THE TRUE LESSON OF PROTEST- 

 ANTISM l 



SINCE the day when Martin Luther 

 posted his audacious heresies on the 

 church door at Wittenberg, a great change 

 has come over men's minds, the full significance 

 of which is even yet but rarely comprehended. 

 To inquire into the nature of this change, and 

 into what we may perhaps call its ultimate tend- 

 ency, is well worth our while, whether as stu- 

 dents of history or as students of philosophy. 

 In outward aspect, the results of Protestantism 

 have come to be very different to-day from 

 what they were at first. The immediate conse- 

 quence of Luther's successful revolt was the 

 formation of a great number of little churches, 

 each with its creed as clean-cut and as thoroughly 

 dried as the creed of the great church from 

 which they had separated, each making prac- 

 tically the same assumption of absolute infalli- 

 bility, each laying down an intellectual assent 

 to sundry transcendental dogmas as an exclusive 



1 An address delivered before a Convention of Unitarian 

 clergymen at Princeton, Mass., October 4, 1881. 

 244 



