A legal union arises when one person or family is unable to fight with the world around him. In order to secure a certain share of well-being, a person enters into an agreement with another person in the same position. They make mutual commitments and work for the common good. But this communion is not at all a communion of love, not a moral union; These people serve others only because otherwise they will not get what they want for themselves. The purpose of their life is not society, but their own "I". The legal constitution, therefore, has as its task to compare several selfishnesses, so that they do not interfere with each other and that each of them receives its due share. As such, the legal system can only benefit selfishness. "His first benefit is that instead of a living union, he offers a cold, external one. For the state or my fellow citizens it is not particularly important what my inner mood is, for them only my external behavior is important, because only the latter concerns their well-being, expresses my attitude towards them. This, of course, humiliates the individual, turning him into a soulless screw in the social machine, but it also gives man such freedom, or rather, such arbitrariness in spiritual life, which he cannot obtain under any other system, especially in the moral one. The moral union demands conformity to the moral, penetrates with its demands and instructions into the very sanctuary of human conscience. The legal system never penetrates there, being content with observing the external agreed framework and leaving man as a complete master within itself.

This arbitrariness is increased by the consciousness of complete independence or non-obligation to anyone for one's well-being. In fact, if others serve a man in any way, he knows that they serve not out of affection for him, but out of necessity or out of a desire for the good, first of all, for themselves. For this service, they receive the same amount from his side: the relationship is equal, and consequently he does not have to consider anyone his benefactor. True, this dooms a person to terrible loneliness, but self-love is loneliness in essence. The consciousness of independence, this vague specter of originality, is more valuable to the sinful self as such.

At the same time, all those services, even the most insignificant, which he renders to his allies, receive the highest importance in the eyes of man. These services are made, in fact, apart from desire, not out of love for an ally, but simply out of a desire to receive equal reward. Therefore, a person demands this reward for himself, demands it as a matter of course, and will consider himself entitled to take revenge if this reward does not follow. Feelings of gratitude in the proper sense cannot be found in the soul of a self-lover.

Therefore, the certainty on which all unions are based does not have the same properties as in a moral union. In the latter it is a joyful and at the same time humble hope, but in the former it is rather the assurance that the ally cannot deceive, since there is a certain guarantee by which he is in some way compelled to fulfill the obligation. There, confidence rests on the free desire of the individual, and hence the constant gratitude to him, but here on something third that compels the personality, and hence there is no gratitude, but only a selfish feeling of security. Man loses "that freedom of the child of God," which is his highest possession, but for self-love this freedom is too heavy for him not to exchange it for slavery, if only it would leave him at his desires.

It is not difficult to see what can happen if a person (who, it should be noted, has already lost the heat of the first zeal for Christ and now struggles to vacillate between love for God and selfishness) if he considers his relationship to God from a legal point of view.

The main danger of this point of view is that in it a person can consider himself as if in the right not to belong to God with all his heart and mind: in a legal union, such intimacy is not assumed and is not required; Only the external conditions of the union must be observed there. A person may not love the good, he may remain the same selfish, he must only fulfill the commandments in order to receive a reward. This, as well as possible, favors that mercenary, slavish mood that does good only because of the reward, without inner attraction and respect for it. True, this state of involuntary good deeds is necessarily experienced by every ascetic of virtue, and more than once in his earthly life, but this state should never be elevated to a rule, it is only a preliminary stage, and the goal of moral development is in perfect, voluntary good deeds. The legal point of view sins precisely because it sanctifies this preliminary, preparatory state as complete and perfect. And since the mercenary attitude to the will of God is sanctified, the door is also opened for all those conclusions that necessarily follow from this attitude.

