antique world, in its highest and best, and the mind that was in Christ. The philosopher of ancient Rome, in his singularly beautiful treatise On Old Age,' proposes it as the aim of the good man to quit the world owing nothing either to gods or men. The Apostle of modern Rome, of whom his biographer tells us, 'many held for certain that he had attained perfection in every virtue,' and declared that his very face breathed sanctity,' protested in his last illness, Lord, if I recover, so far as I am concerned, I shall do more evil than ever, because I have promised so many times to change my life and have not kept my word-so that I despair of myself.' Cicero and St. Philip Neri judged by different standards. Saint had before him the perfect law of righteousness; and he knew well that, strive as he might, he should ever fall short of it. Luther would not acquiesce in that conclusion. Earnestly religious as he undoubtedly was, as undoubtedly he was grievously wanting in the virtue which is an essential note of the saintly character-humility. His failure to obtain perfection and peace of mind by works of righteousness, led him to fall foul of works of righteousness altogether. And so he gradually made his way to that doctrine of justification by faith alone which is a special feature of his theology.

6

The

Gradually,' we say. It is important to realize how gradually. We have his own express testimony that he did not fully apprehend this doctrine until 1519. But quite fifteen years before that, he had hit upon the notion of imputed righteousness, which is its chief foundation. If all good works are vain and valueless, how can sinful man be reconciled with a just God?-that was the question which very early presented itself to him. And the answer which ever more and more forcibly commended itself to his mind was, Merely by the imputation of the merits of Christ: an imputation, as it appeared to him, not qualified by any conditions which natural religion imposes, but absolute, and independent of the moral and spiritual state of the subject of it. This was his point of departure-though for years he was far from realizing it-from the old theology which taught that Christ came 'ex injustis justos facere'; that justification, which was another name for the state of salvation, meant not merely imputed but inherent righteousness: or, in other words, that justifying grace is a 'gratia gratum faciens.' The principle to which Luther was tending, as Mozley accurately puts it, was 'that the goodness of the person had nothing whatever to do with his being accounted good by God'; that the only thing necessary for the imputation of Christ's righteousness was what he called faith: by which he meant—

to

to quote Mozley further-'the pure abstract faculty of confidence whereby the mind assures itself of something of which it wants to be assured.' This doctrine he came ever more and more to consider the very kernel of Christianity.

We have been led to dwell thus much upon this matter, because rightly to apprehend it is absolutely necessary for understanding Luther's career. And at the risk of incurring the charge of damnable iteration,' we must again warn our readers against the mistake, very commonly made both by his admirers and opponents, of supposing that the peculiar dogma which we have just sketched, sprang from his head fully developed and equipped, like Pallas from the head of Zeus. Luther, although a sharp disputant, was not a consecutive and logical thinker, and was for long years unconscious that he was deviating from the old theological paths, which, it must be remembered, had not then been fenced in by the Tridentine decrees. To borrow some admirable words from Dr. Beard, 'It was on the anvil of controversy that Luther's doctrines were beaten out. For years his view of justification was more or less in a fluid condition. He is sure that we are justified by faith in Christ. He is sure that in the work of salvation God is everything, man nothing. But he is far from having worked out the idea of "faith only" with the precision which it afterwards assumed with him.'

How he came to work it out, we shall see by and by. Let us here resume the thread of his history. In 1508—the year after he was ordained priest-he quitted his convent to proceed to the University of Wittenberg, where the place of Professor of Philosophy had been given him by the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, upon the recommendation of Staupitz. We are told that in his professorial capacity he read lectures on Aristotle's 'Dialectics' and 'Physics.' But doubtless his scriptural and theological studies chiefly occupied his thoughts. In 1509 he received the appointment of Court Preacher at Wittenberg. He accepted it with reluctance-the office appeared to him so full of responsibility and danger. He soon became a power in the pulpit. His voice, we are told, was fine, sonorous, clear, striking. And the matter of his discourses seems to have attracted his hearers no less than his elocution. He departed wholly from the established type of sermon, founding himself not upon the Scholastics, but upon the Bible, and especially upon the Epistles attributed to St. Paul. We know little of the details of his life during the first three years that he spent at Wittenberg. In 1512 he was sent to Rome on business of his Order-' propter monachorum controversias,'

controversias,' Melanchthon says, with contemptuous vagueness. He stayed there four weeks. We find in his 'Table Talk' a considerable number of scattered traces of the impressions produced upon him by this expedition. But, as Dr. Beard very judiciously remarks, 'It is clearly necessary to discriminate between his mood at the time and the light which afterexperience threw upon his recollections. . . . It is quite a mistake to suppose that the seed of Protestant rebellion, which undoubtedly lay hid in his heart, had yet begun to germinate.' 'Hail, holy Rome!' were the words which burst from his lips when the towers and domes of the city fell upon his sight; and he speaks - perhaps not very accurately-of having demeaned himself during the period of his stay there, 'like a mad saint.' We do not know for certain whether he was successful in his mission. At all events he returned to Wittenberg with no loss of reputation. In 1512 he took the degree of Doctor of Divinity, against his will, in obedience to the counsels of Staupitz, the Elector Frederick paying the obligatory fees. In 1515 he became District Visitor of his Order for Meissen and Thuringen, eleven convents being under his jurisdiction. His life at this time seems to have been particularly full. In 1516 he writes: 'I have need of almost two secretaries. All day long I do little but write letters. Seldom have I sufficient time to say my hours and to celebrate, to say nothing of my private temptations by the world, the flesh, and the devil.'

