bad for the Church; and the highest moral obligation became
sin when it stood in St. Peter's way.

There had been an outburst of free thought in Bohemia a century and a
half before. John Huss, Luther's forerunner, came with a safe conduct to
the Council of Constance; but the bishops ruled that safe conducts could
not protect heretics. They burnt John Huss for all their promises, and
they hoped now that so good a Catholic as Charles would follow so
excellent a precedent. Pope Leo wrote himself to beg that Luther's safe
conduct should not be observed. The bishops and archbishops, when
Charles consulted them, took the same view as the Pope.

'There is something in the office of a bishop,' Luther said, a year or
two later, 'which is dreadfully demoralising. Even good men change their
natures at their consecration; Satan enters into them as he entered into
Judas, as soon as they have taken the sop.'

It was most seriously likely that, if Luther trusted himself at the Diet
on the faith of his safe conduct, he would never return alive. Rumours
of intended treachery were so strong, that if he refused to go, the
elector meant to stand by him at any cost. Should he appear, or not
appear? It was for himself to decide. If he stayed away, judgment would
go against him by default. Charles would call out the forces of the
empire, and Saxony would be invaded.

Civil war would follow, with insurrection all over Germany, with no
certain prospect except bloodshed and misery.

Luther was not a man to expose his country to peril that his own person
might escape. He had provoked the storm; and if blood was to be shed,
his blood ought at least to be the first. He went. On his way, a friend
came to warn him again that foul play was intended, that he was
condemned already, that his books had been burnt by the hangman, and
that he was a dead man if he proceeded.

Luther trembled--he owned it--but he answered, 'Go to Worms! I will go
if there are as many devils in Worms as there are tiles upon the roofs
of the houses.'

The roofs, when he came into the city, were crowded, not with devils,
but with the inhabitants, all collecting there to see him as he passed.
A nobleman gave him shelter for the night; the next day he was led to
the Town Hall.

No more notable spectacle had been witnessed in this planet for many a
century--not, perhaps, since a greater than Luther stood before the
Roman Procurator.

There on the raised dais sate the sov