The first essential is watchfulness. There must be diligent self-scrutiny. Prayer is enjoined, and the reading of Scripture. The Christian warrior is to know himself. We are to gain Christ's peace by fighting our vices. In our composite nature, reason should be king, and the appetites all in subjection. Our affections also must be subordinate to reason. Spirit, soul, and flesh must be kept in their proper order. The Holy Spirit will favour those that exercise themselves in the craft of virtuous living. We must believe firmly that the things are true which are declared in Scripture. The way of health we may enter with a jocund courage. All fearsome things that oppose us are to be counted nought. We are to have Christ always in sight, and " think Him to be nothing else save charity, simplicity, or innocency, patience, cleanness, and shortly whatsoever Christ taught."

Perfect piety is that we ascend from things visible to things invisible. Christ is to be the only and chief example or form of living. We must still be climbing, yea, though we despair to attain to the top. Temptation we must take for a sign that God scourgeth us as sons. We must have our mind always circumspect, and pray fervently, or get to some holy occupation, to turn ourselves from temptation. We must trust only to the strength of Christ. Temptation should be so overcome as to be made an occasion of virtue. We must think no vice too light for our attention. We are to encourage ourselves by comparing the bitterness of the struggle with the bitter shame that would follow defeat. Failure must not be allowed to bring despair. The example of the Cross of Christ is to be the only and chief remedy against temptation.

We should think of the true dignity of man as against the shameful indignity of sin. Again, we ought to compare the two captains, God and the devil; also, eternal death and immortal life. We should consider how transitory is this life at the longest. And we should bethink ourselves of the peril of that impenitence or obduration of mind, which is of all mischiefs the extreme and worst.

After these rules come certain suggested remedies against various specific vices or sins. In conclusion it is said, "We have taken upon us this labour for thy sake, that unto thee (as it were with a finger) we might show the way which leadeth straight unto Christ."

Here is much sagacious advice, much moral wisdom and religious discernment, much that might be of service to every Christian soldier in the war with sin. We can understand that the shrewd sense of these instructions would commend them to Luther, and make him the more wishful to have such a fellowcombatant in the war that he had to wage. Yet we may well imagine that he would wonder how a thinker so acute, whose eyes were so open to those abuses of the Name of Christ which were prevalent everywhere, should have missed the main secret. Salvation is taken for granted. It is regarded as having been effected once for all, and secured personally by the loyal observance of Church rule. Faith is a sure belief in what is declared, rather than individual trust in an individual Saviour. Jesus Christ is our Pattern; His Cross has exemplary virtue. The great joy of an assured forgiveness; the glory of the adoption of sons; the conquest of sin by immediate faith

in an ever present Saviour; the self-forgetting consecration of holy love-all this is wanting. Once more, as with the other teachers, it is effort of which we are told, not newness of life by faith.

We must now pass, however, to the great crisis in Luther's spiritual history, which taught him—that he also might teach others-the vital principle of Freedom by Faith. His earlier life has been passed in review, with its various influences for good or for evil; we have followed him, as he took the plunge into monastic life, and have watched his futile struggling with sin, and his despairing attempt to make himself perfect before God; we have seen the slow dawning of the light, and the gathering together of various forces and factors that were making for his emancipation. Now we are on the verge of the crisis that was to determine immense issues for himself and his fellow-men.

II

THE GREAT RELIGIOUS EMANCIPATION, AND ITS WITNESS

I. THE RELIGIOUS

EMANCIPATION

OF

LUTHER, AND THE CHALLENGE

ONE of the events that helped to quicken Luther's nascent faith, in this case almost forcing it to a more decisive self-assertion, was an official visit that he paid to Rome in 1511. There were certain matters in dispute concerning the Augustinian convents and their administration, which were referred to Rome for settlement, and Luther was appointed, with another monk, to carry out the negotiations. He does not seem to have taken any active part in the affair, leaving this to his colleague; but the visit to the Holy City filled him, in anticipation, with wondering joy. When they arrived, after a slow pilgrimage, within sight of Rome, he threw himself on the ground, and burst into a cry of almost adoring salutation. But there came a speedy disenchantment, as he went from one holy place to another, drinking in at first, greedily enough, what was told him regarding various relics and other delusions. Luther soon found that he was only laughed at and despised for his innocent credulity; nor for this alone, but on account of his real and earnest piety, a thing which was quite out of date among the

notables of the Neo-Paganism of a revived classical culture, and their retainers. The very mysteries of his religion, he found, were ridiculed, even while they were being performed, and this by their appointed guardians and administrators, who sometimes flouted them with shocking blasphemy. As for morals, they were scarcely in being; nor can this be wondered at, when it is remembered that the infamies of the Borgia family had but lately been in the ascendant.

Notwithstanding the shock of these revelations, Luther still tried to hold fast to his belief in the pretensions of the priesthood, and continued to pay homage to the claims that Rome made upon the faith of its devotees. This, however, could not last long. According to the story which his son Paul remembered being told, by Luther himself, in his childhood, when the weary and disheartened monk was one day ascending, on bare knees, the stone steps of the Scala Santa, or Holy Staircase, up which so many generations of pilgrims had toiled, that they might win merit; in the midst of his painful climbing, so symbolical of the protracted struggles of the foregoing years, he seemed to hear a Voice, re-echoing the words that had thrilled his soul some two or three years before at Wittenberg, and again at Bologna on his way to Rome, 'The just shall live by faith,' and at once, rising to his feet, he walked down quietly, a free man. All his life he had been toiling upward to win merit, never attaining, never seeing the sky. Even after he had begun to learn that man's merit was nothing, that the merit of Christ was everything; that only as man disowns his poor, false merit, and is willing to trust in the merit of Christ, as alone sufficing for his salvation,