that he could live a month, the cardinals took his bribes and made him pope. Then he got well. He was more refined than Alexander, if not more pure. He was devoted to art and helped on the work of building St. Peter's, and invented the farming out of indulgences, which brought Luther to the front. After the death of his brother and nephew, Leo X modified the zeal which distinguished him at the outset. He gave himself up to the pleasure of the chase. He had four masters of the art occupied in inventing unheard-of dishes, for which the faithful paid seven millions a year for supplying the table of the pope. He died Dec. 1, 1521, aged 44 years, having been pope for nearly nine years. Then came Adrian VI, who tried to reform the church, and at one time threatened to go to Germany, study the doctrines of Luther, and, should he lose the tiara, become a convert to the new belief and labor with the reformer in overthrowing the theocratic edifice and leading the church back to the worship of the true religion of Christ. This determination no sooner was known than a concert of curses rose against him, and attempt after attempt was made to assassinate him. In 1523, Clement VII became pope, and undid all that Adrian tried to accomplish. It was during his reign the Anabaptists were persecuted, and in less than a year there were more than 150,000 martyrs. They were content to preach, suffer and die. Henry VIII broke from Rome at the same time. After Clement, in 1534, came Paul III, who pushed nepotism farther even than Alexander VI. He was the foe of education, of liberty, of Christianity. But the Reformation spread and was established. To recount Rome's cruelties is impossible. Her history is echoed in the carnage of the battle field, in the sighs of suffering innocence. Her pathway is marked by the blood of more than 50,000,000 of earth's noblest and best. Over the grave of Waldenses and Albigenses, Baptists and lovers of the word of God, the crosier cast its shadow, when Luther stood forth to preach Christ and him crucified. To read the Bible was to be guilty of sin. To keep a Bible was to be guilty of death. Lucretia Borgia, the own daughter of Alexander VI, the pope, presided over the affairs of the church and the councils of the car dinals in the costume of a bacchante, with naked bosom and her body scarcely covered by a muslin robe. In this condition, she deliberated on questions of licentiousness, and helped rule and govern, in accordance with written laws, 50,000 licensed prostitutes, and herself received caresses so immodest that Burchard exclaims, "Horror! ignominy! disgrace!" This at the Vatican. Imagine the condition of affairs where priests and bishops give themselves up to every form of indulgence. In the midst of the Augean stable Luther arose. 4. Luther in harness deserves to be studied. He told the truth. He translated the Bible. He proclaimed it. He was not afraid. Luther emancipated the people from superstition. He called things by their names. He showed that it was possible to defy the pope and live. He dared him to do his worst and thrived in doing it. He was utterly reckless in his assaults. His pamphlets on The Abuse of Masses, Against the Idol of IIalle, and Monastic Vows, contain language so rough, so impolitic, so harsh, that you see at once that he had burned the bridges behind him and had not thought of making a compromise. He cleared the air of superstitious dread. He showed that it was possible to telthe truth and live. He was utterly fearless, and seems to have been reared to do work which had never before been attempted. Think of him when urged not to go to Worms: "If Jesus Christ do but aid me, I will never fly from the field nor desert the word of my God; should the pope kindle a fire that will blaze from Wittenberg to Worms, I will appear in the name of my God." When told that Duke George would be sure to arrest him, he replied: "If it should rain Duke Georges for nine days together, I will go." He had taken the book out of the angel's hands, and felt that he must prophesy before many peoples and nations and tongues and kings. Luther emancipated conscience. It had been captured, as is the conscience of Romanists at this hour. The church is its custodian, the priest is its jailer. Luther threw open the prison doors, and paved the way not only for the Reformation but for religious liberty and for our republic. Romanists today are permitted to build their sanctuaries and chant their Ave Marias because of the work wrought by Luther. The emancipation of conscience gave liberty to thought and struck off the shackles which had held the laity captive. For centuries the people had been taught to believe that no layman could approach God, except through the mediation of a priest, and therefore that the distinction between priest and layman was a distinction on which the whole hierarchical system of Rome rests. But Luther, remembering how he hims elf, in his own bitterness of soul, had come directly to God, without any intervention save that of the one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, and had found peace in believing, struck a Titan blow at the distinction between priest and layman, declaring that the veil of the temple was still rent in twain, and that all believers, whether ministers or laymen, men or women, adults or children, were alike priests before God, having equal right of entrance into heaven's holy of holies. This threw back the prison bars from the worshipers, and permitted men and women, without liturgical forms, to sing and pray and preach as the Spirit moved upon them. It was Luther's mission to emancipate the latent, imprisoned convictions and yearnings of awaking Christendom. He was