736 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 τὸ 1580.
natory judgments of such men as Erasmus, Zwingli, and CEcolampadius, not to speak of his Romish adversaries. Nothing shows more clearly the great distance which sepatates him from the apostles and evangelists.
But, with all his faults, he is the greatest man _ that Germany produced, and one of the very greatest in history. Melanchthon, who knew him best, and suffered most from his imperious temper, called him the Elijah of Protestantism, and compared him to the Apostle Paul! And indeed, in his religious experience and theological standpoint, he strongly resembles the Apostle of the Gentiles, — though at a considerable distance, — more strongly than any schoolman or father. He roused by his trumpet voice the church from her slumber; he broke the yoke of papal tyranny; he re-. conquered Christian freedom ; he re-opened the fountain of God’s holy Word to all the people, and directed the Christians to Christ, their only Master.
This is his crowning merit and his enduring monument.
Augustin, Luther, Calvin.
The men who, next to the Apostles, have exerted and still exert through their writings the greatest influence in the Christian Church, as leaders of theological thought, are St. Augustin, Martin Luther, and John Calvin: all pupils of Paul, inspired by his doctrines of sin and grace, filled with the idea that God alone is great, equally eminent for purity of character, abundance in labors, and whole-souled consecration to the service of Christ, their common Lord and Saviour ; and yet as different from each other as an African, a German, and a Frenchman can be. Next to them I would place an Englishman, John Wesley, who, as to abundance of
1 He announced the death of Luther to his students with the words: “Ah! obiit auriga et currus Israel, qui rexit ecclesiam in hac ultima senecta . mundi... . . Amemus igitur hujus viri memoriam.”’
8 124. LUTHER’S PUBLIC CHARACTER. 137
useful labor in winning souls to Christ, is the most apostolic man that Great Britain has produced.
Augustin commands the respect and gratitude of the Catholic as well as the Protestant world. He is, among the three, the profoundest in thought, and the sweetest in spirit ; free from bitterness and coarseness, even in his severest polemics; yet advocating a system of exclusiveness which justifies coercion and persecution of heretics and schismatics. _He identified the visible catholic church of his day with the kingdom of God on earth, and furnished the program of medieval Catholicism, though he has little to say about the papacy, and protested, in the Pelagian controversy, against the position of one Pope, while he accepted the decision of another. All three were fighters, but against different foes and with different weapons. Augustin contended for the catholic church against heretical sects, and for authority against false freedom; Luther and Calvin fought for evangelical dissent from the overwhelming power of Rome, and for rational freedom against tyrannical authority. Luther was the fiercest and roughest fighter of the three; but he alone had the Teutonic gift of humor which is always associated with a kindly nature, and extracts the sting out of his irony and sarcasm. His bark was far worse than his bite. He advised to drown the Pope and his cardinals in the Tiber; and yet he would have helped to save their lives after the destruction of their office. He wrote a letter of comfort to Tetzel on his death-bed, and protested against the burning of heretics.
Luther and Calvin learned much from Augustin, and esteemed him higher than any human teacher since the Apostles; but they had a different mission, and assumed a polemic attitude towards the traditional church. Augustin struggled from the Manichean heresy into catholic orthodoxy, from the freedom of error into the authority of truth; the Reformers came out of the corruptions and tyranny of