ties. tain their favour, or to appease their hostility, by assailing us with undeserved reproaches and sarcasms. It is obvious that God has not given you the energy or the courage requisite for an open and fearless attack on these mon. sters, nor am I of a temper to exact from you what is beyond your strength."-"I have re gifts of God which is in you. None can deny that you have promoted the cause of literature, thus opening the way to the right understanding of the Scriptures; or that the endowment which you have thus received from God is magnificent and worthy of all admiration. Here is a just cause for gratitude. I have never desired that you should quit your cautious and measured course to enter our camp. Great are the services you render by your genius and eloquence; and as your heart fails you, it is best that you should serve God with such powers as He has given you. My only apprehension is, lest you should permit yourself to be dragged by our enemies to publish an attack upon our doctrines, for then I should be compelled to resist you to the face.""Things have now reached a point at which we should feel no anxiety for our cause, even though Erasmus himself should direct all his abilities against us. It is no wonder that our party should be impatient of your attacks. Human weakness is alarmed and oppressed by the weight of the name of Erasmus. Once to be lashed by Erasmus is a far different thing from being exposed to the assaults of all the papists put together."-"I have written all this in proof of my candour, and because I desire that God may impart to you a spirit worthy of your name. If that spirit be withheld, at least let me implore you to remain a mere spectator of our tragedy. Do not join your forces to our enemies. Abstain from writing against me, and I will write nothing against you." should never be separated from Holbein's | hinder the cause which you maintain against etchings, without which the reader may now our common enemies the papists. For the and then smile, but hardly laugh. The "Cice- same reason, it gives me no displeasure that, ronians" is one of those elaborate pleasantries in many of your works, you have sought to ob which give pleasure only to the laborious. For neither as a wit nor as a theologian, nor perhaps even as a critic, does Erasmus rank among master intellects; and in the other departments of literature no one has ventured to claim for him a very elevated station. His real glory is to have opened at once new channels of popular and of abstruse knowledge-spected your infirmity, and that measure of the to have guided the few, while he instructed the many-to have lived and written for noble ends-to have been surpassed by none in the compass of his learning, or the collective value of his works-and to have prepared the way for a mighty revolution, which it required moral qualities far loftier than his to accomplish. For the soul of this great man did not pirtake of the energy of his intellectual faculHe repeatedly confesses that he had none of the spirit of a martyr; and the acknowledgment is made in the tone of sarcasm, rather than in that of regret. He belonged to that class of actors on the scene of life, who have always appeared as the harbingers of great social changes-men gifted with the power to discern, and the hardihood to proclaim, truths of which they want the courage to encounter the infallible results; who outrun their generation in thought, but lag behind it in action; players at the sport of reform so long as reform itself appears at an indefinite distance; more ostentatious of their mental superiority, than anxious for the well-being of mankind; dreaming that the dark page of his tory may hereafter become a fairy tale, in which enchantment will bring to pass a glorious catastrophe, unbought by intervening strife, and agony, and suffering; and therefore overwhelmed with alarm when the edifice begins to totter, of which their own hands have sapped the foundation. He was a reformer until the Reformation became a fearful reality; a jester at the bulwarks of the papacy until they began to give way; a propagator of the Scriptures, until men betook themselves to the study and the application of them; depreciating the mere outward forms of religion, until they had come to be estimated at their real value; in short, a learned, ingenious, benevolent, amiable, timid, irresolute man, who, bearing the responsibility, resigned to others the glory of rescuing the human mind from the bondage of a thousand years. The distance between his career and that of Luther was, therefore, continually enlarging, until they at length moved in opposite directions, and met each other with mutual animosity. The reformer foresaw and deprecated this collision; and Bossuet has condemned as servile the celebrated letter in which Luther endeavoured to avert the impending contest. In common with many of his censures of the great father of the protestant churches, this is evidently the result of prejudice. It was conceived with tenderness, and expressed with becoming dignity. "I do not," he says, "reproach you in your estrangements from us, fearing lest I should This lofty tone grated on the fastidious ear of the monarch of literature. He watched