ntellectual curiosity he had scarcely any; of interest in truth for
truth's sake none at all. . . . He remained entirely without
intellectual difficulties, finding no trouble with the most extreme
supernaturalism."[18] In many respects, as Harnack has insisted, his
Christianity was a "medieval phenomenon."[19] Only in one thing was he
supremely the master of his age and the hero of a new time--in his
discovery of a way of Faith which makes a man "intrepid" even in the
wreck of worlds and "in a thousand deaths." On the lower levels of
life, where most of his work was done, he was strangely under the sway
of the past, a distruster of reason, a restorer of ancient doctrine, a
conservative in thought and action, a friend of rulers, a guardian, as
far as he could be, of the _status quo_--a leader who anathematized
radicals and enthusiasts and who staved off and postponed for nearly
four hundred years the truly liberating and thoroughly {16} adequate
reformation. He was determined to be the repairer of the "Old Church,"
not the builder of a "New Church," and he was resolved not to travel
farther nor faster than the substantial men of his time considered safe
and wise.

But less was perhaps more. There will at least always be those who
think that the sinuous way of progress is the most certain way of
advance. The slow incline, the gradual spiral, each wind of the curve
"ever not quite" the old level--that is the most approved method of
leaving an outworn past and of moving forward into a new stage of
history. It may be so. It certainly is true that through Luther's
_insight_ new reliance upon God came to men, new energy of faith was
won, and by his work of repair, conservative and cautious though it
was, in the long sweep of time a liberated Christianity has come, a
vital social gospel has become effective, and great vistas of progress
are opening out before the Church of Christ. But it is impossible to
forget that other group--those men of the other type--who even in
Luther's day saw the way straight across into Canaan, the men who saw
their vision fade away unrealized, and who failed to behold the fruit
of their spiritual travail largely because Luther misunderstood them,
refused to give them aid and comfort, and finally helped to marshal the
forces which submerged them and postponed their victory. We may not
blame him, but it is not fair to these heroic souls that they should
longer lie submerged in the oblivion