At this point of development, Lutheranism and Calvinism came into existence. The new religions were not the religions of a wealthy upper class but of the urban middle class, the poor in the cities, and the peasants. They carried an appeal to these groups because they gave expression to a new feeling of freedom and independence as well as to the feeling of powerlessness and anxiety by which their members were pervaded. But the new religious doctrines did more than give articulate expression to the feelings engendered by a changing economic order. By their teachings they increased them and at
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