Church as the most critical temper must admit to be both natural and desirable, had been discarded by Lutheranism, and, as the result of this, we think, it generated Rationalism and Neology.

In the English Church, on the contrary, doctrines had never been put forth as those of any man; practices had never been enforced upon others as originating with individuals. The Bible as interpreted in the purest ages-the ritual of ancient Christendom purified from papal and unscriptural additions-these were the professed standards of her reformers, which stood forth with a prominence which they have ever since retained in our country, and which have had a constant and marked influence on the steadiness with which, on the whole, Catholic truth has been maintained among us, both in the Church and by those who dissent from her. We believe that if it had been possible for Cranmer to have given much of what was his own subjectivity to the English Reformation, and for Englishmen then to have called their Church Polity Cranmerism, the effects would have been as marked here as they were in Germany. We cannot "pin our faith to the sleeve of any man, unless he were inspired and commissioned of Heaven to instruct us, without its becoming a mere human thing in the end; and even the names of Paul and Apollos and Cephas, used as party words, would, we may learn from Scripture, have blighted the piety of those who adopted them. "Those who honour me," says God, "I will honour, but they that despise me shall be lightly esteemed;" and to put our own name, or that of any human being, to the Church of Christ, is, we maintain, a despising of the Author and Finisher of our faith. Are we wrong in attributing it as a failing in Luther that he placed self too highly in his treatment of the Church? Are we wrong in attributing to the influence of this pernicious example the subsequent unhappy fate of Lutheranism?

It will be understood, we hope, that all we have said must be taken in reference to Luther's greatness in the prime work of his life; not with regard to him as a man of ordinary moral stature or intellectual power. Had Luther never appeared as a Reformer in the first rank, but followed in the rear of others, as Melancthon did in his, there are excellencies enough in him to have made his life memorable for all time; a piece of biography which must interest young and old as long as Christianity shall delight to honour its master-minds. The very things which, perhaps, made him unfit to reconstruct what he had assisted in throwing down,-his warmth of temper and his disregard of the opinions of others-confer a charm on his conversation, and give

life to his biography. Few men have so many points of interest during a long career as Luther had, and when his life is read as that of a member of the clerical body and of general society, it has a great fascination about it. His love of children, of music, and of flowers, prove that his happiness was not dependent on great things, or existing circumstances. His disregard of wealth, and the luxuries it can procure, attest the singleness of his purpose as a holy and spiritual man; and his expansive benevolence to those in distress and sorrow, more than make compensation for the almost savageness of his treatment of his public adversaries.

It is thus, perhaps, a misfortune, that Luther has to be contemplated in two aspects so opposed to each other, as a reformer of public abuses, and a reconstructor of what had been thrown down; but such contrasts are inevitable in public men, and we can only avoid the inferences arising from them by a blind worship of their subjects. It is not in mortal man to exhibit perfection; and God has not interfered supernaturally, since the Apostolic age, to endow the instruments of his purposes with extraordinary and untarnished gifts. It shews a temper more allied to party spirit than to truth, when men seek to make idols of their "spiritual pastors and masters," and resent any exhibition of their frailties. Why should it be thought a wrong to the memory of Luther to record his frailties and failings, when he was, in his own opinion, so eminently compassed with infirmity? If three centuries do not enable us to view events and characters with an unprejudiced eye nothing will, and history, instead of instructing and correcting us, must be made to flatter our spirit of partizanship.

Luther has long since formed judgments of men and things far different from those which he so pertinaciously adhered to while a tenant of this lower world. May we not believe that many of those whose salvation he so rashly affirmed to be impossible, have long since held communion with him in that state in which the souls of the redeemed wait for their perfect consummation and bliss at the appearing of their Lord? If we, still the denizens of a land of intellectual mists and shadows, have to correct the past in the light of the present, how much more must disembodied spirits see to alter in their former cherished convictions? Erasmus, Zwingle, and Luther, could not harmonize on earth, because their souls looked out through the flesh, and saw things variously, in many respects, no doubt, apart from anything wrong in their opposite convictions. In estimating, therefore, the characters of great men engaged in the work of the Church of Christ, we should endeavour to raise

ourselves from the low platform of their exertions, to the elevated position they now occupy, and from which they judge impartially of all they did, wrote, and said. Solemn consideration! adapted well to make us faithful to their memories, and to guard ourselves against the faults into which they fell!

It will tend, more than anything else, to enable us to form a right estimate of Luther, to remember that, after all, the Reformation of the sixteenth century will not always occupy the same rank as an event in the history of the Church, as it has done from that day to this. The Church of Christ may have an existence of some thousands of years, and its history will then have to be surveyed from points of view of which now we can form no conception. Luther evidently thought the world was not destined to last long, and it was thus quite natural that he should infer the greatness of the crisis in which he was called to labour. Most Christian minds at the present day entertain a somewhat similar idea; they think these are the last days, and therefore the Papacy occupies much of their field of vision, either as a series of crimes on the part of those who belong to it, or of all-important struggles on the side of its opponents. This view may be a correct one, but we do not know that it is. What appears so great to us now may have to be viewed by our descendants as we look upon the conflicts of the early ages of the Church-the age of Athanasius and Arius for instance. Should such be really the case, then Luther and his contemporaries will have to be considered on a vastly wider field, and, while always taking their places in history, will cease to be the rallying-points of partizans.

