ned an advance and a
victory. Even now, after three centuries and a half, this prodigious
movement has an irresistible fascination for the German people. Never,
from its first existence, had the nation revealed its innermost being
so touchingly and grandly. All the fine qualities of the German mind
and character burst forth at this time; enthusiasm, self-devotion, a
deep moral indignation, an intense pleasure in systematic thought, and
an inward seeking after the highest. Every individual took his share in
the strife. The travelling trader over the fire at night contended for
or against the indulgences, the countryman in the most remote villages
heard with astonishment of the new heretic whom his spiritual father
cursed in every sermon, and the women of the villages no longer gave
willingly to the mendicant monks. A sea of small literature overflowed
the country, a hundred printing-presses were in activity, spreading
abroad the numerous controversial writings, both learned and popular;
parties raged in every cathedral and parish church; everywhere men of
resolute character amongst the ecclesiastics declared themselves for
the new doctrines, whilst the weaker ones struggled with timid doubts;
the doors of the monasteries were opened, and the cells soon became
empty. Every month brought to the people something new and unheard of.

It was no longer a quarrel between priests, as Hutten had in the
beginning contemptuously called the dispute between the Wittenberger
and Tetzel; it had become a war of the nation against the Romish
supremacy and its supporters. Ever more powerfully rose the image of
Luther before his cotemporaries. Banished, cursed, persecuted by Pope
and Emperor, by princes and high ecclesiastics, he became in four short
years the idolized hero of the people. His journey to Worms was
described in the style of the Holy Scriptures, and the over-zealous
placed him on a footing with the martyrs of the New Testament.[24] The
learned also felt themselves irresistibly drawn into the struggle; even
Erasmus smiled approbation, and Hutten's soul fired up in the cause of
the new teacher, he no longer wrote in Latin, but broke forth in
German, more stormy and wild than the Wittenberger, with a fire that
consumed himself, the knight fought his last fight for the peasant's
son.

The man on whom for half a generation the highest feelings of his
nation were concentrated, now enters upon the scene. Yet before we
endeavour to