Protestantism in Sweden and Denmark - James Aitken Wylie

favored the continuance of such a system as the
Church of Rome, which provided an easy pardon
for sin, furnished opiates for the conscience, and
instead of checking, encouraged vice. On the other
hand, it deprived the Reformers of a fulcrum of
enlightened moral sentiment on which to rest their
lever for elevating the world. We freely admit the
causes that were operating towards a change, but
left to themselves these causes never would have
produced such a change as the Reformation. They
would but have hastened and perfected the
destruction of the putrid and putrifying mass, they
never could have evoked from it a new and
renovated order of things. What was needed was a
force able to restore conscience. The Word of God
alone could do this.
Protestantism -- in other words, evangelical
Christianity -- came down, and Ithuriel-like put
forth its spear, touched the various forces at work
in society, quickened them, and drawing them into
a beneficent channel, converted what would most
surely have been a process of destruction into a
process of Reformation.
80