Among these principles was that of salvation by faith, which meant practically salvation by right belief. This was no new principle in Christian theology. The Church had always insisted upon acceptance of the main articles of its creed as necessary to salvation. But by reason of the emphasis which had been placed upon the doctrine of the meritoriousness of works, many had come to believe, and to act upon the belief, that a man is justified by what he does. The assertion of the doctrine of justification through faith alone had important consequences for morality, since it implied the denial of the ethical value of works, which meant specifically the repudiation of the principles of asceticism, on which the monastic system rested, as well as the rejection of the doctrine of purgatory, which afforded basis and sanction for a considerable part of the moral code of the medieval Church. II. SOME IMPORTANT MORAL OUTCOMES OF THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS REFORM [Sidenote: The reform movement reënforces the ethical tendencies of the Renaissance] Though the immediate results of the Reformation were disastrous to Humanism, the ultimate effect of the religious movement was to reënforce the true ethical tendencies of the intellectual revival. As we have seen, the thing of deepest import for morals in the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the announcement of the freedom and self-dependence of the individual spirit, since such self-sovereignty is the prerequisite of a true and vital morality. Likewise the essential proclamation of the Reformation was the autonomy of the individual in matters religious and moral. It is true that the reformers, though proclaiming liberty of conscience, the right of individual judgment, did not, as has already been said, at once recognize all the ethical implications of this principle. “The Reformation,” as Dr. Arnold truly observes, “was weak in that it never consciously grasped or applied the central idea of the Renaissance--the Hellenic idea of pursuing, in all lines of activity, the law and science, to use Plato’s words, of things as they really are.”[717]