an
Protestantism of the end of the nineteenth century had been created. It
rooted itself in elements common to all religion, it inherited
practically the whole content of the Old Testament, it invested Hebraic
systems of sacrifice with typical meanings and Jewish prophecy with a
mystic authority. It was in debt to St. Paul and Augustine for its
theology. Its cosmogony was 4,000 years old and practically uninfluenced
by modern science, or else at odds with it. It was uncritical in its
acceptance of the supernatural and trained on the whole to find its main
line of evidence for the reality of religion in the supernatural. It
made more of the scheme of deliverance which St. Paul found in the
Crucifixion of Jesus than the ethics of the Gospels. It was mystic in
its emphasis upon an inner testimony to the realities it offered. For
the Protestant it locked up unexpectedly upon the infallible authority
of the Bible and for the Catholic upon the inerrancy of the Church. It
was out of the current of the modern temper in science and philosophy
generally. Its conceptions of the probable fate of the world were Jewish
and of the future life were medieval, and perhaps the strangest thing in
it all was the general unconsciousness of its dependence upon
assumptions open to challenge at almost every point and the process of
profound readjustment upon the threshold of which it stood.

It is almost impossible to disentangle the action of the two sets of
strain which have within the last half century been brought to bear upon
it. Each has reacted upon the other. Perhaps the best thing to do is to
consider the forces which for the last two generations have been
challenging and reshaping inherited faiths, and then to consider the
outcome of it all in the outstanding religious attitudes of our own
time.

II

NEW FORCES AND OLD FAITHS

Within the last fifty years particularly the fundamentals of the
Christian faith have not only come up for reexamination but have been
compelled to adapt themselves to facts and forces which have gone
farther toward recasting them than anything for a millennium and a half
before. The Reformation went deep but it did not go to the bottom. There
are differences enough in all reason between Protestantism and
Catholicism, but their identities are deeper still. The world of Martin
Luther and John Calvin was not essentially different in its outlook upon
life from the world of Augustine and Athanasius. The