In a legal union, a person does not stand before the face of God in the position of an unrequited sinner who owes everything to Him: he is inclined to present himself as more or less independent, he expects to receive the promised reward not by God's mercy, but as a matter of due for his labors. The object of hope here, strictly speaking, is not the mercy of God, but man's own powers, and man's own deeds serve as a guarantee, that third which binds the ally, without at the same time making him a benefactor. Deeds, therefore, are transformed into something valuable in themselves, deserving of a reward – a conclusion that is most suitable for a selfish nature that has lost its original purity, which, reluctantly, forces itself to fulfill the commandments and therefore values its involuntary good at the highest price. Moreover, the dignity of merit is not ascribed to virtues or permanent dispositions of the soul, but to individual external actions, which, in turn, the mercenary mood tried to reduce as much as possible and make as formal as possible, according to the natural desire in the mercenary to achieve his payment with the least possible expenditure of effort. Man's life from free moral growth has turned into a soulless fulfillment of private prescriptions.

The mechanism developed in the Western Church did not fail to affect theological science, which, under the influence of the epoch, completely submitted to it and in turn contributed to its further development and, so to speak, to its formation. Scholasticism, with its worship of Aristotle, cared more about the formal harmony of its systems and coped little (not at all) with spiritual experience, with life. It is not surprising if it (scholasticism) adopted a legal point of view. Could a scholasticist have thought about its truth, when under each of its points he saw extracts from various celebrities – excerpts, we may add, taken out of the connection of speech? And in this way, so to speak, typographical method of proof, scholasticism justified all the extreme conclusions of the legal worldview. The quite natural teaching about the mutual aid of church members was transformed under the pen and in the mind of the scholastic into a completely mechanical record of the actions of one person (saint) to another. The uncertain situation of the souls of those who have died even in repentance, but who have not borne fruit worthy of repentance, who have not been established in goodness, has turned into a purgatory, where man pays God with his torments for crimes committed on earth, and not yet paid. Pastoral guidance during confession took the absurd form of payment for sins and indulgences – absolution of sins without moral tension, without repentance. The sacraments were transformed into magical actions opus operatum, in which bodily participation is needed rather than spiritual participation, etc. Sinful fear of moral work, taking advantage of a fortunate pretext, invented many necessary teachings for itself and so polluted Western Christianity with all outsiders that it was difficult even to recognize the truth of Christ in it. It was not without reason that when the German reformers came to the idea that faith alone saves man, this expression, so common in Christianity and constantly on the lips of the Holy Fathers, seemed so unusual and terrible that some considered it a heresy and the destruction of all morality, while others took it almost as some kind of new revelation and finally distorted its meaning. "Such fruits were brought to the West by its legal point of view on salvation. Its main danger, we repeat, was that it made it possible for a person, if he did not want to, to confine himself to one appearance; moral work was forgotten, as it were. Hence the good Catholic was often a very bad Christian inside, and in spite of this he thought that he was being saved, and in this self-deception he perished.

The human soul, in its best part, always thirsting for true life and salvation, can only be satisfied with the described doctrine through misunderstanding, it will certainly feel its falsity. This feeling of a living soul has been expressed, albeit unsuccessfully, in innumerable sects, in many attempts to correct Catholicism, such as we see throughout the entire course of Western Church history, and finally broke out in that terrible upheaval which is called the Reformation, and which still stands before Catholicism as a living denunciation of its untruth, which in turn awaits its accusers.

The Reformation came out with a merciless denunciation of all Catholic imitations in life and teaching, the soulless formalism that reigned in it, and demanded life and truth for man. Protestants both wrote and said that the source of Catholic wisdom is not the Gospel, not the teaching of Christ, but the considerations of reason, which stands on its own point of view and judges these things exclusively inhumanly [2]. Without penetrating into the inner work of those who are being saved, reason stops at the external side and bases its conclusions on this alone. It is not surprising if in this way he arrives at propositions that are absurd from the point of view of spiritual experience and before the judgment of human conscience [3]; and then, feeling falsehood and at the same time seeing no other way than the existing one, he is forced against his will to resort to various artificial constructions in order to somehow drown out the tormenting voice of his conscience. (That is why there are extraneous deeds, extraneous objects of veneration, invented by people at the moment of (feeling) danger (spiritual) against the fear of conscience [4]). In order to avoid this sad and terrible fate, it is necessary to break all connection with the philosophical views that have been accepted, but are not reconciled with the truth of Christ, and to turn to the truth of Christ itself and examine it, listening to the inner voice of one's conscience, trying to grasp that the Word of God and the Church's tradition are to be spoken not only to the mind, but to the whole soul [5], and to be concerned not only with fidelity to logic, but about fidelity to the truth, which is essentially living and active, and not formal. Protestantism has indeed proclaimed this only true and safe method of theology – guidance. They thought to see the test of the truth of their doctrine not in agreement with the metaphysics of Aristotle (for which Luther could not find a sufficiently strong curse) [6] and with scholastic axioms, but in the fact that in it good consciences find peace and consolation "piae et pavidae conscientiae" [7].

