Out of such elements as these, then, through such inheritances and disciplines the representative religious consciousness of American Protestantism of the end of the nineteenth century had been created. It rooted itself in elements common to all religion, it inherited practically the whole content of the Old Testament, it invested Hebraic systems of sacrifice with typical meanings and Jewish prophecy with a mystic authority. It was in debt to St. Paul and Augustine for its theology. Its cosmogony was 4,000 years old and practically uninfluenced by modern science, or else at odds with it. It was uncritical in its acceptance of the supernatural and trained on the whole to find its main line of evidence for the reality of religion in the supernatural. It made more of the scheme of deliverance which St. Paul found in the Crucifixion of Jesus than the ethics of the Gospels. It was mystic in its emphasis upon an inner testimony to the realities it offered. For the Protestant it locked up unexpectedly upon the infallible authority of the Bible and for the Catholic upon the inerrancy of the Church. It was out of the current of the modern temper in science and philosophy generally. Its conceptions of the probable fate of the world were Jewish and of the future life were medieval, and perhaps the strangest thing in it all was the general unconsciousness of its dependence upon assumptions open to challenge at almost every point and the process of profound readjustment upon the threshold of which it stood. It is almost impossible to disentangle the action of the two sets of strain which have within the last half century been brought to bear upon it. Each has reacted upon the other. Perhaps the best thing to do is to consider the forces which for the last two generations have been challenging and reshaping inherited faiths, and then to consider the outcome of it all in the outstanding religious attitudes of our own time. II NEW FORCES AND OLD FAITHS Within the last fifty years particularly the fundamentals of the Christian faith have not only come up for reexamination but have been compelled to adapt themselves to facts and forces which have gone farther toward recasting them than anything for a millennium and a half before. The Reformation went deep but it did not go to the bottom. There are differences enough in all reason between Protestantism and Catholicism, but their identities are deeper still. The world of Martin Luther and John Calvin was not essentially different in its outlook upon life from the world of Augustine and Athanasius. The world of Jonathan Edwards was much the same as the world of John Calvin and the world of 1850 apparently much the same as the world of Jonathan Edwards. There was, of course, an immense difference in the mechanism with which men were working but an unexpectedly small difference in their ruling ideas.