leasing to God. Who is this man who dares to say that for so many
crowns the soul of a sinner can be made whole?

These, and like these, were Luther's propositions. Little guessed the
Catholic prelates the dimensions of the act which had been done. The
Pope, when he saw the theses, smiled in good-natured contempt. 'A
drunken German wrote them,' he said; 'when he has slept off his wine, he
will be of another mind.'

Tetzel bayed defiance; the Dominican friars took up the quarrel; and
Hochstrat of Cologne, Reuchlin's enemy, clamoured for fire and faggot.

Voice answered voice. The religious houses all Germany over were like
kennels of hounds howling to each other across the spiritual waste. If
souls could not be sung out of purgatory, their occupation was gone.

Luther wrote to Pope Leo to defend himself; Leo cited him to answer for
his audacity at Rome; while to the young laymen, to the noble spirits
all Europe over, Wittenberg became a beacon of light shining in the
universal darkness.

It was a trying time to Luther. Had he been a smaller man, he would have
been swept away by his sudden popularity--he would have placed himself
at the head of some great democratic movement, and in a few years his
name would have disappeared in the noise and smoke of anarchy.

But this was not his nature. His fellow-townsmen were heartily on his
side. He remained quietly at his post in the Augustine Church at
Wittenberg. If the powers of the world came down upon him and killed
him, he was ready to be killed. Of himself at all times he thought
infinitely little; and he believed that his death would be as
serviceable to truth as his life.

Killed undoubtedly he would have been if the clergy could have had their
way. It happened, however, that Saxony just then was governed by a
prince of no common order. Were all princes like the Elector Frederick,
we should have no need of democracy in this world--we should never have
heard of democracy. The clergy could not touch Luther against the will
of the Wittenberg senate, unless the Elector would help them; and, to
the astonishment of everybody, the Elector was disinclined to consent.
The Pope himself wrote to exhort him to his duties. The Elector still
hesitated. His professed creed was the creed in which the Church had
educated him; but he had a clear secular understanding outside his
formulas. When he read the propositions, they did not seem to him the
pernicious things which the monks sa