s
negative side, regarding the Reformation as a mere destructive movement,
stopped short in too early a stage. He does not seem to be aware that
Protestantism has any positive influences, other than the general ones
of Christianity; and misses one of the most important facts connected
with it, its remarkable efficacy, as contrasted with Catholicism, in
cultivating the intelligence and conscience of the individual believer.
Protestantism, when not merely professed but actually taken into the
mind, makes a demand on the intelligence; the mind is expected to be
active, not passive, in the reception of it. The feeling of a direct
responsibility of the individual immediately to God, is almost wholly
a creation of Protestantism. Even when Protestants were nearly as
persecuting as Catholics (quite as much so they never were); even when
they held as firmly as Catholics that salvation depended on having the
true belief, they still maintained that the belief was not to be
accepted from a priest, but to be sought and found by the believer, at
his eternal peril if he failed; and that no one could answer to God for
him, but that he had to answer for himself. The avoidance of fatal error
thus became in a great measure a question of culture; and there was the
strongest inducement to every believer, however humble, to seek culture
and to profit by it. In those Protestant countries, accordingly, whose
Churches were not, as the Church of England always was, principally
political institutions--in Scotland, for instance, and the New England
States--an amount of education was carried down to the poorest of the
people, of which there is no other example; every peasant expounded the
Bible to his family (many to their neighbours), and had a mind practised
in meditation and discussion on all the points of his religious creed.
The food may not have been the most nourishing, but we cannot be blind
to the sharpening and strengthening exercise which such great topics
gave to the understanding--the discipline in abstraction and reasoning
which such mental occupation brought down to the humblest layman, and
one of the consequences of which was the privilege long enjoyed by
Scotland of supplying the greater part of Europe with professors for its
universities, and educated and skilled workmen for its practical arts.

This, however, notwithstanding its importance, is, in a comprehensive
view of universal history, only a matter of detail. We find no
fund