the middle ages,
this weapon was omnipotent; and the middle ages had but just passed
away. No one could stand before that awful anathema which consigned
him to the wrath of incensed and implacable Deity. Much as some
professed to despise the sentence, still, when inflicted, it could not
be borne, especially if accompanied with an interdict. Children were
left unburied. The churches were closed. The rites of religion were
suspended. A funereal shade was spread over society. The fears of hell
haunted every imagination. No reason was strong enough to resist the
sentence. No arm was sufficiently powerful to remove the curse. It
hung over a guilty land. It doomed the unhappy offender, who was
cursed, wherever he went, and in whatever work he was engaged.

But Luther was strong enough to resist it, and to despise it. He saw
it was an imposition, which only barbarous and ignorant ages had
permitted. Moreover, he perceived that there was now no alternative
but victory or death; that, in the great contest in which he was
engaged, retreat was infamy. Nor did he wish to retreat. He was
fighting for oppressed humanity, and death even, in such a cause, was
glory. He understood fully the nature and the consequence of the
struggle. He perceived the greatness of the odds against him, in a
worldly point of view. No man but a Luther would have been equal to
it; no man, before him, ever had successfully rebelled against the
pope. It is only in view of this circumstance, that his intrepidity
can be appreciated.

What did the Saxon monk do, when the papal bull was published? He
assembled the professors and students of the university, declared his
solemn protest against the pope as Antichrist, and marched in
procession to the gates of the Castle of Wittemberg, and there made a
bonfire, and cast into it the bull which condemned him, the canon law,
and some writings of the schoolmen, and then reentered the city,
breathing defiance against the whole power of the pope, glowing in the
consciousness that the battle had commenced, to last as long as life,
and perfectly secure that the victory would finally be on the side of
truth. This was in 1520, on the 10th of December.

The attention of the whole nation was necessarily drawn to this open
resistance; and the sympathy of the free thinking, the earnest, and
the religious, was expressed for him. Never was popular interest more
absorbing, in respect to his opinions, his fortunes, and his fate. Th