St Paul and Protestantism - 1875 Author:Matthew Arnold Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ST. PAUL PROTESTANTISM. M. Renan sums up his interesting volume on St. Paul by saying :—' After having been for three hundred years, thanks to Protest... more »antism, the Christian doctor par excellence, Paul is now coming to an end of his reign.' All through his book M. Renan is possessed with a sense of this close relationship between St. Paul and Protestantism. Protestantism has made Paul, he says ; Pauline doctrine is identified with Protestant doctrine ; Paul is a Protestant doctor, and the counterpart of Luther. M. Renan has a strong distaste for Protestantism, and this distaste extends itself to the Protestant Paul. The reign of this Protestant is now coming to an end, andsuch a consummation evidently has M. Kenan's approval. St. Paul is now coming to an end of his reign. Precisely the contrary, I venture to think, is the judgment to which a true criticism of men and of things, in our own country at any rate, leads us. The Protestantism which has so used and abused St. Paul is coming to an end ; its organisations, strong and active as they look, are touched with the finger of death ; its fundamental ideas, sounding forth still every week from thousands of pulpits, have in them no significance and no power for the progressive thought of humanity. But the reign of the real St. Paul is only beginning ; his fundamental ideas, disengaged from the elaborate misconceptions with which Protestantism has overlaid them, will have an influence in the future greater than any which they have yet had,— an influence proportioned to their correspondence with a number of the deepest and most permanent facts of human nature itself. Elsewhere' I have pointed out how, for us in this country, Puritanism is the strong and special representative of Protestantism. The Church of England exis...« less