i8 74 ] WHAT TO SEEK IN THE BIBLE 223 



power of the truth already quick within them, than 

 busied in spontaneously working out new principles. 



It is plain that this quite singular phenomenon does 

 not find its explanation in the vitality of Luther s own 

 Christianity, or the impulse he gave to vital Christianity 

 in others. The mediaeval Church has never been without 

 vital Christianity. Experience of sin and experience of 

 grace were no new things. Again and again religious 

 movements the most genuine, often springing from the 

 influence of the intense religious experience of one in 

 dividual, had proved to the Church before the Reforma 

 tion, as similar movements have proved to the Roman 

 Church since the Reformation, sources not of division but 

 of strength. Nay, was not Augustin, the greatest doctor 

 of the Western Church, as deeply versed as Luther in 

 the antithesis of sin and grace ? But in the old Church 

 the notion of grace is bound up, above all, with the 

 doctrine of the sacraments ; in the Reformation it is 

 bound up with the notion of justifying faith. Of course 

 I do not mean by this that the old Church saw no con 

 nection between grace and faith, that Luther would 

 allow none between grace and the sacraments. But 

 while the one said, The sacrament gives me grace ex 

 opere operate, because I receive the sign, the other said, 

 The sacrament is a vehicle of grace only in so far as by 

 faith I pass beyond the sign and lay hold of God s promise 

 signified^ Now I do not wish to go into the theological 

 niceties of this difference, nor to ask how far the whole 

 old Church would have gone against Luther s position. 

 What I have just said represents sufficiently the attitude 

 of the two parties as you will find it expressed, e.g., in 

 Luther s book on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church ; 

 and the meaning of the difference is very plain. To the 

 mediaeval Church grace is a magical thing ; to Luther it 

 is a moral, a personal thing. The Reformers are separated 

 from their fore-goers not by a mere difference of theo 

 logical opinion, but by a growth of the religious con- 



