In France we have the story of a long and bitter conflict, and a doubtful victory of despotism at the end. First, the gradual joyous spread of a tenderer, deeper, freer faith, through hymns and popular chants; then a long, silent, peaceable endurance, for forty years, of the tyranny that strove to exterminate it; then the sudden blazing out and long rancor of religious wars, with party rage and treachery, battle and conspiracy, the outlawing of whole populations, and the wholesale series of assassinations which we call the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Peace is won at length, as a refuge from exhaustion and fear, an armed and treacherous peace, to be followed yet again by the cruelties of licensed and victorious despotism; till the religious liberties of France seem crushed, persecution is regularly bought and paid for by the clergy with grants of money to the king's hungry exchequer, free thought can only show itself as free-thinking, mock pietism breeds a scepticism licentious and undevout, and the fatal path is entered which leads at last to the public denial of Christ, the worship of Reason, the enthroning of the Mob, and the Reign of Terror.

And again, this great revolution of thought has its humbler, tenderer side. It is among the numerous populations of the industrious poor, in Lower Germany and along the Lower Rhine, that the new faith finds its warmest disciples. These humble, poor, toiling men, these patient, suffering women, asked for nothing more than the joy to feel the love of God dwelling in them, as the lightening and solace of their daily toil, a privilege they sought through such bitter hostility and persecution oftentimes, that mothers there were who were burnt to death for teaching their child the Lord's Prayer in its mother-tongue, and pious women who did not cease to sing their hymn of patient trust, as they lay in the pit that was to be their living grave. It was in the Christian hymns that rose amidst the hum of daily toil, that kept time to the darting of the shuttle and the pulses of the loom, that cheered the poor lace-weaver's busy task, that swelled from the broad plain where congregations gathered in the open air to their Sunday worship, or floated in the manly tones of the wayfaring laborer, as he went from city to city, perhaps at hazard of

his life, bearing with him those precious versions of the Psalms set to music which the press at Geneva scattered through all Christendom, - it was in these Christian hymns and sacred melodies that the vital religion of the time became blended with all affections and tasks of home, and sanctified the daily lives of thousands. It was through that sacred channel of humble suffering and toil and tears that the forms of modern piety were wrought out, and the tone was given to the truest faith of the modern world.

In this bird's-eye view of the event we call the Reformation, both its political effects and its moral characteristics, we see how vast, vital, radical, was the change it brought upon Western Europe. No nation or government-hardly a hamlet or lonely cottage — that was not touched by its all-penetrating presence. France and Spain, that seem, if not quite to have kept it from their borders, at least to have met and subdued it there, were cut as deep to the heart as any by its two-edged sword. Italy alone, the centre and seat of Catholic dominion, seems impregnable to the reform heralded so eloquently by Savonarola thirty years before. Blind to the new visions of truth, deaf to the new words of faith, it kept on its career of Art that from Christian had turned completely Pagan, and of elegant literature from which the masculine strength was already gone. Meanwhile, its spiritual lords profited warily by the lessons they had learned already, and by those the great revolt in the North was teaching. A new champion was found to defend the ancient faith,- Loyola against Luther; and a new empire of souls was founded on the fervid fanaticism, the subtle policy, the consummate culture, and the disciplined skill of the great Order that now marshalled itself under the name of Jesus. Crippled in its polity abroad, and beset with a war of creeds, the Roman Church gathers a new Council at Trent, on its menaced frontier, to utter its final word on controverted forms of faith, and opposes to rival creeds its own more authoritative and imposing system. The era of Sixtus V. shows with what skill and success the Papacy has done its work at home. But Italy was also the field of battle fiercely fought, the prize of victory in the great wars of ambition, a sufferer where she had not force to be a party.

The victory of Pavia was in the same year with the outbreak of the Peasants' War, and in the year following Rome itself was entered by the troops of Charles, and the holy places were polluted by the ravage of new hordes of Northern barbarism. The very position of Italy, helpless and neutral in the vortex of such a strife, itself shows the appalling magnitude of the contest which set her great spiritual empire at stake; just as the utter worldly scepticism of the Holy See at the very crisis of its fate, by contrast shows most vividly the intense conviction that animated its assailants, and made its defeat seem a thing for human hands to undertake.

It is impossible, in ever so brief a survey of the period we have indicated, not to linger a little upon the central figure which Providence set so plainly in the van of the fight. Any great event, to be looked at rightly, should be seen not only in its incidents and its results, but as reflected in the life and character of a man. The event embodies a spiritual force. It has grown from one man's personal conviction; it has taken the stamp of his intellect and will; it has become identified with his personal character and fortunes; and it is so, in its dramatic character and historic unity, that it chiefly interests and instructs us. No philosophy of history is so true as the logic of the soul. Eminently the Reformation is an event so to be studied and judged. Eminently its representative man is also a man of the age and a man of the people. With very good reason, then, our popular histories of the period have been mostly biographies of Martin Luther. Our desire not to trespass on ground already so familiar - and still more, our hope one of these days to present more fully some of the recent results of study respecting the career of the great Reformer -will limit what we have to say at present to a few words, indicating the position which he held towards some of the men and events of his own time.

