It is strangely to mistake the nature of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century to see in it a sort of semi-rationalism, the inconsistent exercise of free examination, or the revolutionary introduction of a foreign philosophical principle into the warp and woof of Christianity. You have only to read the biography of the Reformers and to make a slight analysis of their soul to form an entirely different idea of their work. The first and almost the only question which preoccupies and troubles them is an exclusively religious and practical question: "What must we do in order to be justified before God? How may we attain to peace of soul and to the assurance of pardon and of life eternal?" To find this peace, this pardon and salvation, which the Church could not procure for them, they determined to turn back and quench their thirst at the primitive sources of the Gospel. They went back to the original documents because they were persuaded that Christianity had been corrupted in the course of centuries; they wished to have it in its purity. Their whole reformation was to consist in this restoration of primitive truth. But history never recommences. This return to the past and this re-reading of the Bible were accompanied by a religious experience and an act of consciousness which made of their enterprise something essentially new and original, and which rendered it immeasurably fruitful. It is unnecessary to seek elsewhere than in psychological experience the germ of Protestantism. It was in the humble cell of a convent at Erfurt and in the soul of a poor monk that the drama was first enacted from which sprang the revolution that has changed the face of the world.