ion not to go faster or
farther than he could carry Germany, especially the nobility, with him.
He was, in a very real sense, a child of his time, a product of
medieval Europe, and he never succeeded in liberating himself from the
tight swaddling-bands in which his youth was wrapped. He could not
comprehend, as we shall see, the bold spirits who were dedicated to the
task of reinterpreting Christianity in terms of the new age; he loved
the old, in so far as it seemed to him unspoiled by apostacy and
corruption, and he naturally kept reverting to the ancient dogma and
the accepted theology of the old Church instead of leading the way into
a fresh, vital, spiritual form of Christianity adapted to the social
aspiration of the time.

In spite of the fact that Luther knew and loved the German mystics and
had himself received a powerful inward experience of Christ as the
bridegroom of his soul--an experience which quickened all the forces of
his will and raised him to the rank of a world-hero--nevertheless his
normal tendency was toward a non-mystical type of Christianity, toward
a Christianity thoroughly based on Scripture, logically constructed out
of concepts of the nature of God and Man, so ancient, sacred, and
orthodox, that they seemed to him axioms of theology and capable of
being formulated into a saving {10} system of truth, as universal and
as unalterable as the multiplication table.

However unconscious Luther himself may have been of the shift of
emphasis that was taking place in him as the movement progressed, the
historical observer has no difficulty in noting the change from the
Luther who is endeavouring to sound the deeps of life itself, and whose
religion is the creation of the inward stream of life within him; and
the Luther who wanders far afield from experience, draws curious
conclusions from unverified concepts, piles text on text as though
heaven could be scaled by another Pelion on Ossa, and once more turns
religion back to the cooled lava-beds of theology. He never could
succeed in getting the God of his heart's glowing faith into the
theologies which he laboriously builded. As soon as he started
constructing he invariably fell back upon the building-material which
had already been quarried, and which lay at hand. His experimental
Faith discovered a God of all Grace, but his inherited _concept_ of
God, the God of the Old Testament and of theology, was vastly
different, and remained to the end un