his opportunity, and inflicted a terrible revenge. To have attacked the doctrines of the Reforma tion would have been to hazard an unanswer able charge of inconsistency. But Luther, in exploring his path, had lost his way in the labyrinth of the question of free will; and had published opinions which were nothing short of the avowal of absolute fatalism. In a treatise De Libero Arbitrio, Erasmus made a brilliant charge on this exposed part of his adversary's position: exhausting all the resources of his sagacity, wit, and learning, to lower the theological character of the founder of the Lutheran Church. The reformer staggered beneath this blow. For metaphysical debate he was ill prepared-to the learning of his antagonist he had no pretension-and to his wit could oppose nothing but indignant vehemence. His answer, De Servo Arbitrio, has been confessed by his most ardent admirers, to have been but a feeble defence to his formidable enemy. The temper in which he conducted the dispute may be judged from the following To the last, the sense of this defeat would appear to have clung to Luther. Accustomed to triumph in theological debate, he had been overthrown in the presence of abashed friends and exulting enemies; and the record of his familiar conversation bears deep traces of his keen remembrance of this humiliation. Many of the contumelious words ascribed to him on this subject, if they really fell from his lips, were probably some of those careless expressions in which most men indulge in the confidence of private life; and which, when quoted with the utmost literal exactness, assume, in books published for the perusal of the world at large, a new meaning and an undesigned emphasis. But there is little difficulty in receiving as authentic the words he is said to have pronounced when gazing at the picture of Erasmus-that it was, like himself, full of craft and malice; a comment on the countenance of that illustrious scholar, as depicted by Holbien, from which it is impossible altogether to dissent. example:-"Erasmus, that king of amphibo- | who has not received adult baptism is not a logy, reposes calmly on his amphibological Christian, he who is not a Christian is a pagan; throne, cheats us with his ambiguous language, and it is the duty of the faithful to oppose the and claps his hands when he finds us entangled enemies of truth by all arms, spiritual or secuamongst his insidious tropes, like beasts of lar, within their reach. Strong in this reasonchase fallen into the toils. Then seizing the ing, and stronger still in numbers and in zeal, occasion for his rhetoric, he springs on his the Anabaptists declared open war, expelled captive with loud cries, tearing, scourging, the Catholics and Lutherans from the city, tormenting, and devoting him to the infernals, pillaged the churches and convents, and because, as it pleases him to say, his words adopted as their watchword the exhortation to have been understood in a calumnious, scandal- repent, with which the Baptist of old had adons and Satanic sense, though it was his own dressed the multitudes who surrounded him in design that they should be so taken. See him the wilderness of Judea. If the insurgents did come on creeping like a viper." &c., &c. no works meet for repentance, they did many to be bitterly repented of. Their success was accompanied by cruelty, and followed by still fouler crimes. John de Mattheison, their chief prophet, established a community of goods, and committed to the flames every book except the Bible. John of Leyden, his successor, was a journeyman tailor, and, though at once a rogue and a fanatic, was not without some qualities which might have adorned a better cause. He conducted the defence of the city against the bishop with as much skill and gallantry as if his accustomed seat had been, not the shopboard, but the saddle of a belted knight. In the Scriptures, which his predecessor had exempted from the general conflagration, he found a sanction for the plurality of wives, and proofs that the sceptre of David had passed into his own hands. Twelve princes, representing the heads of the tribes of Israel, received from him authority to ascend the thrones of Europe; and apostles were sent to the great cities of Germany to propagate the new faith, and to attest the miracles of which they had been the witnesses. The doctrine they taught was less abstruse than might have been anticipated. It consisted in these propositions:-There have been four prophets: the true are King David and John of Leyden; the false are the pope and Martin Luther: but Luther is worse than the pope. While this pithy creed was inculcated without the walls, the most frightful debaucheries, and a strange burlesque on royalty, went on within. The king paraded the city, attended by his queen, and followed by a long train of led horses caparisoned in gold brocade, a drawn sword being borne at his left hand, and a crown and Bible at his right. Seated on a throne in the public square, he received petitions from supplicants pros trate on the earth before him. Then followed impious parodies on the most sacred offices of the Christian worship, and scenes of profligacy which may not be described. To these, ere long, succeeded horrors