the literal interpretation of the scriptures, adds: "from | Fifth had excited against the holy empire. Germany, this venomous stock sprung the errors of the Begards, thenceforth, became the theatre of bloody and relentthe mendicants of Lyons, and their like. There be many laymen among them, who hold copies of the Bible in the vulgar tongue, to the great detriment and scandal of Catholic truth."

beggars of Flanders, in a name which they hallowed by successful resistance against the power of despotism. But the servile wars of antiquity generally terminated fatally to the serfs. The peasantry of Cisalpine Gaul, known in history under the name of Baganda, who revolted at the period of the dismemberment of the Roman empire, were hewn into subjection; and the Jacqueries of the fourteenth century were massacred by the nobles, who banded from one extremity of Europe to the other, in a war of extermination.

less wars. If history affords frequent instances of what it is fashionable to call the inferior classes-the laborers, the peasantry and the mechanics-rising against that social order, which oppresses them; the issue of The ultimate action of these elements of opposition, their insurgency is, nevertheless, rarely of a successful was to strip the church of Rome of the support of tra- character. And for this we can easily account. They dition and authority, and to transfer the latter to the generally want all the necessary elements of successscriptural text,-saving the freedom of interpretation, skilful organization, proper leaders, and adequate which the innovators reserved to themselves. In this means: they bring but stout hearts and willing hands we may clearly trace the march of all opinions, which to the contest. Yet there are examples of triumph in suddenly modify the state of society; as well as the the case of the corporations of mechanics, who freed transitions through which they necessarily pass. It themselves in some of the cities of Europe, during the would seem, considering things in the abstract, that middle ages; and wrung charters of rights from the human reason, unshackled in its operations, and free reluctant grasp of barons, bishops and kings. In anspontaneously to combine the data of the intellect, cient history we find a solitary fact of this kind on might overleap time, space and circumstance, and indis-record:-that of the inhabitants of Brutium-slaves, criminately attain this or that extremity at will. But who shook off the yoke of the Lucanians, their masthe award of experience stands to the contrary:--al- ters; and who, branded with the contemptuous appellathough the limits of the intellectual domain are neither | tion of brutiates—brutes—prided themselves, like the visible to the eye nor tangible to the hand, they are not, therefore, the less accurately defined. An additional proof-though in a different order of observation, that intellect is dependant on and bound to the laws of a continuous development, the progress of which is in harmony with the development of the rest of earthly things. Luther contested and annihilated the infallibility of the pope and of the church; but he referred the principle of authority to the Bible. Though seemingly a retroaction, this was virtually an achievement—and, considering the period, the only achievement which the human mind could have made. To go from the authority of the holy see to the authority of the holy book ;-to seek for a rule of faith, not in the teachings of the church, who decided for the faithful; but in a revealed text, whence each was free to draw forth his inspirations and his proofs;--to pass from the rule of submission to that of inquiry, though an inquiry hemmed within certain bounds; such were the labors and achievements of the reformers--and such the terms, beyond which they were forbidden to go by the nature of things. But this term once attained, the authority of the scriptures themselves was in turn ex-trusty weapons of defence against the aggressions of -amined--questioned-denied :—revelation was contested, and christianity shaken to its centre. This was the work of the reformers of the eighteenth century, who ceased to limit investigation to the texts of a book, which they no longer deemed divinely inspired. The religious revolution, started by Luther's doc-gious levellers of the reformation and the democrats trines, induced great changes both in the order of poli- of the American revolution, as well as those who intics and the distribution of wealth. It secularised herited their principles and doctrines. many a church feoff; sequestrated the property of con- When we consult the records of those days of relivents and monasteries, and enlarged the authority of gious controversy, we marvel at the violence of lanthe temporal magistracy at the expense of the ecclesi-guage which condemns and the rigor of punishment astical tribunals. But this political movement pro- which visits mere opinions on points of theology, gressed still farther; and the commotion threatened the the most incomprehensible and abstruse. There is no very basis of the fabric of social order in Germany. expression sufficiently strong to characterise the flagiThe peasantry swarmed from their hovels and beset the tiousness of the man who does not know whether strong holds of the barons. The anabaptists enlisted Christ have two natures or two wills: no amercement the interests of earth under the banner of heaven; and is adequately severe-none too atrocious for the misdeclared war against all existing powers:-this state giving heretic. Rome burns the Calvinist, who deof intestine feuds was powerfully assisted by the ex-clines belief in the intercession of saints; the Calvinist ternal enmities which the ambition of Charles the condemns the Unitarian to fire and oil. The Gomarist,

