ritances of dark and medieval ages.

III

There are two types of religious genius, both of which play great roles
in history. There is first the genius who, inspired by the ideal of
some earlier prophet, or made wise because he has himself discovered
the trend of celestial currents, sees through the complex and tangle of
his time, and forecasts a truth which all men in a happier coming age
will recognize. When he has once seen it, this vision transforms all
his ideas and aims, and spoils forever for him all meaner gains, all
half truths, all goods which must be won through surrender of a
possible better. He will be obedient to that vision regardless of all
cost. He will bear witness to the full light which he has seen even
though he can compel nobody else in the heedless world of his
generation to see it. He may only cry in the wilderness, but at all
events he will _cry_, and he will cry of that highest thing his heart
knows.

There is, on the other hand, the genius who understands his own age
like an open book. He is almost hypersensitive to the movings of his
time. He feels the silent yearnings and strivings of the dumb
multitudes about him; he anticipates in his thought what the rest are
incipiently thinking--he is the clear voice and oracle of the spirit of
his age. He knows to a nicety how far his contemporaries will allow
themselves to be carried. {15} He will not over-hurry, he will not
outrun their possible speed, and he will sacrifice everything to carry
his epoch with him toward the goal which he sees. He is contented to
keep his roots deep in the past, and he tempers all his creative
insights with a judicious mixture of the experience of the past and the
ideas which time has made sacred. He will not satisfy the idealist who
wants leaps, and he will not please the radical in any period; but if
he is brave, wise, and sincere, and, withal, possessed of rare gifts of
interpretation and unusual powers of leadership, he may be able to
shape the course of history no less effectively, perhaps more surely,
than the genius who insists upon an immediate march straight across
country to Canaan the moment he glimpses it from his Pisgah.

Luther was a reformer of this second type. He was beset by very real
limitations. Dr. McGiffert does not overstate the facts when he says:
"He cared little for clearness and consistency of thought. A
satisfactory and adequate world-view was not of his concern. Of
i