which rendered the New Jerusalem no inapt antitype of the old. The conquered king expiated his crimes on the scaffold, enduring protracted and inhuman torments with a firmness which redeems his character from the abhorrence to which it had so many indisputable titles. Yet the story is not without interest. The rapidity with which the contagion of such stupid extravagances was propagated, and the apparent genuineness of the belief which a man of much fortitude and some acuteness at length yielded to the coinage of his own brain, however frequent, are still curious phenomena in the science of The contests with Erasmus and the sacramentarians had taken place in that debatable land which religion and philosophy each claims for her own. But Luther was now to oppose a revolt not merely against philosophy and religion, but against decency and common sense. Equally astounding and scandalous were the antics which the minds of men performed when, exempt from the control of their ancient prepossessions, they had not as yet been brought into subjection to any other. Throughout the north of Germany and the Netherlands, there were found many converts to the belief, that a divorce might be effected between the virtues which the gospel exacts, and those new relations between man and the Author of his being, which it at once creates and reveals; that, in short, it was possible to be at the same time a Christian and a knave. The connexion between this sottish delirium, and the rejection of infant baptism, was an accident, or at most a caprice; and the name of Anabaptist, afterwards borne by so many wise and good men, is unfortunately, though indelibly associated with the crazy rabble who first assumed or received it at Munster. Herman Shaprada, and after him Rothmann, were the first who instructed the inhabitants of that city in these ill-omened novelties; and they quickly gained the authority which any bold and unscrupulous guide may command in times when hereditary creeds have been abandoned by those who want the capacity or the knowledge to shape out new opinions for themselves. He mental nosology. From his answers to the | favour from the objects of the Divine displeainterrogatories which attended his trial, it may sure. We believe this epitome of the Lutherbe inferred that he was perfectly sane. His an doctrine to be inaccurate, and, but for the mind had been bewildered, partly by a de- greatness of the names by which it is sancpraved imagination and ungoverned appetites, tioned, we should have ventured to add, superand partly by his encounter with questions too ficial. In hazarding a different translation of large for his capacity, and with detached sen- Luther's meaning into the language of the tences from Holy Writ, of which he perceived world we live in, we do but oppose one asserneither the obvious sense nor the more sublime tion to another, leaving the whole weight of intimations. The memory of this guilty, pre- authority on the unfavourable side. The apsumptuous and unhappy man, is rescued from peal ultimately lies to those whose studies oblivion by the audacity of his enterprise, and have rendered them familiar with the restill more by the influence it exerted in arrest- former's writings, and especially with his ing the progress of the Reformation. "Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians," which he was wont affectionately to call his Catherine de Bora. It must be conceded that they abound in expressions which, detached from the mass, would more than justify the censure of the historian of the "Literature of the Middle Ages." But no writer would be less fairly judged than Luther by isolated passages. Too impetuous to pause for exact discrimination, too long entangled in scholastic learning to have ever entirely recovered the natural relish for plain common sense, and compelled habitually to move in that turbid polemical region which pure and unrefracted light never visits, Luther, it must be confessed, is intelligible only to the impartial and laborious, and might also be supposed to have courted the reproaches which he least deserves. Stripped of the technicalities of divinity and of the schools, his Articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiæ may, perhaps, with no material error be thus explained. The reproach, however unmerited, fell heavily on Luther. It is the common fate of all who dare to become leaders in the war against abuses, whether in religious or political society, to be confounded with the baser sort of innovators, who at once hate their persons, and exaggerate and caricature the principles on which they have acted. For this penalty of rendering eminent services to the world every wise man is prepared, and every brave man endures it firmly, in the belief that a day is coming when his fame will be no longer oppressed by this unworthy association. Luther's faith in the ultimate deliverance of his good name from the obloquy cast on it by the madness of the Anabaptists, has but imperfectly been justified by the event. Long after his name belonged to the brightest page of human history, it found in Bossuet an antagonist as inveterate as Tetzel, more learned than Cajetan, and surpassing Erasmus himself in eloquence and