Our task is now accomplished, and we may turn briefly to consider a little more closely the work of Mr. Worsley, which has been the text for our rather long homily. That an opening existed for something new on this subject, we think the author has established in the following paragraph of his Preface:—

"The Life of Martin Luther now offered to the public, is an attempt to supply a simple, impartial, and truthful narrative of the great Reformer's public acts and personal and domestic history in a succinct and readable form. Although many biographies of Luther existed previously in foreign languages, it would be difficult to point out one which is in any measure a complete work, or aims at being such; for the custom has been to dilate on the early portions of the Reformer's career, and to finish off the remainder of the story in a few pages or paragraphs. There is indeed no instance between the Life of Luther by Kiel, and perhaps one or two more works of the same kind, which has even aspired to a chronological arrangement. To the majority of readers, what is known of Luther has

probably been derived from the popular work of D'Aubigné, an interesting and graphic, as well as able history, which no candid person would be willing to depreciate; but besides that it is a history of the Reformation, and not of its principal agent, it does not carry down the narrative lower than the Diet of Augsburg, and Luther's life was extended nearly as much as sixteen years beyond that date. Whether, however, the present biography has supplied the desideratum which has unquestionably existed, can only be determined by the unbiassed judgment of the public."

We quite concede to Mr. Worsley that he has " supplied a desideratum;" and we thank him for doing so. But he has done still better service by presenting the character of Luther rather more fairly than has been done by others,—D'Aubigné, for instance. He is evidently under the spell which yet binds some of the master spirits of our age, as to Luther's almost supernatural powers, and as to some divine perfectness in the work he accomplished:-a spell from which we have endeavoured to shew that we aim to be free :-but at the same time he has a very proper view of the mere human element of the sayings and doings of his hero. Thus, after enumerating some of the acknowledged advantages of the Reformation he proceeds :

"But these undeniable facts do not constitute any inducement for dealing more tenderly than truth demands with the actions and life of the Reformer, to whom more than any other human agent the achievement of that great religious and intellectual revolution is attributable; for had Luther been as exceptionable a character as Henry VIII. of England, the movement which he originated would nevertheless have to take its stand strictly on its own merits. The endeavour has been to represent Luther such as he actually was; neither to feign motives, nor to suppress facts ; but to give his unbiassed story from his birth to the grave, without magnifying his excellences or extenuating his failings."

Enquiry will naturally be made as to the sources of information employed by the author; and as to how far they have been used primá manu. In the first years which follow the death of a man who has been the idol of his age, the mythical principle is reversed, and his character is less likely to be soberly looked upon by his contemporaries than by succeeding generations. This seems to have been the case in a special manner with Luther, who could scarcely be viewed as human by those who at first took upon themselves to describe him from the Protestant stand-point. But time has equalized the praises of his friends and the aspersions of his foes, and produced the materials for a

We cannot give up pretensions to candour; and yet we must depreciate the work of Dr. Merle D'Aubigné. As a religious romance his history has delighted us; but it is far too much coloured by the author's own mind to claim the character of sober history.

more life-like picture. What these are, as stated by Mr. Worsley, will appear in the following paragraphs, which although long, contain information which may be useful to our readers :

:

"The sources of information from which the narrative is drawn are principally the writings of Luther himself, or his contemporaries. The writings of Melancthon, Mathesius, Spalatin, Myconius, Cochlæus, and others, are of importance only second to the accounts transmitted by Luther's own pen. The observations of many contemporaries of what they saw or heard are collected in the careful pages of Seckendorf; and Walch's German edition of Luther's works, in twenty-four parts, published at Halle, in 1750, which also contains many documents, public and private, bearing on the Reformation and the great Reformer's career, has been found of essential service. There is also much to be gathered from the less trodden field of epistolary correspondence; and the familiar letter of Melancthon and Erasmus, and Zwingle and Ecolampadius, are considerable helps towards forming a true estimate of the character of persons and of the times. But Luther's own writings are, of course, the best and most authentic ground on which to compile his biography. These have been published in various editions, at different times, in Latin and German; but it is a disadvantage that no edition of his works hitherto brought to a close is quite perfect and complete. In the 'Acts,' or reports of events, conferences, etc., which appeared at the time from the pen of some Wittenburg writer, and answered the same purpose as the newspaper reports of the present day, and which evidently, from the frequent intermixture of the first with the third personal pronoun, were generally viewed by the Reformer himself, and therefore are authorized versions of what they relate, references are made for the most part either to the Jena or the Altenberg edition of Luther's works. His references to the Table-talk (Tischreden) are to Förstemann's admirable edition, published at Leipsic in 1844. And great use has been made of De Wette's excellent edition of Luther's Letters, published at Berlin in 1825 -a source of information altogether invaluable for his biography, as in perusing his unpremeditated familiar correspondence with an infinite variety of characters, monarch and merchant, warrior and scholar, his bosom friends, and his acquaintances of yesterday, the biographer in fact takes his seat at the entrance of his heart, and views character and motives in their spring and well-head.

"But other means of obtaining information, and of arriving at a fair and impartial estimate of acts and opinions have not been overlooked. Amongst these may be mentioned such German and French biographies of Luther as have been accessible, as well as the pages of Seckendorf, Sleidan, Father Paul, Pallavicini, Maimburg, etc., and also the more general histories of the period. And the greatest obligation must be acknowledged to the modern historian Ranke, whose stores of information are as immense as his philosophical instructions are invaluable, and who has enjoyed access to manuscript letters of ambassadors, and others personally engaged in the transactions they record, preserved among the archives of princes and cities, which throw a new light on history."