not come athwart his little path, and force him to assault
it! Conceivable enough that, in this case, he might have held his
peace about the abuses of Rome; left Providence, and God on high, to
deal with them! A modest quiet man; not prompt he to attack
irreverently persons in authority. His clear task, as I say, was to do
his own duty; to walk wisely in this world of confused wickedness, and
save his own soul alive. But the Roman Highpriesthood did come athwart
him: afar off at Wittenberg he, Luther, could not get lived in honesty
for it; he remonstrated, resisted, came to extremity; was struck-at,
struck again, and so it came to wager of battle between them! This is
worth attending to in Luther's history. Perhaps no man of so humble,
peaceable a disposition ever filled the world with contention. We
cannot but see that he would have loved privacy, quiet diligence in
the shade; that it was against his will he ever became a notoriety.
Notoriety: what would that do for him? The goal of his march through
this world was the Infinite Heaven; an indubitable goal for him: in a
few years, he should either have attained that, or lost it forever! We
will say nothing at all, I think, of that sorrowfulest of theories, of
its being some mean shopkeeper grudge, of the Augustine Monk against
the Dominican, that first kindled the wrath of Luther, and produced
the Protestant Reformation. We will say to the people who maintain it,
if indeed any such exist now: Get first into the sphere of thought by
which it is so much as possible to judge of Luther, or of any man like
Luther, otherwise than distractedly; we may then begin arguing with
you.

The Monk Tetzel, sent out carelessly in the way of trade, by Leo
Tenth,--who merely wanted to raise a little money, and for the rest
seems to have been a Pagan rather than a Christian, so far as he was
anything,--arrived at Wittenberg, and drove his scandalous trade
there. Luther's flock bought Indulgences: in the confessional of his
Church, people pleaded to him that they had already got their sins
pardoned. Luther, if he would not be found wanting at his own post, a
false sluggard and coward at the very centre of the little space of
ground that was his own and no other man's, had to step-forth against
Indulgences, and declare aloud that _they_ were a futility and
sorrowful mockery, that no man's sins could be pardoned by _them_. It
was the beginning of the whole Reformation. We know how it went;