The primitive purity of the early Church soon yielded to a Church hierarchy. In those early times, before the New Testament was admitted to equal canonical authority with the Old, the Church became the supreme authority and the Bible was subordinate. After the incorporation of the New Testament into the Bible, the Scriptures and the Church appear to be coördinate authority in the patristic writings of that period. During the Middle Ages the Church grew rapidly in political power and the influence of the Scriptures waned accordingly, so that Dante complains of the way in which not merely creeds and fathers but canon law and the decretals were studied instead of the gospels. It is true that pious people, ever since the days of Pentecost, had believed that “the inward spiritual facts of man's religious experience were of infinitely more value than their expression in stereotyped forms recognized by the Church,” and that, too, “ in such a solemn thing as the forgiveness of sin man could go to God directly without human mediation.” These pious souls had found the pardon they sought, but the good majority were under the dominion of the Church, which at last degraded the meaning of “spiritual ” so that it signified mere ritualistic service, and “thrust itself between God and the worshipper, and proclaimed that no man could draw near to God save through its appointed ways of approach. Confession was to be made to God through the priest; God spoke pardon only in the priest's absolution. When Luther attacked indulgences in the way he did he struck at the whole system.” After the Reformation a reaction set in. New and better translations of the Bible were made, and the Word became accessible to every-body. The successors of the Reformers emphasized “the verbal inspiration of the Scripture and its infallible authority (more) than had been done for the most part by the first Reformers, Luther and Calvin and their contemporaries, who never seemed to have sanctioned the famous dictum of Chillingworth, ‘the Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of the Protestants.‘” The Reformers took the Holy Scriptures, because they are the divine word, and require no further supplement from tradition and custom, merely as the rule and canon of their faith. Traditions, dogmas, ordinances established by the Church, were null and void. This freedom of the religious conscience and the Holy Scriptures as the living, pure source of religion brought a rich blessing to Christians. Religion was elevated above that sphere in which mere morality and outer ordinance were the determining principles, and raised man to a new spiritual life. The real motive principle of this new life is justification by faith.
