History of the Development of the Church under Modern European Forms of Civilization. § 121. CHARACTER AND DISTRIBUTION OF MODERN CHURCH HISTORY. In the Reformation of the sixteenth century the intelligence of Germany, which had hitherto been under the training and tutelage of the Romish church, reached maturity by the application of the formal and material principles of Protestantism,--the sole normative authority of Scripture, and justification by faith alone without works of merit. It emancipated itself from its schoolmaster, who, for selfish ends, had made and still continued to make strenuous efforts to check every movement towards independence, every endeavour after ecclesiastical, theological, and scientific freedom, every struggle after evangelical reform. Yet this emancipation was not completely effected in all the purely German nationalities, much less among those Romanic and Slavonic peoples which had bowed their necks to the papal hierarchy. The Romish church of the Reformation not only adhered to the form and content of its former unevangelical constitution, but also still further developed and formally elaborated its creed in the same unevangelical direction, and the result was a split in the western church into an Evangelical Protestant and a Roman Catholic church. Then again the principles of the Reformation were set forth in different ways, and Protestantism branched off into two divisions, the Lutheran and the Reformed. Besides these three new western churches and the one old eastern church, which all rested upon the common œcumenical basis of the old Catholic church, a variety of sects sprang out of them. Through these greater and lesser divisions, modern church history, where, with some advantages and some disadvantages, one church is pitted against another, possesses a character entirely different from the church history of earlier times.