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

the functions of "a Vicar-General of the Augustinian Order," with which
he had been intrusted by Staupitz, (1516.) By this office he was fitted for
that part which he took in giving form to the Church when it ere long
began to renew its youth like the eagle's.
The Reformation in its rise.
We come now to the Reformation itself, (1517,) the warning flash,
the storm, and the purified heaven that followed it. This period is embraced
in sixteen principal pictures, with seven subsidiary ones on a smaller scale.
The first of these grouped pictures presents four scenes. Below,
Luther is refusing, as the Confessor of his people, to give them absolution,
while they exultingly display their indulgences; in the centre, Luther nails
to the door of the church-tower the immortal theses--on the left, Tetzel sells
indulgences, and commits Luther's writing to the flames, and on the right,
the Wittenberg students are handling his own anti-theses in the same
unceremonious way. The smoke from both fires rises to a centre above the
whole, and, like the wan image in a dream, the swan whose white wings
were waving before Huss' dying eyes, is lifting herself unscathed from the
flames. Now Luther bends before Cajetan, and then at night, "without shoe
or stocking, spur or sword," flies on horseback through a portal of
Augsburg. The picture that follows is one of great beauty, rich in portraits.
It represents the dispute at Leipsic between Luther and Eck, (1519.) In the
Hall of the Pleissenburg the two great chieftains face each other--the one
bold, cogent, overwhelming--the other sly, full of lubricity, sophistical and,
watchful; the one Hercules, the other the Hydra. By Luther's side sits
Melanchthon, with the deep lines of thought upon his youthful face; at their
feet, Carlstadt, with a book in each hand, with knit brows searches for
something which his treacherous memory has not been able to retain. In
the centre of the court, Duke George of Saxony listens earnestly to the
dispute, till at Luther's words, that "some Articles even of Huss and the
Bohemians accorded with the Gospel," he involuntarily exclaimed, "The
man is mad!" At his feet sits the court-fool, gazing with a puzzled and
earnest air at Dr. Eck,