In Fifteen Hundred Twenty-five Martin Luther married "Catharine the Nun," a most excellent woman, and one whom rumor says had long encouraged and upheld him in his works. Children came to bless them, and the picture of the great heretic sitting at his wooden table with little Johnny Luther on his knee, his loving wife by his side, and kind neighbors entering for a friendly chat, shows the great reformer at his best.
He was the son of a peasant, all his ancestors were peasants, as he so often told, and he lived like a peasant to the last. For himself he wanted little. He sided with the people, the toilers, with those who struggled in the bonds of slavery and fear—for them he was an Eye, an Ear, a trumpet Voice.
There never lived a braver man—there never lived one more earnest and sincere. He fought freedom's fight with all the weapons God had given him; and for the liberty we now enjoy, in great degree, we are debtors to Martin Luther.
EDMUND BURKE
I was not, like His Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator; "nitor in adversum" is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favor and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts, by imposing on the understandings of the people.
At every step of my progress in life, for in every step I was traversed and opposed, and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honor of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at home; otherwise no rank, no toleration even, for me.
