ible? Where is the criterion of truth?

It is not necessary for me here to relate the well known particulars of
that controversy, the desolating wars and scenes of blood to which it
gave rise: how Luther posted on the door of the cathedral of Wittemberg
ninety-five theses, and was summoned to Rome to answer for his offense;
how he appealed from the pope, ill-informed at the time, to the pope
when he should have been better instructed; how he was condemned as a
heretic, and thereupon appealed to a general council; how, through the
disputes about purgatory, transubstantiation, auricular confession,
absolution, the fundamental idea which lay at the bottom of the whole
movement came into relief, the right of individual judgment; how Luther
was now excommunicated, A.D. 1520, and in defiance burnt the bull of
excommunication and the volumes of the canon law, which he denounced as
aiming at the subversion of all civil government, and the exaltation of
the papacy; how by this skillful manoeuvre he brought over many of the
German princes to his views; how, summoned before the Imperial Diet at
Worms, he refused to retract, and, while he was bidden in the castle of
Wartburg, his doctrines were spreading, and a reformation under Zwingli
broke out in Switzerland; how the principle of sectarian decomposition
embedded in the movement gave rise to rivalries and dissensions between
the Germans and the Swiss, and even divided the latter among themselves
under the leadership of Zwingli and of Calvin; how the Conference of
Marburg, the Diet of Spires, and that at Augsburg, failed to compose
the troubles, and eventually the German Reformation assumed a political
organization at Smalcalde. The quarrels between the Lutherans and the
Calvinists gave hopes to Rome that she might recover her losses.

Leo was not slow to discern that the Lutheran Reformation was something
more serious than a squabble among some monks about the profits of
indulgence-sales, and the papacy set itself seriously at work to
overcome the revolters. It instigated the frightful wars that for so
many years desolated Europe, and left animosities which neither the
Treaty of Westphalia, nor the Council of Trent after eighteen years of
debate, could compose. No one can read without a shudder the attempts
that were made to extend the Inquisition in foreign countries. All
Europe, Catholic and Protestant, was horror-stricken at the Huguenot
massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve (A.D.