HUMAN GREATNESS.

Some men are colossal.  Their characters are so massive, and their position in history is so towering, that other men can hardly get high enough to take their measure.  An overruling Providence so endows and places them that they affect the world, turn its course into new channels, impart to it a new spirit, and leave their impress on all the ages after them.  Even humble individuals, without titles, crowns, or physical armaments, have wrought themselves into the very life of the race and built their memorials in the characteristics of epochs.

History tells of a certain Saul of Tarsus, a lone and friendless man, stripped of all earthly possessions, forced into battle with a universe of enthroned superstition, encompassed by perils which threatened every hour to dissolve him, who, pressing his way over mountains of difficulty and through seas of suffering, and dying a martyr to his cause, gave to Europe a living God and to the nations another and an everlasting King.

We likewise read of a certain Christopher Columbus, brooding in lowly retirement upon the structure of the physical universe, ridiculed, frowned on by the learned, repulsed by court after court, yet launching out into the unknown seas to find an undiscovered hemisphere, and opening the way for persecuted Liberty to cradle the grand empire of popular rule amid the golden hills of a new and independent continent.

And in this category stands the name of MARTIN LUTHER.

He was a poor, plain man, only a doctor of divinity, without place except as a teacher in a university, without power or authority except in the convictions and qualities of his own soul, and with no implements save his Bible, tongue, and pen; but with him the ages divided and human history took a new departure.

Two pre-eminent revolutions have passed over Europe since the beginning of the Christian era.  The one struck the Rome and rule of emperors; the other struck the Rome and rule of popes.  The one brought the Dark Ages; the other ended them.  The one overwhelmed the dominion of the Caesars; the other humiliated a more than imperial dominion reared in Caesar’s place.  Alaric, Rhadagaisus, Genseric, and Attila were the chief instruments and embodiment of the first; Martin Luther was the chief instrument and embodiment of the second.  The one wrought bloody desolation; the other brought blessed renovation, under which humanity has bloomed its happiest and its best.

THE PAPACY.