The difference between loving men as a result of first loving God, and learning to love God through a growing love for men, may not, at first sight, appear profound. To Luther it seemed an abyss, and Luther was right. It was, in a sense, nothing less than the Reformation itself. For carried, as it was not carried by Luther, to its logical result, the argument made, not only good works, but sacraments and the Church itself unnecessary. The question of the religious significance of that change of emphasis, and of the validity of the intellectual processes by which Luther reached his conclusions, is one for theologians. Its effects on social theory were staggering. Since salvation is bestowed by the operation of grace in the heart and by that alone, the whole fabric of organized religion, which had mediated between the individual soul and its Maker—divinely commissioned hierarchy, systematized activities, corporate institutions—drops away, as the blasphemous trivialities of a religion of works. The medieval conception of the social order, which had regarded it as a highly articulated organism of members contributing in their different degrees to a spiritual purpose, was shattered, and differences which had been distinctions within a larger unity were now set in irreconcilable antagonism to each other. Grace no longer completed nature: it was the antithesis of it. Man’s actions as a member of society were no longer the extension of his life as a child of God: they were its negation. Secular interests ceased to possess, even remotely, a religious significance: they might compete with religion, but they could not enrich it. Detailed rules of conduct—a Christian casuistry—are needless or objectionable: the Christian has a sufficient guide in the Bible and in his own conscience. In one sense, the distinction between the secular and the religious life vanished. Monasticism was, so to speak, secularized; all men stood henceforward on the same footing towards God; and that advance, which contained the germ of all subsequent revolutions, was so enormous that all else seems insignificant. In another sense, the distinction became more profound than ever before. For, though all might be sanctified, it was their inner life alone which could partake of sanctification. The world was divided into good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. The division between them was absolute; no human effort could span the chasm.
The remoter corollaries of the change remained to be stated by subsequent generations. Luther himself was not consistent. He believed that it was possible to maintain the content of medieval social teaching, while rejecting its sanctions, and he insisted that good works would be the fruit of salvation as vehemently as he denied that they could contribute to its attainment. In his writings on social questions emphasis on the traditional Christian morality is combined with a repudiation of its visible and institutional framework, and in the tragic struggle which results between spirit and letter, form and matter, grace and works, his intention, at least, is not to jettison the rules of good conscience in economic matters, but to purify them by an immense effort of simplification. His denunciation of medieval charity, fraternities, mendicant orders, festivals and pilgrimages, while it drew its point from practical abuses, sprang inevitably from his repudiation of the idea that merit could be acquired by the operation of some special machinery beyond the conscientious discharge of the ordinary duties of daily life. His demand for the abolition of the canon law was the natural corollary of his belief that the Bible was an all-sufficient guide to action. While not rejecting ecclesiastical discipline altogether, he is impatient of it. The Christian, he argues, needs no elaborate mechanism to teach him his duty or to correct him if he neglects it. He has the Scriptures and his own conscience; let him listen to them. “There can be no better instructions in … all transactions in temporal goods than that every man who is to deal with his neighbor present to himself these commandments: ‘What ye would that others should do unto you, do ye also unto them,’ and ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ If these were followed out, then everything would instruct and arrange itself; then no law books nor courts nor judicial actions would be required; all things would quietly and simply be set to rights, for everyone’s heart and conscience would guide him.”152
“Everything would arrange itself.” Few would
