tumn, careless of consistency with its first buddings in the cold rains of Jlarch. That Luther was unselfish, earnest, honest, inflexibly brave in danger, full of ten- derness and humanity, the ideal of Germanic strength and of Germanic goodness ; that he was one of the great creative spirits of the race, mighty in word and deed, matchless as a popular orator, one of the very people, yet a prince among princes, a child of faith, a child of God — this is admitted by all (see Krauth's Conservative Reformat, p. 45-87).
There is scarcely another instance in history in which an individual, without secular authority or mili- tary achievement, has so stamped himself upon a peo- ple, and made himself to so great an extent tlie lead- er, the representative, the voice of the nation. He has been to Germany what Homer was to Greece. " He was the only Protestant reformer," says Bayard Taylor, " whose heart was as large as his brain." (See " An In- terview with Jlartin Luther," in Harper's Monthli/, xxii, 231.) Luther was well-set, not tall, was handsome, with a "clear, brave countenance," and fresh complexion. His eyes were remarkable for their keenness, "dark and deep-set, shining and sparkling like a star, so that they could not well be looked upon," as old Kessler describes them. The fulness of face given him in his later pic- tures was the rcsidt, not of robustness, but of a dropsical tendency, resulting from his early austerities. His pliys- ical life was largely one of suffering. His habits were abstemious, and his enjoyments at the table were social, not Epicurean. His voice was not loud nor strong. Melancthon's happy phrase touching Luther's words is, that they were " fulmina," not " tonitrua" — it was their lightning, not their thunder, by which their mighty ef- fects were produced. The papal system, the upas of the ages, which they struck, is not dead, but it is riven and blasted from its crown to its root.
XII. Luther as a Conservator. — The culmination of Luther's epic for the world at large is undoubtedly the defence at Worms. An obvious source of the diminu- tion of interest in the later years of Luther's life is that the carrying through of what had been so grandly be- gun presents, in the nature of the case, less that brings before the mind, in all the magic of its unparalleled power, the personal character of Luther. \Mien the warfare is ended, the life of the greatest soldier becomes as tame as that of the ordinary man. But, beyond this, a diminished interest and a divided sympathy are due to the fact that in the development of doctrine and of the constitution of the Church Luther took a position on which the Protestant world has divided. Tlie occa- sion for the exhibition of Luther's conservatism was given by his conflict with the Zwickau Prophets (1522) and Carlstadt, and by the dreadful excesses of the peas- ant insurrections. In these he encountered what claim- ed to be results of the German mystical thinking — a mysticism which he himself had cherished; he found that these wild fanatics put their own construction upon his views of Christian liberty and the rights of the con- grpgation, and ajipealed to those views in self-defence. Tliese results and this construction Luther looked upon with abhorrence. Luther brought to a fuller exhi- bition wliat was the real difference in principle be- tween the position of these fanatics and his own. He saw that they consciously ignored and rejected a prin- ciple without which reformation \voul(l be transformed into a radical and violent revolution, foreign in its own nature to the whole genius and history of Christianity. This principle is that of the unbroken historical life and development of the Church. Not as a something iso- lated from the Church, but as a divine power within it, had the truth of God reached the soul of Luther. The power which ojiened to Luther the true nature of re- pentance, justitication, and grace, had not simply lin- gered in the Church, but had ripened in it, and the Ref- ormation could no more have been, nor Luther have been Luther, without the Church in history, than with- out the Word. Men are betjotten of God through the
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Word, but the Church is the mother who bears them. The 'Word of God is the all-sufhcient rule of faith, but it must be seeu or heard in order to be applied ; and the rule of faith does not write itself, print itself, circulate itself, or speak itself, and all the ordinary organs of its perpetuation, circulation, and application are within the (jhurch. The divinity of the Word and the divinity of the Church are doctrines not only in harmonj' with each other, but necessary to each other's existence. The first without the second is fanaticism, sectarianism, and hopeless individualism ; the second without the first is popery. The movement of Luther, from the hour of its riper self-perception, was so completely churchly and historical that the fanatics hated Luther more than they hated the pope. Among the evidences that Luther felt the need of building the sound, as well as of thinning down and removing the rotten, may be mentioned the Wittenberg Order of the Congregations, 1522 ; the Leis- nig Order of the General Fund, 1523 ; letter to the land- grave of Hesse in regard to the Homberg Church-Or- der. 1527; the Visitation, 1527-1529; the part he took in the arrangement of the consistories and for the gov- ernment of the Church.