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back; and he is seen occupying a position of conflict both with the one and with the other. The Papacy on one side and his single figure on the other no longer fill up the scene; but other figures, some reactionary, and others of an impatient and violent character, crowd round, and he is beheld mingling in the crowd, rather than any more controlling and guiding it.

His controversy with Carlstadt and then with Erasmus; the peasant war in 1525, and his marriage in the same year; the conference at Marburg with Zwingle in 1529; and the Diet at Augsburg and residence at Coburg in the following year, mark the most important epochs in this latter part of his life.

In the Wartburg he tarried for about a year, attired and living in all outward appearance as a knight. He let his beard grow, wore a sword, and went by the name of Younker George. He rambled among the hills and hunted, notwithstanding that the ban of the Empire was out against him. In the hunting-field, however, he was still the theologian, and thought of Satan and the Pope, with their impious troops of bishops and divines, hunting simple souls as he saw the hare pursued by the dogs. "I saved one poor leveret alive," he says, " and tied it in the sleeve of my coat, and removed to a little distance; but the dogs scented out their victim, sprang up at it, broke its leg, and throttled it. It is thus that Satan and the Pope rage."* Although grieved to be absent from the scene of conflict, he rejoiced to hear that it still went on; and the old walls rang with his laughter as some satir* Briefe, vol. i. p. 44.

ical pamphlet of Hutten or Luke Cranach reached him in his retreat. "I sit idle and full of meat and drink the whole day," he writes to Spalatin; "I read the Bible in Greek and Hebrew. I am writing a sermon in German on the liberty of auricular confession; and I shall proceed with my comments upon the Psalms and with the Bible as soon as ever I have received what I want from Wittenberg.' "'* He began now his greatest literary achievement-the translation of the Scriptures into his native language. He had few books with him, but by the indefatigable zeal and interest with which he worked, he completed his version of the whole of the New Testament during the period of his confinement (nine months). Add to this three treatises -on Private Confession, on the Abuse of Private Masses, and on Monastic Vows-besides his commentaries and postils, and his accusation against himself of idleness will appear sufficiently strange.

In fact, sedentary habits and hard study began to tell upon his health. his health. He heard noises and seemed to see the devil in imaginary shapes as he sat at night in his room or as he lay in bed. A bag of hazel nuts which had been brought to him by two noble youths who waited upon him with his food, was violently agitated by satanic power, one night after he retired to rest. The nuts rolled and struck against one another with such force that they made the beams of the room to shake, and the bed on which he was lying to rattle. The same night, although the steps leading to his solitary apartment were barred fast with iron chains and an iron door, he was roused from his sleep by a treBriefe, vol. i. p. 6. WORSLEY'S Life, vol. i. p. 281.

mendous rumbling up and down the steps, which he describes as though threescore casks were rolling up and down. Nothing doubting that it was the devil at work trying to molest him, he got up and walked to the stair's head, and called aloud, "Is it thou? be it so then! I commend me to the Lord Christ, of whom it is written in the eighth Psalm, Thou hast put all things under His feet.'" On another and still more memorable occasion, as he pored keenly over the pages of his Greek Testament, the enemy assailed him in the shape of a moth buzzing round his ears and disturbing him in his sacred task. His spirit was kindled in him by the envious pertinacity of the evil one, and seizing his inkstand he hurled it at the intruder. A hole of singularly apocryphal dimensions in the wall of the chamber which he inhabited, is pointed out to the traveller who can spare a long summer's day to visit the Wartburg and enjoy himself on its breezy slopes, as the mark made by the reformer's inkstand in this great encounter.

It is well for us to smile at such incidents, but Luther lived all his days in the most real and pervading belief of a personal and visible devil haunting him in all his work, and never ceasing to disturb and hinder him. Once, in his monastery at Wittenberg, after he had celebrated matins and begun his studies, "the devil," he says, "came into his cell and thrice made a noise behind the stove, just as though he were dragging some wooden measure along the floor" (a mouse, probably, as one has heard the little creature in the quiet night, with no other noise in the room save the creaking of the ceaseless pen). "As I found he was going to begin

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again," he adds, "I gathered together my books and got into bed." "Another time in the night I heard him above my cell, walking in the cloister; but as I knew it was the devil, I paid no attention to him and went to sleep." There is almost an affectionate familiarity in some of his expressions-a gentleness of chiding and humorous badinage mingling with the irony and insult, which he thinks are among the best weapons for encountering his foe. "Early this morning when I awoke, the fiend came and began disputing with me. Thou art a great sinner,' said he. I replied, 'Canst thou not tell me something new, Satan?' " Again, "when the devil comes to me in the night, I say to him, 'Devil, I must now sleep; for it is the command and ordinance of God that we labour by day and sleep by night.' If he goes on with the old story, accusing me of sin, I say to him, to vex him, 'Holy Spirit, Satan, pray for me.' 'Go,' I say to him, 'Physician, cure thyself."" "The best way," he adds, "of getting rid of the devil, if you cannot do it with the words of Holy Scripture, is to rail at him and mock him; he cannot bear scorn." A very efficient plan also is "to turn your thoughts to some pleasant subject; to tell or hear jests or merry stories out of some facetious book. Music, too, is very good, for the devil is a saturnine spirit, and music is hateful to him, and drives him far away from it."

This sort of belief will appear superstitious in a different degree to different minds; but there are some expressions which the belief assumes not only to Luther, but to the more severe and sober mind of Calvin, so absolutely credulous and fanatical as to be

matters of mere amazement to us now. And yet, in truth, it is rather the form of credulity that is changed than the spirit of it that is extinguished, as many things in our own day, bearing upon this very subject, plainly witness.

As Luther pursued his literary labours in the Wartburg, stimulating by his writings the spirit which his noble acts had kindled, unpleasant news reached his ears as to the progress of the Reformation in its home in Wittenberg. Carlstadt and some others, uncontrolled by his master-spirit, began to carry out to its natural consequences the mere spirit of negation involved in the Reformation. This was to some extent inevitable. It was impossible for the popular mind to be aroused to a sense of the deceptions which had been practised upon it for centuries, without breaking out into extreme manifestations of hostility against the old Church system, in its forms as well as its doctrines. Iconoclasm was only a natural development of the reformed movement. It is the gift of but few minds -and never the gift of the mere popular and logical mind-to separate the form and the spirit, and to recognise that all reformation of any worth is in the latter and not in the former, which will by-and-by accommodate itself, without being violently cast down, to the improved and higher spirit. Carlstadt was merely a prominent expression of this popular and logical spirit. He was a species of German Puritan before that

* Luther's notions, for example, of devil-children, "called in Latin Supposititii, and by the Saxons Kilkropff."-MICHELET'S Life, p. 325 (Bohn's Translation); and Calvin's apparently firm belief of a sick person being raised from his bed and transported across the Rhone by satanic agency.-DYER's Life, p. 205.

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