Middle Ages.

Deep religious fervor easily leads to narrowness, especially when the
spiritual values regarded as essential are subjective and rather
formal. Because confessional Protestantism was as other-worldly as the
Mediaeval Church, it cut itself loose from aspects of life which might
otherwise have mellowed it and saved it from formalism and hardness.
We may laugh with {202} Swift at the freaks of Jack, at his dourness
and savagery, his strained interpretation of the scriptures and his
lack of social tact, but we must, if we would be just, always bear in
mind the outlook which Jack had inherited.

The Protestant of to-day does not usually realize how different the
Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was from that
which he sees around him. Protestantism has mellowed and absorbed
values and interests which it would once have repudiated as irrelevant
to the tremendous drama of salvation. Take mediaeval Catholicism, with
its ideal of a Church-directed society, its doctrines of sin and
redemption, its belief in another world overshadowing this one, its
strain of asceticism, and remove the sacramental power of the Church,
and you have early Protestantism before you. Instead of fleeing the
world and its temptations, the Christian was ordered to live in it like
a sentinel on his guard. He was not to set his heart on creaturely
comforts nor love the things and interests of this life overmuch, but
rather to trample them underfoot while gazing upwards. No wonder that
the early Protestants were a stern people; they were a community of
secular monks. They had the joy of union with God and assured
redemption from sin, but this world was not their true home. Whereas
the Mediaeval Church had tempered the asceticism of historical
Christianity by the distinction between what was imposed upon clergy
and what was demanded of the laity, Protestantism was unable to
continue this distinction because all believers were priests. All had
to come up to the same high standard or risk damnation. This
exaltation has in large measure departed from Protestantism, and we who
{203} have grown into a mellower idea of salvation are inclined to
judge this set of ideals as narrow and even morbid. We forget that
puritanism was the expression of an ascetic religious view of the world.

It was in the sphere of church government that Protestantism made its
great changes by attempting to return to the polity of the early