HIS DEATH-BEFORE AND AFTER.

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he lost the use of reason at many of the sumptuous banquets, in which he was wont to revel with his intimate friends; and Seckendorf, his warmest admirer, admits that "he used food and drink joyfully, and indulged in jokes,"* even on the eve of his death. In fact, so little was he in the habit of restraining his passions, or of concealing his vices, that they all stood out in bold relief,-strong even in death!

His death was in every respect worthy of the life he had habitually led since he had turned reformer. His last words contained a refusal to retract his errors, and a declaration that he wished to die as he had lived! We will give a few incidents connected with his last moments. "I am ready to die," he said, "whenever it shall please God my Saviour; but I would wish to live till Pentecost, that I might stigmatize before the whole world this Roman beast, whom they call the Pope, and with him his kingdom." His pains becoming very acute, he said one day to his nurse: "I wish there was a Turk here to kill me." Hear how he prays, while suffering: "My sins-death, the devil-give me no rest! What other consolation have I but thy grace, O God! Ah! let it not abandon the most miserable of men, the greatest of sinners!" Witness again the spirit of the following characteristic prayer, in which the supplication for mercy is blended with hatred of his enemies: "O my God! how I would wish that Erasmus and the Sacramentarians did for a moment experience the pains that I suffer: then I would become a prophet and foretell their conversion."+

After the sumptuous feast alluded to above, he gave vent to his humor in the following strain, the subject of which is the devil-his usual hobby: "My dear friends, we can not die, till we have caught hold of Lucifer by the tail! I saw his back yesterday from the castle turrets.”‡

* "Cibo et potu hilariter usus est; et facetiis indulsit." Seckendorf, Commentar. de Lutheranismo.

For more facts of a similar kind, see Audin, p. 482, seqq.

Rareburgius, in his MS. Seckendorf, lib. iii, § 36, cxxxiv.

The discourse subsequently turned on the study of the Scriptures, and Luther made the following declaration, which is valuable as a death-bed confession. "It is no trifle to understand the Scriptures. Five years' hard labor will be required to understand Virgil's Georgics: twenty years' expe rience to be master of Cicero's Epistles: and a hundred years' intercourse with the prophets Elias, Eliseus, John the Baptist, Christ, and the apostles, to know the Scriptures!— Alas! poor human nature!"* And yet the last twenty-nine years of his life had been devoted to the promulgation of the cardinal principle of his new religion, that every one was competent to understand the Scriptures by his own private judgment! Well may we exclaim-"Alas! poor human

nature!"

Such was, or rather became, Martin Luther, after he had left the holy Catholic Church! Compare his character then with what it was before that event; and then apply D'Aubigné's test given above, and the conclusion is irresistible: that he was not a chosen instrument in the hands of God for reforming the Church, which "He had purchased with His blood." Before he left the Church, he was, as we have seen, humble, patient, pious, devoted, chaste, scrupulous; afterwards, he was, in every one of these particulars, directly the reverse. Does God choose such instruments to do his work? Was Moses, was Aaron, were the apostles such characters? Luther, like the apostles, forsooth! They were humble, chaste, patient, temperate, and modest: he was proud, immoral, impatient, and wholly shameless. They had a mission from God, and proved it by mirales: he had not the one, nor did he claim the other; though challenged on the subject, both by the Zuinglians and by the Anabaptists. Therefore

* Florimond Remond, b. iii, c. ii, fol. 287. Laign, vita Lutheri, fol. 4.

+ Acts xx: 28.

See Audin, p. 239. Stübner, an Anabaptist, asked him to produce his miracles. He was silent, though a little before, he had made the very same challenge to Karlstadt, and renewed it afterwards to the Zuinglians!

CHARACTER OF THE REFORMERS.

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God did not send him—and all of D'Aubigné's canting theory falls of itself to the ground. What must the lock of the Reformation be, if Luther's personal character be the key, which suits its internal structure?

