acumen” (Boehmer, p. 179 f.).  He had the courage to tell the Church that it was a shame, that a heathen philosopher, Aristotle, should formulate the doctrines which Christians are to believe and their pastors are to teach.  He threw this heathen, who had for ages dominated Christian teaching, out of his lecture-room, and took his students straight to the pure fountain of religious truth, the Word of God.  He publicly burned the Canon Law by which the Roman Church had forged chains for the consciences of men, and which she upholds to this day.  His lecture-room became crowded with eager and enthusiastic students, and the stripling university planted on the edge of civilization in the sands along the Elbe became for a while the religious and theological hub of the world.  The students who gathered about Luther knew that they had a real professor in him.  The world of his day came to this fledgling doctor with the weightiest questions, and received answers that satisfied.  That part of the intelligent world of to-day which has read and studied Luther endorses the verdict of Luther’s contemporaries as regards his ample learning and proficiency as a teacher.

More learned men, indeed, than Luther there have been.  Some of these have also made attempts to introduce needed reforms in the corrupt Roman Church.  Rome met their learned and labored arguments with the consummate skill of a past master in sophistry.  Those learned efforts came to naught.  Rome will never be reformed by human learning and scholarship.  Scholars are rarely men of action.  It is because Professor Luther taught and acted that Rome hates him.  He would have been permitted to lecture in peace whatever he wished—­others in the universities were doing that at the time—­if he had only been careful not to do anything, at least not publicly, against the authority of the Church.  That was the unpardonable blunder of Luther that he wanted to live as he believed, and that he taught others to do the same.  For this reason he is a dullard, an ignoramus, a poor scholar, a poor writer, in a word, an inferior person from a literary and scholarly point of view.

In Numbers (chap. 22) there is a story told of the prophet Balaam, who went out on a wicked mission for which a great reward had been promised him.  He rode along cheerfully, feasting his avaricious heart on the great hoard he would bring back, when suddenly the ass that bore him balked.  The prophet began to beat the animal, but it did not budge an inch.  All at once this dunce of an ass which had never been put through a spelling-book began to talk and remonstrated with the prophet:  “Am I not thine ass?  What have I done unto thee that thou hast smitten me?” To his amazement the prophet was able to understand the ass quite well.  This dumb brute made its meaning plain to a learned man.  It was an intolerable outrage that an ass should lecture a doctor, and balk him in his designs.  Luther is that ass.  Rome rode him, and he patiently bore his wicked master until the angel of the Lord stopped him and he would go no further.  The only difference is that Balaam had his eyes opened, left off beating his ass, and felt sorry for what he had done.  Rome’s eyes have not been opened for four hundred years.  It is still beating the poor ass.  It does not see the Lord who has blocked her path and said, You shall go no further!