CHAP. IV.

THE REFORMATION, AND THE LITERARY ACTIVITY OF ITS ERA.

WICKLIFFE'S 160 or 200 manuscripts had been hunted up and safely burned in England and in Bohemia, and their ashes scattered, like those of their author, to the four winds of heaven; but the spirit in those writings, being the spirit of truth, was indestructible, and was destined in due time to be embodied in a worthy successor.

About thirty years after printing was invented in Germany, and twelve years after it had been introduced into England, Martin Luther was born

"The solitary monk that shook the world."

Luther's early personal history is brief but interesting. Born in poverty at Eisleben, in Saxony, of honest, intelligent, strict parents; want and work were his inheritance. A mind at once strong and active manifested itself, even in childhood; and the father, poor labourer as he was, determined his son should be a scholar. He went to the school; but there learning was made as re

pulsive as possible by a brutal teacher. Still the boy persevered; obtained access ultimately to higher schools of learning, though obliged, as the custom was, to beg his bread with the poor scholars who in Germany used to sing and chant before the doors of the benevolent. His mind became deeply exercised on the subject of religion. He found nothing in the classics or the writings of the schoolmen to satisfy the craving of a soul that felt its need of a Saviour. At length he fell upon an old Latin Bible, and opening on the history of Samuel, the child dedicated by his pious mother to the Lord,-he read and read again and again. What light was falling on his darkened soul! Still his conversion did not take place then. The sudden death of his friend Alexis roused him to a deeper sense of his own condition as a sinner. "Was he himself prepared to die, if so suddenly smitten?" was a question conscience put with terrible distinctness. Soon after a terrific thunder-storm placed him in deadly peril. The lightning glared in upon Luther's soul, and kindled a fire of dread that nothing but the knowledge of a Saviour could appease. Fortunately he knew where to get this knowledge. The writings and preaching of the cloister were both vain and empty: he could not allay his appetite with the husks that the swine did eat: but in the neglected old book-the Latin version of the Holy Scrip

tures-he found his comfort, his cure, his guide. Henceforth he needed no other. Forsaking all secular studies, he entered a monastery, and devoted himself to God.

Think of an earnest spirit full of the divine knowledge he had gained,— a faithful preacher of Christ, hearing that Tetzel the monk, in order to raise money for the Pope, had come with indulgences from Rome. The very offer to sell people the permission to commit sins with impunity was an abomination too great to be borne. Tetzel was doubtless some such man as "The Pardoner" our Chaucer had described and deservedly derided 150 years before in England.

Luther did not laugh deridingly, as the poet had done; he denounced, in righteous indignation and solemn earnest, the unholy traffic. He preached against it. What he preached it behoved him to maintain, and to explain also, in writing. The matter spread rapidly. Priests were alarmed, people were convinced. Then followed examinations before councils, controversies among scholars and divines, and a commotion every where that had no precedent.

In England our king, Henry VIII., thought proper to enter the lists as a disputant, and wrote a thesis disproving- or attempting to do soLuther's doctrines; and the Pope, glad of a learned prince as his ally, gave him the title of

poor

"Defender of the Faith," which our monarchs yet bear. When kings become authors and enter on polemics, we are sure that the example will be followed. Hence learning, authorship, and the study of divinity, became fashionable; and as any thing is better than stagnation, good results followed. Whoever could read, whether men or women, entered into the subject: nothing else interested them. Henry imagined that, being a king, his treatise would be sufficient to crush a enthusiastic monk. He wrote, it was said, with the sceptre. He little knew the spirit of the Reformer, and was startled to find that Luther replied with a tone as high as his own, and arguments based only on the Scriptures. Many endeavoured to dissuade Luther from replying to Henry, the benignant Melancthon among others. But Luther said, "I wo'nt be gentle toward the king of England; I know it is useless to humble myself, to compromise, to entreat, and try peaceful measures." He showed that Henry supported his statements merely by decrees and doctrines of "As to me," he says, "I do not cease to cry, the Gospel, the Gospel-Christ, Christ."

men.

The king, incensed, exclaimed, such a heretic should perish,—he deserved to be burnt; and he sent an ambassador, with a letter to the Elector, and to the Dukes of Saxony, urging some extreme measures, saying, "What is this doctrine which

he calls evangelical other than the doctrine of Wickliffe? Now, most honoured uncles, I know how your ancestors have laboured to destroy it: they pursued it as a wild beast in Bohemia, and, driving it till it fell into a pit, they shut it in there, and barricaded it. You will not, I am sure, let it escape through your negligence."

Henry was about thirty-one when he wrote against Luther; meanwhile his passions were to give, ultimately, nearly as great an impetus to the Reformation-though from what different motives!-as the zeal and faithfulness of Luther.

Sir Thomas More entered also into the contest, and attacked Luther with a coarse ribaldry that is in our day utterly unreadable. That so elegant a scholar and so virtuous a man could have ever written in such a style, is to be explained only on the principle that the age was learned but not refined, vehement and disputatious rather than argumentative; and that a latitude of expression was indulged even by women-virtuous and highborn women that to modern readers is perfectly revolting. Yet Sir Thomas More was far beyond his age, and better than his creed, in reference to toleration. In his "Utopia a philosophical romance, in which he supposed the existence of a pure and perfect state- he certainly propounded the doctrine of freedom of opinion. He remarks: "At the first constitution of their