It would be easy to show, by unquestionable evidence, that the other reformers were not a whit better than Luther. We have seen already, what testimony they mutually bore to the character of one another; and we shall probably have occasion to recur to the subject in the sequel of our essay:

"The historian, Hume, has truly characterized the reformers as 'fanatics and bigots;' but with no less justice might he have added, that they were (with one exception perhaps)* the coarsest hypocrites:† men, who, while professing the most high-flown sanctity in their writings, were in their conduct, brutal, selfish, and unrestrainable; who, though pretending, in matters of faith, to adopt reason as their guide, were in all things else, the slaves of the most vulgar superstition; and who, with the boasted right of private judgment forever on their lips, passed their lives in a course of mutual recrimination and persecution; and transmitted the same warfare as an heirloom to their descendants. Yet, 'these be thy Gods,' O Protestantism !—— these the coarse idols which heresy has set up in the niches of the saints and fathers of old, and whose names, like those of all former such idols, are worn like brands upon the foreheads of their worshipers."

Whoever will read attentively the veridical history of the Reformation, will admit the truth of this picture drawn by the great Irish bard.

* Melancthon.

† Bucer admits the justice of this reproach. Epist. ad Calvin.

‡ “Travels of an Irish Gentleman," etc., p. 200, 201. Doyle, New York, 1835.

PART II.

CAUSES AND MANNER OF THE REFORMATION.

CHAPTER II.

CHARACTER OF THE REFORMATION-THEORY OF D'AUBIGNE EXAMINED.

The question stated-D'Aubigné's opinion-Mother and daughter-Argumentum ad hominem-Jumping at a conclusion-Second causes-Why Germany was converted-Why Italy and Spain were not-Luther and Mohammed-Reasoning by contraries-Why France continued Catholic. WE have seen what was the character of the chief instruments who brought about the Reformation in Germany; we are now to examine what was the character of the work itself, and how it was accomplished. Were the reasons which were assigned, as the principal motives for this alleged reform in religion, sufficient to justify it, according to the judgment of impartial men? Were the means employed for bringing it about such as would lead us to believe, that it was really a change for the better; and were they such as God would or could have approved and sanctioned? Finally, weighing these motives and these means, and making all due allowance for the condition of the times, was there any thing very remarkable in the rapid progress of the Reformation itself? We will endeavor to answer these questions in the following chapters.

D'Aubigné, and those who concur with him, profess to believe, or at least endeavor to make others believe, that the Reformation was not only sanctioned by God, but that it was directly His work. He says:

"Christianity and the Reformation are, indeed, the same revolution, but working at different periods, and in dissimilar circumstances. They differ in secondary features-they are alike in their first lines, and leading charac

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ITS RAPID DIFFUSION.

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The former closes the Between them is the

teristics. The one is the reappearance of the other. old order of things-the latter begins the new. middle age. One is the parent of the other; and if the daughter is in some respects inferior, she has, in others, characters altogether peculiar to herself.”*

In opposition to this flattering theory, we will endeavor to prove that the Reformation differs from Christianity, not only "in secondary features," but also "in its first lines and leading characteristics ;" and that, if the former was the daughter of the latter, she was a most recreant and degenerate daughter truly, with scarcely one lineament in common with her parent. Verily, she had "characters altogether peculiar to herself," and she was not only "in some respects," but in almost every thing, not only "inferior" to, but the direct opposite, of her alleged parent!

According to our author, one of these "characters of the Reformation peculiar to itself," was "the suddenness of its action." He illustrates the rapidity with which the Reformation was established, by the figure employed by our blessed Saviour to denote the suddenness of His second coming: "As the lightning cometh forth from the west and shineth to the east, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be." "Christianity," he says, "was one of those revolutions, which was slowly and gradually prepared ;" the Reformation, on the contrary, was instantaneous in its effect:-"A monk speaks, and in half of Europe the power and glory [of the Church of Rome] crumbles in the dust!"+ This rapidity he views as a certain evidence, that the Reformation was assuredly the work of God. For "how could an entire people-how could so many nations, have so rapidly performed so difficult a work? How could such an act of critical judgment [on the necessity and measure of the reform] kindle the enthusiasm indispensable to great, and especially to sudden revolutions? But the Reformation was a work of a very different kind; and this, its history will prove. It was the pouring forth anew of that life which Christianity had brought into the world."† * D'Aubingé, Preface, p. iv. + Ibid.

Ibid.