Protestantism’s reactions to the problems of preserving a sense of tension between religion and life have been a little more varied than those of the medieval church because of the multifarious nature of its historic forms. But varied as may be the strategies of the various churches, they do not finally differ from the three which Catholicism employed, i.e., capitulation without a struggle, compromise after a struggle, and victory gained through the device of avoiding some of the issues. The marked differences between the medieval and the modern church lie in the areas of life where the struggle between religion and human inertia was attempted, where the compromises were made and where the victories were won. If Catholicism left the individual to his own devices, the churches of the Reformation followed a similar course in dealing with the moral problems of all human groups. The state was completely secularized under Protestant influence. The Reformation was in some of its aspects simply a simultaneous revolt of the various new nations of Europe against the restraints of the international papacy. In Germany, Scotland and finally in England, the nationalistic motive was a decided force in destroying the prestige of the old religion. Lutheranism capitulated much more easily to the secular state than Calvinism, which tried in fact to maintain the ancient controls upon political life. But once the Reformation had destroyed the old unity of Western society and the prestige of the organization which maintained it, secular nationalism became the universal characteristic of Western civilization. Even Calvinism, which was ambitious to dominate the policy of political states, hardly had the opportunity of affecting international relations. Its influence barely went beyond domestic policy, and there it was less interested in the morality of the state than in the legal enforcement of individual moral ideals. The greed and lust for power of national groups is not a unique characteristic of the modern world; but our own era takes the moral autonomy of the nation for granted more generally than did the Middle Ages. The Protestant church did not create Machiavellian politics but it was more impotent before unscrupulous nationalism than any other institution of the religious ideal, and its impotence was partly due to its lack of interest in social problems.