n. But the great reformer was in no danger. By the
majority of the Germans of the north the edict was denounced as a most
unjust and outrageous document. For greater safety, Luther was hidden in
the Wartburg, a castle belonging to the Elector of Saxony, and there
he defied all papal authority by translating the entire Bible into the
German language, that all the people might read and know the word of God
for themselves.

By this time, the Reformation was no longer a spiritual and religious
affair. Those who hated the beauty of the modern church building used
this period of unrest to attack and destroy what they did not like
because they did not understand it. Impoverished knights tried to make
up for past losses by grabbing the territory which belonged to the
monasteries. Discontented princes made use of the absence of the Emperor
to increase their own power. The starving peasants, following the
leadership of half-crazy agitators, made the best of the opportunity
and attacked the castles of their masters and plundered and murdered and
burned with the zeal of the old Crusaders.

A veritable reign of disorder broke loose throughout the Empire. Some
princes became Protestants (as the "protesting" adherents of Luther were
called) and persecuted their Catholic subjects. Others remained Catholic
and hanged their Protestant subjects. The Diet of Speyer of the year
1526 tried to settle this difficult question of allegiance by ordering
that "the subjects should all be of the same religious denomination as
their princes." This turned Germany into a checkerboard of a thousand
hostile little duchies and principalities and created a situation which
prevented the normal political growth for hundreds of years.

In February of the year 1546 Luther died and was put to rest in the
same church where twenty-nine years before he had proclaimed his famous
objections to the sale of Indulgences. In less than thirty years, the
indifferent, joking and laughing world of the Renaissance had been
transformed into the arguing, quarrelling, back-biting, debating-society
of the Reformation. The universal spiritual empire of the Popes came
to a sudden end and the whole Western Europe was turned into a
battle-field, where Protestants and Catholics killed each other for
the greater glory of certain theological doctrines which are
as incomprehensible to the present generation as the mysterious
inscriptions of the ancient Etruscans.

RELIGIOUS WA