Protestantism and Progress; A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI Protestantism And Modern Religious Feeling We have now followed the influence of Protestantism through the various departments of the Family, Law, the State, Economics and Society, Science and Art. Everywhere our investigation has yielded a twofold result: while Protestantism has furthered the rise of the modern world, often largely and decisively, in none of these departments does it appear as its actual creator. What it has done is simply to secure for it greater freedom of development--and that, moreover, in the various departments in very various ways; and besides, the action of the different Confessions and groups has differed in strength and direction. All it has anywhere done is to favour, strengthen, colour, and modify the course of the development, while in some cases it maintained and even reinforced the opposing influences drawn from the Late-medieval view of life. The modern State, its freedom and constitutional form, its officialdom and military system, modern economics and social stratification, modern science and art, are everywhere, to a greater or less extent, already arising before and apart from it. They have their roots in Latemedieval developments; above all, in the growth of town life and the Territorial State, and the great activity in the formation of new ideas and forces which characterised the fruitful centuries from the fifteenth to the seventeenth. The really leading power in respect of civilisation during the Confessional Period was the centralised French State, in which the Renaissance, Catholicism, and modern politics all united. Protestantism, when all is said and done, only, in its own domain, did away with the hindrances which the Catholic system, for all its splendour, opposed, by its...