"But I will soon bring your hiding-places to the light, therefore do I laugh in your faces my laughter of the height.
"And 'Will to Equality'—that itself shall henceforth be the name of virtue; and against all that hath power will we raise an outcry!
"Ye preachers of equality, the tyrant frenzy of impotence crieth thus in you for 'equality': your most secret tyrant longings disguise themselves in words of virtue!"[36]
And now recapitulating a moment, what have we found our heritage to consist of, in the realm of the religious spirit?
In the first place: a certain universal acknowledgment and claim of liberty, which has no special purpose or direction, and which is too fair to some and unfair to many. Secondly, a devotion to a truth that could be general, which perforce has reduced us to vulgar reality; thirdly, a prevailing depression in the value and dignity of man, resulting from the suspicion that has been cast upon all authority and all loftiness; and fourthly, a wanton desecrating and befingering of all sanctuaries by anybody and everybody, which is the inevitable outcome of that amateur priesthood introduced and sanctified by Martin Luther.
[23] Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. II, p. 140: "Whatever the prejudices of some may suggest, it will be admitted, by all unbiassed judges, that the Protestant Reformation was neither more nor less than an open rebellion. Indeed, the mere mention of private judgment, on which it was avowedly based, is enough to substantiate this fact. To establish the right of private judgment was to appeal from the Church to individuals," etc. (See also p. 138 in the same volume.) Cambridge Modern History, Vol. II, p. 166: "In the Edict of Worms, Luther had been branded as a revolutionary, then as a heretic, and the burden of the complaints preferred against him by the Catholic humanists was, that his methods of seeking a reformation would be fatal to all order, political or ecclesiastical. They painted him as the apostle of revolution, a second Catiline." And p. 174: "The most frequent and damaging charge levelled at Luther between 1520 and 1525 reproached him with being the apostle of revolution and anarchy, and predicted that his attacks on spiritual authority would develop into a campaign against civil order unless he were promptly suppressed."
[24] A Treatise Touching the Libertie of a Christian, by Martyne Luther (translated from the Latin by James Bell, 1579. Edited by W. Bengo' Collyer, 1817), p. 17: "So that it is manifest that to a Christian man faith sufficeth only for all, and that he needeth no works to be justified by. Now, if he need no works, then also he needs not the law: if he have no need of the law, surely he is then free from the law. So this also is true. The law is not made for the righteous man, and this is the same Christian libertie."
[25] Ibid., p. 3.
[26] Ibid., p. 31.