Page:Vactican as a World Power.djvu/266

 THE SACK OF ROME

wrought, and tuned the lyre of his feeling to the music of wonder* ful song* The demon in Luther hated devilishly, slew about him raucously, and made grimaces; but the bright, pious, darling child in him praised the Lord as he had always done in hymns. Today he doubts the value of his achievement; tomorrow he is certain of it again. Pushed on by the trend of events, he must often permit and do things that his heart repudiates; but if the whole is successful, what difference has a huge lie made? For him more than for anyone else the end justifies the means.

In founding and building up the Church he had severed from Rome he made tremendous mistakes. He tied it to the same worldly power which he had fought as the mortal enemy of a spiritual power and had none the less buttressed with quotations from the Scripture. The old and the new epochs part company in this giant and do battle within his soul It is no wonder, then, that from his eye there looked heaven and also hell The new era that took its rise in him he did not under- stand or desire. Freedom of faith and liberty of conscience, which he is said to have created, were so alien to him that he much preferred contradicting himself to conceding that one who contradicted him was right. No Church was any longer necessary, for his religion of God and the Soul required no visible authority. But it was too nearly akin to chaos to permit the rebels to surrender all that was contained in the Church. This disappeared only partly in the stormy waters; on the wreck to which its apostles clung, there raged a dreadful battle concerning the word of God, the half crushed Host, and the dregs of spilled Wine a thousand years old.

The drama was enough to drown out the voice of many a friend of Luther during the song of exultation. One for example, was Erasmus of Rotterdam. The greatest scholar of Europe was also the embodiment of a long-established quandary in which minds were caught as they faced the Church which was the backbone of Europe, and the new life of culture which broke against the walls of that Church. It was likewise a puzzle of choosing between the rights of the institution and the rights of the personality. Erasmus had poured out buckets of sarcasm over the way things were going in the Church and the Papacy; he had despatched the most ruthless satire to Julius II

THE