vantes was a soldier; Byron, Pope, and Dryden, were all able to look after their own affairs. And, then, why should not a man join in the ambitions of other men ?" "Because it is so much more noble to look on than to struggle in the ignoble fight," said Allen grandly.

"I don't know that. But even if it were, I do not see that the fight is ignoble. The people work to keep wife and children. Work therefore means love, which is not ignoble. The first desire is to improve the material condition. That is not ignoble. There is not much art among the mob it is true, and no desire for art. Art is imitation and representation, and means some kind of ease. As for the people, I think that the spectacle of the whole world from the very beginning, looking for some one who will tell them how equal justice may be had, is not ignoble." "There spoke my pupil," said my father. But Gertrude shook her head.

"We live in a land where there is equal justice," she said. Indeed she had always been told so, and was now too old to learn anything different.

"You should ask the better-class workman what he thinks about equal justice," said Will. "You remember the old walks and talks, Allen ?"

"Oh! yes," Allen replied, going without a blush straight over to the opposite side. "I remember, of course I remember now. The people are always asking how things are to be set right. There are a thousand wrongs of which we feel hardly any, and they feel all. I had forgotten. Do you remember, Will, the shoemaker we met one Sunday afternoon at Walthamstow, and how he spoke of rich men's law and poor men's law? I should have gone with him and learned how he lived. We miss our best chances. He was a splendid subject and I let him go." "But-ignoble, Allen?"

The

"No, not ignoble; I was wrong. life of the man who works is not ignoble. The ignoble life begins a little higher up-or lower down-with the small trader."

"Allen does well," said Gertrude, "to study the common people. They are splendid material for him; they are his workshop. As for me, I find them coarse in manner and rough in speech. I prefer my own kind."

"Allen might have done better for himself," said Will," if he had studied the people a little longer. He observed and made pictures. I suppose, Allen "-he laid his hand on Allen's shoulder, the familiar trick-" I

suppose that nature made you an artist, so that you see picturesque situations where I saw only things ugly and mean. Perhaps the more you study the people the more picturesque things you will see. Let us begin the old walks again."

"We will," said Allen; "we will have a thousand walks together. I shall get new ideas, just as I used to get them when we were boys together, and every walk brought a flood of thoughts."

"There are two ways," Will went on, "of watching things. One is, yours, to study the effect; the other is, perhaps, mine, to look for the cause."

"After all," said my father, "it was Will who learned my lesson aright. Then my life has not been thrown away."

"Yes," Will went on, "I have not Allen's genius but still I have ambitions. I do not know yet how I shall begin or what may be attempted. When one lives abroad, far away from the things which at home distract the thoughts, one can sit down and think. Then the memory of our old walks and talks came back, and I began to wonder if it was possible to find out a way."

"Always for the people?" my father asked.

"Always for the people. It may be that I have found out some of their wants. I do not say; only I hope that I have found something."

"He hopes," repeated my father. "It is modestly said. But he who leads the people must not expect to be taught by the people. Yet, my son, he who works for the people must trust the people."

"There is nothing else to trust," Will replied. "Everything else has been tried and has broken down. If this, too, fails, there will be no more hope. Trust them? Why, is there not the safety of the divine instinct in their hearts which cries continually for justice?"

"Will," my father sprang to his feet and caught his pupil by both hands," you, too, have heard it. Listen!"-he held up his finger. "You too can hear it. It is the far-off breaking of the wave which will overwhelm the world. It is the footstep of the universal Democracy."

"Oh!" said Gertrude half-laughing, half in complaint. "Then there will be no stalls, but all pit; no half-crown days, but all shilling days; no beautiful books, but all cheap literature; no place at all, my poor Allen, for you and me!"

A

LL Protestant Germany is now engaged in doing honour by processions, speeches, and other modes of celebration, to one who by universal testimony was the typical German-to the man who most fitly summed up in his own person those heroic qualities which have made Germany what it is, and whose very defects must be looked at kindly, for they only make him liker, and bring him nearer, to his brother Germans.

Martin Luther was, so far as one man can be, the creator of that great movement which has been called the Reformation, and while he lived he led, guided, and controlled it, within Germany at least. He was fitted for his task because he had in his own inner life lived through those spiritual, intellectual, and social experiences which were the historical preparation for that tumultuous upheaval of human life impregnated by spiritual revival which separated medieval from modern Europe. His big humanity had touched, and in touching had incorporated and brought into one living personality, all those movements of thought and feeling which made the centuries before the Reformation such a time of restless change. With Bernard of Clairvaux he passionately recognised the omnipotence of the claims of conscience and the surpassing worth of the heavenly life to be lived on earth; like Francis of Assisi, he was prepared to venture all, if only he could fashion, his life in imitation of Christ's, and, separating himself from the world, be continually where Christ was and do always what Christ did; our own William of Occam had taught him the value of the individual human soul in conflict with systems ecclesiastical or political; from Nicholas of Basel, and John Tauler, and the other old German mystics, he had learned that all true religion is heart religion, and that the one need of the human soul is to get face to face with God its Maker and Redeemer; Humanism had touched him and made him see that the world of noble thoughts and generous aspirations was larger than medieval Europe had dreamed; his own hearty loving nature, not without a dash of coarseness, with its fondness for flowers and music and children, kept him in sympathy with the good side of those wild outbursts against the ecclesiastical tyranny of the day which appeared in the Albigensian Troubador, and in kindred popular movements; his German heart, with its love of the hearth and of

honest labour, showed him that every spiritual aspiration could be satisfied and the highest Christian life lived within the family circle and in the midst of daily secular work.

