_Permission Underwood & Underwood, New York_
LUTHER MONUMENT AT WORMS by ERNST RIETSCHEL]

But the spirit of the nation does not long endure the preeminence of a
single, well-centred personality; for the life and the power and the
needs of a nation are more manifold than even the greatest single
force and lofty aim. The eternal contrast between the individual and
the nation appears. Even the soul of a nation is, in the presence of
the eternal, a finite personality--but in comparison with the
individual it appears boundless. A man is forced by the logical result
of his thoughts and actions, by all the significance of his own deeds,
into a closely restricted path. The soul of the nation needs for its
life irreconcilable contrasts and incessant effort in most varied
directions. Much that the individual failed to assimilate rises to
fight against him. The reaction of the people begins--at first weak,
here and there, based on different reasons and with slight
justification; then it grows stronger and ever more victorious.
Finally the intellectual influence of the life of the individual is
limited to his own followers, and crystallizes into a single one of
the many elements of national growth. The last period of a great life
is always filled with secret resignation, with bitterness, and with
silent suffering.

Thus it was with Luther. The first of these periods continued up to
the day on which he posted his theses, the second until his return
from the Wartburg, the third to his death and the beginning of the
Schmalkaldic War. It is not the purpose of this sketch to give his
entire biography, but to tell briefly how he developed and what he
was. Much in his nature appears strange and unpleasing so long as he
is viewed from afar; but this historic figure has the remarkable
quality of becoming greater and more attractive the more closely it is
approached, and from beginning to end it would inspire a good
biographer with admiration, tenderness, and a certain good humor.

Luther rose from the great source of all national strength, the
freeholding peasant class. His father moved from Moehra, a forest
village of the Thuringian mountains, where his relatives constituted
half the population, northward into the neighborhood of Mansfeld, to
work as a miner. So the boy's cradle stood in a cottage in which was
still felt the old thrill of the ghosts of the pine wood and the dark
clefts which were thought to be the entrances to the ore