and inciting the people to revolution.  Hans Boehm, a wandering piper, had visions and went forth as a preacher of righteousness, railing against priests and civil potentates.  True religion, he declared, consisted in worshiping the Blessed Virgin, but the priests were thieves and robbers, the Emperor was a miscreant, “who supported the whole vile crew of princes, overlords, tax gatherers, and other oppressors of the poor.”  He predicted the coming of a day when the Emperor himself would be forced, like all poor folks, to work for days’ wages.  The people flocked by thousands to hear him preach, but his day was brief.

They burnt him at the stake, but multitudes venerated him, and made pilgrimages to the chapel which had been the scene of his triumph.  The “Bundschuh” revolts which broke out in Elsass and spread through Switzerland and Germany were of a similar character.  Then came years of famine, which deepened the popular disquiet, and which help to explain the fact that “on the eve of the Reformation the condition of Europe, and of Germany in particular, was one of seething discontent and full of bitter class hatreds—­the trading companies and the great capitalists against the guilds, the poorer classes against the wealthier, and the nobles against the towns.”

These were the social conditions in the midst of which Luther appeared.  It was on this turbulent flood of social unrest that the Reformation was launched.  When the great reformer’s voice was heard, denouncing priestly misrule and hierarchical tyranny, these were the people who listened, and they interpreted his words by their own experience.  If his quarrel was largely with theological or ecclesiastical abuses, theirs was mainly with industrial inequalities, but it seemed to them that he was fighting their battle.  Indeed, his brave words gave fit utterance to their hopes.  For, as the historian reminds us, Luther’s message was democratic.  That must have been its character if it was, in any proper sense, a return to “the simplicity that is in Christ.”  “It destroyed the aristocracy of the saints, it leveled the barriers between the layman and the priest, it taught the equality of all men before God, and the right of every man of faith to stand in God’s presence, whatever be his rank and condition of life.  He had not confined himself to preaching a new theology.  His message was eminently practical.  In his ’Appeal to the Nobility of the German Nation’ Luther had voiced all the grievances of Germany, had touched upon almost all the open sores of the time, and had foretold disasters not very far off.  Nor must it be forgotten that no great leader ever flung about wild words in such a reckless way.  Luther had the gift of strong, smiting phrases, of words which seemed to cleave to the very heart of things, of images which lit up a subject with the vividness of a flash of lightning.  He launched tracts and pamphlets from the press about almost everything, written for