eration. But they were all defiant and fierce, for the
age was rough and earnest. The Pope, in wrath, hurls the old weapons of
the Gregorys and the Clements. But they are impotent as the darts of
Priam; Luther laughs at them, and burns the Papal bull before a huge
concourse of excited students and shopkeepers and enthusiastic women. He
severs himself completely from Rome, and declares an unextinguishable
warfare. He destroys and breaks up the ceremonies of the Mass; he pulls
down the consecrated altars, with their candles and smoking incense and
vessels of silver and gold, since they are the emblems of Jewish and
Pagan worship; he tears off the vestments of priests, with their
embroideries and their gildings and their millineries and their laces,
since these are made to impose on the imagination and appeal to the
sense; he breaks up monasteries and convents, since they are dens of
infamy, cages of unclean birds, nurseries of idleness and pleasure,
abodes at the best of narrow-minded, ascetic Asiatic recluses, who
rejoice in penance and self-expiation and other modes of propitiating
the Deity, like soofists and fakirs and Braminical devotees. In defiance
of the most sacred of the institutions of the Middle Ages, he openly
marries Catherine Bora and sets up a hilarious household, and yet a
household of prayer and singing. He abolishes the old Gregorian service;
and for Mediaeval chants, monotonous and gloomy, he prepares hymns and
songs,--not for boys and priests to intone in the distant choir, but for
the whole congregation to sing, inspired by the melodies of David and
the exulting praises of a Saviour who redeems from darkness into light.
How grand that hymn of his,--

"A mighty fortress is our God,
A bulwark never failing."

He makes worship more heartfelt, and revives apostolic usages: preaching
and exhortation and instruction from the pulpit,--a forgotten power. He
appeals to reason rather than sense; denounces superstitions, while he
rebukes sins; and kindles a profound fervor, based on the recognition of
new truths. He is not fully emancipated from the traditions of the past;
for he retains the doctrine of transubstantiation, and keeps up the
holidays of the Church, and allows recreation on the Sabbath. But what
he thinks the most of is the circulation of the Scriptures among plain
people. So he translates them into German,--a gigantic task; and this
work, almost single-handed, is done so well that it