h more communicants than it
had in the days of Luther. The fact that it still exists proves its
usefulness. It will still live, and it will change as men change. The
Church and the Pope are not the detestable things that Martin Luther
pictured them; and Protestantism is not the sweet and lovely object that
he would have us believe. All formal and organized religions will be
what they are, as long as man is what he is--labels count for little.

In Fifteen Hundred Twenty-five Martin Luther married "Catharine the
Nun," a most excellent woman, and one whom rumor says had long
encouraged and upheld him in his works. Children came to bless them, and
the picture of the great heretic sitting at his wooden table with little
Johnny Luther on his knee, his loving wife by his side, and kind
neighbors entering for a friendly chat, shows the great reformer at his
best.

He was the son of a peasant, all his ancestors were peasants, as he so
often told, and he lived like a peasant to the last. For himself he
wanted little. He sided with the people, the toilers, with those who
struggled in the bonds of slavery and fear--for them he was an Eye, an
Ear, a trumpet Voice.

There never lived a braver man--there never lived one more earnest and
sincere. He fought freedom's fight with all the weapons God had given
him; and for the liberty we now enjoy, in great degree, we are debtors
to Martin Luther.

EDMUND BURKE

I was not, like His Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and
dandled into a legislator; "nitor in adversum" is the motto for a
man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated
one of the arts, that recommend men to the favor and protection of
the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I
follow the trade of winning the hearts, by imposing on the
understandings of the people.

At every step of my progress in life, for in every step I was
traversed and opposed, and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged
to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to
the honor of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not
wholly unacquainted with its laws and the whole system of its
interests both abroad and at home; otherwise no rank, no toleration
even, for me.

--_Edmund Burke_

[Illustration: EDMUND BURKE]

In the "American Encyclopedia," a