at a very early hour, with my heart filled with pious confidence. My Christ lives and reigns; and I shall live and reign." " (March 19th.)

About the same time, Henry VIII. published the work which he had got his chaplain Edward Lee to write, and in which he announced himself the champion of the church.

"This work betrays royal ignorance, but a virulence and mendacity as well, which are wholly Lee's." (July 22d.) Luther's reply came out the following year, and exceeded in violence even all that might have been expected from his writings against the pope. Never had any private man before him, addressed a monarch in such contemptuous and audacious

terms:

"To the words of fathers, men, angels, devils, I oppose, not ancient usage, or a multitude of men, but the word alone of the Eternal Majesty the Gospel which they themselves are forced to recognize. On this, I take my stand; this is my glory, my triumph; and from this, I mock popes, Thomists, Henricists, sophists, and all the gates of hell. I care little about the words of men, whatever their sanctity, and as little for tradition and deceitful usage. God's word is above all. If I have the Divine Majesty with me, what signifies all the rest, even if a thousand Austin friars, a thousand Cyprians, a thousand of Henry's churches, were to rise up against me? God cannot err, or be deceived; Augustin and Cyprian, as well as all the elect, can err, and have erred. The mass conquered, we have, I opine, conquered the popedom. The mass was as it were the rock on which the popedom with its monasteries, episcopacies, colleges, altars, ministers, and doctrines, on which, in fine, its whole paunch was founded. All this will topple down along with the abomination of their sacrilegious mass. In Christ's cause I have trodden under foot the idol of the Roman abomination, which had seated itself in God's place, and had become mistress of kings, and of the world. Who then is this Henry, this new Thomist, this disciple of the monster, that I should respect his blasphemies and his violence? He is the defender of the Church; yes, of his own church, which he exalts so high, of the whore who lives in purple, drunken with debauch, of that mother of fornications. leader is Christ; and with one and the same blow, I will dash in pieces this Church and its defenders, who are but one. My

My

doctrines, I feel convinced, are of heaven. I have triumphed with them over him who has more strength and craft in his little finger than all popes, kings, and doctors, put together. My doctrines will remain, and the pope will fall, notwithstanding all the gates of hell, and all the powers of the air, the earth, and the sea. They have defied me to war; well, they shall have war. They have despised the peace I offered them; peace shall no more be theirs. God will see which of the two will first have enough of it, the pope or Luther. Thrice have

I appeared before them. I entered Worms, well aware that Cæsar was to violate the public faith in my person. Luther, the fugitive, the trembling, came to cast himself within the teeth of Behemoth. . . . But they, these terrible giants, has one single one of them presented himself for these three years at Wittemberg? And yet they might have come in all safety, under the Emperor's guarantee. The cowards! Do they dare yet to hope for triumph? They thought that my flight would enable them to retrieve their shameful ignominy. It is now known by all the world; it is known that they have not had the courage to face Luther alone." (A.D. 1523.)

He was still more violent in the treatise which he published in German on the Secular Power: "Princes are of the world, and the world is alien from God; so that they live according to the world, and against God's law. Be not surprised then by their furious raging against the Gospel, for they cannot but follow the laws of their own nature. You must know, that from the beginning of the world, a wise prince has been rare; still more an honest and upright prince. They are generally great fools, or wicked castaways (maxime fatui, pessimi nebulones super terram). And so the worst is always to be expected from them, and scarcely ever good; especially when the salvation of souls is concerned. They serve God as lictors and executioners, when he desires to chastise the wicked. Our God is a powerful King, and must have noble, illustrious, rich executioners and lictors, such as they, and wills them to have riches and honors in abundance, and to be feared of all. It is his divine pleasure that we style his executioners merciful lords, that we prostrate ourselves at their feet, that we be their most humble subjects. But these very executioners do not push the trick so far, as to desire to become good pastors. If a prince be wise, upright, a Christian, it is a great miracle,

