The Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages had consecrated the life of every individual by a multitude of pious usages, and shut it up in an aristocratic spiritual state, in which the spirit of the individual was fast bound in rigid captivity, with little spontaneous action. The Reformation destroyed in the greater part of Germany these fetters of the popular mind; it set freedom of decision and mental activity in opposition to the outward constraint and splendid mechanism of the old Church. But Protestantism gave a system of doctrine, as well as freedom and depth, to the German mind. In the great soul of Luther, both these tendencies of the new faith were in equilibrium; the more passionately he struggled for his explanation of holy writ and the dogmas of his school, the stronger and more original was the mental process through which, after his own way, he sought his God in free prayer. It is, nevertheless, clear that the great progress which accrued to the human race from his teaching, could not fail to result in forming two opposite tendencies in Protestantism. The two poles of every religion, knowledge and the emotions of the soul, the intellectual boundaries of religious knowledge and the fervid resignation of self to the Divine, must prevail in the soul with varying power, according to the wants of the individual and the cultivation of the period; now one, now the other will preponderate, and the time might arrive when both tendencies would come into strife and opposition. At first Protestantism waged war against the old Church, and against the parties that arose within itself,--a necessary consequence of greater freedom and independence of judgment.