all he saw to stand apart and let it go its way alone.  Fearful and distrustful of himself he long was, but his timidity was only the natural shrinking before new and untried duties of a soul that saw more clearly and felt more keenly than most.  The imperative demands inevitably made upon him by every situation led him instinctively to dread putting himself where he could not help responding to the call of unfamiliar tasks; but once there, the summons was irresistible, and he threw himself into the new responsibilities with a forgetfulness of self possible only to him who has denied its claims, and with a fearlessness possible only to him who has conquered fear.  He might interpret his confidence as trust in God, won by the path of a complete contempt of his own powers; but however understood, it gave him an independence and a disregard of consequences which made his conscience and his vision effective for reform.”

McGiffert suggests a comparison of Luther with, let us say, Erasmus.  Had he been a humanist, he would have laughed the whole thing [Tetzel’s selling of indulgences] to scorn as an exploded superstition beneath the contempt of an intelligent man; had he been a scholastic theologian, he would have sat in his study and drawn fine distinctions to justify the traffic without bothering himself about its influence upon the lives of the vulgar populace.  But he was neither humanist nor schoolman.  He had a conscience which made indifference impossible, and a simplicity and directness of vision which compelled him to brush aside all equivocation and go straight to the heart of things.  With it all he was at once a devout and believing son of the Church, and a practical preacher profoundly concerned for the spiritual and moral welfare of the common people.” (p. 66f. 87.) Had Luther considered his personal interests as Erasmus did, he would not have become the Luther that we know.  Erasmus in his day was regarded as the wisest of men; Luther in his own view, like Paul, frequently had to make a fool of himself in order to achieve his purpose.  For instance, when he wrote against the dullards at the University of Louvain, against the sacrilegious coterie at Rome that was running the Church and the world pretty much as they pleased, or against the brutal “Hans Wurst” (Duke Henry of Brunswick).  Erasmus and his school of gentle reformers always counseled a slackening of the pace and the use of the soft pedal.  Where is Erasmus to-day in the world’s valuation?  Even Rome, in whose bosom he nestled, and who fondled him for a season, has cast him aside as worthless.  Luther lives yet, to the delight not only of Coleridge, but of millions of the world’s best men, who, with the British divine, regard him this very hour as “a purifying and preserving spirit to Christianity at large.”

Luther was conscious of the difference in the method of warfare between himself and his colaborer Melanchthon.  He says:  “I am rough, boisterous, stormy, and altogether warlike.  I am born to fight against innumerable monsters and devils.  I must remove stumps and stones, cut away thistles and thorns, and clear wild forests; but Master Philip comes along softly and gently, sowing and watering with joy, according to the gifts which God has abundantly bestowed upon him,” (14, 176.)