ies prostrate by his valor; it was he that
conquered the world for us!--See, accordingly, was not Luther himself
reverenced as a true Pope, or Spiritual Father, _being_ verily such?
Napoleon, from amid boundless revolt of Sansculottism, became a King.
Hero-worship never dies, nor can die. Loyalty and Sovereignty are
everlasting in the world:--and there is this in them, that they
are grounded not on garnitures and semblances, but on realities and
sincerities. Not by shutting your eyes, your "private judgment;" no, but
by opening them, and by having something to see! Luther's message was
deposition and abolition to all false Popes and Potentates, but life and
strength, though afar off, to new genuine ones.

All this of Liberty and Equality, Electoral suffrages, Independence and
so forth, we will take, therefore, to be a temporary phenomenon, by no
means a final one. Though likely to last a long time, with sad enough
embroilments for us all, we must welcome it, as the penalty of sins that
are past, the pledge of inestimable benefits that are coming. In all
ways, it behooved men to quit simulacra and return to fact; cost what it
might, that did behoove to be done. With spurious Popes, and Believers
having no private judgment,--quacks pretending to command over
dupes,--what can you do? Misery and mischief only. You cannot make an
association out of insincere men; you cannot build an edifice except
by plummet and level,--at right-angles to one another! In all this wild
revolutionary work, from Protestantism downwards, I see the blessedest
result preparing itself: not abolition of Hero-worship, but rather what
I would call a whole World of Heroes. If Hero mean _sincere man_, why
may not every one of us be a Hero? A world all sincere, a believing
world: the like has been; the like will again be,--cannot help being.
That were the right sort of Worshippers for Heroes: never could the
truly Better be so reverenced as where all were True and Good!--But we
must hasten to Luther and his Life.

Luther's birthplace was Eisleben in Saxony; he came into the world there
on the 10th of November, 1483. It was an accident that gave this honor
to Eisleben. His parents, poor mine-laborers in a village of that
region, named Mohra, had gone to the Eisleben Winter-Fair: in the tumult
of this scene the Frau Luther was taken with travail, found refuge in
some poor house there, and the boy she bore was named MARTIN LUTHER.
Strange enough to refle