But it is in Northern Europe that we can most clearly trace the disintegrating effects of modern culture within Christianity itself. Here Catholicism was replaced by a new conception of Christianity that gave free scope to the centrifugal tendencies of the Western mind. Protestantism eliminated the metaphysical element in the Christian tradition. It abolished asceticism and monasticism ; it subordinated contemplation to action and the intelligence to the will.
God was no longer conceived as the Super-essential Being, from Whom the created universe receives all that it has of reality and intelligibility, but as a ” magnified non-natural man, who likes and dislikes, knows and decrees, just as a man, only on a scale immensely transcend-ing anything of which we have experience.” *
It is true that Luther’s own religious experience was both genuine and profound, but it was not the positive intuition of the contemplative; it was a dark and tormented sense of man’s utter helplessness and of the otherness of the Divine Power. For his discarding of the intellectual element in religion had brought his mind back, as it were, to the religious attitude of primitive man who sees the Divine as an unknown and hostile power from which he recoils in terror.
” Yea,” he writes, ” God is more terrible and * Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism, p. 14.
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