books rush along like thunderstorms or turbid mountain torrents. He knew his violent temper, but
never took the trouble to restrain it; and his last books against the Papists, the Zwinglians, and the
Jews, are his worst, and exceed any thing that is known in the history of theological polemics. In
his little tract against the Romish Duke Henry of Brunswick,^993 the word Devil occurs no less than
a hundred and forty-six times.^994 At last he could not pray without cursing, as he confessed himself.^995
He calls his mastery of the vocabulary of abuse his rhetoric. "Do not think," he wrote to Spalatin,
"that the gospel can he advanced without tumult, trouble, and uproar. You cannot make a pen of a
sword. The Word of God is a sword; it is war, overthrow, trouble, destruction, poison; it meets the
children of Ephraim, as Amos says, like a bear on the road, or like a lioness in the wood."^996 We
may admit that the club and sledge-hammer of this Protestant Hercules were necessary for the
semi-barbarous Germans of his day. Providence used his violent temper as an instrument for the
destruction of the greatest spiritual tyranny which the world ever saw. Yet his best friends were
shocked and grieved at his rude personalities, and condemnatory judgments of such men as Erasmus,
Zwingli, and Oecolampadius, not to speak of his Romish adversaries. Nothing shows more clearly
the great distance which separates him from the apostles and evangelists.
But, with all his faults, he is the greatest man that Germany produced, and one of the very
greatest in history. Melanchthon, who knew him best, and suffered most from his imperious temper,
called him the Elijah of Protestantism, and compared him to the Apostle Paul.^997 And indeed, in
his religious experience and theological standpoint, he strongly resembles the Apostle of the
Gentiles,—though at a considerable distance,—more strongly than any schoolman or father. He
roused by his trumpet voice the church from her slumber; he broke the yoke of papal tyranny; he
reconquered Christian freedom; he re-opened the fountain of God’s holy Word to all the people,
and directed the Christians to Christ, their only Master.
This is his crowning merit and his enduring monument.
Augustin, Luther, Calvin.
The men who, next to the Apostles, have exerted and still exert through their writings the
greatest influence in the Christian Church, as leaders of theological thought, are St. Augustin,
Martin Luther, and John Calvin: all pupils of Paul, inspired by his doctrines of sin and grace, filled
with the idea that God alone is great, equally eminent for purity of character, abundance in labors,
and whole-souled consecration to the service of Christ, their common Lord and Saviour; and yet
as different from each other as an African, a German, and a Frenchman can be. Next to them I
would place an Englishman, John Wesley, who, as to abundance of useful labor in winning souls
to Christ, is the most apostolic man that Great Britain has produced.
Augustin commands the respect and gratitude of the Catholic as well as the Protestant world.
He is, among the three the profoundest in thought, and the sweetest in spirit; free from bitterness
and coarseness, even in his severest polemics; yet advocating a system of exclusiveness which
justifies coercion and persecution of heretics and schismatics. He identified the visible catholic
(^993) He calls him Hanswurst, Jack Sausage.
(^994) So says Döllinger (Die Reform., III. 265, note), who counted the number. He adds, that in Luther’s book on the Councils, the devils
are mentioned fifteen times in four lines.
(^995) See the passages above, p. 657 sq., note 3.
(^996) Comp. the comparison between Luther and Melanchthon, p. 193 sq.
(^997) He announced the death of Luther to his students with the words: "Ah! obiit auriga et currus Israel, qui rexit ecclesiam in hac ultima
senecta mundi. ... Amemus igitur hujus viri memoriam."