spiritual atmosphere which serious-minded men breathed. Every one of
the men who belong in my list of "Spiritual Reformers" read and loved
"the golden book of German Theology," and most of them knew the other
writings of the great fourteenth-century mystics. There are
unmistakable evidences of a subtle formative influence from these rich
sources, which explains the simultaneous sporadic outbreak of similar
views in widely sundered places.

There was, thus, abroad at the opening of the Reformation a deep
yearning among serious people for a religion of inward experience, a
religion based not on proof-texts nor on external authority of any
kind, but on the native capacity of the soul to seek, to find and to
enjoy the living God who is the Root and Sap of every twig and branch
of the great tree of life. The general trend of this mystical
tendency, as also of the Humanistic movement, was in the direction of
lay-religion, and both movements alike emphasized the inherent and
native capacity of man, whose destiny by his free choice is in his own
hands.

There were, too, at work many other deep-lying tendencies away from the
bondage and traditions of the past; aspiration for economic and social
reforms to liberate the common people and give them some real chance to
be persons--tendencies which all the Reformers treated in this book
deeply felt and shared.

All these movements toward intellectual, spiritual, and social freedom
seemed at first to find their champion in the dynamic hero, whose
ninety-five theses on the door at Wittenberg shook the world awake in
1517. He was by birth and spirit a child of the people--"ein Kind des
Volkes"--and he seemed to be a prophet, divinely called to voice their
dumb aspirations. He possessed, {5} like all great prophets, a
straightforward moral honesty and sincerity, an absolute fearlessness,
a magnetic and commanding personality, an unusual mastery of the
vernacular speech, and an abundant power of pathos, humour, and satire.
All the world loves a hero who can say in the face of real danger, "I
would go forward to Worms if there were as many devils there as there
are tiles on the roof!" or again, "I would go to Leipzig if it rained
Duke Georges for nine days running!"[6]

He had, too, unusual religious depth and power which sprang, as in the
case of the great mystics, from a profound inward experience. Luther,
like St. Paul and St. Augustine, and many another spiritual guide of