ingenuity. Later still has arisen, in the person of Mr. Hallam, a censor, whose religious opinions, unquestionable integrity, boundless knowledge, and admirable genius, give a fearful weight to his unfavourable judgment of the Father of the Reformation. Neither of these great writers, indeed, countenance the vulgar calumny which would identify the principles of Martin Luther with those of John of Leyden, although both of them arraign him in nearly the same terms, as having adopted and taught the antinomian doctrines, of which the Anabaptists exhibited the practical results. The course we are shaping having brought us within reach of the whirlpools of this interminable controversy, roaring in endless circles over a dark and bottomless abyss, we cannot altogether yield to that natural impulse which would pass them by in cautious silence and with averted eyes. The Labarum of Luther was a banner inscribed with the legend "Justification by Faith"-the compendium, the essence, the Alpha and the Omega of his distinctive creed. Of the many, received or possible interpretations of this enigmatical symbol, that which Bossuet and Mr. Hallam regard as most accordant with the views of the great standard-bearer himself, may be stated in the following terms:-If a man be firmly assured that his sins have been remitted by God, in the exercise of a mercy gratuitous and unmerited as it respects the offender himself, but accorded as the merited reward of the great propitiation, that man stands within the line which, even in this life, separates the objects of the Divine Define the word "conviction" as a deliberate assent to the truth of any statement, and the word "persuasion" as the habitual reference to any such truth (real or supposed) as a rule of conduct; and it follows, that we are persuaded of many things of which we are not convinced: which is credulity or superstition. Thus, Cicero was persuaded of the sauetity of the mysteries which he celebrated as one of the College of Augurs. But the author of the Treatise De Natura Deorum had certainly no corresponding convictions. We are convinced of much of which we are not persuaded, which, in theological language, is a "dead faith." The Marquis of Worcester deliberately assented to the truth, that the expansive force of steam could be applied to propel a vessel through the water; but wanting the necessary "persuasion," he left to others the praise of the discovery. Again, there are many propositions of which we are at once convinced and persuaded, and this in the Lutheran style is a "living or saving faith." In this sense Columbus believed the true configuration of the earth, and launched his caravels to make known the two hemispheres to each other. It is by the aid of successful experiment engendering confidence; of habit producing facility; and of earnest thoughts quickening the imagination and kindling desire, that our opinions thus ripen into motives, and our theoretical convictions into active persuasion. It is, therefore, nothing else than a contradiction in terms to speak of Christian faith separable from moral virtue! The practical results of that as of any other motive, will vary directly as the intensity of the impulse, and inversely as the number and force of the impediments; but a motive which produces no motion, is the same thing as an attraction which does not draw, or as a propensity which does not incline. Far different as was the style in which Luther enounced his doctrine, the careful study of his writings will, we think, convince any dispassionate man that such was his real meaning. The faith of which he wrote was not a mere opinion, or a mere emotion. It was a mental energy, of slow but stately growth, of which an intellectual assent was the basis; high and holy tendencies the lofty superstructure; and a virtuous life the inevitable use and destination. In his own emphatic words:-"We do not say the sun ought to shine, a good tree ought to produce good fruit, seven and three ought to make ten. The sun shines by its own proper nature, without being bidden to do so; in the same manner the good tree yields its good fruit; seven and three have made ten from everlasting-it is needless to require them to do so hereafter." If any credit is due to his great antagonist, Luther's doctrine of "Justification" is not entitled to the praise or censure of novelty. Bossuet resents this claim as injurious to the Church of Rome, and as founded on an extravagant misrepresentation of her real doctrines. To ascribe to the great and wise men of whom she justly boasts, or indeed to attribute to any one of sound mind, the dogma or the dream which would deliberately transfer the ideas of the market to the relations between man and his Creator, is nothing better than an ignorant and uncharitable bigotry. To maintain that, till Luther dispelled the illusion, the Christian world regarded the good actions of this life as investing even him who performs them best, with a right to demand from his Maker an eternity of uninterrupted and perfect bliss, is just as rational as to claim for him the detection of the universal error which had assigned to the animal man a place among the quadrupeds. There is in every human mind a certain portion of indestructible