m
turned the balances in which the whole subsequent history of
civilization hung. It was the _Yes_ and _No_ which applied the brakes
to the Juggernaut of usurpation, whose ponderous wheels had been
crushing through the centuries. It was the _Yes_ and _No_ which
evidenced the reality of a power above all popes and empires. It was
the _Yes_ and _No_ which spoke the supreme obligation of the human
soul to obey God and conscience, and started once more the pulsations
of liberty in the arteries of man. It was the _Yes_ and _No_ which
divided eras, and marked the summit whence the streams began to form
and flow to give back to this world a Church without a pope and a
State without an Inquisition.

Charles had the happiness at Worms to hear the tidings that Fernando
Cortes had added Mexico to his dominions. The emancipated peoples of
the earth in the generations since have had the happiness to know that
at Worms, through the inflexible steadfastness of Martin Luther, God
gave the inspirations of a new and better life for them!

FOOTNOTES:

[14] "With this noble protest was laid the keystone of the
Reformation. The pontifical hierarchy shook to its centre, and the
great cause of truth and regenerate religion spread with electric
speed. The marble tomb of ignorance and error gave way, as it were, of
a sudden; a thousand glorious events and magnificent discoveries
thronged upon each other with pressing haste to behold and
congratulate the mighty birth, the new creation, of which they were
the harbingers, when, with a steady and triumphant step, the peerless
form of human intellect rose erect, and, throwing off from its
freshening limbs the death-shade and the grave-clothes by which it was
enshrouded, ascended to the glorious resurrection of that noontide
lustre which irradiates the horizon of our own day, rejoicing like a
giant to run his race."--John Mason Good's _Book of Nature_, p. 321.

LUTHER'S CONDEMNATION.

After Luther and his friends left Worms the emperor issued an edict
putting him and all his adherents under the ban of the empire,
forbidding any one to give him food or shelter, calling on all who
found him to arrest him, commanding all his books to be burned, and
ordering the seizure of his friends and the confiscation of their
possessions.

It was what Germany got for putting an Austro-Spanish bigot on the
Imperial throne.

LUTHER IN THE WARTBURG.

But the cause of Rome was not helped by it. Luther's