nal account with God, without
mediation of priest or sacrament. Another element in this new dogma
was the simpler, and yet more profound, psychology of the new age. The
shift of emphasis from the outer to the inner is traceable from the
earliest age to the present, from the time when Homer delighted to tell
of the good blows struck in fight to the time when fiction is but the
story of an inner, spiritual struggle. The Reformation was one phase
in this long process from the external to the internal. The debit and
credit balance of outward work and merit was done away, and for it was
substituted the nobler, or at least more spiritual and less mechanical,
idea of disinterested morality and unconditioned salvation. The God of
Calvin may have been a tyrant, but he was not corruptible by bribes.

We are so much accustomed to think of dogma as the _esse_ of religion
that it is hard for us to do justice to the importance of this change.
Really, it is not dogma so much as rite and custom that is fundamental.
The sacramental habit of mind was common to medieval Christianity and
to most primitive religions. For the first time Luther substituted for
the sacramental habit, or attitude, its antithesis, an almost purely
ethical criterion of faith. The transcendental philosophy and the
categorical imperative lay implicit in the famous _sola fide_.

[Sidenote: Monism]

The second great change made by Protestantism was more intellectual,
that from a pluralistic to a monistic {747} standpoint. Far from the
conception of natural law, the early Protestants did little or nothing
to rationalize, or explain away, the creeds of the Catholics, but they
had arrived at a sufficiently monistic philosophy to find scandal in
the worship of the saints, with its attendant train of daily and
trivial miracles. To sweep away the vast hierarchy of angels and
canonized persons that made Catholicism quasi-polytheistic, and to
preach pure monotheism was in the spirit of the time and is a
phenomenon for which many parallels can be found. Instructive is the
analogy of the contemporary trend to absolutism; neither God nor king
any longer needed intermediaries.

[Sidenote: Political and economic aspects]

(2) In two aspects the Reformation was the religious expression of the
current political and economic change. In the first place it reflected
and reacted upon the growing national self-consciousness, particularly
of the Teutonic peoples. [Sideno