;
justice a byword; murders and assassinations unavenged; central power
destroyed; vice, in all its enormities, vulgarities, and obscenities,
rampant and multiplying itself; false opinions gaining ground; soldiers
turned into banditti, and senators into slaves; women shrieking in
terror; bishops praying in despair; barbarism everywhere, paganism in
danger of being revived; a world disordered, forlorn, and dismal;
Pandemonium let loose, with howling and shouting and screaming, in view
of the desolation predicted alike by Jeremy the prophet and the Cumaean
sybil;--great was that Leo, when in view of all this he said, with old
patrician heroism, "I will revive government once more upon this earth;
not by bringing back the Caesars, but by declaring a new theocracy, by
making myself the vicegerent of Christ, by virtue of the promise made to
Peter, whose successor I am, in order to restore law, punish crime, head
off heresy, encourage genius, conserve peace, heal dissensions, protect
learning; appealing to love, but ruling by fear. Who but the Church can
do this? A theocracy will create a new civilization. Not a diadem, but a
tiara will I wear, the symbol of universal sovereignty, before which
barbarism shall flee away, and happiness be restored once more." As he
sent out his legates, he fulminated his bulls and established tribunals
of appeal; he made a net-work of ecclesiastical machinery, and
proclaimed the dangers of eternal fire, and brought kings and princes
before him on their knees. The barbaric world was saved.

But greater than Leo was Luther, when--outraged by the corruptions of
this spiritual despotism, and all the false and Pagan notions which had
crept into theology, obscuring the light of faith and creating an
intolerable bondage, and opposing the new spirit of progress which
science and art and industry and wealth had invoked--he courageously yet
modestly comes forward as the champion of a new civilization, and
declares, with trumpet tones, "Let there be private judgment; liberty of
conscience; the right to read and interpret Scripture, in spite of
priests! so that men may think for themselves, not only on the doctrines
of eternal salvation but on all the questions to be deduced from them,
or interlinked with the past or present or future institutions of the
world. Then shall arise a new creation from dreaded destruction, and
emancipated millions shall be filled with an unknown enthusiasm, and
advance with the