The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

and Savanarola, will be forever dear to mankind. Yet the Reformers before
the Reformation were only such potentially. So often did the Reformation
seem to hang upon Luther's own person, that we are justified in saying
that God gave him the place he filled, because there was no other man of
his age to fill it. With all the literary grace of Erasmus, how feeble does he
seem, "spending his life," as Luther happily said, "trying to walk on eggs
without breaking them." Without Luther, we see no evidence that the
Reformation of the sixteenth century would have taken place, or that the
names of Zwingle, Melanchthon, or Calvin would occupy their present
place in history. No position is so commanding as that of Luther. He rises
above the crowned heads, above the potentates in Church and in State, and
above all the Reformers of his era. In this or that respect he has had equals-
-in a few respects he has had superiors, but in the full circle of those
glorious gifts of nature and of grace which form a great man, he has had
no superiors, and no equals. He sustained a responsibility such as never
rested upon any other man, and he proved himself sufficient for it. In the
Reformation, of the Germanic and Scandinavian type, his views carried
great weight with them. His name to this hour is revered with a singleness
and passionateness of affection without a parallel. No man was able to take
to the Swiss type of Reformation, the attitude Luther took to the Germanic.
In its own nature, the Reformed division has no ideal embodied in an
actual life; it cannot have a solitary man who is its microcosm. It can have
no little Cosmos, because it has no great Cosmos; it can have no name
equally revered in all its branches. Luther is more a hero to it than any one
of its own heroes. It could have at best but a unity like that of those great
stars which have been broken, and as asteroids are now separate in their
unity. But, in fact, it has no unity, no tendency to draw around a common
historical centre. It binds itself closely to the particular nationalities in
which it is found. It is German, Dutch, Scotch. Out of this arises a
confusion, when these churches make a transition into other nationalities.
So little is there of the tendency to unity, that they keep up their old
divisions