almost disgraceful
servitude" which, says Melanchthon, he imposed upon his followers,
because they knew that he was leading them to victory in a great and
worthy cause. Even so, now, many men overlook his narrowness and
bigotry because of his genius and bravery.

His grandest quality was sincerity. Priest and public man as he was,
there was not a line of hypocrisy or cant in his whole being. A sham
was to him intolerable, the abomination of desolation standing where it
ought not. Reckless of consequences, of danger, of his popularity, and
of his life, he blurted out the whole truth, as he saw it, "despite all
cardinals, popes, kings and emperors, together with all devils and
hell." Whether his ideal is ours or not, his courage in daring and his
strength to labor for it must command our respect.

Next to his earnestness he owed his success to a {125} wonderful gift
of language that made him the tongue, as well as the spear-point, of
his people. [Sidenote: His eloquence] In love of nature, in wonder,
in the power to voice some secret truth in a phrase or a metaphor, he
was a poet. He looked out on the stars and considered the "good
master-workman" that made them, on the violets "for which neither the
Grand Turk nor the emperor could pay," on the yearly growth of corn and
wine, "as great a miracle as the manna in the wilderness," on the
"pious, honorable birds" alert to escape the fowler's net, or holding a
Diet "in a hall roofed with the vault of heaven, carpeted with the
grass, and with walls as far as the ends of the earth." Or he wrote to
his son a charming fairy-tale of a pleasant garden where good children
eat apples and pears and cherries and plums, and where they ride on
pretty ponies with golden reins and silver saddles and dance all day
and play with whistles and fifes and little cross-bows.

Luther's character combined traits not usually found in the same
nature. He was both a dreamy mystic and a practical man of affairs; he
saw visions and he knew how to make them realities; he was a
God-intoxicated prophet and a cool calculator and hard worker for
results. His faith was as simple and passionate as his dogmatic
distinctions were often sophistical and arid. He could attack his foes
with berserker fury, and he could be as gentle with a child as only a
woman can. His hymns soar to heaven and his coarse jests trail in the
mire. He was touched with profound melancholy and yet he had a
wholesome, rea