No thought that ever dwelt honestly as true in the heart of
man but _was_ an honest insight into God's truth on man's part, and
_has_ an essential truth in it which endures through all changes, an
everlasting possession for us all. And, on the other hand, what a
melancholy notion is that, which has to represent all men, in all
countries and times except our own, as having spent their life in
blind condemnable error, mere lost Pagans, Scandinavians, Mahometans,
only that we might have the true ultimate knowledge! All generations
of men were lost and wrong, only that this present little section of a
generation might be saved and right. They all marched forward there,
all generations since the beginning of the world, like the Russian
soldiers into the ditch of Schweidnitz Fort, only to fill-up the ditch
with their dead bodies, that we might march-over and take the place!
It is an incredible hypothesis.

Such incredible hypothesis we have seen maintained with fierce
emphasis; and this or the other poor individual man, with his sect of
individual men, marching as over the dead bodies of all men, towards
sure victory: but when he too, with his hypothesis and ultimate
infallible credo, sank into the ditch, and became a dead body, what
was to be said?--Withal, it is an important fact in the nature of man,
that he tends to reckon his own insight as final, and goes upon it as
such. He will always do it, I suppose, in one or the other way; but it
must be in some wider, wiser way than this. Are not all true men that
live, or that ever lived, soldiers of the same army, enlisted, under
Heaven's captaincy, to do battle against the same enemy, the Empire of
Darkness and Wrong? Why should we misknow one another, fight not
against the enemy but against ourselves, from mere difference of
uniform? All uniforms shall be good, so they hold in them true valiant
men. All fashions of arms, the Arab turban and swift scimetar, Thor's
strong hammer smiting down _Joetuns_, shall be welcome. Luther's
battle-voice, Dante's march-melody, all genuine things are with us,
not against us. We are all under one Captain, soldiers of the same
host.--Let us now look a little at this Luther's fighting; what kind
of battle it was, and how he comported himself in it. Luther too was
of our spiritual Heroes; a Prophet to his country and time.

As introductory to the whole, a remark about Idolatry will perhaps be
in place here. One of Mahomet's characteristics, wh