they, too, had been
destroyed. Franz von Sickingen was dead. The league of the cities and
princes had faded away forever. Luther was hidden in the Wartburg, no
one knew where, and scarcely a trace of the Reformation was left in
Germany. Whatever Hutten had touched he had ruined. He had "dared
it," and the force he had defied had crushed him in return.

But, looking back over these centuries, the life of Hutten rises into
higher prominence. His writings were seed in good ground. At his
death the Reformation seemed hopeless. Six years later, at the second
Diet of Spires, half Germany signed the protest which made us
Protestants. "It was Luther alone who said _no_ at the Diet of Worms.
It was princes and people, cities and churches, who said _no_ at the
Diet of Spires."

Hutten's dream of a United German people freed from the yoke of Rome
was for three hundred years unrealized. For the Reformation sundered
the German people and ruined the German Empire, and not till our day
has German unity come to pass. But, as later reformers said, "It is
better that Germany should be half German, than that it should be all
Roman."

For the true meaning of this conflict does not lie in any question of
church against church or creed against creed, nor that worship in
cathedrals with altars and incense and rich ceremony should give way to
the simpler forms of the Lutheran litany. The issue was that of the
growth of man. The "right of private interpretation" is the
recognition of personal individuality.

The death of Hutten was, after all, not untimely. He had done his
work. His was the "voice of one crying in the wilderness." The head
of John the Baptist lay on the charger before Jesus had fulfilled his
mission. Arnold Winkelried, at Sempach, filled his body with Austrian
spears before the Austrian phalanx was broken. John Brown fell at
Harper's Ferry before a blow was struck against slavery. Ulrich von
Hutten had set every man, woman, and child in Germany to thinking of
his relations to the Lord and to the Pope. His mission was completed;
and longer life for him, as Strauss has suggested, might have led to
discord among the Reformers themselves.

For this lover of freedom was intolerant of intolerance. For fine
points of doctrine he had only contempt. When the Lutherans began to
treat as enemies all Reformers who did not with them subscribe to the
Confession of Augsburg, Hutten's fiery pen would have repudiate