THE SACK OF ROME
o all mean instincts. The Sesame of freedom opened gates through which the dammed-up corruption of society drained off. If one wishes to term the Lutheran movement a cloaca maxima, the remark is just if one bears in mind that the corruption was of long standing and that therefore he who set the foul current in motion was only partly to blame, Luther avenged the preachers of reform Peter Damien, Bernard, Catherine of Siena and many others whose words had not been heeded. Twenty years previous the Church had kindled the fire that smothered the sermons of the prophet of Florence. Now there came a man who placed the brand in her own building.
Small wonder that Leo X did not understand what was happening. The seriousness of the German monk kindled no echo in the smiling Medici prince. Luther himself, as he blundered on, did not see whither the road led. Magis raptus qttam tractus (hustled into rather than attracted to) he had entered the monastery ; and in quite the same way he now rushed onward under the lash of his daemon. There can be no doubt that he was in earnest when he wrote the Pope that he fell at his feet, surrendered himself together with all he was and had, recognized in him the voice of Christ, and was minded also not to fear death if he had deserved it. Soon thereafter he refused to obey the Roman legate's demand for a retraction and fled. His adaman- tine certainty that he sought the right was transformed by the applause of thousands who looked upon him as a religious and social emancipa- tor, into a prophetic belief that he and his teaching had been ordained by God Himself. A few months afterward, relying upon his feeling that surely he wanted only what was best for the Church, he once more assured the Pope of his loyalty; and yet a few weeks afterward he confessed that he did not know whether the Pope was anti-Christ himself, or merely anti-Christ's apostle. Like all powerful natures destined to become innovators, he wavered between flagrant contradic- tions; and he leapt now to this and now that beam of a scaffold which he himself had caused to topple. The letters and the treatises he wrote in the single year of 1520, which sealed his breach with Rome, mirror all the moods of a gruff assailant, a vengeful man, a tender for- giver of wrong, a vicious rebel, a gentle, quiet seeker after the peace of God, an iconoclast and a dreamer envisaging an ideal religious culture.
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