[Illustration:  Permission Underwood & Underwood, New York LUTHER MONUMENT AT WORMS by ERNST RIETSCHEL]

But the spirit of the nation does not long endure the preeminence of a single, well-centred personality; for the life and the power and the needs of a nation are more manifold than even the greatest single force and lofty aim.  The eternal contrast between the individual and the nation appears.  Even the soul of a nation is, in the presence of the eternal, a finite personality—­but in comparison with the individual it appears boundless.  A man is forced by the logical result of his thoughts and actions, by all the significance of his own deeds, into a closely restricted path.  The soul of the nation needs for its life irreconcilable contrasts and incessant effort in most varied directions.  Much that the individual failed to assimilate rises to fight against him.  The reaction of the people begins—­at first weak, here and there, based on different reasons and with slight justification; then it grows stronger and ever more victorious.  Finally the intellectual influence of the life of the individual is limited to his own followers, and crystallizes into a single one of the many elements of national growth.  The last period of a great life is always filled with secret resignation, with bitterness, and with silent suffering.

Thus it was with Luther.  The first of these periods continued up to the day on which he posted his theses, the second until his return from the Wartburg, the third to his death and the beginning of the Schmalkaldic War.  It is not the purpose of this sketch to give his entire biography, but to tell briefly how he developed and what he was.  Much in his nature appears strange and unpleasing so long as he is viewed from afar; but this historic figure has the remarkable quality of becoming greater and more attractive the more closely it is approached, and from beginning to end it would inspire a good biographer with admiration, tenderness, and a certain good humor.

Luther rose from the great source of all national strength, the freeholding peasant class.  His father moved from Moehra, a forest village of the Thuringian mountains, where his relatives constituted half the population, northward into the neighborhood of Mansfeld, to work as a miner.  So the boy’s cradle stood in a cottage in which was still felt the old thrill of the ghosts of the pine wood and the dark clefts which were thought to be the entrances to the ore veins of the mountain.  Certainly the imagination of the boy was often busy with dark traditions from heathen mythology.  He was accustomed to feel the presence of uncanny powers as well in the phenomena of nature as in the life of man.  When he turned monk such remembrances from childhood grew gloomier and took the shape of the devil of Scripture, but the busy tempter who everywhere lies in wait for the life of man always retained for him something of the features of the mischievous goblin who secretly lurks about the peasant’s hearth and stable.