Protestantism was not only a Reformation but also a Revolution. From the legal point of view the whole Church system against which Luther revolted could lay claim to full obedience. It had just as much legal validity in Western Europe as the laws of the State themselves. When Luther burnt the papal bull he undoubtedly performed a revolutionary act— revolutionary, not in the bad sense of a revolt against legal ordinance which is also moral ordinance as well, but certainly in the sense of a violent breach with a given legal condition. It was against this state of things that the new movement was directed, and it was to the following chief points that its protest in word and deed extended. Firstly: It protested against the entire hierarchical and priestly system in the Church, demanded that it should be abolished, and abolished it in favour of a common priesthood and an established order formed on the basis of the congregation. What a range this demand had, and to what an extent it interfered with the previously existing state of things, cannot be told in a few sentences. To explain it all would take hours. Nor can we here show how the various arrangements actually took shape in the evangelical churches. That is not a matter of fundamental importance, but what is of fundamental importance is that the “divine” rights of the Church were abolished.
Secondly: It protested against all formal, external authority in religion; against the authority, therefore, of councils, priests, and the whole tradition of the Church. That alone is to be authority which shows itself to be such within and effects a deliverance; the thing itself, therefore, the Gospel. Thus Luther also protested against the authority of the letter of the Bible; but we shall see that this was a point on which neither he nor the rest of the Reformers were quite clear, and where they failed to draw the conclusions which their insight into fundamentals demanded.
Thirdly: It protested against all the traditional arrangements for public worship, all ritualism, and every sort of “holy work.” As it neither knows nor tolerates, as we have seen, any specific form of worship, any material sacrifice and service to God, any mass and any works done for God and with a view to salvation, the whole traditional system of public worship, with its pomp, its holy and semi-holy articles, its gestures and processions, came to the ground. How much could be retained in the way of form for (esthetic or educational reasons was, in comparison with this, a question of entirely secondary importance.
Fourthly: It protested against Sacramentalism. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper it left standing, as institutions of the primitive Church, or, as it might be, of the Lord himself; but it desired that they should be regarded either as symbols and marks by which the Christian is known, or as acts deriving their value exclusively from that message of the forgiveness of sins which is bound up with them. All other sacraments it abolished, and with them the whole notion of God’s grace and help being accessible in bits, and fused in some mysterious way with definite corporeal things. To sacramentalism it opposed the Word, and to the notion that grace was given by bits, the conviction that there is only one grace, namely, to possess God himself as the source of grace. It was not because Luther was so very enlightened that in his tract “On the Babylonian Captivity” he rejected the whole system of Sacramentalism— he had enough superstition left in him to enable him to advance some very shocking contentious— but because he had had inner experience of the fact that where “grace” does not endow the soul with the living God Himself it is an illusion. Hence for him the whole doctrine of sacramentalism was an infringement of God’s majesty and an enslavement of the soul.
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