The insurgent peasantry of Germany shared a similar fate. They and the anabaptists were incited, in this temporary revolution, by the twofold motive of politics and religion. This religious democracy of the sixteenth century widely differs from the democracy which prepared the great revolution of the eighteenth. In the blindness of their mysticism, they assailed the sciences, which, in the course of history, constitute the main safety of democracies. The ceaseless tendency of science is, as far as practicable, to equalise the bodily and mental faculties of man; and knowledge is the only armory from which the masses can draw

the privileged orders:-the plebeian of Rome did not bulwark himself behind the limits of the Mons Sacer, until he had looked into the pious frauds of the augurs, and caught a glimpse of the mysteries of Panda. This brutal hostility to the arts and sciences establishes a well defined distinction between the politico-reli

mailed in hopeless predestination, gives up to popular | Luther's reforms were, in some respects, highly im. frenzy the Arminian, who maintains the doctrine of portant. The authority of the popes was curtailed, free will. It must be confessed, that behind these seem- and confession abolished. Convents were suppressed, ingly religious opinions, whether assailing or assailed, and celibacy ceased to be binding on the priesthood. were screened questions of high political interests, The priests and monks who left their monasterieswhich also acted on the offensive or defensive ground. the nuns who were restored to the world--availed Hence, if in our own country, we lately saw a tribunal themselves of the privilege of marriage. Luther himpassing sentence on an union of trades, and proscribing self, an unhooded monk of the order of the Augustines, an enunciation of opinions, it is because both the married a nun, Catharine à Bohran; and Erasmus, the union and their opinions threaten the growing aristo- elegant railer, who, though no Protestant, was but a cratic privileges of the country; and these privileges-sorry Catholic, writes thus:-"People may contend as did the religious dogmas of other days-defend that Lutheranism is a tragical affair;—for my part, I themselves behind a rampart of laws and punishments, am convinced that nothing can be more comical;-for not enacted in our land, not provided by our own sta- the upshot is always of a merry cast, and the catastutes, but drawn from the dust of a foreign soil, the trophe turns into a wedding!" muniments of feudalism, originally intended to check Saxon cerfs and Norman vassals.

with pure deism, which holds the Bible to be a book "like one another"--a mere monument of the human intellect.

