LUTHER THE CHOSEN INSTRUMENT.

We may not limit Providence.  The work was to be done.  Every interest of the world and of the kingdom of God demanded it.  And if there had been no Luther at hand, some one else would have been raised up to serve in his place.  But there was a Luther, and, as far as human insight can determine, he was the only man on earth competent to achieve the Reformation.  And he it was who did achieve it.

Looked at in advance, perhaps no one would have thought of him for such an office.  He was so humbly born, so lowly in station, so destitute of fortune, and withal so honest a Papist, that not the slightest tokens presented to mark him out as the chosen instrument to grapple with the magnitudinous tyranny by which Europe was enthralled.

But “God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty.”  Moses was the son of a slave.  The founder of the Hebrew monarchy was a shepherd-boy.  The Redeemer-King of the world was born in a stable and reared in the family of a village carpenter.  And we need not wonder that the hero-prophet of the modern ages was the son of a poor toiler for his daily bread, and compelled to sing upon the street for alms to keep body and soul together while struggling for an education.

It has been the common order of Providence that the greatest lights and benefactors of the race, the men who rose the highest above the level of their kind and stood as beacons to the world, were not such as would have been thought of in advance for the mighty services which render their names immortal.  And that the master spirit of the great Reformation was no exception all the more surely identifies that marvelous achievement as the work of an overruling God.

LUTHER’S ORIGIN.

Luther was a Saxon German—­a German of the Germans—­born of that blood out of which, with but few exceptions, have sprung the ruling powers of the West since the last of the old Roman emperors.  He came out of the bosom of the freshest, strongest, and hardiest peoples then existing—­the direct descendants of those wild Cimbrian and Teutonic tribes who, even in their heathenism, were the most virtuous, brave, and true of all the Gentiles.

Nor was he the offspring of enfeebled, gouty, aristocratic blood.  He was the son of the sinewy and sturdy yeomanry.  Though tradition reports one of his remote ancestors in something of imperial place among the chieftains of the semi-savage tribes from which he was descended, when the period of the Reformation came his family was in like condition with that of the house of David when the Christ was born.  His father and grandfather and great-grandfather, he says himself, were true Thuringian peasants.

LUTHER’S EARLY TRAINING.