realizing intensity, the
beautiful myths of Romish superstition, which her innocent soul
transfigured into gracious ministering spirits of seraphic might and
seraphic tenderness, glared in upon his more morbid spiritual vision as
menacing angels, or grinning imps, or scoffing fiends. But still the
tortured soul toiled sturdily on through the anguish of its self-created
hells, the mind crazed and shattered, the heart hungry for peace, the
will resolute that it should have no peace until it found peace in
truth. Yet, our of this prodigious mental and moral anarchy, with its
devil's dance of dogmas and delusions, the young Luther organized,
before he was thirty, the broadest, raciest, and strongest character
that ever put on the armor and hurled the bolts of the Church Militant.
Casting doubt and fear under his feet, and growing more practically
efficient as he grew more morally exalted, at the age of thirty-seven he
had hooted out of Germany the knavish agent of a deistical Pope,--had
nailed to the Wittenberg Church his intellectual defiance of the theory
of Indulgences,--had cast the excommunication and decretals of the
Pontiff into the flames,--and, before the principalities and power of
the Empire, one German against all Germany, had simply and sublimely
indicated the identity of his doctrine with his nature, by declaring
that he not merely _would_ not, but _could_ not, recant.

And whom could he not abjure? Does not this question point to Him who is
the central Person and Power of the past eighteen hundred years of
history?--to Him who will be the central Person and Power of the whole
future of history?--to Him who came into the world in the form of a
young man, and whom a young man announced, crying in the wilderness?--to
Him who clasps in his thought and in his love the whole humanity whose
troubled annals history recounts, and who divinized the spirit of youth
when He assumed its form?

AROUND MULL.

PART I.

I.

We had come from Dumbarton, (my temporary home,) the Bailie, Christie,
and I, for a week's tour along the western coast and among the
Highlands. Sallying forth from Strathleven cottage one sunny morning in
August, we had footed it to the river-side, (I learned the full use of
my feet in Scotland.) had stepped on board a wee bonnie boat, just large
enough for us and our light baggage, exclusive of the space occupied by
a single oarsman,--and dropping down the Leven, and past the Castle, had