tal anguish, which
cost nothing, and an expensive church for a cheap Bible--we feel that the
dish of theory has run away with the spoon of fact. The climax was
capped by the German sociologist Friedrich Simmel, who explained the
Reformation by the law of the operation of force along the line of least
resistance. The Reformers, by sending the soul straight to God, spared
it the detour via the {727} priest, thus short-circuiting grace, as it
were, and saving energy.

[Sidenote: Lamprecht]

The genius who first and most fully worked out a tenable economic
interpretation of the Lutheran movement was Karl Lamprecht, who stands in
much the same relation to Marx as did Ranke to Hegel, to wit, that of an
independent, eclectic and better informed student. Lamprecht, as it is
well known, divides history into periods according to their psychological
character--perhaps an up-to-date Hegelianism--but he maintains, and on
the whole successfully, that the temper of each of these epochs is
determined by their economic institutions. Thus, says he, the condition
of the transition from medieval to modern times was the development of a
system of "money economy" from a system of "natural economy," which took
place slowly throughout the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. "The
complete emergence of capitalistic tendencies, with their consequent
effects on the social, and, chiefly through this, on the intellectual
sphere, must of itself bring on modern times." Lamprecht shows how the
rise of capitalism was followed by the growth of the cities and of the
culture of the Renaissance in them, and how, also, individualism arose in
large part as a natural consequence of the increased power and scope
given to the ego by the possession of wealth. This individualism, he
thinks, strengthened by and strengthening humanism, was made forever safe
by the Reformation.

It is a momentous error, as Lamprecht rightly points out, to suppose that
we are living in the same era of civilization, psychologically
considered, as that of Luther. Our subjectivism is as different from his
individualism as his modernity was from medievalism. The eighteenth
century was a transitional period from the one to the other.

{728} One of the chief characteristics of the Reformation, continues
Lamprecht, seen first in the earlier mystics, was the change from
"polydynamism," or the worship of many saints, and the mediation of
manifold religious agencies, to "monodynam