ssential truth in
it which endures through all changes, an everlasting possession for us
all. And, on the other hand, what a melancholy notion is that, which
has to represent all men, in all countries and times except our own, as
having spent their life in blind condemnable error, mere lost Pagans,
Scandinavians, Mahometans, only that we might have the true ultimate
knowledge! All generations of men were lost and wrong, only that this
present little section of a generation might be saved and right. They
all marched forward there, all generations since the beginning of the
world, like the Russian soldiers into the ditch of Schweidnitz Fort,
only to fill up the ditch with their dead bodies, that we might march
over and take the place! It is an incredible hypothesis.

Such incredible hypothesis we have seen maintained with fierce emphasis;
and this or the other poor individual man, with his sect of individual
men, marching as over the dead bodies of all men, towards sure victory
but when he too, with his hypothesis and ultimate infallible credo, sank
into the ditch, and became a dead body, what was to be said?--Withal, it
is an important fact in the nature of man, that he tends to reckon his
own insight as final, and goes upon it as such. He will always do it,
I suppose, in one or the other way; but it must be in some wider, wiser
way than this. Are not all true men that live, or that ever lived,
soldiers of the same army, enlisted, under Heaven's captaincy, to do
battle against the same enemy, the empire of Darkness and Wrong? Why
should we misknow one another, fight not against the enemy but against
ourselves, from mere difference of uniform? All uniforms shall be good,
so they hold in them true valiant men. All fashions of arms, the Arab
turban and swift scimetar, Thor's strong hammer smiting down _Jotuns_,
shall be welcome. Luther's battle-voice, Dante's march-melody, all
genuine things are with us, not against us. We are all under one
Captain, soldiers of the same host.--Let us now look a little at this
Luther's fighting; what kind of battle it was, and how he comported
himself in it. Luther too was of our spiritual Heroes; a Prophet to his
country and time.

As introductory to the whole, a remark about Idolatry will perhaps be
in place here. One of Mahomet's characteristics, which indeed belongs to
all Prophets, is unlimited implacable zeal against Idolatry. It is the
grand theme of Prophets: Idolatry, the worship