fiery eyes whose keen brilliancy was hard to meet.  He was a respected man, not only in his order, but at the University; not a great scholar—­he learned Greek from Melanchthon in the first year of his professorship, and Hebrew soon after.  He had no extensive book learning, and never had the ambition to shine as a writer of Latin verse; but he was astonishingly well-read in the Scriptures and some of the Fathers of the Church, and what he had once learned he assimilated with German thoroughness.  He was the untiring shepherd of his flock, a zealous preacher, a warm friend, once more full of a decorous cheerfulness; he was of an assured bearing, polite and skilful in social intercourse, with a confidence of spirit which often lighted up his face in a smile.  The small events of the day might indeed affect him and annoy him.  He was excitable, and easily moved to tears, but on any great emergency, after he had overcome his early nervous excitement, such as, for instance, embarrassed him when he first appeared before the Diet at Worms—­then he showed wonderful calmness and self-command.  He knew no fear.  Indeed, his lion’s nature found satisfaction in the most dangerous situations.  The danger of death into which he sometimes fell, the malicious ambushes of his enemies, seemed to him at that time hardly worthy of mention.  The reason for this superhuman heroism, as one may call it, was again his close personal relation to his God.  He had long periods in which he wished, with a cheerful smile, for martyrdom in the service of truth and of his God.  Terrible struggles were still before him, but those in which men opposed him did not seem to deserve this name.  He had defeated the devil himself again and again for years.  He even overcame the fear and torment of hell, which did its utmost to cloud his reason.  Such a man might perhaps be killed, but he could hardly be conquered.

The period of the struggle which now follows, from the beginning of the indulgences controversy until his departure from the Wartburg—­the time of his greatest victories and of his tremendous popularity—­is perhaps best known; but it seems to us that even here his nature has never yet been correctly judged.

Nothing is more remarkable at this period than the manner in which Luther became gradually estranged from the Church of Rome.  His life was modest and without ambition.  He clung with the deepest reverence to the lofty idea of the Church, for fifteen hundred years the communion of saints; and yet in four short years he was destined to be cut off from the faith of his fathers, torn from the soil in which he had been so firmly rooted.  And during all this time he was destined to stand alone in the struggle, or at best with a few faithful companions—­after 1518 together with Melanchthon.  He was to be exposed to all the perils of the fiercest war, not only against innumerable enemies, but also in defiance of the anxious warnings of sincere friends and patrons.  Three