s against indulgences, his imperturbable
steadfastness, his method of interpreting the Scriptures, rested upon
the struggles through which he, while a monk, had found his God; and
it may well be said that the new era of German history began with
Luther's prayers in the monastery. Life was soon to thrust him under
its hammer, to harden the pure metal of his soul.

In 1508 Luther reluctantly accepted the professorship of dialectics at
the new university of Wittenberg. He would rather have taught that
theology which even then he believed the true one. When, in 1510, he
went to Rome on business for his order, it is well known what devotion
and piety marked his sojourn in the Holy City, and with what horror
the heathen life of the Romans and the moral corruption and
worldliness of the clergy filled him. It was there where his
devotions, while he was officiating at mass, were disturbed by the
reckless jests which the Roman priests of his order called out to him.
He never forgot the devil-inspired words[2] as long as he lived.

But the hierarchy, however deeply its corruption shocked him, still
contained his whole hope; outside of it there was no God and no
salvation. The noble idea of the Catholic Church, and its conquests of
fifteen hundred years, enraptured the mind even of the strongest. And
when this German in Roman clerical dress, at the risk of his life,
inspected the ruins of ancient Rome and stood in awe before the
gigantic columns of the temples which, according to report, the Goths
had once destroyed, the sturdy man from the mountains of the old
Hermunduri little dreamed that it would be his own fate to destroy the
temples of medieval Rome more thoroughly, more fiercely, more grandly.
Luther came back from Rome still a faithful son of the great Mother
Church. All heresy, such as that of the Bohemians, was hateful to him.
He took a warm interest, after his return, in Reuchlin's contest
against the judges of heresy at Cologne, and, in 1512, stood on the
side of the Humanists; but even then he felt that something separated
him from this movement. When, a few years later, he was in Gotha, he
did not call upon the worthy Mutianus Rufus, although he wrote him a
very polite letter of apology; and soon after he was offended by the
inward coldness and secular tone in which theological sinners were
ridiculed in Erasmus' dialogues. The profane worldliness of the
Humanists was never quite in harmony with the cheerful faith of