Apparently, the time has come for a radical renewal in Western Christianity. Indeed, Protestantism began to refute with fury the main dogma of the legal view – the doctrine of deeds as merits before God. This teaching is untenable for the very reason that it fundamentally contradicts the very foundation of the Christian faith – salvation by Jesus Christ alone. "Whoever confesses that he has deserved grace through works, despises the merit of Christ and grace, and seeks the way to God besides Christ, by human powers" [8]. And even if there were no such contradiction, the taking of man's deeds in themselves, by their very essence, cannot be merit before God: man does good deeds only with the help of the grace of God [9], yet everything that he does himself inevitably bears the stamp of sin [10]. Therefore, all who boast of the merits of their works, or hope for superfluous works, boast of vanity, and hope for idolatry, which is subject to condemnation" [11], we read in the Scottish Confession. Thus resolutely and mercilessly were exposed all the conclusions that necessarily followed from Catholic teaching: purgatory, indulgences, etc.

But... Protestantism was a child of its time and school. The first reformers learned to speak and think in the same Aristotle and Cicero as their Catholic opponents. Therefore, indignant at the blatant distortion of Christ's truth which they saw in Catholicism, they thought to explain it only by accidental causes, the wickedness of the hierarchy, etc., and did not suspect that instead of these conclusions, others would necessarily appear, equally false, because the lie is not in the conclusions, but in the very basis, in the very point of view on the subject. Instead of rejecting this basic lie, the Protestants were able to reject only some of its offspring, and thus only replaced some distortions with others.

For this reason, the Reformation, in the sense of the restoration of Christ's truth, ended in complete failure.

Protestants, as we have seen, turned to life itself and tried to test their conclusions with it, but they looked at life from a legal point of view. They wanted to bring peace of conscience with their teaching, but they understood this peace quite legally, in the sense of a sense of security, impunity for the sins committed. A person is afraid of punishment, and so the death of Jesus Christ is pointed out to him as such a great, excessive satisfaction with God's truth, that this truth can no longer – it has no right to demand anything else from a person, any other satisfactions. A person, since he believes in the Gospel, must calm down about himself. We see that Protestants have not understood this greatest and most comforting mystery of our salvation in all its depth and vitality. Of course, man is by nature a hireling, of course, he fears first of all for himself and seeks security for himself, and, consequently, he first assimilates the mystery of salvation from this point of view. But our Church, always pointing out to the sinner precisely this side (since it is most comprehensible, closer to the sinner), does not think of forgetting the other, more encouraging aspects of the mystery of salvation. She sees in Christ not a suffering instrument of propitiation, but the restorer of our fallen nature, the firstborn of the dead whom He brought out of death, calls Him "the second Adam," the heavenly Lord, "the heavenly ones" (1 Cor. XV, 20. 23. 45. 47:48), i.e., as if the leader of mankind, but only "Christ's" (v. 23), clothed in Christ, coming after his Leader into the glory of the Father inherent in Him from eternity (Col. 111:1-6). Protestants, on the other hand, thought to find in this greatest mystery only that "third" legal union which lies between its members and which compels one of them, in spite of everything, to make a concession in favor of the other.