an atheist, an imp of Satan; and he calls the Pope the scarlet mother of abominations, Antichrist, Babylon.  That age is prodigal in offensive epithets; kings and prelates and doctors alike use hard words.  They are like angry children and women and pugilists; their vocabulary of abuse is amusing and inexhaustible.  See how prodigal Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are in the language of vituperation.  But they were all defiant and fierce, for the age was rough and earnest.  The Pope, in wrath, hurls the old weapons of the Gregorys and the Clements.  But they are impotent as the darts of Priam; Luther laughs at them, and burns the Papal bull before a huge concourse of excited students and shopkeepers and enthusiastic women.  He severs himself completely from Rome, and declares an unextinguishable warfare.  He destroys and breaks up the ceremonies of the Mass; he pulls down the consecrated altars, with their candles and smoking incense and vessels of silver and gold, since they are the emblems of Jewish and Pagan worship; he tears off the vestments of priests, with their embroideries and their gildings and their millineries and their laces, since these are made to impose on the imagination and appeal to the sense; he breaks up monasteries and convents, since they are dens of infamy, cages of unclean birds, nurseries of idleness and pleasure, abodes at the best of narrow-minded, ascetic Asiatic recluses, who rejoice in penance and self-expiation and other modes of propitiating the Deity, like soofists and fakirs and Braminical devotees.  In defiance of the most sacred of the institutions of the Middle Ages, he openly marries Catherine Bora and sets up a hilarious household, and yet a household of prayer and singing.  He abolishes the old Gregorian service; and for Mediaeval chants, monotonous and gloomy, he prepares hymns and songs,—­not for boys and priests to intone in the distant choir, but for the whole congregation to sing, inspired by the melodies of David and the exulting praises of a Saviour who redeems from darkness into light.  How grand that hymn of his,—­

    “A mighty fortress is our God,
       A bulwark never failing.”

He makes worship more heartfelt, and revives apostolic usages:  preaching and exhortation and instruction from the pulpit,—­a forgotten power.  He appeals to reason rather than sense; denounces superstitions, while he rebukes sins; and kindles a profound fervor, based on the recognition of new truths.  He is not fully emancipated from the traditions of the past; for he retains the doctrine of transubstantiation, and keeps up the holidays of the Church, and allows recreation on the Sabbath.  But what he thinks the most of is the circulation of the Scriptures among plain people.  So he translates them into German.  And this, not the first but the best translation, is done so well that it becomes the standard of the German language, as the Bible of Tindale helped to form the English tongue; and not only so, but it has