The fact that freedom in the interpretation of the Bible produced, and must necessarily produce, anarchy of opinion, has, by the representatives of the Rationalistic school of Protestant theology, been urged against the positive elements which Luther chose to retain. The tendency which, had he not set himself resolutely against it, would have brought Luther even in later years face to face with a purely naturalistic view of life, has been clearly and accurately pointed out. Paul Wernle, a theologian whose ideal of a renewed Christianity is a natural religion clad in religious dress, points to the anarchy resulting from the multitude of interpretations, and attacks Luther’s Bible faith for the contradictions it involves. “The appeal to ‘Bible Christianity,’ and ‘Primitive New Testament Christianity,’ produced a whole crop of divergent views of Christianity”; “the limitations of this Renascence of Christianity,” which was no real Renascence at all, are, he says, very evident; Luther had summed up “the theology of Paul in a one-sided fashion, purely from the point of view of fear of, and consolation in, sin”; his comprehension of Paul was “one-sided, repellent and narrow,” and, in favour of Paul, “he depreciated most unjustly the first three Gospels”; the new theology “rested exclusively on Romans and Galatians,” and, root and branch, is full of contradictions.[40] Luther himself invited such criticism by his constant advocacy of individualism in his later no less than in his earlier years. “If individualism be introduced even into religious life,” writes E. Troeltsch, “then the Church loses her significance as an absolute and objective authority.” And concerning the “whole crop of views on Christianity” which sprang from such individualism, he says with equal justice: “A truth which can and must live in so many embodiments, can of its very nature never be expressed in one simple and definable form. It is in its nature to undergo historical variations and to take on different forms at one and the same time.”[41] But this is the renunciation of stable truth, in other words: scepticism. Denifle put it clearly and concisely when he said: “Luther planted the seed of present-day Protestant incredulity.”[42]