Lutheranism is not at issue with catholicism on the great question of the eucharist ;-the former, as well Luther, who had introduced freedom of inquiry in as the latter, maintains that the bread and wine are religious matters, in his system of theology, sacrificed converted into the very body and blood of Christ, by the freedom of man to the power of grace. He stoutly the power of the sacramental words. Some of the maintained that God does everything in man, sin as reformers went beyond the Lutherans:—they sacriwell as virtue; and that free will is incompatible with ficed the mystery of transubstantiation, and saw, in human corruption and divine prescience. This problem the last supper, but a memorial and a type. Other of man's freedom, as well as that of the existence and protestant sects have still further trenched upon the cause of evil necessarily connected with it, has been interpretation of the mysteries, and, at the extremity vexed both by the philosopher and the theologian. of this school, are the Socinians, who deny the divinity Baronius, in his Philosophia Theologiæ Ancellans, has said of Christ, and hold him as a man blessed with peculiar that the former was a Hagar near a Sarah, and ought gifts from the hand of God. We should not confound to be expelled with her Ishmaël, whenever he attempted | Socinianism, which rests its belief on the scriptures, to play the rebel. But the time is gone by for the admission of such doctrines. Theology has clearly proved inadequate to solve the problem; and the proof lies in this-that the different christian sects have drawn That which would be a serious obstacle to any sudfrom the same sources, which they hold sacred, the den religious revolution in our day, is founded on the most conflicting interpretations-free will and servile fact, that the nineteenth century is not marked by any will. Philosophy also came to the assay; but bound excessive propensity to believe:-that which stamped to restrict its pretensions to a subordinate sphere, it the reformation with a peculiar character of arduouscan only point to acknowledged facts, nor attempt to ness, was that Luther's age was credulous even unto offer an evidently impossible solution. Man feels him- gross superstition. The fact is learned from Luther self morally free. This feeling is derived from his con- himself. He was long checked in his course by the science; but it is hemmed within narrow limits, and idea of the responsibility which he was about to asvaries according to the individual. To admit that free-sume; and of the perdition into which so many would dom, under its restrictions-to point out its inequalities be whelmed, should he be deceived. The thought according to the differences of organization, of climate tortures him-and frequently recurs to his mind :-to and education-differences which do not depend on have witnessed the delinquencies of Rome is an indirect individual will, and which, under another form, repro-justification of his course. "For," says he, "had I not duce the differences of theological grace ;--to receive the seen this city of abominations, I would have remained existence of evil as a fact, without attempting to recon- in the dread of doing injustice to the pope." Luther cile it with divine omnipotence and divine foreknow-constituted himself the head of the new heresy ;-and, ledge, which are not known to us ;-to compass the in so doing, he had to make use of his own rudely means of circumscribing evil, and of substituting, as picturesque language, Sisyphus-like, an enormous rock much as possible, human freedom and intelligence to to roll. The doubts which distracted his mind, are the fatality of nature ;--such, the true scope of philoso- readily conceived; and the agony which racked him, phy and science-the actual state of the question of free when his jaded spirits flagged in their almost brutal will, and the relation which it bears to the existence energies, can be as easily realised. He battled, but of evil through the world. To go beyond this, man with unequalled vigor and success, the so much resmust make up his mind to launch into gratuitous hy-pected authority of tradition, and the deeply dreaded potheses and speculations, or yield, at once, to the power of the Roman church, which, up to his times, suggestions of faith, which speaks differently to differ- had been sanctioned into right by the consentient opient capacities, and equally justifies the Protestant and nions of mankind. With the force of habit, that overthe Catholic, the Mussulman and the Brahmin. We mastering element in the nature of man; and with the must accept, without weakness, as without pride, both obstinacy of faith, of its own nature opposed to reathe mysterious darkness which overhangs the primi-soning, he manfully grappled. But before laying a tive facts of nature, and the faint, vacillating, but only desecrating hand on a tabernacle which men had light which our reason affords. deemed holy with sheer antiquity, long and frequent VOL. IV.-76

were his self-communings:-and even after the dealing | ground down the people into a bitterer bondage than of the blow, he questioned himself, at different inter- Rome had ever imposed. To admit, therefore, the vals, to satisfy his conscience of the uprightness of his deed. Indeed we cannot, at any time, advance a grave proposition, in politics, religion, philosophy, or even science, without feeling some of the misgivings, which Luther experienced :-from a deep and thorough conviction of the necessity of peace, Hobbes was led to a radically false conclusion-the necessity of strict bond. age and political inequality.

The reformer of Germany has left voluminous works to posterity. His correspondence, tracts, and minutest sayings, have been collected by his friends and disciples, and handed down to us with religious care. Melancthon, especially, has exhibited every phasis of his full-toned existence; yet no one, I think, has judged Luther better than Luther himself. The following letter, to a friend of his, is a choice morceau; and may be considered as a correct judgment, passed by Luther upon himself:

unconditional and paramount influence of the reformation in spreading freedom abroad, is not only to reject the sounder teachings of subsequent experience-but it is to assume, as a fact, that which is controverted by every page of history. The reformation has been tested by the ordeal of more than three centuries. And it is a debatable question whether Germany, the cradle of its birth, is at the present day politically freer than either Italy or Spain.* If we turn even to England, which has systematised Protestantism into a form of government; we find that the safeguards of her liberties had been established by the Catholic ba rons, long before the lust of her royal headsman had suggested the idea of his becoming the founder of a church.

