“change of mind,” it seemed to him a wonderful revelation.  On this ground rested the confident assurance with which he opposed the words of Scripture to the ordinances of the Church.  By this means Luther in the monastery gradually worked his way to spiritual liberty.  All his later doctrines, his battles against indulgences, his imperturbable steadfastness, his method of interpreting the Scriptures, rested upon the struggles through which he, while a monk, had found his God; and it may well be said that the new era of German history began with Luther’s prayers in the monastery.  Life was soon to thrust him under its hammer, to harden the pure metal of his soul.

In 1508 Luther reluctantly accepted the professorship of dialectics at the new university of Wittenberg.  He would rather have taught that theology which even then he believed the true one.  When, in 1510, he went to Rome on business for his order, it is well known what devotion and piety marked his sojourn in the Holy City, and with what horror the heathen life of the Romans and the moral corruption and worldliness of the clergy filled him.  It was there where his devotions, while he was officiating at mass, were disturbed by the reckless jests which the Roman priests of his order called out to him.  He never forgot the devil-inspired words[2] as long as he lived.

But the hierarchy, however deeply its corruption shocked him, still contained his whole hope; outside of it there was no God and no salvation.  The noble idea of the Catholic Church, and its conquests of fifteen hundred years, enraptured the mind even of the strongest.  And when this German in Roman clerical dress, at the risk of his life, inspected the ruins of ancient Rome and stood in awe before the gigantic columns of the temples which, according to report, the Goths had once destroyed, the sturdy man from the mountains of the old Hermunduri little dreamed that it would be his own fate to destroy the temples of medieval Rome more thoroughly, more fiercely, more grandly.  Luther came back from Rome still a faithful son of the great Mother Church.  All heresy, such as that of the Bohemians, was hateful to him.  He took a warm interest, after his return, in Reuchlin’s contest against the judges of heresy at Cologne, and, in 1512, stood on the side of the Humanists; but even then he felt that something separated him from this movement.  When, a few years later, he was in Gotha, he did not call upon the worthy Mutianus Rufus, although he wrote him a very polite letter of apology; and soon after he was offended by the inward coldness and secular tone in which theological sinners were ridiculed in Erasmus’ dialogues.  The profane worldliness of the Humanists was never quite in harmony with the cheerful faith of Luther’s soul, and the pride with which he afterward offended the sensitive Erasmus in a letter which was meant to be conciliatory, was probably even then in his soul.  Even the forms of literary modesty adopted by Luther at that time give the impression that they were wrung from an unbending spirit by the power of Christian humility.