The rise of Protestantism was the consequence of many factors which temporarily combined and worked in the same direction. There are those who maintain that it was an unhappy accident, which threw back the wheels of progress some hundreds of years. But those who bewail the division of the Christian Church forget that division is a sign of incompatible tendencies within a body not flexible enough to contain them. Strife is irrational only when we cease to be realists. The appearance of Protestantism in the sixteenth century is only one instance among many of the inadequacy of any one institution to comprehend the life of its time. Were we to call the roll of the heresies of the past, the names which would appear upon the list would be far more numerous than popular history records. Just because Christians believed that they possessed a final truth they were intolerant and persecuting. The natural desire of an institution to maintain itself and its interests intact added its force to this unfortunate characteristic. But the tragedy of the situation was, that this final truth could not prove itself by an appeal to experience and reason. It had, therefore, to resort to violence. The logic of revelation is the logic of the _auto da fe_. The logic of science is the logic of tested {199} fact. Science can have hope of agreement; theological religion has no right to such a hope. Protestantism had its ethical, political, economic and doctrinal sides. It was not merely a religious movement. Had it been so, it might more readily have run its course as a reform movement within the institutional life of the time. Had the Northern nations possessed greater power in the councils of the Church, it is just possible that the change would have been brought about without the occurrence of an open rupture. But the Church was too centralized and too rich to escape conflict with the growing nationalism. For our present purpose, however, this larger social setting of Protestantism is not important. What we wish to study is the religious tendencies covered by this term. What advance did they contain? What was the weakness of the movement?