Or when Protestantism, in virtue of its
supposed rational and intellectual origin, gives the law to criticism
too magisterially, criticism may and must remind it that its
pretensions, in this respect, are illusive and do it harm; that the
Reformation was a moral rather than an intellectual event; that Luther's
theory of grace[59] no more exactly reflects the mind of the spirit than
Bossuet's philosophy of history[60] reflects it; and that there is no
more antecedent probability of the Bishop of Durham's stock of ideas
being agreeable to perfect reason than of Pope Pius the Ninth's. But
criticism will not on that account forget the achievements of
Protestantism in the practical and moral sphere; nor that, even in the
intellectual sphere, Protestantism, though in a blind and stumbling
manner, carried forward the Renascence, while Catholicism threw itself
violently across its path.
I lately heard a man of thought and energy contrasting the want of ardor
and movement which he now found amongst young men in this country with
what he remembered in his own youth, twenty years ago.
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