frightful than the Devil, for He dealeth with us and bringeth us to ruin with power, smiteth and hammereth us and payeth no heed to us. ‘ In His majesty He is a consuming fire.’ For there-from can no man refrain ; if he thinketh on God aright his heart in his body is stricken with terror… . Yea, as soon as he heareth God named he is filled with trepidation and fear.”
” For He assaileth a man and has such a delight therein that He is of His Jealousy and Wrath impelled to consume the wicked.” *
But Luther’s personal attitude is decidedly abnormal and non-representative; the norma Protestant religious experience is of the milder and more emotional type represented by pietism and revivalism. Here faith is no longer conceived as a super-rational knowledge founded on the Divine Reason, but as a subjective conviction of one’s own conversion and justification, and in place of the spiritual ecstasy of the mystic, who realises his own nothingness, we have the self-conscious attitude of the pietist, who is intensely preoccupied with his own feelings and with the moral state of his neighbour. And this substitution of the ideal of pietism for those of asceticism and mysticism eventually led to the weakening and discrediting of the ethical ideals * Quoted by R. Otto in The Idea of the Holy p p . 102-103.
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of Christianity, just as sectarianism undermined its social authority. However unjust may be the popular caricature of the pietist as a snuffling hypocrite of the type of Tribulation Whole-some or Zeal-of-the-Land Busy or Mr. Chad-band, there can be no doubt that Puritan and Evangelical pietism succeeded in making religion supremely unattractive in a way that mediaeval asceticism had never done.
And, at the same time, the divorce of dogma at once from ecclesiastical tradition and from philosophy eventually left it helpless before rationalist criticism. It is true that nothing could have been further from the intention of the Reformers. In fact, it was the very vehe-mence of their conviction of the absolute transcendence and incomprehensibility of the Divine action that led them to reject alike the supernatural authority of the Church and the natural rights of human intelligence, and to fall back on the testimony of personal experience and the infallible authority of Scripture. But, though they succeeded in erecting on these foundations a system of dogma more rigid and more exclusive than that which it replaced, the whole dogmatic edifice rested on an arbitrary subjective basis and had no internal coherence or consistency. It incorporated a great part of the traditional patristic and scholastic theology, 70
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which really formed an organic element of the Catholic tradition that it professed to reject.
Hence, as Harnack has shown, the work of the Reformation was confused and incomplete, and produced at first merely an impoverished version of traditional Catholicism. It required a long process of criticism and historical inquiry before the kernel of Protestant doctrine could be freed from its husk of traditional dogma.
With the advance of historical scholarship in the nineteenth century, it finally became clear that the dogmatic tradition of Christianity could not be separated from its ecclesiastical and sacramental elements. Catholicism was not, as the Reformers believed, the result of the apostasy of the mediaeval Papacy; it was a continuous process of organic development which is as old as Christianity itself. And so the modern Protestant scholar, who admitted that Christianity and Catholicism were identical down to the age of the Reformation, that ” the Christianity of the apostolic age is itself incipient Catholicism, and that the Catholicising of Christianity begins immediately after the death of Jesus,” was forced to reject the Reformation compromise. He was left with the choice of two alternatives—either to deny the organic unity of the whole development and to view Christianity as mere syncretism—” a varying 71