narratives, its glorious poetry, its awful prophecies, its supernal counsels, its consoling and emancipating truths,—­so tender and yet so exalting, raising the soul above the grim trials of toil and poverty into the realms of seraphic peace and boundless joy.  The Bible even gave hope to heretics.  All sects and parties could take shelter under it; all could stand on the broad platform of religion, and survey from it the wonders and glories of God.  At last men might even differ on important points of doctrine and worship, and yet be Protestants.  Religious liberty became as wide in its application as the unity of the Church.  It might create sects, but those sects would be all united as to the value of the Scriptures and their cardinal declarations.  On this broad basis John Milton could shake hands with John Knox, and John Locke with Richard Baxter, and Oliver Cromwell with Queen Elizabeth, and Lord Bacon with William Penn, and Bishop Butler with John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards with Doctor Channing.

This idea of private judgment is what separates the Catholics from the Protestants; not most ostensibly, but most vitally.  Many are the Catholics who would accept Luther’s idea of grace, since it is the idea of Saint Augustine; and of the supreme authority of the Scriptures, since they were so highly valued by the Fathers:  but few of the Catholic clergy have ever tolerated religious liberty,—­that is, the interpretation of the Scriptures by the people,—­for it is a vital blow to their supremacy, their hierarchy, and their institutions.  They will no more readily accept it than William the Conqueror would have accepted the Magna Charta; for the free circulation and free interpretation of the Scriptures are the charter of human liberties fought for at Leipsic by Gustavus Adolphus, at Ivry by Henry IV.  This right of worshipping God according to the dictates of conscience, enlightened by the free reading of the Scriptures, is just what the “invincible armada” was sent by Philip II. to crush; just what Alva, dictated by Rome, sought to crush in Holland; just what Louis XIV., instructed by the Jesuits, did crush out in France, by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.  The Satanic hatred of this right was the cause of most of the martyrdoms and persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  It was the declaration of this right which emancipated Europe from the dogmas of the Middle Ages, the thraldom of Rome, and the reign of priests.  Why should not Protestants of every shade cherish and defend this sacred right?  This is what made Luther the idol and oracle of Germany, the admiration of half Europe, the pride and boast of succeeding ages, the eternal hatred of Rome; not his religious experiences, not his doctrine of justification by faith, but the emancipation he gave to the mind of the world.  This is what peculiarly stamps Luther as a man of genius, and of that surprising audacity and boldness which only great geniuses evince when they follow out the logical sequence of their ideas, and penetrate at a blow the hardened steel of vulcanic armor beneath which the adversary boasts.