of any incompatibility among the things he retained or of any coherence between what he gave up and what he spared. Thus he opposed to the authority of the Pope the authority of Holy Scripture; but the Apostle who seemed to ignore or deny his most fundamental belief he was ready to denounce as if he were the Pope. He appealed to the German people to uphold against Rome a Gospel which declared all men to be equal before God; but, when the peasants drew from his first principle an inference which justified their revolt, he sided with the Princes. From his doctrine of Justification by Faith he argued against the papal chair and its claims; but his theory of the Eucharistie Sacrament was more full of mysteries that tax the reason than any of the articles which he regarded as specifically Popish. He held freedom to be the right of every Christian man, and confessed himself bound to accept every consequence which came by legitimate reasoning from the truth he acknowledged; but he refused the right hand of brotherhood to Reformers whose love of freedom, integrity of character, purity of motive, and zeal in the faith were equal to his own.
The longer the Protestant Church lived, the more the Reformer's inconsistencies and the inadequacy of his Reformation became evident; and so a double result followed. On the one side the ancient Church pressed with growing severity upon the revolt and its leaders; and, on the other side, the more eager of the rebellious spirits went forward in search of simpler yet more secure positions. Rome did not indeed understand at once what had happened; but she understood enough to see how Luther and the communities he had founded could best be dealt with. An ancient Church which has governed man for centuries, instructed him, organised and administered his worship, consecrated him from his birth and comforted him in his death, has always an enormous reserve of energy. Man is a being with an infinite capacity for reverence; and it is where he most reveres that he is most conservative and least inclined to change. And consequences soon followed from the Reformation which threatened to limit its scope to the purification of Catholicism, to the restoration of its decayed energies, and to furnishing it with the opportunity of vindicating by policy and argument, by speech and action, its name and its claims. Heresies soon arose in the Protestant as they had arisen in the early Church; the collision of the new thought with the old associations provoked discussion; discussion begat differences; differences became acute antitheses which were hardened into permanence by the very means taken to soften or overcome them. Anabaptism supplied Catholicism with fruitful illustrations of the dangers incident to freedom of thought; the Peasants' War was made to point a moral which appealed to the jealousy of nobles and the ambitions of Kings; the rise of sectaries and the multiplication of sects were employed to set off" the excellence of a uniform faith and an infallible Church; the abolition of priesthood and hierarchy was used to unchurch
