The first general form of the principle of freedom of examination expressed itself in Protestantism. In it this freedom at first remained confined within the more or less narrow limits of Christian theology. The spirit of criticism at first especially endeavoured, in the very name of Christianity, to ruin the admirable system of the Catholic hierarchy, which was its social realisation. This is the characteristic inconsequence of the metaphysical spirit, which always denies the logical deductions while claiming to maintain the principles, and which, in this particular case, aspired to reform Christianity at the same time that it destroyed the necessary conditions of its existence, that is to say, its organisation. In the same way, as in the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, Comte chiefly admires “the masterpiece of political wisdom,” which knew how to separate the attributes of temporal power from those of spiritual power; so in Protestantism he especially sees the destructive principle of this masterpiece. He unceasingly reproaches it with having subordinated the spiritual to the temporal power in the whole of Europe. This “chief perturbation” was the origin of all the others. In accordance with the leaders of the traditionalist school, with de Maistre and de Bonald in France, with Haller in Germany, Comte insists upon the close relationship between the Protestant spirit and the revolutionary spirit. Once it has been demanded, the right of examination spreads by a necessity which is at once mental and social and cannot be overcome, to all individuals and all questions. The name of Protestantism should not be restricted to religious reform. It is no less suitable for the whole of the revolutionary philosophy. For this philosophy, from Lutheranism to the Deism of the XVIII. century, “without excluding Atheism which constitutes its extreme phase” is a _protestation_, at first against the principles of the old social order, and then against any organisation, whatever.[308] The “absolute and indefinite” dogma of free examination sets up each individual judgment as an arbiter upon all social questions. From this dogma gradually emerge absolute liberty in speaking and writing, the political sovereignty of the masses at will creating or destroying institutions, the equality of all men, the isolation of nations: in a word, as Haller has said, “social and political atomism.” These consequences had become inevitable from the day when Protestantism gave the supreme decision in religious questions to every one, without taking into account conditions either of competence, or authority. This first step was a decisive one. If, supposing an impossibility, modern society were replaced in the state in which it was when Protestantism succeeded in becoming established, the same necessary succession of social and political consequences would again unfold themselves.