But to resume the subject of the reformation itself, we must rank, among its principal causes, the antagonism of German and Italian nature-the opposition "To J. Brentius :-I do not wish to flatter thee. Nei- of the northern and the southern man-an opposition ther do I deceive thee or myself, when I say that I which has existed in all countries and through all prefer thy writings to mine. Not Brentius do I praise; times-and which, in this instance, availed itself of the but the holy spirit, that is gentler in thee than in me :- slightest pretext of separation, and ended in the defeat thy words flow on more purely and mildly. My style, and oppression of the south by the north. We should unskilful and untutored, pours along, a flood, a chaos also keep in view the political state of Germany in of words, turbulent as an impetuous athlet, ever the sixteenth century-its oligarchy of princes and struggling with a thousand succeeding monsters; and, dukes, margraves and counts, bishops and abbots, conif I dared to compare small things with great ones, it vents and free towns, whose desire of independence would seem that something of the fourfold spirit of and thirst of lucre were marvellously subserved by Elias has been granted unto me-something rapid as Luther's doctrines; and who were among the first to the wind, and devouring as fire, which uproots the adopt and defend the reformation. In Holland, Switmountain and consumes the rock. Thine, on the con-zerland, Sweden and England, reasons purely political, trary, are the gentle murmur-the soft and cooling breeze. One thing comforts me: the divine father of the human race needs, in this, his immense family, the rude for the rude-the harsh for the harsh like a sturdy wedge for sturdy knots. To purify the air and fertilize the soil, the watering rain is not sufficient ;--the flashings of the lightning are also required."

contributed to its success:-the same powers that subdued the hosts of anabaptists, and the two hundred thousand followers of Thomas Muntzer, might have crushed the reformation, had not the reformation essentially befriended their temporal interests. Protestantism-once a political, though now a religious distinetion-Protestantism necessarily incurred the penalty of a close alliance between religion and politics. For if the This letter sums up the whole of Luther's individu- religious interest was originally the primary motive of ality;-his bluntness and impetuosity-his incoherence action-that which aroused kings and nations and drew and vanity are unwittingly defined, by his own pen, them together, it was soon mastered and absorbed by in a few hasty and graphic lines. So much for Luther the political interest; and the world witnessed an adulteas a man. But as to the moving causes, which favored rous union between church and state, more hideous the development of the reformation, there are many, than the semi-temporal authority of Rome; and which, independent of both its spirit and its doctrines, which under any circumstances, has ever been a cause of viexclusively belong to the province of history. The tuperation and impotence in religion. She basely cast Protestant christian, in order to throw a relief upon his her holy attributes at the footstool of power; and, in peculiar creed, in contradistinction with that of the the witheringly vigorous line of Dante Alighieri, was Catholic christian, assimilates it with freedom, and seen putaneggiar có regi, shamelessly wantonning with vindicates it as a progress of the human mind and a kings. Such was the fate which Luther marked triumph of human liberty. For our part, we are at a out for his religion, from the moment that he placed loss to say how it advanced the cause of freedom, himself at the mercy of the elector of Saxony, and while the iron hand of Charles V, and the exactions wilfully pandered to the debaucheries of the Landof his petty barons, continued to weigh upon the grave of Hesse. ple of Germany. They, in fact, lost by the change in many instances; for while it served the interest of Rome, the bull of excommunication was at hand; and the mother of deep and unrivalled scholarship. Her sevens *We do not speak this disparagingly of Germany: she is the veriest serf might sometimes thank the tyranny have largely paid their tribute to the cause of freedom, science of the spiritual master for a respite from the tyranny and humanity. But their usefulness and influence are restricted of the temporal lord. But the thunder of the Vatican to the university walls:-the light passes not from them to cheer being once quenched, and the bull of the pope stripped shackles, which their Teutonic ancestry knew not in their the masses, whose limbs, in this our boastful century, bear of its terrors; the baron, unawed and unchecked, 'rudest days of barbaric ignorance.

peo

Δ.

draw from the coldest worldling a wish that the days
were merged into nights as clear, as bright, as still as
was the present. The long, solemn, death-like streets,
were unlit, save by the moon and stars, that hung above
them like jewels on the bosom of the sky, and a few
feeble lamps, that flickered and gradually expired away,
shamed as it seemed by the glorious lights poured upon
the sleeping earth, from the unexhausted urns of hea-
ven. He had soon passed the streets and entered upon
the open road that wound its serpentine path along the
river shore. Away in the distance was stretched the
dark forests, whose tall and noble trees, as they were
stirred by the air, resembled ranks of armies, waving on
high their dark green plumes. Beyond them could be
seen the blue mountains bordering the distant view. No
sound was forth, save the sighings of the southerly
wind, rich with scent from the plains and vineyards
over which it had passed, and the low and not unmu-
sical murmur of the Seine, as its sky-mirroring waters
moved along the thick grass or rippled among the peb-snow upon battlemented clouds.
bles on its shore.

