In dealing with a subject of such a general character, I am well aware of the limitations of the undertaking. It is not possible to define the nature of Protestantism in such a manner as to establish certain principles to which all its historical expressions must or do conform. I accept the statement of Wilhelm Dilthey which reads as follows:

The religions which appear within a developed civilization have common features. They lift the human consciousness to a point at which, by its connection with divinity and the invisible, it renders itself independent from the world. Hence it is the aim of these religions to overcome the contradictions and repressions of life (Hemmungen) by an inner connection with God. Beatitude signifies the developing total state of mind in which all single emotions arising from participation in the world are resolved. Hence religion is neither a cult nor a dogma nor a mode of action but the total life context of a person in which this aim has been attained. From this there result significant consequences for the historian. No religion or communion can be represented by a principle from which cult, dogma, and morality can be derived. The endless theological debates about a principle of Christianity, of Reformed religiousness, of the Lutheran or Reformed church, are without object. This life context cannot even be wholly analysed. As in every form of life, there remains something unanalysable also in every form of religiousness. Just therein religion is, like art; superior to scientific knowledge. One cannot state in one sentence the essence of Christianity. Every attempt of such a sort is historical metaphysics. Knowledge of Christianity is the analysis of the Christian religiousness in individual Christians and in society.

Anabaptism, the bête noire of confessional Protestantism, cursed at least once in most sixteenth century confessions of faith from Augsburg and Trent on, classified under the Deformation of the Reformation by Kurtz, and reconsidered by Troeltsch, is now interpreted by Schuster and Franke as the third primary type of Reformation Protestantism. Quiescent Protestantism, otherwise known as Lutheranism, and militant Protestantism, otherwise know as Calvinism, are at present represented as walking down the Reformation board-walk with radical Anabaptism.

The condemnation of Origen is one of the saddest episodes in the history of the Christian church. The breadth of his thought, the keenness of his genius and the wide sympathy of his religion, contrast vividly with the narrow obscurantism of his monkish detractors. It is significant that the final defeat of Origen and the closing of the philosophic schools of Athens belong to the same era. It is as if a curtain were then drawn upon the intellectual freedom of the East, and along with certain garbled texts from his works all that was fine and liberal and mature in the faith and thought of Origen had been condemned. He who had striven for a religion truly catholic and had contended that all things were the church's heritage and all things were Christ's, was cast out of the church with imprecations of intolerance and fanaticism. The long controversies over Origen that reach their climax under Justinian mark the passing of much that was noble and enlightened in the early tradition of Greek Christianity.