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

pitch of learning unknown to the age in which he lived. His knowledge in
Scripture was admirable, his elocution manly, and his way of reasoning,
with all the subtility that the plain truths he delivered would bear. His
thoughts were bent always on great designs, and he had a resolution to go
through with them, and the assurance of his mind was not to be shaken, or
surprised. His life was holy, and, when he had leisure for retirement,
severe. His virtues were active chiefly, and social, and not those lazy, sullen
ones of the cloister. He had no ambition, but in the service of God; for
other things, neither his enjoyments nor wishes ever went higher than the
bare conveniences of living. If, among this crowd of virtues, a failing crept
in, we must remember that an apostle himself had not been irreproachable;
if in the body of his doctrine, a flaw is to be seen, yet the greatest lights of
the Church, and in the purest times of it, were, we know, not exact in all
their opinions. Upon the whole, we have certainly great reason to break
out in the language of the prophet, and say, 'How beautiful on the
mountains are the feet of him who bringeth gladtidings.'" 20
Bayle.
Bayle, prince of skeptics, has devoted an article of his great
Dictionary, to a defence of Luther's character from the falsehoods which
have been published concerning him. His slanderers, Bayle says, have had
no regard to probability or the rules of their own art. "His greatest enemies
cannot deny but that he had eminent qualities, and history affords nothing
more surprising than what he has done: for a simple monk to be able to
give Popery so rude a shock, that there needed but such another entirely to
overthrow the Romish Church, is what we cannot sufficiently admire." 21
Tennison.
Archbishop Tennison, of the Church of England, says: "Luther was
indeed a man of warm temper, and uncourtly language; but (besides that
he had his
20 Atterbury's vindication of Luther, (1687.) Burnet, in his History of his Own Times, regards this vindication as one
of the most able defences of the Protestant religion. Atterbury, on his trial, appealed to this book to exculpate
himself from the charge of a secret leaning to Popery.
21 Bayle's Histor. and Critic. Dictionary, translated by Maizeaux, London, 1736, vol. iii., pp. 934-937.