“There was an ill-omened look about the man.”
“He looked something like the Trojan horse, and Beelzebub only knows what he has in his belly.”
When Luther came into his lonely cell, he wept with a young man’s boundless grief when reality contradicts his expectations, and he finds that all which he has learnt to prize is only contemptible and common.
He was not, however, allowed to be alone long, for there was a knock at the door, and there entered a young Augustinian monk, who seemed, with a confidential air, to invite his acquaintance.
“Brother Martin, you must not be solitary, but open your heart to sympathetic friends.”
He took Martin’s hands. “Tell me,” he said, “what troubles you, and I will answer you.”
Luther looked at the young monk, and saw that he was a swarthy Italian with glowing eyes. But he had been so long alone that he felt the necessity of speech.
“What do you think,” he said, “our Lord Christ would say if he now arose and came into the Holy City?”
“He would rejoice that His churches, His three hundred and sixty-five churches, are built on the foundations of the heathen temples. You know that since Charles the Great dragged the great marble pillars to Aachen in order to build his cathedral, our Popes have also gone to work, and the heathen and their houses have been literally laid at the feet of Christ. That is grand and something to rejoice at! Ecclesia Triumphans! Would not Christ rejoice at it? How well Innocent III has expressed the ‘Idea’ of the conquering Church, as Plato would call it. You know Plato—the Pope has just paid five thousand ducats for a manuscript of the Timoeus. Pope Innocent says: ‘St Peter’s successors have received from God the commission not only to rule the Church but the whole world. As God has set two great lights in the sky, he has also set up two great powers on earth, the Papacy, which is the higher because the care of souls is committed to it, and the Royal power which is the lower, and to which only the charge of the bodies of men is committed.’ If you have any objection to make to that, brother, speak it out.”