And meantime, a work, not without peril, but full of sacred joy, opens before me. I have been supplied by the friends of Dr. Luther's doctrine with copies of his books and pamphlets, both in Latin and German, which I am to sell as a hawker through the length and breadth of Germany, and in any other lands I can penetrate.
I am to start to-morrow, and to me my pack and strap are burdens more glorious than the armour of a prince of the empire; my humble pedlar's coat and staff are vestments more sacred than the robes of a cardinal or the weeds of a pilgrim.
For am I not a pilgrim to the city which hath foundations! Is not my yoke the yoke of Christ? and am I not distributing, among thirsty and enslaved men, the water of life and the truth which sets the heart free?
Black Forest, May 1521.
The first week of my wandering life is over. To-day my way lay through the solitary paths of the Black Forest, which, eleven years ago, I trod with Dr. Martin Luther, on our pilgrimage to Rome. Both of us then wore the monk's frock and cowl. Both were devoted subjects of the Pope, and would have deprecated, as the lowest depth of degradation, his anathema. Yet at that very time Martin Luther bore in his heart the living germ of all that is now agitating men's hearts from Pomerania to Spain. He was already a freedman of Christ, and he knew it. The Holy Scriptures were already to him the one living fountain of truth. Believing simply on Him who died, the just for the unjust, he had received the free pardon of his sins. Prayer was to him the confiding petition of a forgiven child received to the heart of the Father, and walking humbly by his side. Christ he knew already as the Confessor and Priest; the Holy Spirit as the personal teacher through His own Word.
The fetters of the old ceremonial were indeed still around him, but only as the brown casings still swathe many of the swelling buds of the young leaves; which others, this May morning, cracked and burst as I passed along in the silence through the green forest paths. The moment of liberation, to the passer-by always seems a great, sudden effort; but those who have watched the slow swelling of the imprisoned bud, know that the last expansion of life which bursts the scaly cerements is but one moment of the imperceptible but incessant growth, of which even the apparent death of winter was a stage.
But it is good to live in the spring time; and as I went on, my heart sang with the birds and the leaf-buds, "For me also the cerements of winter are burst,—for me and for all the land!"
And as I walked, I sang aloud the old Easter hymn which Eva used to love:—
Fone luctum, Magdalena,
Et serena lacrymas;
Non es jam cermonis cœna,
Non cur fletum exprimas;
Causae mille sunt lætandi,
Causae mille exultandi,
Alleluia resonet!