nts." He calls Luther "a lawless one," "one of the most
intolerant of men," "a revolutionist, not a reformer." He says that
Luther "attempted reformation and ended in deformation." He charges
Luther with having written and preached "not for, but against good
works," with having assumed rights to himself in the matter of liberty
of conscience which "he unhesitatingly and imperiously denied to all who
differed from him," with having "rent asunder the unity of the Church,"
with having "disgraced the Church by a notoriously wicked and scandalous
life," with having "declared it to be the right of every man to
interpret the Bible to his own individual conception," with "one day
proclaiming the binding force of the Ten Commandments and the next
declaring they were not obligatory on Christian observance," with having
"reviled and hated and cursed the Church of his fathers."

These opprobrious remarks are only a part of the vileness of which the
writer has delivered himself in his first chapter. His whole book
bristles with assertions of Luther's inveterate badness. This coarse and
crooked Luther, we are told, is the real Luther, the genuine article.
The Luther of history is only a Protestant fiction. Protestants like
Prof. Seeberg of Berlin, and others, who have criticized Luther, are
introduced as witnesses for the Catholic allegation that Luther was a
thoroughly bad man. We should like to ascertain the feelings of these
Protestants when they are informed what use has been made of their
remarks about Luther. Some of them may yet let the world know what they
think of the attempt to make them the squires of such knights errant as
Denifle and Grisar.

It is about ten years ago since the Jesuit Grisar began to publish his
_Life of Luther,_ twice that time, since Denifle painted his caricature
of Luther. Several generations ago Janssen, in his _History of the
German Nation,_ gave the Catholic interpretation of Luther and the
Reformation. Going back still further, we come to the Jesuit Maimbourg,
to Witzel, and in Luther's own time to Cochlaeus and Oldecop, all of
whom strove to convince the world that Luther was a moral degenerate and
a reprobate. The book of Mgr. O'Hare, which has made its appearance on
the eve of the Four-hundredth Anniversary of Luther's Theses, is merely
another eruption from the same mud volcano that became active in
Luther's lifetime. It is the old dirt that has come forth. Rome must
periodically relieve its