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

or assailed by the powers of hell, tempted with the mitre, or threatened with
the stake, he came off more than conqueror in all. He made a world rich
forevermore, and, stripping himself in perpetual charities, died in poverty.
He knew how to command--for he had learned how to obey. Had he been
less courageous, he would have attempted nothing; had he been less
cautious, he would have ruined all: the torrent was resistless, but the banks
were deep. He tore up the mightiest evils by the root, but shielded with his
own life the tenderest bud of good; he combined the aggressiveness of a
just radicalism with the moral resistance--which seemed to the fanatic the
passive weakness--of a true conservatism. Faith-inspired, he was faithinspiring.
Great in act as he was great in thought, proving himself fire with
fire, "inferior eyes grew great by his example, and put on the dauntless
spirit of resolution." The world knows his faults. He could not hide what
he was. His transparent candor gave his enemies the material of their
misrepresentation; but they cannot blame his infirmities without bearing
witness to the nobleness which made him careless of appearances in a
world of defamers. For himself, he had as little of the virtue of caution as he
had, toward others, of the vice of dissimulation. Living under thousands of
jealous and hating eyes, in the broadest light of day, the testimony of
enemies but fixes the result: that his faults were those of a nature of the
most consummate grandeur and fulness, faults more precious than the
virtues of the common great. Four potentates ruled the mind of Europe in
the Reformation, the Emperor, Erasmus, the Pope, and Luther. The Pope
wanes, Erasmus is little, the Emperor is nothing, but Luther abides as a
power for all time. His image casts itself upon the current of ages, as the
mountain mirrors itself in the river that winds at its foot--the mighty fixing
itself immutably upon the changing.