Protestantism was a Reformation, that is to say, a renewal, as regards the core of the matter, as regards religion, and consequently as regards the doctrine of salvation. That may be shown in the main in three points.
In the first place, religion was here brought back again to itself, in so far as the Gospel and the corresponding religious experience were put into the foreground and freed of all alien accretions. Religion was taken out of the vast and monstrous fabric which had been previously called by its name—a fabric embracing the Gospel and holy water, the priesthood of all believers and the Pope on his throne, Christ the Redeemer and St. Anne—and was reduced to its essential factors, to the Word of God and to faith. This truth was imposed as a criterion on everything that also claimed to be “religion” and to unite on terms of equality with those great factors. In the history of religions every really important reformation is always, first and foremost, a critical reduction to principles; for in the course of its historical development, religion, by adapting itself to circumstances, attracts to itself much alien matter, and produces, in conjunction with this, a number of hybrid and apocryphal elements, which it is necessarily compelled to place under the protection of what is sacred. If it is not to run wild from exuberance, or be choked by its own dry leaves, the reformer must come who purifies it and brings it back to itself. This critical reduction to principles Luther accomplished in the sixteenth century, by victoriously declaring that the Christian religion was given only in the Word of God and in the inward experience which accords with this Word. In the second place, there was the definite way in which the “Word of God” and the “experience” of it were grasped. For Luther the “Word” did not mean Church doctrine; it did not even mean the Bible; it meant the message of the free grace of God in Christ which makes guilty and despairing men happy and blessed; and the “experience” was just the certainty of this grace. In the sense in which Luther took them, both can be embraced in one phrase: the confident belief in a God of grace. They put an end—such was his own experience, and such was what he taught—to all inner discord in a man; they overcome the burden of every ill; they destroy the sense of guilt; and, despite the imperfection of a man’s own acts, they give him the certainty of being inseparably united with the holy God:
Now I know and believe
And give praise without end
That God the Almighty
Is Father and Friend, And that in all troubles, Whatever betide,
He hushes the tempest
And stands at my side.
Nothing, he taught, is to be preached but the God of Grace, with whom we are reconciled through Christ. Conversely, it is not a question of ecstasies and visions; no transports of feeling are necessary; it is faith that is to be aroused. Faith is to be the beginning, middle, and end of all religious fervour. In the correspondence of Word and faith “justification” is experienced, and hence justification holds the chief place in the Reformers’ message; it means nothing less than the attainment of peace and freedom in God through Christ, dominion over the world, and an eternity within.
Lastly, the third feature of this renewal was the great transformation which God’s worship now inevitably underwent, God’s worship by the individual and by the community. Such worship—this was obvious—can and ought to be nothing but putting faith to practical proof. As Luther declared over and over again, “all that God asks of us is faith, and it is through faith alone that He is willing to treat with us.” To let God be God, and to pay Him honour by acknowledging and invoking Him as Father — it is thus alone that a man can serve Him. Every other path on which a man tries to approach Him and honour Him leads astray, and vain is the attempt to establish any other relation with Him. What an enormous mass of anxious, hopeful, and hopeless effort was now done away with, and what a revolution in worship was effected! But all that is true of God’s worship by the individual is true in exactly the same way of public worship. Here, too, it is only the Word of God and prayer which have any place. All else is to be banished; the community assembled for God’s worship is to proclaim the message of God with praise and thanksgiving, and call upon His name. Anything that goes beyond this is not worship at all.
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