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The prejudice is even stronger today, two hundred years after Hume wrote. This is due to the further development of the idea that Protestantism, or just the progress of enlightenment, has refuted any view of Christian salvation requiring disciplines for the spiritual life. The Western world at large, not merely philosophers and scholars, is now firmly prejudiced against disciplinary activities as a part of the religious life.
What, we wonder, could possibly be the point of such discipline, if not the earning of merit or maybe forgiveness through self-denial and suffering? We are confidently informed that the fundamental principle of the Protestant movement -- that salvation is secured by justification through faith and not through dead works -- "struck at the root of monkery an mortification in general." That's how the article on "asceticism" in the long-standard M'Clintock and Strong encyclopedia on religion expresses this accepted attitude of Protestant culture.
Somehow, the fact that "mortification" -- self-denial, the disciplining of one's natural impulses -- happens to be a central teaching of the New Testament is conveniently ignored.
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Dallas Willard (The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives)