To look back from the safe distance of almost four centuries upon this era of great hope and even greater disappointment, to think of the sublime courage of so many men and women who wasted their lives on the scaffold and on the field of battle for an ideal that was never to be realized, to contemplate the sacrifice made by millions of obscure citizens for the things they held to be holy and then to remember the utter failure of the Protestant rebellion as a movement towards a more liberal and more intelligent world, is to put one’s charity to a most severe test. For Protestantism, if the truth must be told, took away from this world many things that were good and noble and beautiful and it added a great many others that were narrow and hateful and graceless. And instead of making the history of the human race simpler and more harmonious, it made it more complicated and less orderly. All that, however, was not so much the fault of the Reformation as of certain inherent weaknesses in the mental habits of most people. They refuse to be hurried. They cannot possibly keep up with the pace set by their leaders. They are not lacking in good will. Eventually they will all cross the bridge that leads into the newly discovered territory. But they will do so in their own good time and bringing with them as much of the ancestral furniture as they can possibly carry. As a result the Great Reform, which was to establish an entirely new relationship between the individual Christian and his God, which was to do away with all the prejudices and all the corruptions of a bygone era, became so thoroughly cluttered up with the medieval baggage of its trusted followers that it could move neither forward nor backward and soon looked for all the world like a replica of that papal establishment which it held in such great abhorrence. For that is the great tragedy of the Protestant rebellion. It could not rise above the mean average of intelligence of the majority of its adherents. And as a result the people of western and northern Europe did not progress as much as might have been expected. Instead of a man who was supposed to be infallible, the Reformation gave the world a book which was held to be infallible. Instead of one potentate who ruled supreme, there arose a thousand and one little potentates, each one of whom in his own way tried to rule supreme.