h the absolute
sovereignty of States. He proclaimed religious liberty, believing
that Rome had never persecuted; then he denounced Jews and
Anabaptists, and required that there should never be two religions in
the same place. He denounced the ruling classes in his country with
extreme violence; but when the peasants rose, with their just and
reasonable demands, and threatened Saxony, he issued a tract insisting
that they should be cut to pieces. He valued the royal prerogative so
highly that he made it include polygamy. He advised Henry VIII that
the right way out of his perplexity was to marry a second wife without
repudiating the first. And when the Landgrave Philip asked for leave
to do the same thing, Luther gave it on condition that it was denied.
He insisted on what he called a downright lie. The great fact which
we have to recognise is that with all the intensity of his passion for
authority he did more than any single man to make modern History the
development of revolution.

The Humanists had generally supported Luther almost from the
beginning, and Melanchthon, the young Professor of Greek, proved his
most useful coadjutor. They applauded his attack on abuses, and on
the treatment of Germany by Rome; and it was believed that the
Renaissance prepared the Reformation, that Luther had only hatched the
Erasmian egg. When the salient points of his system appeared, they
began to fall away from him. Nearly all the older men among the
leaders died in the Roman communion--Reuchlin, Wimpheling, Mutianus
Rufus, Pirkheimer, Zasius, the best jurist in Germany, and Crotus, who
wrote the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum. They were urging the mind of
man along all the paths of light open to its effort, and they found
the exclusiveness of the new interests an impediment to letters.
Younger men remained true to the movement; but when Erasmus defended,
as he had always done, the doctrine of free-will, even Melanchthon was
convinced, and imputed to his friend and master the fatalism of the
Stoics. Like Fisher and More in England, many of Luther's German
opponents, such as Eck and Cochlaeus, were men of the Renaissance. The
breach with Erasmus, the quarrel with Zwingli and his friends in the
south-west, the irruption of the Anabaptists, the dispute with
Carlstadt, the sacrifice of Luther's popularity among the masses, by
his attack on the peasants, produced a recoil. Many of the regular
clergy went over, and many towns;