elp me."

Hutten, on his sick-bed at Ebernburg, not far away, was full of wrath
at the trial of Luther. "Away!" he shouted, "away from the clear
fountains, ye filthy swine! Out of the sanctuary, ye accursed
peddlers! Touch no longer the altar with your desecrating hands. What
have ye to do with the alms of our fathers, which were given for the
poor and the Church, and you spend for splendor, pomp, and foolery,
while the children suffer for bread? See you not that the wind of
Freedom[2] is blowing? On two men not much depends. Know that there
are many Luthers, many Huttens here. Should either of us be destroyed,
still greater is the danger that awaits you; for then, with those
battling for freedom, the avengers of innocence will make common cause."

I have wished, in writing this little sketch, that I could have a
novelist's privilege of bringing out my hero happily at the end. I
have hitherto had the struggles of a man living before his time to
relate; the voice of one crying in the wilderness. If this were a
romance, I might tell how, with Hutten's entreaties and Luther's
exhortations, and under the wise management of Franz von Sickingen, the
people banded together against foreign foes and foreign domination, and
German unity, German freedom, and religious liberty were forever
established in the Fatherland. But, alas! the history does not run in
that way; at least not till a hundred years of war had bathed the land
in blood.

For Hutten henceforth I have only misery and failure to relate. The
union of knights and cities resulted in a ruinous campaign of Franz von
Sickingen against Treves. Sickingen's army was driven back by the
Elector. His strong Castle of Landstuehl was besieged by the Catholic
princes, and cannon was used in this siege for the first time in
history. The walls of Landstuehl, twenty-five feet thick, were battered
down, and Sickingen himself was killed by the falling of a beam. The
war was over, and nothing worthy had been accomplished.

When Luther heard of the death of Sickingen, he wrote to a friend:
"Yesterday I heard and read of Franz von Sickingen's true and sad
history. God is a righteous but marvelous Judge. Sickingen's fall
seems to me a verdict of the Lord, that strengthens me in the belief
that the force of arms is to be kept far from matters of the Gospel."

Hutten was driven from the Ebernburg. He was offered a high place in
the service of the King of France; but, a