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an

account of his extraordinary behaviour. Luther, who now

was the national hero of the Germans, went. He refused to

take back a single word of what he had ever written or said.

His conscience was controlled only by the word of God. He

would live and die for his conscience

The Diet of Worms, after due deliberation, declared

Luther an outlaw before God and man, and forbade all Germans

to give him shelter or food or drink, or to read a single

word of the books which the dastardly heretic had written.

But the great reformer was in no danger. By the majority

of the Germans of the north the edict was denounced as a most

unjust and outrageous document. For greater safety, Luther

was hidden in the Wartburg, a castle belonging to the Elector

of Saxony, and there he defied all papal authority by translating

the entire Bible into the German language, that all the

people might read and know the word of God for themselves.

By this time, the Reformation was no longer a spiritual

and religious affair. Those who hated the beauty of the modern

church building used this period of unrest to attack and

destroy what they did not like because they did not understand

it. Impoverished knights tried to make up for past losses by

grabbing the territory which belonged to the monasteries.

Discontented princes made use of the absence of the Emperor

to increase their own power. The starving peasants, following

the leadership of half-crazy agitators, made the best of

the opportunity and attacked the castles of their masters and

plundered and murdered and burned with the zeal of the old

Crusaders.

A veritable reign of disorder broke loose throughout the

Empire. Some princes became Protestants (as the ``protesting''

adherents of Luther were called) and persecuted their

Catholic subjects. Others remained Catholic and hanged their

Protestant subjects. The Diet of Speyer of the year 1526

tried to settle this difficult question of allegiance by ordering

that ``the subjects should all be of the same religious denomination

as their princes.'' This turned Germany into a checkerboard

of a thousand hostile little duchies and principalities and

created a situation which prevented the normal political

growth for hundreds of years.

In February of the year 1546 Luther died and was put

to rest in the same church where twenty-nine years before he

had proclaimed his famous objections to the sale of Indulgences.

In less than thirty years, the indifferent, joking and

laughing world of the Renaissance had been transformed into

the arguing, quarrelling, back-biting, debating-society of the

Reformation. The universal spiritual empire of the Popes

came to a sudden end and the whole Western Europe was

turned into a battle-field, where Protestants and Catholics

killed each other for the greater glory of certain theological

doctrines which are as incomprehensible to the present generation

as the mysterious inscriptions of the ancient Etruscans.

RELIGIOUS WARFARE

THE AGE OF THE GREAT RELIGIOUS

CONTROVERSIES

THE sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the age of

religious controversy.

If you will notice you will find that almost everybody

around you is forever ``talking economics'' and discussing

wages and hours of labor and strikes in their relation to the

life of the community, for that is the main topic of interest

of our own time.

The poor little children of the year 1600 or 1650 fared

worse. They never heard anything but ``religion.'' Their

heads were filled with ``predestination,'' ``transubstantition,''

``free will,'' and a hundred other queer words, expressing

obscure points of ``the true faith,'' whether Catholic or

Protestant. According to the desire of their parents they were

baptised Catholics or Lutherans or Calvinists or Zwinglians

or Anabaptists. They learned their theology from the Augsburg

catechism, composed by Luther, or from the ``institutes

of Christianity,'' written by Calvin, or they mumbled the

Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith which were printed in the English