power in their hands. The most eminent of the explorers was a Genoese sailor; the best known conqueror was an officer's bastard; the author of the new astronomy was a clerk who never became a priest; the foremost scholar of the day was a child born out of wedlock; the most acute political thinker was a plain Florentine citizen; and the most potent English statesman was the son of a rustic tradesman. And this strenuous individualism found its counterpart in religion; the rights of man in religion were declared; the individual asserted his competence to know and to obey the truth by which he was to be judged.
But the Reformation, at least in its earlier phase, bore also upon its face the image of the man whose genius gave it actual being. Luther had become a Reformer rather by necessity of nature than by choice of will. His peasant descent may have given him a conservative obstinacy which was concentrated and intensified by his narrow scholastic education. No man ever clung with more tender intensity to the customs and beliefs that could be saved from the wreckage of the past. But he did his work as a Reformer the more thoroughly because he did it from nature rather than from choice. It is doubtful if in the whole of history any man ever showed more of the insight that changes audacity into courage. By the publication of his Theses he proclaimed a doctrine of grace that broke up the system which Europe had for centuries believed and obeyed. By burning the papal Bull he defied an authority which no person or people had been able to resist and yet live. By his address to the nobles of the German nation he appealed from ecclesiastical passion and prejudice to secular honour and honesty. By his appearance and conduct at the Diet of Worms he showed that he could act as he had spoken. By his translation of the Bible he spread before the eyes of every religious man the law by which he was bound. And by his marriage he declared the sanctity of the home and the ties which attached man to woman.
But, though Luther was by nature strong and heroic, he was yet so intellectually timid that he could not bear suspense of judgment, even where such suspense was an obvious duty. And so the system he created was, alike in what it sacrificed and what it spared, a splendid example of dialectical adaptation to personal experience. He was indeed so typical a German that his Church suited the German people; but for the same reason it could not live outside Teutonic institutions and the Teutonic mind. He had no constitutional tendency to scepticism, for his convictions did not so much follow or obey as underlie and guide the processes of his logic. Hence he was a man equally powerful in promoting and in resisting change; he stood up against forces that would have overwhelmed a weaker or a smaller man; but as a conservative by nature he professed beliefs that a man of a more consistent intellect would have dismissed, and cherished customs which a more radical reformer would have surrendered. And he was not conscious
