ld with its
pomps and vanities, its lusts and sinful desires that become as mast to
the soul. The return to the father is the return to God's love here
below and to everlasting felicity above. To those who can believe it,
it is the most beautiful story in the world.

[Sidenote: Faust]

And it is a perfect contrast to that other tale, equally typical of the
time, the fable of Faust. Though there was a real man of this name, a
charlatan and necromancer who, in his extensive wanderings visited
Wittenberg, probably in 1521, and who died about 1536-7, his life was
but a peg on which to hang a moral. He became the type of the man who
had sold his soul to the devil in return for the power to know
everything, to do everything and to enjoy everything in this world.

{697} The first printed _Faust-book_ (1587) passed for three centuries
as a Protestant production, but the discovery of an older and quite
different form of the legend in 1897 changed the whole literary
problem. It has been asserted now that the Faust of this unknown
author is a parody of Luther by a Catholic. He is a professor at
Wittenberg, he drinks heartily, his marriage with Helena recalls the
Catholic caricature of Luther's marriage; his compact with the devil is
such as an apostate might have made. But it is truer to say that Faust
is not a caricature of Luther, but his devilish counterpart, just as in
early Christian literature Simon Magus is the antithesis of Peter.
Faust is the man of Satan as Luther was the man of God; their
adventures are somewhat similar but with the reverse purpose.

And Faust is the sixteenth century man as truly as the Prodigal or
Pantagruel. To live to the full; to know all science and all
mysteries, to drain to the dregs the cup crowned with the wine of the
pleasure and the pride of life: this was worth more than heaven! The
full meaning of the parable of salvation well lost for human experience
was not brought out until Goethe took it up; but it is implied both in
the German Faust-books and in Marlowe's play.

[Sidenote: Greatness of the Sixteenth Century]

Many twentieth-century men find it difficult to do justice to the age
of the Reformation. We are now at the end of the period inaugurated by
Columbus and Luther and we have reversed the judgments of their
contemporaries. Religion no longer takes the place that it then did,
nor does the difference between Catholic and Protestant any longer seem
the most importan