rotestant Church could only operate from different points; hence it was
unable to bring about the same uniformity.

The movement that was not superficial was the scientific and humanist
movement, of which the Reformation was in a certain sense an episode.
Italy and France did more for the world than Germany. Martin Luther
was a great fighter, but not a more heroic one than Giordano Bruno.
Melancthon was not so important a man as Galileo. Rabelais even, with
all his dirt and jesting, was more in the stream of progress than
Luther, and far more than Calvin. In the long run, it is knowledge
and idea? that rule the world. Luther was not great in knowledge,
and certainly not great in ideas. He was a born fighter and a strong
character. His proper place is among the heroic figures of history. He
was a man of leading, but scarcely a man of light.

Luther was violently opposed to the scientific movement. He called
Copernicus an old fool. He would hear nothing against the accepted
Biblical theory of the universe. Genesis was to him, as well as to
the Pope, the beginning and the end of sound science. Nor was he more
friendly to philosophy. Draper truly asserts that the leaders of the
Reformation "were determined to banish philosophy from the Church."
Aristotle was villified by Luther as "truly a devil, a horrid
calumniator, a wicked sycophant, a prince of darkness, a real Apollyon,
a beast, a most horrid impostor on mankind, a public and professed liar,
a goat, a complete epicure, this twice execrable Aristotle." Such
was Luther's style in controversy. We commend it to the attention of
Protestants who rail at the _Freethinker_.

Liberty of conscience is a principle of which Luther had no conception.
He claimed the right to think against the Pope; he denied the right of
others to think against himself. His attitude towards the Anabaptists
was fiendish. During the Peasants War he urged the authorities to
exterminate the rebels, to "stab, kill, and strangle them without
mercy." Melancthon taught that heretics "ought to be restrained by the
sword." Luther likewise declared that whoever denied even one article of
the Protestant faith should be punished severely. Referring to a false
teacher, he exclaimed, "Drive him away as an apostle of hell; and if he
does not flee, deliver him up as a seditious man to the executioner."

Hallam, Buckle, Lecky, and all reputable historians, agree that
the Protestant party held the same principle o