Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/146

 The intensity and sincerity of this protracted struggle marked Luther for life. It gave him a strength of character and a living power which never left him. The end of the long inner fight had freed him from the burden which had oppressed him, and his naturally frank, joyous nature found a free outlet. It gave him a sense of freedom, and the feeling that life was something given by God to be enjoyed,—the same feeling that humanism, from its lower level, had given to so many of its disciples. For the moment however nothing seemed questionable. He was a faithful son of the Medieval Church, "the Pope's house," with its Cardinals and its Bishops, its priests, monks, and nuns, its masses and its relics, its Indulgences and its pilgrimages. All these external things remained unchanged. The one thing that was changed was the relation in which one human soul stood to God. He was still a monk who believed in his vocation. The very fact that his conversion had come to him within the convent made him the more sure that he had done right to take the monastic vow. "

Soon after he had attained inward peace Luther was ordained, and Hans Luther came from Mansfeld for the ceremony, not that he took any pleasure in it, but because he did not wish to shame his eldest son. The sturdy peasant adhered to his anti-clerical Christianity, and when his son told him that he had a clear call from God to the monastic life, the father suggested that it might have been a prompting from the devil. Once ordained, it was Luther's duty to say mass and to hear confessions, impose penance and pronounce absolution. He had no difficulties about the doctrines and usages of the Church; but he put his own meaning into the duties and position of a confessor. His own experience had taught him that man could never forgive sin; that belonged to tifod alone. But the human confessor could be the spiritual guide of those who came to confess to him; he could warn them against false grounds of confidence, and show them the pardoning grace of God.

Luther's theological studies were continued. He devoted himself to Augustine, to Bernard, to men who might be called " experimental " theologians. He began to show himself a good man of business, with an eye for the heart of things. Staupitz and his chiefs entrusted him with some delicate commissions on behalf of the Order, and made quiet preparation for his advancement. In 1508 he, with a few other brother monks, was transferred from the convent at Erfurt to that at Wittenberg, to assist the small University there.

Some years before this the Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, the head of the Ernestine branch of his House, had resolved to provide a university for his own dominions. He had been much drawn to the Augustinian Eremites since his first acquaintance with them at Grimma when he was a boy at school. Naturally Staupitz became his chief adviser in his new scheme; indeed the University from the first might almost be called an educational establishment belonging to the