common sense. Small as this may be in most of us, it is yet enough to rescue us all, at least when sane and sober, from the stupidity of thinking not only that the relations of creditor and debtor can really subsist between ourselves and Him who made us, but that a return of such inestimable value can be due from Him for such ephemeral and imperfect services as ours. People may talk foolishly on these matters; but no one seriously believes this. Luther slew no such monster, for there were none such to be slain. The error which he refuted was far more subtle and refined than this, and is copiously explained by Hooker, to whose splendid sermon on the subject it is a "good work" to refer any to whom it is unknown. The celebrated thesis of "Justification by Faith," if really an Antinomian doctrine, was peculiar to Luther and to his followers only in so far as he extricated it from a mass of superstitions by which it had been obscured, and assigned to it the prominence in his system to which it was justly entitled. But if his indig nation had been roused against those who had darkened this great truth, they by whom it was made an apology for lewdness and rapine were the objects of his scorn and abhorrence. His attack on the Anabaptists is conceived in terms so vigorous and so whimsical, that it is difficult to resist the temptation to exhibit some extracts. But who would needlessly disturb the mould beneath which lies interred and forgotten a mass of disgusting folly, which in a remote age exhaled a moral pestilence? Resolving all the sinister phenomena of life, by assuming the direct interference of the devil and his angels in the affairs of men, Luther thought that this influence had been most unskilfully employed at Munster. It was a coup manque on the part of the great enemy of mankind. It showed that Satan was but a bungler at his art. The evil one had been betrayed into this gross mistake that the world might be on their guard against the more astute artifices to which he was about to resort: "These new theologians did not," he said, "explain themselves very clearly." "Having hot soup in his mouth, the devil was obliged to content himself with mumbling out mum, mum, wishing doubtless to say something worse." "The spirit which would deceive the world must not begin by yielding to the fascinations of woman, by grasping the emblerns and honours of royalty, still less by cutting people's throats. This is too broad; rapacity and oppression can deceive no one. The real deceit will be practised by him who shall dress himself in mean apparel, assume a lamentable countenance, hang down his head, refuse money, abstain from meat, fly from woman as so much poison, disclaim all temporal authority, and reject all honours as damnable; and who then, creeping softly towards the throne, the sceptre, and the keys, shall pick them up and possess himself of them by stealth. Such is the man who would succeed, who would deceive the angels, and the very elect. This would indeed be a splendid devil, with a plumage more gorgeous than the peacock or the pheasant. But thus impudently to seize the crown, to take not merely one wife, but as many as caprice or appetite suggests-oh! it is the conduct of a mere schoolboy devil, of a devil at his A B C; or rather, it is the true Satan-Satan, the learned and the crafty, but fettered by the hands of God, with chains so heavy that he cannot move. It is to warn us, it is to teach us to fear his chastisements, before the field is thrown open to a more subtle devil, who will assail us no longer with the A B C, but with the real, the difficult text. If this mere deviling at his letters can do such things, what will he not do when he comes to act as a reasonable, knowing, skilful, lawyer-like, theological devil?" These various contests produced in the mind of Luther the effects which painful experience invariably yields, when the search for truth, prompted by the love of truth, has been long and earnestly maintained. Advancing years brought with them an increase of candour, moderation, and charity. He had lived to see his principles strike their roots deeply through a large part of the Christian world, and he anticipated, with perhaps too sanguine hopes, | same spirit, he preferred the gospel of St. John 66 their universal triumph. His unshaken reliance in them was attested by his dying breath. But he had also lived to witness the defection of some of his allies, and the guilt and folly of others. Prolonged inquiry had disclosed to him many difficulties which had been overlooked in the first ardour of the dispute, and he had become painfully convinced that the establishment of truth is an enterprise incomparably more arduous than the overthrow of error. His constitutional melancholy deepened into a more habitual sadness-his impetuosity gave way to a more serene and pensive temper and as the tide of life ebbed with still increasing swiftness, he was chiefly engaged in meditating on those cardinal and undisputed truths on which the weary mind may securely repose, and the troubled heart be still. The maturer thoughts of age could not, however, quell the rude vigour and fearless confidence, which had borne him through his early contests. With little