a precious sign of divine favor; for, commonly, it happens as with the Jews, to whom God said, 'I will give thee a king in my anger, and take him away in my wrath' (Dabo tibi regem in furore meo, et auferam in indignatione meâ). And look at our Christian princes who protect the faith, and devour the Turk. . . . Good people, trust not to them. In their great wisdom, they are about to do something; they are about to break their necks, and precipitate nations into disasters and misery. . . Now I will make the blind to see, in order that they may understand these four words in Psalm cvii. Effundit contemptum super principes (He poureth contempt on princes). I swear to you by God himself, that if you await for men to come and shout in your ears those four words, you are lost even though each of you were as powerful as the Turk; and then it will avail you nothing to swell yourselves out and grind your teeth... Already there are very few princes who are not treated as fools and knaves; for the plain reason that they show themselves such, and the people begin to use their understanding. . . . Good masters and lords, govern with moderation and justice, for your people will not long endure your tyranny; they neither can, nor will. This world is no more the world of former days, in which you went hunting down men like wild beasts." Luther remarks with regard to two severe rescripts of the emperor's against him: "I exhort every good Christian to pray with me for these blind princes, whom God has no doubt sent us in his wrath, and not to follow them against the Turks. The Turk is ten times more able and more religious than our princes. How can these wretches, who tempt and blaspheme God so horribly, succeed against him? Does not that poor and wretched creature, who is not for one moment sure of his life, does not our emperor impudently boast that he is the true and sovereign defender of the Christian faith? Holy Scripture says that the Christian faith is a rock, against which the devil, and death, and every power shall be broken; that it is a divine power, and that this divine power can be protected from death by a child, whom the slightest touch would throw down. O God! how mad is this world! Here is the king of England, who, in his turn, styles himself, Defender of the Faith! Even the Hungarians boast of being the protectors of God, and sing in their litanies, Ut nos defensores tuos exaudire digneris

6

(Vouchsafe to hear us, thy defenders). Why are not there princes to protect Jesus Christ as well, and others to defend the Holy Ghost? On this fashion, the Holy Trinity and the faith would, I conclude, at last be fitly guarded!". (A. D. 1523).

Daring like this alarmed the elector. Luther could hardly reassure him :-"I call to mind, my dear Spalatin, what I wrote from Born to the elector, and would to God that, warned by such evident signs from God's own hand, you would but have faith. Have I not escaped these two years from every attempt? Is not the elector not only safe, but has he not for this year past seen the rage of the princes abated? It is not hard for Christ to protect Christ in this cause of mine; which the elector espoused, induced by God alone. Could I devise any means of separating him from this cause, without casting shanfe on the Gospel, I should not grudge even my life. Nay, I had made sure that before a year was over, they would drag me to the stake; and in this was my hope of his deliverance. Since, however, we cannot comprehend or divine God's designs, we shall ever be perfectly safe if we say—' Thy will be done! And I have no doubt but that the prince will be secure from all attack, so long as he does not publicly espouse and approve our cause. Why is he forced to partake our disgrace? God only knows; although it is quite certain that this is not to his hurt or danger, but, on the contrary, to the great benefit of his salvation" (October 12th, 1523).

What constituted Luther's safety, was the apparent imminency of a general revolutionary movement. The lower classes grumbled. The petty nobility, more impatient, took the initiative. The rich ecclesiastical principalities lay exposed as a prey; and it seemed as if their pillage would be the signal for civil war. The catholics themselves protested by legal means, against the abuses which Luther had pointed out in the church. In March, 1523, the diet of Nuremberg suspended the execution of the imperial edict against Luther, and drew up against the clergy the Centum Gravamina (The Hundred Grievances). Already the most zealous of the princes of the Rhine, Franz von Sickingen, had begun the contest between the petty barons and princes, by attacking the Palatine. "Matters," exclaimed Luther, "are come to a grievous pass. Certain signs indicate approaching revolution; and

I am convinced Germany is threatened either with a most cruel war or its last day " (January 16th, 1523).

CHAPTER II.

Beginnings of the Lutheran Church.-Attempts at organization, &c. THE most active and laborious period of Luther's life was that succeeding his return to Wittemberg. He was constrained to go on with the Reformation, to advance each day on the road he had opened, to surmount new obstacles, and yet, from time to time, to stop in this work of destruction to reconstruct and rebuild as well as he might. His life loses the unity it presented at Worms, and in the castle of Wartburg. Hurried from his poetic solitude into a vortex of the meanest realities, and cast as a prey to the world, 'tis to him that all the enemies of Rome will apply. All flock to him, and besiege his door-princes, doctors, or burgesses. He has to reply to Bohemians, to Italians, to Swiss, to all Europe. Fugitives arrive from every quarter. Indisputably, the most embarrassing of these are the nuns who, having fled from their convents, and having been rejected by their families, apply for an asylum to Luther. This man, thirty-six years of age, finds himself obliged to receive these women and maidens, and be to them a father. A poor monk, his own situation a necessitous one (see, above, c. iv.), he labors to get some small help for them from the parsimonious elector, who is allowing himself to die of hunger. To sink into these straits, after his triumph of Worms, was enough to calm the reformer's exaltation.

The answers he returns to the multitude that come to consult him, are impressed with a liberality of spirit which, afterwards, we shall see him occasionally lose sight of; when, raised to be the head of an established church, he shall himself experience the necessity of staying the movement which he had impressed on religious thought.

First comes the pastor of Zwickau, Hausmann, calling on