Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/148

 sight of the city Luther raised his hands in an ecstasy, exclaiming, "I greet thee, thou Holy Rome, thrice holy from the blood of the Martyrs." That was his mood of mind-so little had his convent struggles and the peace he had found in the thought that the just live by faith separated him from the religious ideas of his time.

His official business did not cost much time; he seems to have had no complaints to make against the Curia; indeed the business on which he had been sent seems to have been settled in Germany by an amicable compromise. His official work done, he set himself to see the Holy City with the devotion of a pilgrim and the thoroughness of a German. He visited all the shrines, especially those to which Indulgences were attached. He climbed the thirty-eight steps which led to the vestibule of St Peter's-every step counting seven years' remission of penance; he knelt before all the altars; he listened reverently to all the accounts given him of the various relics and believed them all; he thought that if his parents had been dead, he could, by saying masses in certain chapels, secure them against purgatory. He visited the remains of antiquity which could tell him something of the life of the old Romans -the Pantheon, the Coliseum, and the Baths of Diocletian.

But if Luther was still unemancipated from his belief in relics, in the effect of pilgrimages, and in the validity of Indulgences for the remission of imposed penance, his sturdy German piety and his plain Christian morality turned his reverence of Rome into a loathing. The city he had greeted as holy, he found to be a sink of iniquity; its very priests were infidel, and openly scoffed at the sacred services they performed; the papal courtiers were men of depraved lives; the Cardinals of the Church lived in open sin; he had frequent cause to repeat the Italian proverb, first spread abroad by Machiavelli and by Bembo, "The nearer Rome the worfs Christian." It meant much for him in after-days that he had seen Rome for himself.

Luther was back in Wittenberg early in the summer of 1512. Staupitz sent him to Erfurt to complete the steps necessary for the higher graduation in Theology, preparatory to succeeding Staupitz in the Chair of Theology in Wittenberg. He graduated as Doctor of the Holy Scripture, took the Wittenberg doctor's oath to defend evangelical truth vigorously (viriliter), was made a member of the Senate three days later, and a few weeks after he succeeded Staupitz as Professor of Theology.

From the first Luther's lectures differed from what were then expected from a professor of theology. It was not that he criticised the theology then current in the Church; he had an entirely different idea of what theology ought to be, and of what it ought to make known. His whole habit of mind was practical, and theology for him was an "experimental " discipline. It ought to be, he thought, a study which would teach how a man could find the grace of God, and, having found it, how he could