o deal with
them! A modest quiet man; not prompt he to attack irreverently persons
in authority. His clear task, as I say, was to do his own duty; to
walk wisely in this world of confused wickedness, and save his own soul
alive. But the Roman High-priesthood did come athwart him: afar off
at Wittenberg he, Luther, could not get lived in honesty for it; he
remonstrated, resisted, came to extremity; was struck at, struck again,
and so it came to wager of battle between them! This is worth attending
to in Luther's history. Perhaps no man of so humble, peaceable a
disposition ever filled the world with contention. We cannot but see
that he would have loved privacy, quiet diligence in the shade; that it
was against his will he ever became a notoriety. Notoriety: what would
that do for him? The goal of his march through this world was the
Infinite Heaven; an indubitable goal for him: in a few years, he should
either have attained that, or lost it forever! We will say nothing at
all, I think, of that sorrowfulest of theories, of its being some mean
shopkeeper grudge, of the Augustine Monk against the Dominican,
that first kindled the wrath of Luther, and produced the Protestant
Reformation. We will say to the people who maintain it, if indeed any
such exist now: Get first into the sphere of thought by which it is
so much as possible to judge of Luther, or of any man like Luther,
otherwise than distractedly; we may then begin arguing with you.

The Monk Tetzel, sent out carelessly in the way of trade, by Leo
Tenth,--who merely wanted to raise a little money, and for the rest
seems to have been a Pagan rather than a Christian, so far as he was
anything,--arrived at Wittenberg, and drove his scandalous trade there.
Luther's flock bought Indulgences; in the confessional of his Church,
people pleaded to him that they had already got their sins pardoned.
Luther, if he would not be found wanting at his own post, a false
sluggard and coward at the very centre of the little space of ground
that was his own and no other man's, had to step forth against
Indulgences, and declare aloud that _they_ were a futility and sorrowful
mockery, that no man's sins could be pardoned by _them_. It was the
beginning of the whole Reformation. We know how it went; forward from
this first public challenge of Tetzel, on the last day of October, 1517,
through remonstrance and argument;--spreading ever wider, rising ever
higher; till it became unquenchable,