LEADERS OF THE REFORMATION.

LUTHER.

LUTHER is the most notable of all the Reformers. His name at once starts the most stirring associations, and leads into the widest details and discussions. His work was comparatively single and original in its energy; and his life was especially heroic in its proportions, and varied and graphic and interesting in its incidents. There is a grandeur in the whole subject, below which we are apt to feel that we constantly fall, particularly within the limits. of a mere sketch.

Few characters have been more closely observed, or more keenly scrutinized. There is a breadth and intensity and power of human interest in the career of the German reformer, which have concentrated the attention both of friend and foe upon it; while the careless freedom and humorous frankness with which he himself has lifted the veil and shown us his inner life, have furnished abundant materials for the one and the other to draw their portrait and point their moral. I do not know that in all history there is any one to whose true being, alike in its strength and weaknesses, we get nearer than we get to that of Luther. This is of the very greatness of the man, that from

first to last he is an open-hearted, honest German,—undisguised by education, unweakened by ecclesiasticism, unsoftened by fame. Whatever faults he had lie upon the surface: they appear in all the manifestations of his character, and we have nowhere to search for any secret or double motives in his conduct. No one has ever ventured to accuse him of insincerity. He lives before us in all that he did; and neither dogmatic violence nor political necessity ever serve to hide from us the genuine human heart, beating warm beneath all the strong armor of controversy, or the thin folds of occasional diplomacy.

The life of Luther divides itself into two great periods, which denote as well an important distinction in his work. The first of these periods terminates with the Diet of Worms (1521) and his imprisonment in the Wartburg, and is marked by the striking series of events which signalize his education and conversion, his conflict about indulgences, and then his general conflict and final breach with Rome. The whole series falls naturally into three main groups or stages sufficiently distinct, yet of dispro| portionate outline. The first may be said to extend to the memorable year of 1517, and summons before our minds a varied and graphic succession of pictures—the boy at Mansfield, the scholar at Eisenach, the student and monk at Erfurt, the pilgrim to Rome, the professor and preacher at Wittenberg. The second stage, with all its peculiar significance, is a very rapid one, lasting exactly a year, from October 1517, when he posted the ninety-five theses on the gates of the Church of All Saints, to October 1518, when he fled by night from Augsburg, after his unsuccessful interview with the Legate1 Cajetan. The third is

1 Thomas de Vio, Cardinal of Cajetan.

traced in its successive steps by the Leipzig Disputation, July 1519; the burning of the Papal Bull, December 1520; and, finally, the Diet of Worms, April 1521.

Between these several stages of the reformer's career there is an intimate natural connection a connection not merely accidental, but, so to speak, logical, in the manner. in which they follow one another. They arise, the later from the preceding, by a sure process of rational and spiritual expansion, issuing in order like the evolving steps of a great argument, or the unfolding scenes of a great drama, or like both together, - presenting a marvellous combination at once of logical consistency and dramatic effect. is of great importance, therefore, to understand the principle and ground of the whole, as portrayed in the struggles and experience of the first part of his life. The convent at Erfurt is the significant prologue to the whole drama.

It

Luther was born at Eisleben on the evening of the 10th of December, 1483. His parents were poor- his father, John Luther, being a miner; his mother, Margaret, a peasant. Humble in their circumstances, they were both of superior intelligence and character. The father was a diligent reader of whatever books came within his reach, and had his own somewhat immovable convictions as to life and duty; the mother was esteemed by all her honest co-matrons as peculiarly exemplary in her conduct — ut in exemplar virtutum, as Melancthon says. The story is, that they had gone to Eisleben to attend a fair, when their son was unexpectedly born on the eve of St. Martin. The very next day he was carried to the Church of St. Peter, and baptized by the name of the saint on whose day he had seen the light. Shortly after Luther's birth, his parents removed to Mansfield, where, by industry and perseverance, his father's worldly circumstances improved. He became

the owner of two small furnaces, and was elevated to some civic dignity in the town of the district. Here, in the "Latin school," the young Martin first began to expe rience the hardships of life. He appears to have been a somewhat unruly boy, or the school discipline must have been of a very savage description. He is said to have been flogged by his master fifteen times in one day; and while the scholastic rod thus weighed heavily upon him, the parental rod was not spared. Neither father nor mother nursed the boy in softness. He himself gives us rather an unpleasant glimpse of the domestic discipline. "He was whipped for a mere trifle," he says, till the blood came." But then, as a companion picture, serving to relieve by its bright tenderness the severity of the other, we are told of the father carrying the little Martin to school in his arms, and bringing him back in the same

manner.

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Having got all the schooling he could get at Mansfield, he went first to the school of the Franciscans at Magdeburg, and then nearer home to Eisenach. It was in the latter place, while singing in the streets for bread, according to a common practice of the German schoolboys, that his fair appearance and sweet voice attracted the notice of a good lady of the name of Cotta, who provided him henceforth, during his stay at school, with a comfortable home. Luther, in after years, recalled his school days with all the zest of his genial and affectionate nature, and used, in his familiar house-sermons, to exhort his hearers " o despise the poor boys who sing at their doors, and asked bread for the love of God." He would even illustrate the advantage of prayer by a humorous story drawn from his experience as a street-singer. "Importunity in prayer," he says, "will always bring down from heaven the blessing

"never

sought. How well do I remember singing once as a boy before the house of a rich man, and entreating very hard for some bread. At last the man of the house came running out, crying aloud, Where are you, you knaves?' We all took to our heels, for we thought we had angered him by our importunity, and he was going to beat us; but he called us back and gave us two loaves.”1

On his reaching his eighteenth year, it became a question to what profession he should devote himself. His father's ambition was excited by his talents, and the law seemed the most likely avenue by which these talents could carry him to distinction and emolument. He accordingly entered the university of Erfurt, then the most distinguished in Germany, with the view of preparing himself for the legal profession. There he studied philosophy in the writings of the schoolmen, and perfected his classical knowledge in the pages of Cicero and Virgil. Even thus early the barren subtleties of the scholastic philosophy rather repelled than interested him. They left, however, a permanent influence on his intellectual character. He took his degree of Doctor of Philosophy or Master of Arts in 1505, when he was twenty-two years of age, and the event, according to custom, was celebrated by a torchlight procession and great rejoicing.

But, before this event, he had begun an education of a far more real and profound character than any that the university could impart to him. One day, as he was turning over the books in the university library, he fell upon a copy of the Vulgate. He beheld with astonishment that there were more gospels and epistles than in the lectionaries. A new world opened upon him; he returned again

1 House-Postils Walch, xiii. 535; quoted by Worsley, Life of Luther, i. 41.