t spread over Europe in the
sixteenth century. In those places where Protestantism is dead,--where
rationalism or Pelagian speculations have taken its place,--this fact
may be denied; but the history of Northern Europe blazes with it,--a
fact which no historian of any honesty can deny.

Very likely those who are not in sympathy with this great idea of
Luther, Augustine, and Paul may ignore the fact,--even as Caleb Gushing
once declared to me, that the Reformation sprang from the desire of
Luther to marry Catherine Bora; and that learned and ingenious sophist
overwhelmed me with his citations from infidel and ribald Catholic
writers like Audin. Greater men than he deny that grace underlies the
whole original movement of the reformers, and they talk of the
Reformation as a mere revolt from Rome, as a war against papal
corruption, as a protest against monkery and the dark ages, brought
about by the spirit of a new age, the onward march of humanity, the
necessary progress of society. I admit the secondary causes of the
Reformation, which are very important,--the awakened spirit of inquiry
in the sixteenth century, the revival of poetry and literature and art,
the breaking up of feudalism, fortunate discoveries, the introduction of
Greek literature, the Renaissance, the disgusts of Christendom, the
voice of martyrs calling aloud from their funeral pyres; yea, the
friendly hand of princes and scholars deploring the evils of a corrupted
Church. But how much had Savonarola, or Erasmus, or John Huss, or the
Lollards aroused the enthusiasm of Europe, great and noble as were their
angry and indignant protests? The genius of the Reformation in its early
stages was a _religious_ movement, not a political or a moral one,
although it became both political and moral. Its strength and fervor
were in the new ideas of salvation,--the same that gave power to the
early preachers of Christianity,--not denunciations of imperialism and
slavery, and ten thousand evils which disgraced the empire, but the
proclamation of the ideas of Paul as to the grounds of hope when the
soul should leave the body; the salvation of the Lord, declared to a
world in bondage. Luther kindled the same religious life among the
masses that the apostles did; the same that Wyclif did, and by the same
means,--the declaration of salvation by belief in the incarnate Son of
God, shedding his blood in infinite love. Why, see how this idea spread
through Germany, Switzerland,