the national government, were undermining the industrial
independence of town and gild. Exactions of State and Church were
increasing. The growing extravagance and immorality of the wealthy, both
burgher and noble, was matched by the worldliness of the upper clergy,
and accompanied by the decay of spiritual interests, the accentuation of
ritual and ceremony, and increased reliance upon external and formal
works as sufficient for salvation. From this world of the high-placed
favorites of fortune, where corruption flourished unashamed and power
was too often exercised without a redeeming sense of obligation, the
middle class was already withdrawing at the close of the fifteenth
century. The townsmen in Germany found satisfaction for their spiritual
and intellectual interests in reviving the religious activities of the
gilds, and in the formation of lay religious societies in which a
simplified form of worship was accompanied by study of the Bible and the
preaching of the unworldly virtues of upright living. It was this
separation of the _bourgeois_ from the world in which he lived that
constitutes the first protest, the beginning of the Protestant movement.

Ideal constructions are doubtless the psychic precipitates of social
experience, and the Protestant theory was but the reasoned expression of
the middle-class state of mind. Thwarted by the existing world of fact,
the leaders employed their practical and dexterous intelligence to
create a new world of semblance, a world of the spirit, in which the
way was illumined by the light of reason, and the individual rather than
the social conscience gave the sense of right direction. Material for
such a philosophy was ready to hand. The practice and the thinking of
the apostolic churches had been newly discovered by the study of the
secular and the sacred past; and the essence of all Protestant thinking
was implied in the phrase in which Luther embodied the teaching of St.
Paul: "Good works do not make the good man, but the good man does good
works." Not the conventional judgments of society, expressed through the
commands of Church or State, but the individual conscience, justified by
faith in God's purpose, determines a man's merit. St. Augustine's ideal
City of God was thus once more set over against the visible secular
world of man. Into this intangible community, a house not made with
hands, the elect and the select withdrew themselves, abiding there as in
a refuge, untou