Everybody knows the story so vividly outlined in even the most meagre sketch of that first uprising of the free intellect in rebellion against spiritual usurpation and tyranny. The cheery, fair-complexioned boy, nursed on the breast of poverty, earning his nightly penny in the street-chorus of Christian hymns; the youth, startled by his companion's sudden death

to "a horrible dread of the last day, craving with his very marrow that he might be safe"; the recluse student, coming upon his copy of the Holy Scriptures as a new and infinitely precious treasure; the pious monk, already looked on as the likely leader of a reform in Christian morals, "drunk and drowned in the doctrine of the Pope," on that journey to Rome which he "would not have missed for a thousand florins," climbing the Santa Scala painfully on his knees among the retinue of pilgrims, and struck as with a flash by these words of Paul, The just shall live by faith,-the key, ever after, of his religious life; the "young doctor, fresh from the forge, glowing and cheerful in the Holy Ghost," withstanding to his face the impudent monk Tetzel, and raising a storm of revolutionary passion with his ninety-five Theses on Indulgences; the brave reformer, resolute in his defiance of the enthroned Lie that tyrannized over the soul of Christendom, yet wondering if "the song might not get pitched too high for his voice," and appealing to the Pope himself so coaxingly, as to "a lamb in the midst of wolves, Daniel in the lion's den, or Ezekiel among the scorpions"; the condemned and sentenced heretic, standing unbaffled before the powers of the Empire and the Church at Worms, and uttering his defence in those electric words, the assertion for all time of the liberty of the Christian conscience; the prisoner in the "Patmos" of Wartburg, fighting face to face with Satan, scattering with unseen hand from those friendly towers the words brave and timely that make his name a power among the people, and carrying on the great work that identifies his strong homely idiom with the language of the people's Bible; these pictures have been stamped indelibly on the history of the time, and they bring fresh to our thought nearly all that is worth remembering in the first few years of the great revolutionary era. Results had already

*The close of his defence is as follows: "Since you seek a plain answer, I will give it without horns or teeth, thus: - unless I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture or evident reason, for I trust neither Pope nor Council, since it is clear they have often erred and contradicted themselves,—I am bound by the Scriptures by me adduced; my conscience is captive to the words of God; I cannot retract, and I will not, anything, for against conscience it is neither safe nor sound to act. Here stund 1: 1 cannot otherwise: God help me. Amen." In these last words he forsakes the formal Latin of his defence, and speaks out in his own sturdy Saxon speech.

come about, far beyond anything he had dreamed at first; and a burden of public expectation and fame was already saddled upon him, from which with all his heart and conscience he had shrunk. The Reformation now found a secure foothold in the freer thought and better conscience of the nation. The stanch Saxon independence was rallied to resist the demands of Rome, and a Protestant league soon made the new faith a formidable power in the Empire.

The twenty-five years that elapsed between Luther's release from the sheltering towers of Wartburg and his death, were years of incessant struggle, in which he stands always in the front rank, to receive the scars and bruises of the fight. His words are "half-battles." Papist, Dissenter, Antinomian, Turk, come in for nearly equal shares of that implacable storm of speech. "They say," he writes, "that these books of mine are too keen and cutting. They are right: I never meant them to be soft and gentle. My only regret is that they cut no deeper." Erasmus shrinks from the stern warfare his satire has done its share in kindling; thinks, along with the conservatists and compromisers of all times, that "more progress is to be made by moderation," and "would rather be torn limb from limb than foment discord." "When Erasmus preaches," shouts Luther, "it rings false, like a cracked pot. He has attacked the Pope, and is now drawing his head out of the noose." "When I recover," he says again, "with God's help I will write against him, and kill him. As yet I have hesitated. I killed Münzer, and his death is a load round my neck. But I killed him because he sought to kill my Christ." "I care not about being accused of violence. It shall be my glory and honor henceforth to have it said how I rage and storm against the Papists. I will leave them no rest from my curses till I sink into my grave. I would have them buried to the sound of my thunders and lightnings. .. Yet I keep

towards all the world a kind and loving heart. Often in the night, when unable to sleep, I ponder in my bed painfully and anxiously how they may yet be won to repent before a fearful judgment overtakes them. But it seems that it must not be." "Christianity is open and honest. It sees things as they are, and proclaims them as they are."