o light. Is not such a one a true
Hero and Serpent-queller; worthy of all reverence! The black monster,
Falsehood, our one enemy in this world, lies prostrate by his valour;
it was he that conquered the world for us!--See, accordingly, was not
Luther himself reverenced as a true Pope, or Spiritual Father, _being_
verily such? Napoleon, from amid boundless revolt of Sansculottism,
became a King. Hero-worship never dies, nor can die. Loyalty and
Sovereignty are everlasting in the world:--and there is this in them,
that they are grounded not on garnitures and semblances, but on
realities and sincerities. Not by shutting your eyes, your 'private
judgment;' no, but by opening them, and by having something to see!
Luther's message was deposition and abolition to all false Popes and
Potentates, but life and strength, though afar off, to new genuine
ones.

All this of Liberty and Equality, Electoral suffrages, Independence
and so forth, we will take, therefore, to be a temporary phenomenon,
by no means a final one. Though likely to last a long time, with sad
enough embroilments for us all, we must welcome it, as the penalty of
sins that are past, the pledge of inestimable benefits that are
coming. In all ways, it behoved men to quit simulacra and return to
fact; cost what it might, that did behove to be done. With spurious
Popes, and Believers having no private judgment,--quacks pretending to
command over dupes,--what can you do? Misery and mischief only. You
cannot make an association out of insincere men; you cannot build an
edifice except by plummet and level,--at _right_-angles to one
another! In all this wild revolutionary work, from Protestantism
downwards, I see the blessedest result preparing itself: not abolition
of Hero-worship, but rather what I would call a whole World of Heroes.
If Hero mean _sincere man_, why may not every one of us be a Hero? A
world all sincere, a believing world: the like has been; the like will
again be,--cannot help being. That were the right sort of Worshippers
for Heroes: never could the truly Better be so reverenced as where all
were True and Good!--But we must hasten to Luther and his Life.

* * * * *

Luther's birthplace was Eisleben in Saxony; he came into the world
there on the 10th of November 1483. It was an accident that gave this
honour to Eisleben. His parents, poor mine-labourers in a village of
that region, named Mohra, had gone to the Eisleben