al and prominent figure in the movement is Luther; but the way
was prepared for him by a host of illustrious men, in different
countries,--by Savonarola in Italy, by Huss and Jerome in Bohemia, by
Erasmus in Holland, by Wyclif in England, and by sundry others, who
detested the corruptions they ridiculed and lamented, but could
not remove.

How flagrant those evils! Who can deny them? The papal despotism, and
the frauds on which it was based; monastic corruptions; penance, and
indulgences for sin, and the sale of them, more shameful still; the
secular character of the clergy; the pomp, wealth, and arrogance of
bishops; auricular confession; celibacy of the clergy, their idle and
dissolute lives, their ignorance and superstition; the worship of the
images of saints, and masses for the dead; the gorgeous ritualism of the
mass; the substitution of legends for the Scriptures, which were not
translated, or read by the people; pilgrimages, processions, idle pomps,
and the multiplication of holy days; above all, the grinding spiritual
despotism exercised by priests, with their inquisitions and
excommunications, all centring in the terrible usurpation of the popes,
keeping the human mind in bondage, and suppressing all intellectual
independence,--these evils prevailed everywhere. I say nothing here of
the massacres, the poisonings, the assassinations, the fornications, the
abominations of which history accuses many of the pontiffs who sat on
papal thrones. Such evils did not stare the German and English in the
face, as they did the Italians in the fifteenth century. In Germany the
vices were mediaeval and monkish, not the unblushing infidelity and
levities of the Renaissance, which made a radical reformation in Italy
impossible. In Germany and England there was left among the people the
power of conscience, a rough earnestness of character, the sense of
moral accountability, and a fear of divine judgment.

Luther was just the man for his work. Sprung from the people, poor,
popular, fervent; educated amid privations, religious by nature, yet
with exuberant animal spirits; dogmatic, boisterous, intrepid, with a
great insight into realities; practical, untiring, learned, generally
cheerful and hopeful; emancipated from the terrors of the Middle Ages,
scorning the Middle Ages; progressive in his spirit, lofty in his
character, earnest in his piety, believing in the future and in
God,--such was the great leader of this emancipating