In short, though men felt all the charm of abounding life and
abandonment to its impulses, they dared not, in their deep
self-mistrust, conceive it otherwise than as a force making for
evil--one which must lead to universal ruin unless checked and
literally mortified by self-renunciation in obedience to
superhuman guidance, or at least to some reasoned system of
morals. When it became apparent to the cleverest of them that
no such superhuman guidance existed, and that their secularist
systems had all the fictitiousness of "revelation" without its
poetry, there was no escaping the conclusion that all the good
that man had done must be put down to his arbitrary will as well
as all the evil he had done; and it was also obvious that if
progress were a reality, his beneficent impulses must be gaining
on his destructive ones. It was under the influence of these
ideas that we began to hear about the joy of life where we had
formerly heard about the grace of God or the Age of Reason, and
that the boldest spirits began to raise the question whether
churches and laws and the like were not doing a great deal more
harm than good by their action in limiting the freedom of the
human will. Four hundred years ago, when belief in God and in
revelation was general throughout Europe, a similar wave of
thought led the strongest-hearted peoples to affirm that every
man's private judgment was a more trustworthy interpreter of God
and revelation than the Church. This was called Protestantism;
and though the Protestants were not strong enough for their
creed, and soon set up a Church of their own, yet the movement,
on the whole, has justified the direction it took. Nowadays the
supernatural element in Protestantism has perished; and if every
man's private judgment is still to be justified as the most