mounted the Scala Santa--Pilate's staircase--on his
knees, passed with awe the relief picture in one of the streets which
the popular legend declared to be that of the female Pope Johanna and
her child, saw the ancient pagan deities of Rome depicted in Santa Maria
della Rotonda, the old Pantheon, stared at the head of John the Baptist
in San Silvestro in Capite, tried, but failed to read the famous
Saturday mass at San Giovanni, the oldest and greatest sanctuary of
Christianity, rested from a fatiguing tour through the Lateran in Santa
Croce in Gerusalemme, where Pope Sylvester II, the Faustus of the
Italians, was carried away by the devils, went through the catacombs
with its 6 martyred Popes and 176,000 other martyrs, etc., etc.

Looking back to this visit later, Luther remarked, "I believed
everything" Just what official Rome expected every devout pilgrim to do,
just what it expects them to do to-day. And these Romanists want to
point the finger of ridicule at the simpleton, the easy dupe, the holy
fool Luther! Does Rome perhaps think the same of all the pious pilgrims
that annually crowd Rome? Luther heard himself called "un buon
Christiano" at Rome and discovered that that meant as much as "an
egregious ass." But he considered that a part of Italian wickedness. The
Church, he was sure, approved of all that he did, in fact, had taught
him to do all that. It required ten years or more to disabuse his mind
of the frauds that had been practised on him, and then he declared that
he would not take 100,000 gulden not to have seen with his own eyes how
scandalously the Popes were hoodwinking Christians. If it were not for
his visit at Rome, he says, he might fear that he was slandering the
Popes in what he wrote about them.

While Luther's visit at Rome, then, brought about no spiritual change in
him, it helped to give him a good conscience afterwards when his
conflict with Rome had begun.

13. Pastor Luther.

Luther's famous protest against the sale of indulgences, published
October 31, 1517, in the form of ninety-five theses, is represented by
Catholic writers as an outburst of Luther's violent temper and an
assault upon the Catholic Church that he had long premeditated. By this
time, it is said, Luther had become known to his colleagues as a
quarrelsome man, loving disputations and jealous of victory in a debate.
His methods of teaching at the university were novel, in defiance of the
settled customs of the Churc