fitter man could have been found to do the business of the Pope. With the empire of Germany added to his inherited dominions, who could resist him?
To the new emperor, unless the elector yielded, Luther's case had now to be referred.
The elector, if he had wished, could not interfere. Germany was attentive, but motionless. The students, the artisans, the tradesmen, were at heart with the Reformer; and their enthusiasm could not be wholly repressed. The press grew fertile with pamphlets; and it was noticed that all the printers and compositors went for Luther. The Catholics could not get their books into type without sending them to France or the Low Countries.
Yet none of the princes except the elector had as yet shown him favour. The bishops were hostile to a man. The nobles had given no sign; and their place would be naturally on the side of authority. They had no love for bishops—there was hope in that; and they looked with no favour on the huge estates of the religious orders. But no one could expect that they would peril their lands and lives for an insignificant monk.
There was an interval of two years before the emperor was at leisure to take up the question. The time was spent in angry altercation, boding no good for the future.
The Pope issued a second bull condemning Luther and his works. Luther replied by burning the bull in the great square at Wittenberg.
At length, in April 1521, the Diet of the Empire assembled at Worms, and Luther was called to defend himself in the presence of Charles the Fifth.
That it should have come to this at all, in days of such high-handed authority, was sufficiently remarkable. It indicated something growing in the minds of men, that the so-called Church was not to carry things any longer in the old style. Popes and bishops might order, but the laity intended for the future to have opinions of their own how far such orders should be obeyed.
The Pope expected anyhow that the Diet, by fair means or foul, would now rid him of his adversary. The elector, who knew the ecclesiastical ways of handling such matters, made it a condition of his subject appearing, that he should have a safe conduct, under the emperor's hand; that Luther, if judgment went against him, should be free for the time to return to the place from which he had come; and that he, the elector, should determine afterwards what should be done with him.
When the interests of the Church were concerned, safe conducts, it was too well known, were poor security. Pope Clement the Seventh, a little after, when reproached for breaking a promise, replied with a smile, 'The Pope has power to bind and to loose.' Good, in the eyes of ecclesiastical authorities, meant what was good for the Church; evil, whatever was bad for the Church; and the highest moral obligation became sin when it stood in St. Peter's way.
There had been an outburst of free thought in Bohemia a century and a half before. John Huss, Luther's forerunner, came with a safe conduct to the Council of Constance; but the bishops ruled that safe conducts could not protect heretics. They burnt John Huss for all their promises, and they hoped now that so good a Catholic as Charles would follow so excellent a precedent. Pope Leo wrote himself to beg that Luther's safe conduct should not be observed. The bishops and archbishops, when Charles consulted them, took the same view as the Pope.
'There is something in the office of a bishop,' Luther said, a year or two later, 'which is dreadfully demoralising. Even good men change their natures at their consecration; Satan enters into them as he entered into Judas, as soon as they have taken the sop.'
It was most seriously likely that, if Luther trusted himself at the Diet on the faith of his safe conduct, he would never return alive. Rumours of intended treachery were so strong, that if he refused to go, the elector meant to stand by him at any cost. Should he appear, or not appear? It was for himself to decide. If he stayed away, judgment would go against him by default. Charles would call out the forces of the empire, and Saxony would be invaded.
Civil war would follow, with insurrection all over Germany, with no certain prospect except bloodshed and misery.
Luther was not a man to expose his country to peril that his own person might escape. He had provoked the storm; and if blood was to be shed, his blood ought at least to be the first. He went. On his way, a friend came to warn him again that foul play was intended, that he was condemned already, that his books had been burnt by the hangman, and that he was a dead man if he proceeded.
Luther trembled—he owned it—but he answered, 'Go to Worms! I will go if there are as many devils in Worms as there are tiles upon the roofs of the houses.'
The roofs, when he came into the city, were crowded, not with devils, but with the inhabitants, all collecting there to see him as he passed. A nobleman gave him shelter for the night; the next day he was led to the Town Hall.
No more notable spectacle had been witnessed in this planet for many a century—not, perhaps, since a greater than Luther stood before the Roman Procurator.
There on the raised dais sate the sovereign of half the world. There on either side of him stood the archbishops, the ministers of state, the princes of the empire, gathered together to hear and judge the son of a poor miner, who had made the world ring with his name.
The body of the hall was thronged with knights and nobles—stern hard men in dull gleaming armour. Luther, in his brown frock, was led forward between their ranks. The looks which greeted him were not all unfriendly. The first Article of a German credo was belief in courage. Germany had had its feuds in times past with Popes of Rome, and they were not without pride that a poor countryman of theirs should have taken by the beard the great Italian priest. They had settled among themselves that, come what would, there should be fair play; and they looked on half admiring, and half in scorn.
As Luther passed up the hall, a steel baron touched him on the shoulder with his gauntlet.
'Pluck up thy spirit, little monk;' he said, 'some of us here have seen warm work in our time, but, by my troth, nor I nor any knight in this company ever needed a stout heart more than thou needest it now. If thou hast faith in these doctrines of thine, little monk, go on, in the name of God.'
'Yes, in the name of God,' said Luther, throwing back his head, 'In the name of God, forward!'
As at Augsburg, one only question was raised. Luther had broken the laws of the Church. He had taught doctrines which the Pope had declared to be false. Would he or would he not retract?
As at Augsburg, he replied briefly that he would retract when his doctrines were not declared to be false merely, but were proved to be false. Then, but not till then. That was his answer, and his last word.
There, as you understand, the heart of the matter indeed rested. In those words lay the whole meaning of the Reformation. Were men to go on for ever saying that this and that was true, because the Pope affirmed it? Or were Popes' decrees thenceforward to be tried like the words of other men—by the ordinary laws of evidence?
It required no great intellect to understand that a Pope's pardon, which you could buy for five shillings, could not really get a soul out of purgatory. It required a quality much rarer than intellect to look such a doctrine in the face—sanctioned as it was by the credulity of ages, and backed by the pomp and pageantry of earthly power—and say to it openly, 'You are a lie.' Cleverness and culture could have given a thousand reasons—they did then and they do now—why an indulgence should be believed in; when honesty and common sense could give but one reason for thinking otherwise. Cleverness and imposture get on excellently well together—imposture and veracity, never.
Luther looked at those wares of Tetzel's, and said, 'Your pardons are no pardons at all—no letters of credit on heaven, but flash notes of the Bank of Humbug, and you know it.' They did know it. The conscience of every man in Europe answered back, that what Luther said was true.
Bravery, honesty, veracity, these were the qualities which were needed—which were needed then, and are needed always, as the root of all real greatness in man.
The first missionaries of Christianity, when they came among the heathen nations, and found them worshipping idols, did not care much to reason that an image which man had made could