During the years 1512 to 1517 Luther's characteristic opinions were slowly maturing. This is sufficiently proved by his Lectures on the Psalms, which, according to Melanchthon, 'radiated a new light of Christian doctrine.' He began them in 1513, and was engaged upon them far into the year 1516. Kolde remarks, 'The opposition between the Law and the Gospel, between sin and grace, which he had learnt from his study of the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians, appears here as the very corner-stone (Angelpunkte) of his theological thought. He is firmly convinced that faith alone justifies. But he has no sort of presentiment that in so holding he is, in any way, opposed to the teaching of the traditional theology.' No doubt this was so. The scholastic writers from whom Luther turned aside, during these eventful years of his spiritual and intellectual development, were, after all, mere fallible men, whose systems might have their day and cease to be, like the systems of earlier teachers. He went back, as he supposed, from Aquinas to Augustine, from the Sentences to the Scriptures, with no thought of disloyalty to the Church. We should here note, that in

1516 he came upon a portion-about a fourth part of the Theologia Germanica,' which made a deep impression upon his mind. It appeared to him entirely consonant with his own theology. In truth there is little, we might almost say nothing, of dogmatic divinity in the 'Deutsche Theologie.' Its mysticism harmonizes equally well with the Lutheran view of justification, and with that subsequently laid down by the Council of Trent. But the work appealed powerfully to Luther's strongly subjective nature, and tended largely to develope his individualistic cast of thought. Notable is it also how during these years he grows in self-confidence. Strength is, indeed, from first to last, a distinguishing note of his character: the strength of convictions, which, whether right or wrong, dominated his whole being; the strength of narrow vision and of indomitable will. But now, for the first time, he seems to realize how strong he is, and begins to display that üßpis, as the Greeks called it, that luxuriance of masterfulness, which often arises from such consciousness. At the period of which we are writing, he practically dominated Wittenberg. In a letter written early in 1517 he says, 'Our teaching and St. Augustine's, by God's help, go on prosperously and reign in the University. Aristotle gradually descends to eternal ruin. The lectures on the Sentences are wonderfully disdained. Only teachers of the new biblical theology can hope for hearers.'

Such was Luther's position at Wittenberg in 1517. 'All,' Dr. Beard observes, ' seemed to open to him a brilliant future in the service of the Church. He held high office in his Order, and might expect still higher. He enjoyed the favour of his prince. His university hung upon his words. No consciousness of discord with the Church infused uncertainty into his utterance.' All this was changed by Tetzel's preaching of the indulgence; a matter which might have seemed, which did seem, to careless observers, slight enough, but which was the immediate occasion of the greatest ecclesiastical revolution in the Christian era.

For it appears to us clear as day that Tetzel's preaching was the direct cause of Luther's revolt, and of all that came of it. Janssen, in his very learned work, after devoting many pages to proving-what no well-read student can doubt that from the first Luther was strongly attracted towards that doctrine of justification which he afterwards styled The Gospel,' proceeds to urge that it was not specially the abuses attending the preaching of Leo X.'s pardon which brought Luther into conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities; that it was rather the doctrine itself upon which indulgences rest. This view appears to

us

us quite untenable. The abuses Janssen, of course, does not deny, although he dismisses them with the briefest reference. It is indeed impossible even for the most thoroughgoing partisan -and that description does not fit Janssen-to deny them. They are 'gross as a mountain, open, palpable.' And there is no reason whatever for doubting the truth of the statement that Luther's attention was called to Tetzel's performances by penitents of his own, who advanced against his authority in the confessional, documents which they had obtained from that pardoner. He thought it his duty to utter a warning note to his congregation. There is extant a sermon of his, preached on the Tenth Sunday after Trinity, 1516, containing his earliest utterances on the subject that have come down to us. In this discourse he does not call in question the theological position

-we shall speak of it presently-upon which indulgences rest. But he bewails their prostitution to the greed of gain by subcommissaries, who, instead of declaring the conditions upon which alone they avail, recommend them to the multitude as all-sufficient in themselves for eternal salvation. Then he goes on to express a number of doubts and difficulties in which the whole subject is involved, and to profess his own inability to solve them. The practical conclusion which he draws is a warning against too great confidence in these pardons, against false security in them. It is quite clear that Luther began by denouncing the abuses of indulgences, although he ended, as we all know, by rejecting them altogether.

a

We suppose the conception of an indulgence popular in this country, is pretty much that set forth, with inimitable irony, by Swift in his 'Tale of a Tub':—

'Whenever it happened, that any rogue of Newgate was condemned to be hanged, Peter would offer him a pardon for a certain sum of money, which when the poor caitiff had made all shifts to scrape up, and send, his lordship would return a piece of paper in this form.

To all mayors, sheriffs, jailors, constables, bailiffs, hangmen, &c. Whereas we are informed that A. B. remains in the hands of you, or some of you, under the sentence of death, We will and command you, upon sight hereof, to let the said prisoner depart to his own habitation, whether he stands condemned for murder, sodomy, rape, sacrilege, incest, treason, blasphemy, &c.; for which this shall be your sufficient warrant : and if you fail hereof, God damn you and yours to all eternity. And so we bid you heartily farewell.

Your most humble

'man's man,

Emperor PETER.

The wretches, trusting to this, lost their lives and money too.'

Assuredly,