much more judicious, fruitful, and complete, if it be not more logical, the catholic doctrine appears to us than that of any of the sects which have risen up against her. It is her weakness, but her greatness likewise, to have excluded nothing of man's invention, and to have sought to satisfy at one and the same time the contradictory principles of the human mind, It was this, and this only, which afforded those who reduced man to such or such a given principle the means of their easy triumph over her. The universal, in whatever sense it be understood, is weak against the special. Heresy means choice, a speciality, speciality of opinion, speciality of country. Wickliff and John Huss were ardent patriots; the Saxon Luther was the Arminius of modern Germany. The Church, universal in time, space, and doctrine, was inferior to each of her opponents, inasmuch as she possessed but one common means. She had to struggle for the unity of the world with the opposing forces of the world; inasmuch as the larger number were with her, she was encumbered with the lukewarm and timid; in her political capacity she had to encounter all worldly temptations; the centre of religious belief, she was inundated with numberless local beliefs, against which she could hardly maintain her unity and perpetuity. She appeared to the world, even what the world and time had made her, and tricked out in the motley robe of history. Having undergone and embraced the whole cycle of humanity, she had contracted its littleness and contradictions. The small heretical communions, rendered zealous by danger and by freedom, isolated, and therefore the purer and more sheltered from temptations, misapprehended the cosmopolitan Church, and compared themselves to her with pride. The pious and profound mystic of the Rhine and of the Low Countries, the rustic and simple Vaudois, pure as the herb of his own Alps, could easily accuse of adultery and prostitution her

who had received and adopted everything. Each rivulet may say to the ocean:-"I descend from my mountains, I know no other water than my own; thou art the receiver of the impurities of the whole world."-"Yes; but I am the Ocean."

All this might be said, and ought to be developed; and no work would stand in greater need of an introduction than one dedicated to such a discussion. To know how Luther was compelled to do and to suffer that which he himself calls the extremest of miseries; to comprehend this great and unhappy man, who sent the human mind on its wanderings at the very moment that he conceived he had consigned it to slumber on the pillow of grace; to appreciate the powerlessness of his attempt to ally God and man, it would be necessary to be cognizant of the most important attempts of the kind, made both before and after his day, by the mystics and rationalists; in other words, to sketch the whole history of the Christian religion. At some future time, perhaps, I may be tempted to give such an introduction.

Why, then, put off this too! Why begin so many things, and always stop before you complete? If the answer be thought of consequence, I willingly give it.

Midway in Roman History, I encountered Christianity in its infancy. Midway in the History of France, I encountered it aged and bowed down; here, I have met it again. Whithersoever I go, it is before me; it bars my road and hinders me from passing.

Touch Christianity! it is only they who know it not, who would not hesitate. For me, I call to mind the nights when I nursed a sick mother. She suffered from remaining in the same position, and would ask to be moved, to be helped to turn in her bed-the filial hands would not hesitate; how move her aching limbs !

Many are the years that these ideas have beset me; and, in this season of storms, they ever constitute the torment and the dreams of my solitude. Nor am I in any haste to conclude this internal converse, which is sweet to myself at the least, and which should make me a better man, or to part as yet from these my old and cherished meditations.

THE LIFE OF LUTHER.

BOOK THE FIRST.

A.D. 1483-1521.

CHAPTER I.

A.D. 1483-1517.

Birth, Education of Luther.-His Ordination, Temptations, and Journey to Rome.

"IN the many conversations I have had with Melancthon, I have told him my whole life from beginning to end. I am a peasant's son, and my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all common peasants. My father went to Mansfeld, and got employment in the mines there; and there I was born. That I should ever take my bachelor of arts and doctor's degree, &c., seemed not to be in the stars. How I must have surprised folks by turning monk; and then, again, by changing the brown cap for another! By so doing I occasioned real grief and trouble to my father. Afterwards I went to loggers with the pope, married a runaway nun, and had a family. Who foresaw this in the stars? Who could have told my career beforehand ?"

John Luther, the father of the celebrated Martin Luther, was of Mora or Mærke, a small village of Saxony, near Eisenach. His mother was the daughter of a lawyer of the last named town; or, according to a tradition, which strikes me as the preferable one of the two, of Neustadt in Franconia. A modern writer states, but without giving any authority for the anecdote, that John Luther, having had the misfortune to