and prosperity, abominates the disreputable, thinks
of contemplation as idleness, of solitude as selfishness, of poverty as a
punishment, and of married and industrial life as typically godly. In
short, it is a reversion to German heathendom. But Santayana denies that
Luther prevented the euthanasia of Christianity, for there would have
been, he affirms, a Catholic revival without him. With all its
old-fashioned insistence that dogma was scientifically true and that
salvation was urgent and fearfully doubtful, Protestantism broke down the
authority of Christianity, for "it is suicidal to make one part of an
organic system the instrument for attacking the other part." It is the
beauty and torment of Protestantism that it leads to something ever
beyond its ken, finally landing its adherent in a pious skepticism.
Under the solvent of self-criticism {735} German religion and philosophy
have dropped, one by one, all supernaturalism and comforting private
hopes and have become absorbed in the duty of living manfully the
conventional life of the world. Positive religion and frivolity both
disappear, and only "consecrated worldliness" remains.

Some support to the old idea that the Reformation was a progressive
movement has been recently offered by eminent scholars. [Sidenote:
Recent opinions] G. Monod says that the difference between Catholicism
and Protestantism is that the former created a closed philosophy, the
latter left much open. "The Reformation," according to H. A. L. Fisher,
"was the great dissolvent of European conservatism. A religion which had
been accepted with little question for 1200 years, which had dominated
European thought, moulded European customs, shaped no small part of
private law and public policy . . . was suddenly and sharply questioned
in all the progressive communities of the West."

Bertrand Russell thinks that, while the Renaissance undermined the
medieval theory of authority in a few choice minds, the Reformation made
the first really serious breach in that theory. It is just because the
fight for liberty (which he hardly differentiates from anarchism) began
in the religious field, that its triumph is now most complete in that
field. We are still bound politically and economically; that we are free
religiously is due to Luther. It is an evil, however, in Mr. Russell's
opinion, that subjectivism has been fostered in Protestant morality.

A similar opinion, in the most attenuated form