Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World

Ernst Troeltsch

Translated by W. Montgomery

8 chapters · about 2 h

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The opening

INTRODUCTION

No science can escape from the conditions imposed by the constitution of the thinking mind which gives it birth. Even History, for all its striving after exactitude, objectivity, and minuteness of investigation, does not escape from such conditions. These are summed up in the fact that we are constantly obliged to come back to present experience. The present continually hovers before the backward-looking glance, because it is by the aid of analogies drawn from the life of to-day—however little this may be consciously before the mind—that we reach the causal explanation of the events of the past. But what is still more important is that we always, either voluntarily or involuntarily, relate the course of past events to the complex of effects which lies before us in the present, and that we are constantly drawing either special or general conclusions from the past and making use of them in our task of shaping the present with a view to the future.

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About this edition

The words
W. Montgomery's English translation, copied word for word.
Left out
  • Page numbers and running heads from the printed pages, in 7 places
  • Notes and pages added by translators, editors or publishers, in 24 places
  • The cover of the scanned copy (the series name, “CROWN THECLOGICAL LIBRARY” as read) and a speck (3 blocks)
  • Other material that isn't the author's, in 2 places
  • Archive.org's notice (“Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2025”) (2 blocks)
  • Half-title (“CROWN THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY VOL. XXXVII TROELTSCH’S PROTESTANTISM AND PROGRESS”) (2 blocks)
  • The title page and opening pages before chapter 1
  • A preface, foreword or afterword, in 3 places
  • Title line over the text (“PROTESTANTISM AND PROGRESS”)
  • A scan speck: “”»” between two lines of page 65
  • A scan speck: “?” on page 137
  • A scan speck: “»” among the footnote lines of page 138
  • Pictures and their captions
  • Printer's line (“PRINTED BY NEILL AND CO,, LTD., EDINBURGH,”)
  • The index