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century by what was called Conciliar Reform. The sincerity and ability of the leaders of the movement are unquestioned; but they had failed ignominiously, and the Papacy with all its abuses had never been so powerful ecclesiastically as when its superior diplomacy had vanquished the endeavour to hold it in tutelage to a council.

      The Christian Humanists had made their attempt—preaching a moral renovation and the application of the existing laws of the Church to punish ecclesiastical wrong-doers. Colet eloquently assured the Anglican Convocation that the Church possessed laws which, if only enforced, contained provisions ample enough to curb and master the ills which all felt to be rampant. Erasmus had held up to scorn the debased religious life of the times, and had denounced its Judaism and Paganism. Both were men of scholarship and genius; but they had never been able to move society to its depths, and awaken a new religious life, which was the one thing needful.

      History knows nothing of revivals of moral living apart from some new religious impulse. The motive power needed has always come through leaders who have had communion with the unseen. Humanism had supplied a superfluity of teachers; the times needed a prophet. They received one; a man of the people; bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh; one who had himself lived that popular religious life with all the thoroughness of a strong, earnest nature, who had sounded all its depths and tested its capacities, and gained in the end no relief for his burdened conscience; who had at last found his way into the presence of God, and who knew, by his own personal experience, that the living God was accessible to every Christian. He had won the freedom of a Christian man, and had reached through faith a joy in living far deeper than that which Humanism boasted. He became a leader of men, because his joyous faith made him a hero by delivering him from all fear of Church or of clergy—the fear which had weighed down the consciences of men for generations. Men could see what faith was when they looked at Luther.

      It must never be forgotten that to his contemporaries Luther was the embodiment of personal piety. All spoke of his sensitiveness to religious impressions of all kinds in his early years. While he was inside the convent, whether before or after he had found deliverance for his troubles of soul, his fellows regarded him as a model of piety. In later days, when he stood forth as a Reformer, he became such a power in the hearts of men of all sorts and ranks, because he was seen to be a thoroughly pious man. Albert Dürer may be taken as a type. In the great painter's diary of the journey he made with his wife and her maid Susanna to the Netherlands (1520)—a mere summary of the places he visited and the persons he saw, of what he paid for food and lodging and travel, of the prices he got for his pictures, and what he paid for his purchases, literary and artistic—he tells how he heard of Luther's condemnation at Worms, of the Reformer's disappearance, of his supposed murder by Popish emissaries (for so the report went through Germany), and the news compelled him to that pouring forth of prayers, of exclamations, of fervent appeals, and of bitter regrets, which fills three out of the whole forty-six pages. The Luther he almost worships is the “pious man,” the “follower of the Lord and of the true Christian faith,” the “man enlightened by the Holy Spirit,” the man who had been done to death by the Pope and the priests of his day, as the Son of God had been murdered by the priests of Jerusalem. The one thing which fills the great painter's mind is the personal religious life of the man Martin Luther.131

      Another source of Luther's power was that he had been led step by step, and that his countrymen could follow him deliberately without being startled by any too sudden changes. He was one of themselves; he took them into his confidence at every stage of his public career; they knew him thoroughly. He had been a monk, and that was natural for a youth of his exemplary piety. He had lived a model monastic life; his companions and his superiors were unwearied in commending him. He had spoken openly what almost all good men had been feeling privately about Indulgences in plain language which all could understand; and he had gradually taught himself and his countrymen, who were following his career breathlessly, that the man who trusted in God did not need to fear the censures of Pope or of the clergy. He emancipated not merely the learned and cultivated classes, but the common people, from the fear of the Church; and this was the one thing needful for a true reformation. So long as the people of Europe believed that the priesthood had some mysterious powers, no matter how vague or indefinite, over the spiritual and eternal welfare of men and women, freedom of conscience and a renovation of the public and private moral life was impossible. The spiritual world will always have its anxieties and terrors for every Christian soul, and the greatest achievement of Luther was that by teaching and, above all, by example, he showed the common man that he was in God's hands, and not dependent on the blessing or banning of a clerical caste. For Luther's doctrine of Justification by Faith, as he himself showed in his tract on the Liberty of a Christian Man (1520), was simply that there was nothing in the indefinite claim which the mediæval Church had always made. From the moment the common people, simple men and women, knew and felt this, they were freed from the mysterious dread of Church and priesthood; they could look the clergy fairly in the face, and could care little for their threats. It was because Luther had freed himself from this dread, because the people, who knew him to be a deeply pious man, saw that he was free from it, and therefore that they need be in no concern about it, that he became the great reformer and the popular leader in an age which was compelled to revise its thoughts about spiritual things.

      Hence it is that we may say without exaggeration that the Reformation was embodied in Martin Luther, that it lived in him as in no one else, and that its inner religious history may be best studied in the record of his spiritual experiences and in the growth of his religious convictions.

§ 2. Luther's Youth and Education.

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      Martin Luther was born in 1483 (Nov. 10th) at Eisleben, and spent his childhood in the small mining town of Mansfeld. His father, Hans Luther, had belonged to Möhra (Moortown), a small peasant township lying in the north-east corner of the Thuringian Wald, and his mother, Margarethe Ziegler, had come from a burgher family in Eisenach. It was a custom among these Thuringian peasants that only one son, and that usually the youngest, inherited the family house and the croft. The others were sent out one by one, furnished with a small store of money from the family strong-box, to make their way in the world. Hans Luther had determined to become a miner in the Mansfeld district, where the policy of the Counts of Mansfeld, of building and letting out on hire small smelting furnaces, enabled thrifty and skilled workmen to rise in the world. The father soon made his way. He leased one and then three of these furnaces. He won the respect of his neighbours, for he became, in 1491, one of the four members of the village council, and we are told that the Counts of Mansfeld held him in esteem.

      In the earlier years, when Luther was a child, the family life was one of grinding poverty, and Luther often recalled the hard struggles of his parents. He had often seen his mother carrying the wood for the family fire from the forest on her poor shoulders. The child grew up among the hard, grimy, coarse surroundings of the German working-class life, protected from much that was evil by the wise severity of his parents. He imbibed its simple political and ecclesiastical ideas. He learned that the Emperor was God's ruler on earth, who would protect poor people against the Turk, and that the Church was the “Pope's House,” in which the Bishop of Rome was the house-father. He was taught the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer. He sang such simple evangelical hymns as “Ein Kindelein so lobelich,” “Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist,” and “Crist ist erstanden.” He was a dreamy, contemplative child; and the unseen world was never out of his thoughts. He knew that some of the miners practised sorcery in dark corners below the earth. He feared an old woman who lived near; she was a witch, and the priest himself was afraid of her. He was taught about Hell and Purgatory and the Judgment to come. He shivered whenever he looked at the stained-glass window in the parish church and saw the frowning face of Jesus, who, seated on a rainbow and with a flaming sword in His hand, was coming to judge him, he knew not when. He saw the crowds of pilgrims who streamed past Mansfeld, carrying their crucifixes high, and chanting their pilgrim songs, going to the Bruno Quertfort chapel or to the old church at Wimmelberg. He saw paralytics and maimed folk carried along the roads, going to embrace the wooden cross at Kyffhaüser, and find a miraculous cure; and sick

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