both the child and the sire of his epoch. Truly has it been said that no man ever illustrated more finely the poet's saying: "Great offices will have Great talents, and God gives to every man Luther was greater than Germany. Truth made him a prime factor in the development of the race; for he it was who, by the grace of God, his own genius and his transcendent piety, discovered and clarified colossal truths lost in haze or buried in oblivion; emancipating the intellect and conscience of the church, re-asserting the absolute supremacy of the Bible in matters of faith, restoring the sole headship of Jesus Christ, manumitting the laity, guiding with a strong and skillful hand the swollen, turbulent river of new conceptions bursting forth from the glacier caverns of the long mediæval winter, in the spring freshet of the Reformation; in brief, steering the well-nigh shipwrecked church of God back to her apostolic moorings. That is the Luther of history: let us thank God for the gift. 5. The work to be undertaken by ourselves. The Romanism he fought is not dead. It is here in our land. Its shadow curses the world. It is no longer the fetter to progress that it was when Luther arose. Now, channels have been opened for benevolence, for education and enlightenment on every side. The Roman Catholic churches are not even counted when we reckon up the agencies to be employed for Christianizing and elevating the people of the land. We expect the priests to fight liberty, to oppose education and stand across the path of progress. Capel says they are a unit in opposing our system of free schools. Capel will find himself mistaken. He says that when Rome pulls the trigger, eight millions of Romanists will withdraw their children. from the public schools and refuse to be taxed for their support. So said Jefferson Davis about slavery. It looked then as if it might be true. The trigger was pulled. The gun was fired at the flag of Sumter. The echo of that gun leaped over the land. What was the result? The air grew red with flags, and they flamed on Catholic steeples as elsewhere, for none were brave or bold enough to stem the current of patriotism sweeping over the land. It will be so again. This is Immanuel's land. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. We know what popery is. Today the people feel that there is no danger. Let Rome lift a hand and reveal the fact that there is danger, and you will see that the land of the Book is the land of the free. Luther saw things worse than we see them. He told the truth in plain words and showed "Why Priests Should Wed," saying: "To what condition is the clergy fallen, and how many priests do we find burdened with women and children and their bitter remorse while no one comes to their aid. It may suit the pope and the bishops to let things go on as they list, I will deliver my conscience. The devil says, 'Forbid the clergy to marry;' Paul says, 'Let the bishop be the husband of one wife,' and so I, Martin Luther, will marry." When forty-one years of age, in 1525, he took Catherine Von Bora, who had fled from the Cistercian nunnery of Nimptsch. It was in perfect conformity with his masculine and daring mind, that, having satisfied himself of the nullity of the monastic vows, he should take the boldest method of showing to the world how utterly he rejected them. "He married to please himself, tease the pope and vex the devil." He delighted to praise the wife he honored as "good, pious and obedient, and prized above the kingdom of France or the state of Venice." 6. The slanderers of Luther. It is meet that when the emperor and the people of Germany, where Luther was born and toiled, when Christendom, in the enjoyment of the blessings secured by the prodigious efforts put forth by this man of God, rise up 400 years after he was born to thank God for his bravery and fidelity, that the minions of the pope throughout the world should rise up and slander and vilify him. Rev. William Stang, a priest of Providence, R. I., says: "The so-called Reformation inflicted a wound upon the church, but this wound served for the discharge of impurities which wicked men had introduced into the body of the church." Because Luther raised his voice against the pope and his church, he is described as a coarse, vulgar fellow, a drunkard, a blasphemer, a lascivious wretch who was possessed with a legion of devils. The hatred of Luther is not new or strange. Shortly after his death, his doctrines, his death. and the condition of his body after interment were the objects of ignoble calumnies on the part of Catholics; they published libels against him, affirming that he sprang from carnal commerce beween the devil and his mother; they blackened his memory by accusing him of having sold to Satan his eternal share in paradise for fifty years of pleasant life on earth, of having denied the existence. of God and the immortal soul, and of having composed bacchanalian hymns. Notwithstanding this deluge of calumniating pamphlets, Luther remained the apostle who snatched the people from the yoke of the court of Rome, and led them from degradation and darkness into the principles of liberty which he bequeathed to posterity. Rev. I. T. Hecker, of the Paulist Fathers, disgraced himself by comparing Luther to Guiteau. He did not hurt Luther, but proved that Romanism degrades and dwarfs the intellect and ruins the soul. The fact is that, since the principles sowed broadcast by Luther have taken root, persecutions on any such scale as once characterized the world are an impossibility. The conscience of mankind has been educated. Public sentiment compels nations to move in the beaten path of right. There is a power behind every throne, and |