The central and prominent figure in the movement is Luther; but the way was prepared for him by a host of illustrious men, in different countries,—­by Savonarola in Italy, by Huss and Jerome in Bohemia, by Erasmus in Holland, by Wyclif in England, and by sundry others, who detested the corruptions they ridiculed and lamented, but could not remove.

How flagrant those evils!  Who can deny them?  The papal despotism, and the frauds on which it was based; monastic corruptions; penance, and indulgences for sin, and the sale of them, more shameful still; the secular character of the clergy; the pomp, wealth, and arrogance of bishops; auricular confession; celibacy of the clergy, their idle and dissolute lives, their ignorance and superstition; the worship of the images 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 evil doings of various kinds of which history accuses many of the pontiff’s 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 through great struggles; 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