given a
thousand reasons--they did then and they do now--why an indulgence
should be believed in; when honesty and common sense could give but one
reason for thinking otherwise. Cleverness and imposture get on
excellently well together--imposture and veracity, never.

Luther looked at those wares of Tetzel's, and said, 'Your pardons are no
pardons at all--no letters of credit on heaven, but flash notes of the
Bank of Humbug, and you know it.' They did know it. The conscience of
every man in Europe answered back, that what Luther said was true.

Bravery, honesty, veracity, these were the qualities which were
needed--which were needed then, and are needed always, as the root of
all real greatness in man.

The first missionaries of Christianity, when they came among the heathen
nations, and found them worshipping idols, did not care much to reason
that an image which man had made could not be God. The priests might
have been a match for them in reasoning. They walked up to the idol in
the presence of its votaries. They threw stones at it, spat upon it,
insulted it. 'See,' they said, 'I do this to your God. If he is God, let
him avenge himself.'

It was a simple argument; always effective; easy, and yet most
difficult. It required merely a readiness to be killed upon the spot by
the superstition which is outraged.

And so, and only so, can truth make its way for us in any such matters.
The form changes--the thing remains. Superstition, folly, and cunning
will go on to the end of time, spinning their poison webs around the
consciences of mankind. Courage and veracity--these qualities, and only
these, avail to defeat them.

From the moment that Luther left the emperor's presence a free man, the
spell of Absolutism was broken, and the victory of the Reformation
secured. The ban of the Pope had fallen; the secular arm had been called
to interfere; the machinery of authority strained as far as it would
bear. The emperor himself was an unconscious convert to the higher
creed. The Pope had urged him to break his word. The Pope had told him
that honour was nothing, and morality was nothing, where the interests
of orthodoxy were compromised. The emperor had refused to be tempted
into perjury; and, in refusing, had admitted that there was a spiritual
power upon the earth, above the Pope, and above him.

The party of the Church felt it so. A plot was formed to assassinate
Luther on his return to Saxony. The insulted majesty of