m. He continued his belief
in an authority and revelation anterior, exterior and superior to
man, merely shifting the locus of that authority from the Church
to the Book. Thus he paved the way for Zwingli and the Protestant
scholasticism which became more rigid and sterile than the Catholic
which it succeeded. We usually regard the Reformation as a part of the
Renaissance and hence included in the humanistic movement. Politically
and religiously, it undoubtedly should be so regarded, for it was
a chief factor in the renewal of German nationalism and its central
doctrines of justification by faith, and the right of each separate
believer to an unmediated access to the Highest, exalted the integrity
and dignity of the individual. Inconsistently, however, it continued
the old theological tradition. In the Lutheran system, says Paul de
Lagarde, we see the Catholic scholastic structure standing
untouched with the exception of a few loci. And Harnack, in the
_Dogmengeschichte_ calls it "a miserable duplication of the Catholic
Church."

Now, New England preaching, it is true, found its chief roots in
Calvinism; Calvin, rather than Luther, was the religious leader of
the Reformation outside Germany. But his system, also, is only
the continuation of the ancient philosophy of the Christian faith
originating with Augustine. He reduced it to order, expounded it with
energy and consistency, but one has only to recall its major doctrines
of the depravity of man, the atonement for sin, the irresistible grace
of the Holy Spirit, to see how untouched it was by the characteristic
postulates of the new humanism. And it was on his theology that New
England preaching was founded. It was Calvin who, through Jonathan
Edwards, the elder and the younger, Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins,
Nathaniel Emmons, Nathaniel N. Taylor, determined the course of the
New England pulpit.

The other reason for our relative immunity from humanistic influence
is accidental and complementary merely. It is the mere fact of our
physical isolation, which, until the last seventy-five years, quite
largely shut off thinkers here from continental and English currents
of thought and contributed to the brilliant, if sterile, provincialism
of the New England theology.

It is, therefore, to the second set of media, which may be generally
characterized as scientific and practical, that we now turn. These are
the forces which apparently are most affecting Christian preachi