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 and Duke George of Saxony and Charles V as much as the Elector Frederick. But there was a vast difference between such a recognition and the acknowledgement of Luther's doctrine of the unfree will, between the admission that the theory of good works had been grossly abused and the assertion that all good works were vain. The division thus initiated was deep and permanent, and whereas the practical aims of the Reformation have commanded a universal assent in theory and an ever-widening assent in practice, Luther's theology commanded only a sectional allegiance even among Reformers of his century and a decreasing allegiance in subsequent generations.

But Luther in spite of his repudiation of scholastic theology never got rid of the results of his scholastic training; he must have a complete and logical theory of the universe, and he sought it in the works of the great Father of the Church on whose precepts Luther's own Order had been professedly founded. St Augustine's views on the impotence of the human will had been adopted by the Church in preference to those of his antagonist Pelagius; but in practice their rigour had been mitigated by a host of beneficent dispensations invented to shield mankind from the inevitable effects of its helplessness in the face of original sin. These medieval accretions Luther swept away; he accepted with all its appalling consequences the doctrine of predestination and of the thraldom of mankind to sin, and did not hesitate to make God directly responsible for the evil as well as the good existing in the world. It is a singular phenomenon that a fervent belief in the impotence of the human will should have stimulated one of the most masterful wills which ever affected the destinies of mankind.

The evolution of this doctrine had been but one of the mental activities which occupied Luther during his enforced seclusion at the castle of Wartburg. His abduction had been preconcerted between himself and his friends at the Elector Frederick's Court on the eve of his departure from Worms; and the secret was so well kept that his followers commonly thought that he had been murdered by papal emissaries. Here in his solitude he was subjected to a repetition of those assaults of the devil which he had experienced in the Augustinian cloister. What assurance had he that he was right and the rest of the Church was wrong? But the faith that was in him saved him from his doubts of himself, and hard work prevented him from becoming a visionary. The news that Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz was intent on a fresh recourse to Indulgences provoked a remarkable illustration of Luther's influence; in spite of the efforts of well-wishers at the Saxon Court to keep him quiet, he presented an ultimatum to the Archbishop granting a respite of fourteen days within which Albrecht might retract and escape the perils of the Reformer's ful-minations. The Primate of Germany replied with an abject submission.

It was difficult to silence a man who wielded such an authority,