remaining fondness or patience for abstruse speculations, he was challenged to debate one of the more subtle points of theology. His answer cannot be too deeply pondered by polemics at large. "Should we not," he said, get on better in this discussion with the assistance of a jug or two of beer?" The offended disputant retired, "the devil," observed Luther, "being a haughty spirit, who can bear any thing better than being laughed at." This growing contempt for unprofitable questions was indicated by a corresponding decline in Luther's original estimate of the importance of some of the minor topics in debate with the Church of Rome. He was willing to consign to silence the question of the veneration due to the saints. He suspended his judgment respecting prayers for the dead. He was ready to acquiesce in the practice of auricular confession, for the solace of those who regarded it as an essential religious observance. He advised Spalatin to do whatever he thought best respecting the elevation of the host, deprecating only any positive rule on the subject. He held the established ceremonies to be useful, from the impression they left on gross and uncultivated minds. He was tolerant of images in the churches, and censured the whole race of image-breakers with his accustomed vehemence. Even the use of the vernacular tongue in public worship, he considered as a convenient custom, not an indispensable rule. Carlostadt had insisted upon it as essential. "Oh, this is an incorrigible spirit," replied the more tolerant reformer; "for ever and for ever positive obligations and sins!" But while his Catholic spirit thus raised him above the exaggerated estimate of those external things which chiefly attracted the hostility of narrower minds, his sense of the value of those great truths in which he judged the essence of religion to consist, was acquiring increased intensity and depth. In common with Montaigne and Richard Baxter, (names hardly to be associated on any other ground,) he considered the Lord's prayer as surpassing every other devotional exercise. "It is my prayer," said Luther; "there is nothing like it." In the to all the other sacred books, as containing more of the language of Christ himself. As he felt, so he taught. He practised the most simple and elementary style of preaching. "If," he said, "in my sermons I thought of Melancthon and other doctors, I should do no good; but I speak with perfect plainness for the ignorant, and that satisfies every body. Such Greek, Latin, and Hebrew as I have, I reserve for the learned." "Nothing is more agreeable or useful for a common audience than to preach on the duties and examples of Scripture. Sermons on grace and justification fall coldly on their ears." He taught that good and true theology consisted in the practice, the habit, and the life of the Christian_gracesChrist being the foundation. “Such, however,” he says, "is not our theology now-a-days. We have substituted for it a rational and speculative theology. This was not the case with David. He acknowledged his sins, and said, Miserere mei, Domine !" Luther's power of composition is, indeed, held very cheap by a judge so competent as Mr. Hallam; nor is it easy to commend his elaborate style. It was compared by himself to the earthquake and the wind which preceded the still small voice addressed to the prophet in the wilderness; and is so turbulent, copious, and dogmatical, as to suggest the supposition that it was dictated to a class of submissive pupils, under the influence of extreme excitement. Obscure, redundant, and tautologous as these writings appear, they are still redeemed from neglect, not only by the mighty name of their author, but by that all-pervading vitality and downright earnestness which atone for the neglect of all the mere artifices of style; and by that profound familiarity with the sacred oracles, which far more than compensates for the absence of the speculative wisdom which is drawn from lower sources. But the reformer's lighter and more occasional works not unfrequently breathe the very soul of eloquence. His language in these, ranges between colloquial homeliness and the highest dignity,now condensed into vivid figures, and then diffused into copious amplification,-exhibiting the successive phases of his ardent, melancholy, playful, and heroic character in such rapid succession, and with such perfect harmony, as to resemble the harp of Dryden's Timotheus, alternately touched and swept by the hand of the master-a performance so bold and so varied, as to scare the critic from the discharge of his office. The address, for example, to the Swabian insurgents and nobles, if not executed with the skill, is at least conceived in the spirit of a great orator. The universal testimony of all the most competent judges, attests the excellence of his translation of the Bible, and assigns to him, in the literature of his country, a station corresponding to that of the great men to whom James committed the corresponding office in our own. Bayle has left to the friends of Luther no duty to perform in the defence of his moral character, but that of appealing to the unanswerable reply which his Dictionary contains to the charges preferred against the reformer |