iam Penn, and Bishop Butler with John Wesley, and
Jonathan Edwards with Doctor Channing.

This idea of private judgment is what separates the Catholics from the
Protestants; not most ostensibly, but most vitally. Many are the
Catholics who would accept Luther's idea of grace, since it is the idea
of Saint Augustine; and of the supreme authority of the Scriptures,
since they were so highly valued by the Fathers: but few of the Catholic
clergy have ever tolerated religious liberty,--that is, the
interpretation of the Scriptures by the people,--for it is a vital blow
to their supremacy, their hierarchy, and their institutions. They will
no more readily accept it than William the Conqueror would have accepted
the Magna Charta; for the free circulation and free interpretation of
the Scriptures are the charter of human liberties fought for at Leipsic
by Gustavus Adolphus, at Ivry by Henry IV. This right of worshipping
God according to the dictates of conscience, enlightened by the free
reading of the Scriptures, is just what the "invincible armada" was sent
by Philip II. to crush; just what Alva, dictated by Rome, sought to
crush in Holland; just what Louis XIV., instructed by the Jesuits, did
crush out in France, by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The
Satanic hatred of this right was the cause of most of the martyrdoms and
persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was the
declaration of this right which emancipated Europe from the dogmas of
the Middle Ages, the thraldom of Rome, and the reign of priests. Why
should not Protestants of every shade cherish and defend this sacred
right? This is what made Luther the idol and oracle of Germany, the
admiration of half Europe, the pride and boast of succeeding ages, the
eternal hatred of Rome; not his religious experiences, not his doctrine
of justification by faith, but the emancipation he gave to the mind of
the world. This is what peculiarly stamps Luther as a man of genius, and
of that surprising audacity and boldness which only great geniuses
evince when they follow out the logical sequence of their ideas, and
penetrate at a blow the hardened steel of vulcanic armor beneath which
the adversary boasts.

Great was the first Leo, when from his rifled palace on one of the
devastated hills of Rome he looked out upon the Christian world,
pillaged, sacked, overrun with barbarians, full of untold
calamities,--order and law crushed; literature and art prostrate