ous experience, was helpful.
Luther learned now that a man was saved not by singing masses, but by
the infinite grace of God: a more credible hypothesis. He gradually
got himself founded, as on the rock. No wonder he should venerate the
Bible, which had brought this blessed help to him. He prized it as the
Word of the Highest must be prized by such a man. He determined to
hold by that; as through life and to death he firmly did.

This, then, is his deliverance from darkness, his final triumph over
darkness, what we call his conversion; for himself the most important
of all epochs. That he should now grow daily in peace and clearness;
that, unfolding now the great talents and virtues implanted in him, he
should rise to importance in his Convent, in his country, and be found
more and more useful in all honest business of life, is a natural
result. He was sent on missions by his Augustine Order, as a man of
talent and fidelity fit to do their business well: the Elector of
Saxony, Friedrich, named the Wise, a truly wise and just prince, had
cast his eye on him as a valuable person; made him Professor in his
new University of Wittenberg, Preacher too at Wittenberg; in both
which capacities, as in all duties he did, this Luther, in the
peaceable sphere of common life, was gaining more and more esteem with
all good men.

It was in his twenty-seventh year that he first saw Rome; being sent
thither, as I said, on mission from his Convent. Pope Julius the
Second, and what was going-on at Rome, must have filled the mind of
Luther with amazement. He had come as to the Sacred City, throne of
God's Highpriest on Earth; and he found it--what we know! Many
thoughts it must have given the man; many which we have no record of,
which perhaps he did not himself know how to utter. This Rome, this
scene of false priests, clothed not in the beauty of holiness, but in
far other vesture, is _false_: but what is it to Luther? A mean man
he, how shall he reform a world? That was far from his thoughts. A
humble, solitary man, why should he at all meddle with the world? It
was the task of quite higher men than he. His business was to guide
his own footsteps wisely through the world. Let him do his own obscure
duty in it well; the rest, horrible and dismal as it looks, is in
God's hand, not in his.

It is curious to reflect what might have been the issue, had Roman
Popery happened to pass this Luther by; to go on in its great wasteful
orbit, and