"In part, the character of Protestantism was shaped by its revolutionary character. Rather than reforming the established church of the West, it instigated a revolution that claimed to start Christianity anew, renewed, and reformed, a millennium and a half after its beginning. Because Protestantism developed as a revolt against an institution and a tradition it rightly recognized as corrupt, Protestantism had a natural critical regard of institutional religion and tradition. It was not able to take up the Tradition of the first millennium. Because of its critical stance towards Tradition, it found itself committed in the end to its own secularization, a point well made by the scholar of comparative religions, Rene Guenon (1886-1951). Actually, religion being essentially a form of tradition the anti-traditional spirit cannot help being anti-religious; it begins by denaturing religion nd ends by suppressing it altogether, wherever it is able to do so. Protestantism is illogical from the fact that, while doing its utmost to “humanize” religion, it nevertheless permits the survival, at least theoretically, of a supra-human element, namely revelation; it hesitates to drive negation to its logical conclusion, but, by exposing revelation to all the discussions which follow in the wake of purely human interpretations, it does in fact reduce it practically to nothing .. It is natural that Protestantism, animated as it is by a spirit of negation, should have given birth to that dissolving “criticism” which in the hand of so-called “historians of religion,” has become a weapon of offense against all religion; in this way, while affecting not to recognize any authority except that of the Scriptures, it has itself contributed in large measure to the destruction of the very same authority, of the minimum of tradition, that is to say, which is still affected to retain; once launched, the revolt against the traditional outlook could not be arrested in mid-course."