Note 3 — Chapter I

Footnote 3:

(return)

See Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus. I. p. 80 ff., 93 ff. II. p. 60 f.: 88 f. "The Lutheran view of life did not remain pure and undefiled, but was limited and obscured by the preponderance of dogmatic interests. Protestantism was not delivered from the womb of the western Church of the middle ages in full power and equipment, like Athene from the head of Jupiter. The incompleteness of its ethical view, the splitting up of its general conceptions into a series of particular dogmas, the tendency to express its beliefs as a hard and fast whole; are defects which soon made Protestantism appear to disadvantage in comparison with the wealth of Mediæval theology and asceticism ... The scholastic form of pure doctrine is really only the provisional, and not the final form of Protestantism."