The influence of the general progress in enlightenment was also profoundly ethical, since this movement resulted, as intellectual advance always normally does, in a growing refinement of the moral feelings, in progress in moral ideas, and in truer ethical judgments. By the opening of the modern age trial by combat, acted on by these various influences, had become obsolete or obsolescent in most of the countries of Europe.[715] Strangely enough, the international duel or public war, resting on substantially the same basis as the private judicial duel, has held its place as the instituted and legalized method of settling controversies between nations down to the present time, without, till just yesterday, being seriously challenged by the awakening conscience of the world as equally repugnant to the moral law and incompatible with every principle of reason, humanity, and justice. CHAPTER XVII ETHICS OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION I. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION OF ETHICAL IMPORT [Sidenote: Principle of the self-sovereignty of the individual as the ultimate authority in morals] In its essential principle the Protestant Reformation was a protest against the principle of authority in the realm of the spirit. It proclaimed the right of individual judgment in matters of religion and morals. There was in this proclamation an ethical implication of revolutionary significance. It was a recognition of the truth “that duty in the last analysis is imposed upon the individual ... by himself; that there is no authority in moral matters more ultimate than a man’s rational conviction of what is best.”[716] Of all the agencies which during recent times have been at work moralizing morality and creating for the moral life a permanent and indestructible basis in reason and conscience, this Protestant principle of the autonomy of the individual soul in the spiritual domain has been one of the most efficient and pervasive. [Sidenote: The principle of salvation by right belief] Though the chief significance of the Protestant revolution and its ultimate import for morality lay in this assertion of the self-sovereignty of the individual, still the full ethical consequences of this revolutionary principle did not become clearly manifest till after the lapse of more than three centuries. Throughout the earlier periods of the Reformation era the moral evolution in Protestant lands was influenced less by the announcement of this principle than by that of certain other principles less fundamentally important, or by certain minor modifications effected by the reformers in the body of doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church.