The Reformation, however, had a history. Not only was it struggling into life during the whole fifteenth century; it was the result of the same spiritual throes which long before had issued in movements superficially most opposite to it; in the impulse to find in Palestine the Christ whom ordinances had hidden, in periodic revulsions from recognised and {280} comfortable usage to monastic poverty and contemplation, in the scholastic effort to rationalise and thus reconcile to the spirit the dogmas of the church. All these movements, however, the church, as an outward authority, had been able to direct. She had been general of the crusades, had stereotyped monasticism into a ceremonial discipline, and had kept the schoolmen to the work of spinning threads of which she held the ends. Thus the very effort of the reason to break its shell had complicated its confinement. As it was growing more conscious of its inward rights, the institutions in which it had to acquiesce were becoming more artificial, and the dogmas to be accepted by it more abstract. The result was such a conscious entanglement in the yoke of bondage, holding back the believer from free intercourse with God, as provoked the spiritual revolt of Luther. ‘Justification by faith’ and ‘the right of private judgment’ are the two watchwords of the Reformation. Each indicates a new relation between the spirit and outward authority. ‘Faith’ in the Lutheran language is raised to a wholly different level from that which it had occupied in the language of the church. It no longer means the implicit acceptance of dogma on authority, for lack of which the ‘infidel’ was out of the pale of salvation. As with St. Paul it expressed the continuous act in virtue of which the individual breaks loose from the outward constraint of alien ordinances, and places himself in a spiritual relation to God through union with his Son, so with Luther faith is simply the renunciation by which man’s falser self, with its surroundings of observance and received opinion, slips from him that he may be clothed upon with the person of Christ. The ghost of scholasticism, no doubt, still haunted Luther, and led him astray into disquisitions on the relation of faith to the other virtues. But according to his proper idea, faith was no positive, finite virtue at all. It was the absorption of all finite and relative virtues, as such, in the consciousness of union with the infinite God. Again the spirit searcheth all things, even the deep things of God, as mysteries which Christ had opened. Again the handwriting of ordinances contrary to us was blotted out. Again the conscience moved freely in a redeemed world. [1] [1] [This passage, from ‘Justification by faith’ occurs in the essay on Dogma, above, pp. 178-179.]