Martin Luther came into this world on

November 10th, 1483; just four hundred years ago. Eisleben was his birthplace. His parents, peasants who were mine-labourers, had come from Mohra, a neighbouring village, to the Eisleben winter fair to buy their small stock of winter furnishings, says one story, but more probably in search of work in the copper mines near the place. The world and Germany were waiting for their guide, and he came in this fashion. The travail pangs seized this young German matron when she and her husband were wandering from home in search of honest work, and she brought forth her first-born son in a strange village.

Eisleben and Mohra lie in the centre of Germany. Luther came from the very midst of the German land, and from the German peasant stock. "I am a peasant's son," said Luther, "my father, grandfather, and all my forebears were genuine peasants."

Hans and Margaretha Luther remained six months at Eisleben, and then went on to Mansfeld, to work in the mines there. Hard labour, patient thrift, and wise housewifely economics helped the family, and in the end Luther's parents owned some small property, and were prosperous for peasant labourers. Little Martin grew to be a boy of rude, sturdy figure, with weak health, bright intelligence, and keen sensibilities which brought him some suffering. His father thought that there was the making of a great man in his eldest son, and sent him to school at Mansfeld, at Magdeburg, and at Eisenach. He was a poor man, and the boy with his weak health, delicate, passionate feelings, and fine musical voice, had to fight his way to learning among the poor students of the school and university.

His life was a hard one, full of desolation and darkness and difficulty. The first gleam of human kindness reached him at Eisenach, where Frau Cotta, attracted by his lonely sadness and sweet voice, as he sang for bread in the street, took him to her house and made much of him. From Eisenach he went to Erfurt, to the university, and made rapid progress. He read Cicero, Plautus, Terence, and Livy, and the old world of

Roman thought discovered itself to his keen, eager insight. He studied the great theological books of the medieval Church, and, above all, he read and re-read, till he had got them by heart, the writings of the brave English Franciscan, William of Occam, who had fought the Papacy in the fourteenth century, and had taught Wycliffe and Huss to do the same. He worked at his law studies. He became noted for keen wit, ready eloquence, and a fine gift of song. He was on the road to become a great lawyer, to fulfil the heart's desire of his Spartan father.

Suddenly he turned his back on it all. His college friend, Alexis, had been with him on a visit to his family at Mansfeld. The two young men went back to Erfurt in a storm of rain, and at Erfurt gate Alexis was struck down, slain by lightning. His friend gone in a moment! "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" What good to toil for place and pelf in this life, when such a moment's flash can end it? And how can one save his soul? Luther had seen more than once at Erfurt a young German prince who, for his soul's salvation, had forsaken rank higher than any to which legal scholarship could have ever carried a peasant's son, and had entered the cloister and donned a monk's cowl. The convent door was the gate of heaven, it seemed, and Luther entered, hoping to find heaven's peace. It was his first clear decision, the first forth-putting of his will, the first time he clearly saw what he, Martin Luther, a living, individual, indomitable soul, had to do, and he did it.

The land of Beulah is in most pilgrimages more than a few steps from the wicket-gate; and Luther found it so. He was a pious monk, he has told us. He did, without questioning, whatever convent drudgery was given to poor novices to do. He went through all the prescribed vigils, fasts, prayers, and macerations, and invented for himself austerities which were not enjoined. Yet his heart was full of black doubts and dull despairings; he was no nearer God with all his labours, and the thought would come, Could any labour of his make his peace with God?

Then came the discovery, a blessed one to him, of a whole Bible in the convent library. His eye lighted on the story of Naaman, the Syrian, and he read on far into the night like one in a trance. It taught him lessons of communion with God won otherwise than by monkish austerities. "The German Theology," a book written by an unknown mystic, helped

him greatly. An old monk to whom Luther bewailed broken vows, misspent hours, sins besetting and overcoming, sent him to the Apostles' Creed, and pointing out the sentence, "I believe in the forgiveness of sins," told him to read, "I believe in the forgiveness of my sins." Above all his wise and devout vicar-general Staupitz made "the light of the gospel first dawn out of the darkness of his heart," and when Luther spoke of his fears and guilt, and sins too strong for him, told him that he himself had broken a thousand vows to lead a holy life, and had at last learned to trust only in the love and grace of God manifested in the Cross of Christ. His despair passed away, he saw the free salvation won through Christ and appropriated by "courageous faith," and he felt as if "Paradise had opened to him."

Inward peace brought renewal of work. He rose to importance in his convent. He was sent on missions by his Augustinian order. Staupitz recommended him to the Elector of Saxony, and he was appointed a professor in the new University of Wittenberg, and one of the town's preachers. The period of solitary painful preparation was past, and he took his place among his fellows with his life work before him. He was a successful and brilliant teacher, but it was as a preacher that he carried the hearts of his townsmen by storm. His fine musical voice, his rude homely eloquence, his words, "half battles" as Richter calls them, above all his earnestness, all combined to make him the greatest preacher of his time. His "Table Talk," the most interesting now of all the books proceeding from him, Carlyle says, contains many a maxim which every preacher might well take to heart. He did not like long sermons. "I would not have preachers torment their hearers, and detain them with long and tedious preaching, for the delight of hearing vanishes therewith, and the preachers hurt themselves." "To preach plain and simply is a great art: Christ Himself talks of tilling ground, of mustard seed, &c.; He used altogether homely and simple similitudes." Like many a great preacher he did not recognise faces in his audience. "When a man first comes into the pulpit, he is much perplexed to see so many heads before him. When I stand there I look upon none, but imagine they are all blocks before me." Dr. Forsteim asked him whence proceeded the art of speaking so powerfully, that both Godfearing and ungodly people were moved. Luther answered, "It proceeds from the first commandment of God: I am the Lord thy God."