hip of the world,
Germany had been shaken by the outburst of the Reformation. "That Luther
has a fine genius!" laughed Leo the Tenth when he heard in 1517 that a
German Professor had nailed some Propositions denouncing the abuse of
Indulgences, or of the Papal power to remit certain penalties attached to
the commission of sins, against the doors of a church at Wittemberg. But
the "Quarrel of Friars," as the controversy was termed contemptuously at
Rome, soon took larger proportions. If at the outset Luther flung himself
"prostrate at the feet" of the Papacy and owned its voice as the voice of
Christ, the sentence of Leo no sooner confirmed the doctrine of
Indulgences than their opponent appealed to a future Council of the
Church. In 1520 the rupture was complete. A Papal Bull formally condemned
the errors of the Reformer, and Luther publicly consigned the Bull to the
flames. A second condemnation expelled him from the bosom of the Church,
and the ban of the Empire was soon added to that of the Papacy. Charles
the Fifth had bought Leo's alliance with himself and England by a promise
of repressing the new heresy; and its author was called to appear before
him in a Diet at Worms. "Here stand I; I can none other," Luther replied
to the young Emperor as he pressed him to recant; and from a hiding-place
in the Thuringian forest where he was sheltered after his condemnation by
the Elector of Saxony he denounced not merely, as at first, the abuses of
the Papacy, but the Papacy itself. The heresies of Wyclif were revived;
the infallibility, the authority of the Roman See, the truth of its
doctrines, the efficacy of its worship, were denied and scoffed at in
vigorous pamphlets which issued from his retreat and were dispersed
throughout the world by the new printing-press. Germany welcomed them with
enthusiasm. Its old resentment against the oppression of Rome, the moral
revolt in its more religious minds against the secularity and corruption
of the Church, the disgust of the New Learning at the superstition which
the Papacy now formally protected, combined to secure for Luther a
widespread popularity and the protection of the northern princes of the
Empire.

[Sidenote: Luther and the New Learning]

In England his protest seemed at first to find no echo. The king himself
was both on political and religious grounds firm on the Papal side.
England and Rome were drawn to a close alliance by the identity of their
political position