“Give us time,” cried the theologian, “and perhaps in our home their flowering will attain an unsurpassed richness of development.  With what loose bonds the humanists are still united to you!”

“And the finest intellect of all, the great scholar whose name you bear, though he deemed many things in our old home deserving of improvement, remained with us until his death.  Jesus Christ is one, and so his Church must also remain.  The only question is, What the Saviour still is to you Protestants, what he is to you, my friend?”

“Before how many saints, and many another whom your Church desires to honour, do you bow the knee?” Erasmus fervidly answered; “but we do so only to the august Trinity.  And do you wish to know what Jesus Christ, the Son, is to me?  All, and more than all, is the answer; I live and breathe in my Saviour Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and throughout eternity.”

The young theologian raised his sparkling eyes heavenward as he spoke, and continued:  “Our doctrine is founded on him, his word, his love alone; and who among the enthusiastic heralds of Christianity in ancient times grasped faith in him with warmer sincerity than the very Martin Luther whom you would have led to the stake had not the Emperor Charles’s plighted word been dearer to him than the approval of Rome?  Oh, my friend, our young faith can also show its martyrs.  Think of the Bohemian John Huss and the true Christians who, in the Netherlands and Spain, were burned at the stake and bled upon the scaffold because they read the Bible, the Word of God and their Saviour, and would rather die than deny it.  If it should come to the worst, thousands here would also be ready to ascend the funeral pyre, and I at their head.  If war is declared now, the Emperor Charles will gain the victory; and if he does not wish to withdraw in earnest from Romish influences, who can tell what will then await us Protestants?  But I am not anxious about what may come.  We German citizens, who are accustomed to guide our own destinies and maintain the system of government we arranged for ourselves, who built by our own strength our solid, comfortable, gable-roofed houses and noble, towering cathedrals, will also independently maintain the life of our minds and our souls.  Rome, with her legions of priests, claimed the right not only to interfere in our civil life, but also to intrude into our houses, our married lives, and our nurseries.  What could she not decide for the individual by virtue of the power she arrogates to bind and to loose, to forgive sins, and to open or to close the door of heaven for the dying?  What she has done with the Church’s gifts of grace we know.