as
already knocking at the door!

{62}

CHAPTER II

GERMANY

SECTION 1. THE LEADER

It is superfluous in these days to point out that no great historical
movement is caused by the personality, however potent, of a single
individual. The men who take the helm at crises are those who but
express in themselves what the masses of their followers feel. The
need of leadership is so urgent that if there is no really great man at
hand, the people will invent one, endowing the best of the small men
with the prestige of power, and embodying in his person the cause for
which they strive. But a really strong personality to some extent
guides the course of events by which he is carried along. Such a man
was Luther. [Sidenote: Luther, 1483-1546] Few have ever alike
represented and dominated an age as did he. His heart was the most
passionately earnest, his will the strongest, his brain one of the most
capacious of his time; above all he had the gift of popular speech to
stamp his ideas into the fibre of his countrymen. If we may borrow a
figure from chemistry, he found public opinion a solution
supersaturated with revolt; all that was needed to precipitate it was a
pebble thrown in, but instead of a pebble he added the most powerful
reagent possible.

On that October day when Columbus discovered the new world, Martin, a
boy of very nearly nine, was sitting at his desk in the school at
Mansfeld. Though both diligent and quick, he found the crabbed Latin
primer, itself written in abstract Latin, very difficult, and was
flogged fourteen times in one morning by {63} brutal masters for
faltering in a declension. When he returned home he found his mother
bending under a load of wood she had gathered in the forest. Both she
and his father were severe with the children, whipping them for slight
faults until the blood came. Nevertheless, as the son himself
recognized, they meant heartily well by it. But for the self-sacrifice
and determination shown by the father, a worker in the newly opened
mines, who by his own industry rose to modest comfort, the career of
the son would have been impossible.

Fully as much as by bodily hardship the boy's life was rendered unhappy
by spiritual terrors. Demons lurked in the storms, and witches plagued
his good mother and threatened to make her children cry themselves to
death. God and Christ were conceived as stern and angry judges ready
to thrust sinners into hell. "They p