his will.

Let a man believe his personal salvation to be in the hands of a certain other man, and his spiritual subjection to that fellowman is complete. Let a whole nation or millions of people throughout the world believe in the reality of the pope's anathema, and how many will have the hardihood to oppose his decrees in either doctrine or conduct? Fines and prisons and scaffolds are not to be taken account of in comparison with the supernatural terrors that are wielded, professedly, by the hierarchy of Rome. The free spirit cannot breathe beneath their weight.

The internal government of the hierarchy itself is, in its turn, a system of absolutism. The faithful priest is not to think and act for himself in the name of the one Lord Jesus Christ. For him, as for the laity, there is an ecclesiastic "keeper of the conscience" and of the reason. As in an army, enforced uniformity represses individual initiative and freedom.

Now that individualism has its own dangers, there can be no doubt whatsoever. But the true security against them is not to strike down the individual. One's feet sometimes stumble or go astray; therefore let them be cut off? Individuality means initiative, and initiative-somewhat like "variation" in the animal world-means progress. To deny liberty to reason and conscience, then, is to put an arrest upon the progress of the soul. Indeed, it is to assail essential elements of personality. Is it done in the interest of faith? Such a faith is not fixed upon the God of the reason and the conscience. It distrusts him. Says Cardinal Newman, toward the close of his Apologia, speaking of the time when he found an end to the trials of his mind by submission to Rome: "Since the time that I became a Catholic,

11 Cor. xiv. 20.

I have been in perfect peace and contentment. I have never had a doubt." Nor will any other man who makes that sacrifice which is perhaps the easiest of all to most men, "the sacrifice of the intellect" in matters of religion.1

But the peace that comes thus-that comes through the substitution of authority for truth, and the cessation of rational and reverent thought-is too dearly bought. There is a pathetic calm on the face of the dead.

4. THE PROTESTANT SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM.

Freedom and authority, liberty of the spirit and rational outward order, are not contradictory principles. But they are opposites. And the question which has been laid upon the heart of organized Christianity is, how to maintain the divine harmony of these two principles, so that each shall help, not hinder, the other.

Protestantism, in making its answer to the question, calls for a large measure of liberty in thought and action. It is more a quickening than a leveling force." It accentuates unity of faith rather than theological uniformity. Men have found themselves able to follow, in the same spirit of faith and obedience, the same Divine Christ, and yet to differ widely in opinion as to Christian ordinances, ecclesiastic economy, and sundry points of theology.

'It was another noted convert to Rome who made a similar assertion as to the absence of even a momentary shadow of doubt after his submission to what he accepted as "the one only Catholic and Roman Church:" "I could as soon believe that two and two made five as that the Catholic faith is false." The explanation (assuming no extravagance in the assertion) would seem to be purely psychological and not extremely difficult. When a woman of more than ordinary intelligence, who had recently professed Romanism, was asked how she could reconcile her mind to certain irrational dogmas, she replied: "I do not exercise my mind upon them; I suspend my reason on all questions on which the Church has pronounced its decision."

"If you legislate too much, you may so weaken individual responsibility as to do more harm than good. Once let the idea go forth that it is the duty of the State to take care of everybody, and everybody will cease to take care of himself." (Hadley, "Railroad Transportation," p. 49.) Is not the case of the Church and her children essentially the same?

They have claimed the right to differ thus, and to embody their differences in separate organizations. So the Lutheran, the Reformed, the Anglican, the Free, and many other churches have taken form and appeared. In them all, in all the "variations of Protestantism"-which, in a general way, were foretokened by the various orders of medieval monasticism—a true principle of individualism has been more or less fittingly illustrated.

It would be going much too far, however, to say that the Protestant churches have always solved this question of authority and freedom rightly, either in theory or in practice. At times-especially in the earlier periods of their history-they have taken over and attempted to perpetuate, under other forms, the governmental idea of the Church of Rome. They have degraded authority into intolerance. They have misused discipline to the hurt of personality. Presbyter has played priest.