It was a long time before Montanvers recovered from the fearful and deathlike swoon. When he did so, his mind was heavy and depressed, and his whole frame tottering as if under the effects of some dreadful disease. Manifold thoughts served to weigh him down-thoughts of pain and misery and death-but with a powerful exertion, he threw them from him. Moving from the road, he wended down a narrow path, and stood before the Seine, a draught of whose cooling waters refreshed and invigorated him. On the green turf, which at that point stretches down to the water's edge, he sat, to reflect and scheme, where we will leave him to follow some persons not yet known to the reader.

Some two miles distant the road assumed a different appearance, becoming wider and more level; and beyond it, for miles around, the view was uninterrupted by a single hill, or a rise or fall in the ground. The river wended in a crooked, serpentine path hard by, and the far off mountains hung upon the skylike palaces of

Along that road there was driven a small but neat

Leaving Armine on the road, we would call the atten-carriage, drawn by two horses, which, from their aption of the reader to others.

pearance, had travelled without ceasing for the whole of the day that had passed. Its passengers consisted of a young clergyman, well known near Paris, and his lady. There was something in the countenance of the young man which seemed to denote his profession. His face was pale and heavy, and rather unprepossessing, had it not been for the brightness of the eye, and the gaiety which lingered in the curl of the mouth. There too was a plainness and neatness in his dress, a meekness and humility in his demeanor, and a gentleness in all of his actions, which at one glance bespoke the messenger of glad tidings sent to brighten man's pathway through the adamantine gates up to the golden pavilions of the New Jerusalem. Such was the reverend George Morton, His lady was, or rather had been, beautiful. Sorrows and tears had thrown their nun-like veil over her, and from the fair girl that Morton had wedded, she had passed to the stately and noble wife-not, however, without traces of her former beauty still lingering around her. She was a delightful companion for such a husband.

But, my dear, there are afflictions deeper than those through which you have already gone. Afflic tions that well might wither the mother's heart and scorch the husband's brain, were they not administered by Him in whom we trust; afflictions too deep and overpowering, save to those who can behold in them the visitations of a high and holy power. And He who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, will still watch over and guard the meek and humble.”

How very convenient it would be to take the reader from the task of perusing this history, and convey him to some arena on which each character would appear deliver his thoughts-do his deeds and depart. And then how very pleasant would it be to the writer, who is now annoyed with shifting and changing, to keep a After riding for some distance in silence, he began a disjointed tale together-now chatting with a hero upon conversation which they seemed to have before comthe street, and now whispering sweet words in a draw-menced. ing room, in the ears of a heroine-now moving quietly down a stream, with the reader wistfully gazing after him-and again taking the self same reader, against the advice of all old women, into the damp night air, fearless of coughs and colds, to meet a character upon the gloomy midnight road. I have perused many beautiful definitions of that singular creature, an author. They were all interested as the writers well knew. He resembles a fellow whom I have seen at a cattle show, placed amid the dirt and flare and stench of oil behind the curtain, to raise and drop and shift some dirty canvass, misnamed scenery-or, if that resemblance is not "What are the pomps and glories of the world, that striking, his occupation is much like that of the clown in hankering after them we should forget their worthon stilts, whose duty in the ring is to tease the specta-lessness? We are but wanderers upon a dreary tor by directing his already sated attention to the ex- wilderness-starting forth to-day and cut down totraordinary performances of a goodly number of fero-morrow. Why then should we waste our days in cious and well fed animals. With the reader's permis- sorrow and in grief? Why then should we repine, sion, I will mount the stilts again and turn to my nar- when the angel of death flaps his funeral wing over rative. friends or kindred. The springs of existence, which

He spoke in a low and somewhat agitated voice, but continued in a clearer tone: