The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New Age — John Shaqi
The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New AgeBland, Salem Goldworth
Religion
The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New Age
Bland, Salem Goldworth
Christian sociology; Church and social problems
The Greek mind moulded Christianity into a reasoned and systematized
theology; the Latin, into an organization closely knit and marvellously
efficient for the end to which Latin Christianity was largely and,
perhaps, inevitably content to aim,--external control. Now, at least, we
can see how inevitable it was that a third development of Christianity
should take place after it had been transplanted among the Teutonic
peoples. That development was slower in taking place than either the
Greek or Latin forms. Those northern races which, until their
conversion to Christianity, had stood almost completely outside the
circle of ancient civilization, coming under the spell of a powerful
religion and a civilization, even in its decay, majestic, were brought
so thoroughly under the yoke that for centuries they were content to be
ruled by a spiritual imperialism enthroned at Rome.
But that authority never ceased to be regarded by the northern races as
a foreign one. The Teutonic peoples whose home lay outside the limits of
the old Roman Empire were never Latinized in spirit. When they attained
intellectual maturity and sought the free development of their own
nature, they shook off the authority of Rome and brought to light those
free and individualistic and spiritual germs in Christianity which,
hitherto, in the luxuriant and stately growth of Greco-Roman Catholicism
had remained almost dormant.
The Protestant Reformation, as has been noted, was a complex movement.
It involved many factors. But fundamentally it was the outcome of the
determination, not always clearly conscious, of the Teutonic peoples to
discover a Christianity which should be consonant with that passion for
freedom and that high sense of personal dignity which from the beginning
had characterized the men of the Teutonic stock.
It is an interesting illustration of this that the movement of reform,
or, rather, of revolt, which swept like a prairie fire over all Teutonic
Europe that had never been permanently subdued by the Empire, flickered
and died as soon as it crossed what had been the boundary of the old
Empire, and that that boundary is still the dividing line between those
countries of Western Europe which are preponderatingly Protestant and
those which are preponderatingly Roman Catholic. The Roman Church held
only what the Roman Empire had won. Only where the old Teutonic love of
liberty had been subdued by centuries of the masterful and, on the
whole, beneficent rule of old Rome did it cease to feel the spiritual
rule of the new Rome alien and irksome.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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