guished honors and emoluments. There was no safety to the honest inquirer after truth, either when he went out or when he came in. Hired informers watched him in public, and hired spies pursued him secretly to his most retired closets of study and devotion. Domestics informed against their employers, and relations and connections against their friends. The husband was not secure from accusation by the wife of his bosom, nor the wife by her husband; and, in multitudes of cases, to be accused and informed against, was to be condemned and executed, often with inhuman tortures. Thousands perished in the secret dungeons of the inquisition, and by private executions; and thousands perished in open day, spectacles to men as well as angels.

Such a persecuting power as the Roman Catholic church was at this time is without parallel in the history of the world. Pharaoh, Herod, Nero, Caligula, and all the monsters of ancient cruelty, dwindled into pigmies by the side of this spiritual Babylonian harlot.

But the system was permitted to develop itself fully, and to work out its legitimate results, as if to lay a foundation for its more utter destruction, and to furnish a more effectual warning against all future apostasies.

But God was preparing himself and his people for the great battle of ages. The crusades of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries had given an impulse to the cause of learning; the invention of the mariner's compass, in the fourteenth century, had given an impulse to navigation, commerce and manufactures; the invention of printing, in 1450, had opened new and inexhaustible resources for the diffusion and advancement of knowledge; and, finally, the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, in 1492, with other less important discoveries, prepared the way for a new and mighty movement of the human mind, in respect to religion and the liberties of the human race. Having prepared everything for his work, God introduced. Martin Luther upon the stage of Germany; the only field where,

at that time, his labors could have had full effect, and made him the great instrument of the Protestant reformation.

CHAPTER II.

THE RISE OF LUTHERANISM.

MARTIN LUTHER, the prime mover of the great Protestant reformation of Germany, in the sixteenth century, was born at Eisleben, Nov. 10, 1483. In his boyhood he obtained his support at school, as many other poor scholars did at that time, at the doors of the more wealthy inhabitants in the vicinity of the institution in which he studied; but, at a later period, he was taken under the care of a maternal relation, who provided for his support. In 1501 he entered the university at Erfurt, and received the degree of master in 1503, at the age of twenty. About this time he discovered a Bible in the library of the university, and commenced the study of it. This circumstance led to his studying for the ministry, though his original destination by his father, had been for the law.

Contrary to the wishes of his father, he entered the monastery of the Augustine monks at Erfurt, in 1505, at twenty-two years of age, and submitted to the rules of that order. He was made a priest in 1507, and a professor of philosophy in the new university of Wittemburg, in 1508. Here he began to discover and assert the rights of human reason against the despotism of tradition and the church.

In 1510 he visited Rome on business of his order, and was amazed at the corruption and impiety that he found there. In 1512 he was made a doctor of theology. He had become eminently learned in the Scriptures, and powerfully impressed with

a sense of their value as a standard of Christian faith and practice, and an instrument of general instruction.

In 1517 he opposed the sale of indulgences, in the most public and determined manner, by maintaining ninety-five public propositions against them.

His propositions were condemned as heretical, and, after a variety of ineffectual endeavors to bring him to submission to the Holy See, he was summoned to Rome, to answer for his heresies and other offences against the church. He refused to obey this summons, and continued his attacks on the most vital doctrines of the Papal system, particularly that of the supremacy of the Pope.

After appealing in vain from the Pope and his legate to a general council, he was excommunicated from the church, together with his friends, in 1520, and his writings were publicly burnt at Rome, Cologne and Louvaine. Luther answered this by burning the Pope's bull of excommunication, together with the decretals of the Papal canon of Wittemburg, Dec. 10, 1520.

He became from this time an object of the most intense interest, both to friends and foes. His attitude was one of great boldness and daring, and his enemies numerous and powerful, the principal of whom were the Pope Leo X., and Charles V., emperor of Germany. But he had also powerful friends among the princes of Germany, and, most of all, his God was his fortress and his high tower.

He took his stand on the Scriptures, and contended for Christianity as it was left by Christ and the apostles, denouncing the corruptions of the Papacy in the most unmeasured terms.

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In 1521, at the summons of the emperor Charles V., attended the diet at Worms, and defended his doctrines before the emperor, the archduke Ferdinand, six electors, twenty-four dukes, seven margraves, thirty bishops and prelates, and many other princes, counts, lords and ambassadors, and defied a refutation from the Scriptures.

On the excommunication of himself and his adherents by the

Pope, in 1520, Luther laid the foundation of the connection which has since borne his name, and which speedily became one of the largest and most important churches of the Protestant reformation of the sixteenth century.

He died at Eisleben, his native place, February 18, 1546, aged 63.

The celebrated protest of the princes of Germany favorable to the reformation, against the reëstablishment of the Papacy, was made April 19, 1529.

Luther reformed his church by lopping off the offensive additions of the Papacy and Papal corruption, and leaving the rest. With other things that he left, was a modified and extremely moderate Episcopacy. His Episcopacy, however, is a near approximation to Presbyterianism, except in Sweden and Denmark, where the different orders of the ministry are more marked, and titular distinctions, as well as offices of different grades, are maintained.

The temporal sovereigns of Europe, however, assumed the supreme control of ecclesiastical affairs, and govern the Lutheran churches of their respective domininions by consistories, or church courts, composed of civil and ecclesiastical jurists; the civil jurists appointed by themselves, the ecclesiastical by the church.

The church uses liturgies, and each country has its own liturgical service. The festivals of the Lutheran church are similar to those of the church of England and the Episcopal church of the United States.

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CHAPTER III.

THE LUTHERAN SYSTEM OF CHURCH POLITY.

THE Lutheran system of church government is sometimes di: tinguished from others under the title of the Consistorial System. At the time of the Protestant reformation, it was the common doctrine of the Protestant sovereigns that the sovereign was entitled to administer the affairs of the church equally with those of the state.

Luther's great doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers naturally required that the entire membership should participate in the functions of church government. But circumstances led him practically to exalt the power of the magistrate, and of the clerical body, and to neglect the representation of the membership, in church courts. The same policy was pursued by his successors; and, instead of a government emanating from the membership, or allowing them a controlling voice in church matters, the Lutheran churches received a government of consistories appointed by the sovereign, and subject to his supervision, making the head of the state the head of the church; and not only so, but making him its absolute master and spiritual sovereign.

So that the great enemy and assailant of the Papacy, as a system of spiritual despotism, has in effect set up only modified. systems of the same despotic polity; and the great battle of religious liberty and church government by the membership has been required to be fought and gained over again, by other champions and in other countries.

The secular sovereigns, being recognized as heads of the Lutheran churches in their dominions, have governed them by