We now see our religion as a quaint but quite intelligible evolution
from crude attempts to propitiate the destructive forces of Nature among
savages to a subtle theology with a costly ritual of sacrifice possible
only to the rich as a luxury, and finally to the religion of Luther and
Calvin. And it must be said for the earlier forms that they involved
very real sacrifices. The sacrifice was not always vicarious, and is
not yet universally so. In India men pay with their own skins, torturing
themselves hideously to attain holiness. In the west, saints amazed the
world with their austerities and self-scourgings and confessions and
vigils. But Luther delivered us from all that. His reformation was
a triumph of imagination and a triumph of cheapness. It brought you
complete salvation and asked you for nothing but faith. Luther did not
know what he was doing in the scientific sociological way in which we
know it; but his instinct served him better than knowledge could have
done; for it was instinct rather than theological casuistry that made
him hold so resolutely to Justification by Faith as the trump card by
which he should beat the Pope, or, as he would have put it, the sign in
which he should conquer. He may be said to have abolished the charge for
admission to heaven. Paul had advocated this; but Luther and Calvin did
it.