1

Also, the new-found liberty of Protestantism, by a not unnatural recoil, sometimes ran into a certain sort of unsocial license. In our own time and in all times, indeed, individualism has not infrequently been distorted into egotism and social indifference. Individuality may do scant justice to interdependence. Personality may be perverted into a justification of schism and sectarianism. It has been too often forgotten that independency without vital fellowship is a false individualism. Hence

"Man was, as it were, ushered [by the Reformation] straight into the presence of his Creator, with no human intermediary; and now for the first time large numbers of rude and uncultured people yearned toward the mysteries of absolute spiritual freedom. The isolation of each person's religious responsibility from that of his fellow, rightly understood, was a necessary condition of the highest spiritual progress. But the notion was new to the world, it was bare and naked, not yet overgrown with pleasant instincts; and even in kindly natures individuality showed itself with a hard sharpness of outline, while the coarser natures became self-conscious and egotistic. . . . Individualism had to be purified and softened by much tribulation; it had to become less self-assertive without becoming weaker, before new instincts could grow up around it to revive in a higher form what was most beautiful and most solid in the old collective tendencies." (Marshall, “Principles of Economics," pp. 36, 37.)

too many and far too unfriendly have been the divisions of Protestantism.

Both these errors have often been found and exposed in that stalwart type of the Protestant development of individualism, the Puritan. But it is only fair that we should remember that here they are the errors of an essentially strong, courageous, devout, and conscientious character. The Puritan would not drift with the tide. He would not lose himself in the mass. He would not have his conscience toned down into silence by the maxims or fashions or rewards of worldly society. Why? Because in the whole of life he was conscious of his own proper personal relation to God. Hence his passionate and persistent contention for religious liberty. Hence the touch of sublimity upon his character. Hence his powerful and productive personality. Not unfitting does it seem that both the world's great Christian epic and the world's great allegory of the individual Christian's life should have risen out of Puritanism: one the "precious lifeblood" of a refined and cultured yet lonely spirit who was, "before all things else, a prophet of individual freedom in thought;" the other, the self-expression of an unschooled villager, tender-hearted but with a face like flint against the enemies of the soul—a prisoner for conscience' sake, who through long years of bitter persecution ceased not to tell the things which he had heard and seen in the freedom of the King's highway.

Now that Protestantism should not always have kept itself free from the damaging errors of intolerance or social indifference is not due to any inherent weakness in its main creative idea as shown in the life and teaching of Luther. That idea has increasingly approved itself to be of the very substance of Christianity.

It embodies a truth and a method. The truth is that of the peace of forgiveness, inward righteousness, Divine acceptance, through immediate access to God in Jesus Christ-justification by faith. The method is that of personal experience. The soul is actually to find this deliverance from sin and peace of conscience for itself. The true Christian, says Luther, can say: "I am a

child of God through Christ, who is my justification." The mediation of the priest being therefore no longer needed, the soul's enslavement to him is broken. His teaching and authority must be in accord with the primal sources of Christian knowledgenamely, the Holy Scriptures-which is the same thing as saying that as a priest he goes out of existence. And the gospel is known as the Word of God by that experience of justification and sonship to God which, through its instrumentality, arises in the heart of the believer.' Thus, moreover, the freedom which it offers is not that of lawlessness nor of indifference, but the freedom of the law of love.

Now Luther, notwithstanding his strong and incisive thinking, was far, temperamentally, from being a philosopher. His temperament was passionate, not patiently reflective. He was ill able to endure suspense of judgment, even on the most difficult questions. "I never work better," he declares, "than when I am inspired by anger." Nevertheless the method by which he proved the great central truth of the Christian life was the same as that which was afterwards followed by the father of modern philosophy. For when Descartes started out as an original investigator, turning aside from all book learning, and making an honest effort to rid himself of prejudice and prepossession, he determined to dismiss from his mind every idea about which there could be any doubt whatever. He even went further, and dismissed mathematical ideas. One after another, everything which he had hitherto taken as true must go, until at last he was forced

'Note the significant difference in the grounds on which Luther and his master in theology, Augustine, were convinced of the truth of the gospel. "For my part," says Augustine, "I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Church." ("Against the Epistle of Manichæus," c. 5.)

Along the same line of personal experience as Luther's is the Westminster Confession, I. v.: "We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church to an high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scriptures; . . yet, notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof is from the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts."