For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not justification, in the Protestant sense.  Rather is this latter ethical.  It was from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions—­namely, that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in Catholicism.

The preoccupation of sin has never been such a matter of anguish, or at any rate has never displayed itself with such an appearance of anguish, among Catholics.  The sacrament of Confession contributes to this.  And there persists, perhaps, among Catholics more than among Protestants the substance of the primitive Judaic and pagan conception of sin as something material and infectious and hereditary, which is cured by baptism and absolution.  In Adam all his posterity sinned, almost materially, and his sin was transmitted as a material disease is transmitted.  Renan, whose education was Catholic, was right, therefore, in calling to account the Protestant Amiel who accused him of not giving due importance to sin.  And, on the other hand, Protestantism, absorbed in this preoccupation with justification, which in spite of its religious guise was taken more in an ethical sense than anything else, ends by neutralizing and almost obliterating eschatology; it abandons the Nicene symbol, falls into an anarchy of creeds, into pure religious individualism and a vague esthetic, ethical, or cultured religiosity.  What we may call “other-worldliness” (Jenseitigkeit) was obliterated little by little by “this-worldliness” (Diesseitigkeit); and this in spite of Kant, who wished to save it, but by destroying it.  To its earthly vocation and passive trust in God is due the religious coarseness of Lutheranism, which was almost at the point of expiring in the age of the Enlightenment, of the Aufklaerung, and which pietism, infusing into it something of the religious sap of Catholicism, barely succeeded in galvanizing a little.  Hence the exactness of the remarks of Oliveira Martins in his magnificent History of Iberian Civilization, in which he says (book iv., chap, iii.) that “Catholicism produced heroes and Protestantism produced societies that are sensible, happy, wealthy, free, as far as their outer institutions go, but incapable of any great action, because their religion has begun by destroying in the heart of man all that made him capable of daring and noble self-sacrifice.”

Take any of the dogmatic systems that have resulted from the latest Protestant dissolvent analysis—­that of Kaftan, the follower of Ritschl, for example—­and note the extent to which eschatology is reduced.  And his master, Albrecht Ritschl, himself says:  “The question regarding the necessity of justification or forgiveness can only be solved by conceiving eternal life as the direct end and aim of that divine operation.  But if the idea of eternal life be applied merely to