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Granted that the first-generation reformers were in no hurry to leave the church ino which they had been baptized, what emerged during their battle to reform the church “in head and members” was a genuinely new conception of human salvation, divorced from the Catholic sacrament of penance and centered on the notion of justification by faith alone. This soteriological fault-line between Catholic and Protestant would eventually become one of the clearest boundary markers defining confessional identity in early modern Europe.