Then Luther rose, more powerful, more eloquent, more majestic than before; he rose superior to himself.  “What,” said he, “keep the light of life from the people; take away their guide to heaven; keep them in ignorance of what is most precious and most exalting; deprive them of the blessed consolations which sustain the soul in trial and in death; deny the most palpable truths, because your dignitaries put on them a construction to bolster up their power!  What an abomination! what treachery to heaven! what peril to the souls of men!  Besides, your authorities differ:  Augustine takes different ground from Pelagius; Bernard from Abelard; Thomas Aquinas from Dun Scotus.  Have not your grand councils given contradictory decisions?  Whom shall we believe?  Yea, the popes themselves, your infallible guides,—­have they not at different times rendered different decisions?  What would Gregory I. say to the verdicts of Gregory VII.?

“No, the Scriptures are the legacy of the early Church to universal humanity; they are the equal and treasured inheritance of all nations and tribes and kindreds upon the face of the earth, and will be till the day of judgment.  It was intended that they should be diffused, and that every one should read them, and interpret them each for himself; for he has a soul to save, and he dare not intrust such a precious thing as his soul into the keeping of selfish and ambitious priests.  Take away the Bible from a peasant, or a woman, or any layman, and cannot the priest, armed with the terrors and the frauds of the Middle Ages, shut up his soul in a gloomy dungeon, as noisome and funereal as your Mediaeval crypts?  And will you, ye boasted intellectual guides of the people, extinguish reason in this world in reference to the most momentous interests?  What other guide has a man but his reason?  And you would prevent this very reason from being enlightened by the Gospel!  You would obscure reason itself by your traditions, O ye blind leaders of the blind!  O ye legal and technical men, obscuring the light of truth!  O ye miserable Pharisees, ye bigots, ye selfish priests, tenacious of your power, your inventions, your traditions,—­will ye withhold the free redemption, God’s greatest boon, salvation by the blood of Christ, offered to all the world?  Yea, will you suffer the people to perish, soul and body, because you fear that, instructed by God himself, they will rebel against your accursed despotism?  Have you considered what a mighty crime you thus commit against God, against man?  Ye rule by an infernal appeal to the superstitious fears of men; but how shall ye yourselves, for such crimes, escape the damnation of that hell into which you would push your victims unless they obey you?