can
Church, would be to thresh straw and to study in Protestantism only its
feeble and accidental side. Its true essence is not constituted by the
Christian dogmas that at a given moment it chances to retain, but by the
spirit in which it constantly challenges the others, by the expression
it gives to personal integrity, to faith in conscience, to human
instinct courageously meeting the world. It rebels, for instance,
against the Catholic system of measurable sins and merits, with rewards
and punishments legally adjusted and controlled by priestly as well as
by divine prerogative. Such a supernatural mechanism seems to an
independent and uncowed nature a profanation and an imposture. Away, it
says, with all intermediaries between the soul and God, with all
meddlesome priestcraft and all mechanical salvation. Salvation shall be
by faith alone, that is, by an attitude and sentiment private to the
spirit, by an inner co-operation of man with the world. The Church shall
be invisible, constituted by all those who possess this necessary faith
and by no others. It really follows from this, although the conclusion
may not be immediately drawn, that religion is not an adjustment to
other facts or powers, or to other possibilities, than those met with in
daily life and in surrounding nature, but is rather a spiritual
adjustment to natural life, an insight into its principles, by which a
man learns to identify himself with the cosmic power and to share its
multifarious business no less than its ulterior security and calm.

[Sidenote: It has the spirit of life.]

Protestantism, in this perfectly instinctive trustfulness and
self-assertion, is not only prior to Christianity but more primitive
than reason and even than man. The plants and animals, if they could
speak, would express their attitude to their destiny in the Protestant
fashion. "He that formed us," they would say, "lives and energises
within us. He has sealed a covenant with us, to stand by us if we are
faithful and strenuous in following the suggestions he whispers in our
hearts. With fidelity to ourselves and, what is the same thing, to him,
we are bound to prosper and to have life more and more abundantly for
ever." This attitude, where it concerns religion, involves two
corollaries: first, what in accordance with Hebrew precedent may be
called symbolically faith in God, that is, confidence in one's own
impulse and destiny, a confidence which the world in the end is s