hed to all lands
and ages, are Americans called to the profound study of the epoch
which Luther shaped, and of which our age is but a part. Of all
intense pleasures, none to us was greater than a humble pilgrimage
through Germany where our feet were set in the footprints of the
Reformer.

Quaint Eisleben, with the house where he was born, and that in whose
chamber he was suddenly stricken with mortal pain, while his companions
watched with awe the passing to higher service of that valiant soul, we
had visited before we looked upon Wittenberg. Mansfield, too, with its
flaming forges and its vast cinder-heaps,--where Hans Luther, the
miner, toiled to feed his wife and babes,--we had seen; and historic
Erfurt, with memories of the University where he studied and the
monastery into which he went, taking with him, of all his books, only
his Plautus and his Virgil, to study the Latin Bible chained to its
post, and to fight that mental battle which toughened his sinews for
the world-conflicts awaiting him; and whence he emerged at the call of
his Superior, a young priest of twenty-five years, to take the
professorship offered him at the new University of Wittenberg. At
lovely Eisenach we had tarried for days; had entered the door of the
once grand house of the burgomaster Cotta, before which little Martin,
with the other charity boys of the school near by, had sung Christmas
carols for his bread, and where he had been taken to the heart and the
home of Mother Ursula; had peeped into the room there that was his,
and been driven up the mountain-side beyond the village whose crown is
the fine old castle of the Wartburg; had stood at the solitary casement
of the room where he fought with the devil, and looked out over the
magnificent panorama of wooded mountains and beautiful valley where he
looked forth day after day of those ten months of mysterious
imprisonment, into which friendly hands had thrust him from the thick
of the fight,--where he saw the miracle of spring-time creeping over
the hills and waving trees far beneath him, and heard and felt the
wintry winds howl around his solitude. He was only thirty-five, but he
had already come into conflict with the mightiest power on earth, and
his life was forfeited, when here he slowly came to know that God had
thoughts of good and not of evil concerning him; and here he began
another work,--the translation of the New Testament,--for which he
never would have had time if left to h