of saints, and masses for the dead; the gorgeous ritualism of the mass; the substitution of legends for the Scriptures, which were not translated, or read by the people; pilgrimages, processions, idle pomps, and the multiplication of holy days; above all, the grinding spiritual despotism exercised by priests, with their inquisitions and excommunications, all centring in the terrible usurpation of the popes, keeping the human mind in bondage, and suppressing all intellectual independence,—­these evils prevailed everywhere.  I say nothing here of the massacres, the poisonings, the assassinations, the fornications, the abominations of which history accuses many of the pontiffs who sat on papal thrones.  Such evils did not stare the German and English in the face, as they did the Italians in the fifteenth century.  In Germany the vices were mediaeval and monkish, not the unblushing infidelity and levities of the Renaissance, which made a radical reformation in Italy impossible.  In Germany and England there was left among the people the power of conscience, a rough earnestness of character, the sense of moral accountability, and a fear of divine judgment.

Luther was just the man for his work.  Sprung from the people, poor, popular, fervent; educated amid privations, religious by nature, yet with exuberant animal spirits; dogmatic, boisterous, intrepid, with a great insight into realities; practical, untiring, learned, generally cheerful and hopeful; emancipated from the terrors of the Middle Ages, scorning the Middle Ages; progressive in his spirit, lofty in his character, earnest in his piety, believing in the future and in God,—­such was the great leader of this emancipating movement.  He was not so learned as Erasmus, nor so logical as Calvin, nor so scholarly as Melancthon, nor so broad as Cranmer.  He was not a polished man; he was often offensively rude and brusque, and lavish of epithets, Nor was he what we call a modest and humble man; he was intellectually proud, disdainful, and sometimes, when irritated, abusive.  None of his pictures represent him as a refined-looking man, scarcely intellectual, but coarse and sensual rather, as Socrates seemed to the Athenians.  But with these defects and drawbacks he had just such traits and gifts as fitted him to lead a great popular movement,—­bold, audacious, with deep convictions and rapid intellectual processes; prompt, decided, kind-hearted, generous, brave; in sympathy with the people, eloquent, Herculean in energies, with an amazing power of work; electrical in his smile and in his words, and always ready for contingencies.  Had he been more polished, more of a gentleman, more fastidious, more scrupulous, more ascetic, more modest, he would have shrunk from his tasks; he would have lost the elasticity of his mind,—­he would have been discouraged.  Even Saint Augustine, a broader and more catholic man than Luther, could not have done his work.  He was a sort of converted Mirabeau.  He loved the storms of battle; he impersonated revolutionary ideas.  But he was a man of thought, as well as of action.