ce, and a
feeling of inexpressible happiness; he felt himself a portion of God,
and this sense of intimate communion with Him he preserved during the
whole remainder of his life. He needed no longer the distant paths of
the old Church; with his God in his heart he could defy the whole
world. He already ventured to believe, that teaching must be false
which laid such great weight on works of penance; that besides these
there remained only cold satisfaction and ceremonious confession; and
when later he learned from Melancthon that the Greek word for penance,
"_Metanoia_," denotes literally "a change of heart," it appeared to him
as a wonderful revelation. On this foundation was built that confidence
of faith, with which he brought forward the words of Scripture in
opposition to the prescriptions of the Church.

It was in this way that Luther, whilst still in the monastery, attained
to inward freedom. The whole of his later teaching, his struggle
against the indulgences, his unshaken firmness, and his method of
scriptural exposition, all rest on the inward process by which as a
monk he had found his God; and one may truly say that the new period of
German history began with Luther's cloister prayers. Life soon placed
him under its hammer, to harden the pure metal of his soul.

Luther unwillingly took the Professorship of Dialectics in the new
university of Wittenberg, in 1508; he would rather have taught that new
theology which he already began to consider the truth. It is known that
in the year 1510 he went to Rome on the business of his order; how
devoutly and piously he lingered in the holy city, and with what dismay
he was seized on observing the heathenish character of the people of
Rome, and the worldliness and corrupt morals of the ecclesiastics. But
deeply as he was shaken by the depravity of the hierarchy, he felt that
his whole life was still enclosed in it; out of it there was nothing:
The exalted idea of the Roman Catholic Church, and its triumphant reign
of 1500 years, fettered even the most powerful minds; and when the
German in the dress of a Romish priest, and in danger of his life,
contemplated the ruins of ancient Rome, and stood in amazement before
the gigantic pillars of the temples, which, according to tradition, had
once been destroyed by the Goths little did the valiant man from the
mountains of the old Hermunduren then think, that it would be his own
fate to destroy the temples of the Rome of the m