Protestantism: The Greatest Act of the Roman Catholic Church

Schaff argues that just as "the Jewish dispensation looked always towards the gospel... in like manner the discipline of the Roman Church involved an inward struggle, that became satisfied at last only in the evangelical emancipation of Protestantism." Thus, he says that the immmediate genesis of the Reformation was not in any number of political, scientific, or theological developments as much as it was bound up "in the very center of the religious life of the Catholic Church itself, as it stood at that time." He concludes: "The Reformation is the legitimate offspring, the greatest act of the Catholic Church; and account of true catholic nature itself, in its genuine conception: whereas the Church of Rome, instead of following the divine conduct of history has continued to stick in the old law of commandments, the garb of childhood, like the Jewish hierarchy in the time of Christ, and thus by its fixation as Romanism has parted with the character of catholicity in exchange for that of particularity." (The Principle of Protestantism, 48-50)