Amidst all this it is clear that the old 95 religion would no longer serve the new spirit of the times. The mediæval church, the kingdom of heaven on earth, in full sympathy with the temporal hierarchy, in which also every one had his divinely appointed place, and which restricted commerce and forbade usury, such was no religion for the new commercialism ; the latter’s creed must have nothing to do with the business of this world; so the individualist ethics of early Christianity, which had been kept in the background during the period of the mediaeval church, were once more brought to the front, and took the place of the corporate ethics of that church, of which each one of the “faithful” was but a part.
A new form of Christianity, therefore, had to be found to suit the needs of the new Europe which was being born: but this adaptation of Christianity took two shapes, so widely different from each other that they have usually been opposed as contrasting religions, which is an inaccurate view to take of the matter, since they are but two sides of the same shield. These two forms were Protestantism, and modern or Jesuitised Catholicism; 96 the protagonists of either side being nameable as Martin Luther and Ignatius Loyala. Almost the whole Teutonic race adopted Protestantism in one or other of its forms, and the leading men among them accepted its teachings with depth and sincerity: amongst the Latinised nations it made no real progress, and wherever it gained many adherents, as in the case of the French Huguenots, it was little more than a political badge. It is worthy of remark, too, that, at the present day, in Geneva, the city of Calvin, which is really a French city, the Catholics considerably outnumber the Protestants. It may be noted, as showing the real strength of the Protestant feeling in the north of Europe, that in those countries where the religious struggle was most severe—as in Scotland, England, Holland, and Switzerland—the quality that finally predominated made the form of religion the furthest removed from medieval Catholicism: while in places where the Reformation made itself, so to say, as in Scandinavia and the north of Germany, the outward change was comparatively slight.