The Protestants were thus isolated in single groups or families, without organisation, without knowledge of each other, with nothing to give them coherency as a party; and so they might have long continued, except for an impulse from some external circumstances.  They were waiting for direction, and men in such a temper are seldom left to wait in vain.

The state of England did but represent the state of all Northern Europe.  Wherever the Teutonic language was spoken, wherever the Teutonic nature was in the people, there was the same weariness of unreality, the same craving for a higher life.  England rather lagged behind than was a leader in the race of discontent.  In Germany, all classes shared the common feeling; in England it was almost confined to the lowest.  But, wherever it existed, it was a free, spontaneous growth in each separate breast, not propagated by agitation, but springing self sown, the expression of the honest anger of honest men at a system which had passed the limits of toleration, and which could be endured no longer.  At such times the minds of men are like a train of gunpowder, the isolated grains of which have no relation to each other, and no effect on each other, while they remain unignited; but let a spark kindle but one of them, and they shoot into instant union in a common explosion.  Such a spark was kindled in Germany, at Wittenberg, on the 31st of October, 1517.  In the middle of that day Luther’s denunciation of Indulgences was fixed against the gate of All Saints church, Wittenberg, and it became, like the brazen serpent in the wilderness, the sign to which the sick spirits throughout the western world looked hopefully and were healed.  In all those millions of hearts the words of Luther found an echo, and flew from lip to lip, from ear to ear.  The thing which all were longing for was done, and in two years from that day there was scarcely perhaps a village from the Irish Channel to the Danube in which the name of Luther was not familiar as a word of hope and promise.  Then rose a common cry for guidance.  Books were called for—­above all things, the great book of all, the Bible.  Luther’s inexhaustible fecundity flowed with a steady stream, and the printing presses in Germany and in the Free Towns of the Netherlands, multiplied Testaments and tracts in hundreds of thousands.  Printers published at their own expense as Luther wrote.[483] The continent was covered with disfrocked monks who had become the pedlars of these precious wares;[484] and as the contagion spread, noble young spirits from other countries, eager themselves to fight in God’s battle, came to Wittenberg to learn from the champion who had struck the first blow at their great enemy how to use their weapons.  “Students from all nations came to Wittenberg,” says one, “to hear Luther and Melancthon.  As they came in sight of the town they returned thanks to God with clasped hands; for from Wittenberg, as heretofore from Jerusalem, proceeded the light of evangelical truth, to spread