CHAPTER I

A. INTRODUCTION


The Protestant Reformation marked an era both in life and thought for
the modern world. It ushered in a revolution in Europe. It established
distinctions and initiated tendencies which are still significant. These
distinctions have been significant not for Europe alone. They have had
influence also upon those continents which since the Reformation have
come under the dominion of Europeans. Yet few would now regard the
Reformation as epoch-making in the sense in which that pre-eminence has
been claimed. No one now esteems that it separates the modern from the
mediæval and ancient world in the manner once supposed. The perspective
of history makes it evident that large areas of life and thought
remained then untouched by the new spirit. Assumptions which had their
origin in feudal or even in classical culture continued unquestioned.
More than this, impulses in rational life and in the interpretation of
religion, which showed themselves with clearness in one and another of
the reformers themselves, were lost sight of, if not actually
repudiated, by their successors. It is possible to view many things in
the intellectual and religious life of the nineteenth century, even some
which Protestants have passionately reprobated, as but the taking up
again of clues which the reformers had let fall, the carrying out of
purposes of their movement which were partly hidden from themselves.