It is strange, also, to see how, in these few weeks, the wildest tales have sprung up and spread in all directions about Dr. Luther's disappearance. Some say he has been secretly murdered, and that his wounded corpse has been seen; others, that he was borne away bleeding through the forest to some dreadful doom; while others boldly assert that he will re-appear at the head of a band of liberators, who will go through the length and breadth of the land, redressing every wrong, and punishing every wrong-doer.
Truly, if a few weeks can throw such a haze around facts, what would a century without a written record have done for Christianity; or what would that record itself have been without inspiration?
The country was in some parts very disturbed. In Alsace I came on a secret meeting of the peasants, who have bound themselves with the most terrible oaths to wage war to the death against the nobles.
More than once I was stopped by a troop of horsemen near a castle, and my wares searched, to see if they belonged to the merchants of some city with whom the knight of the castle was at feud; and on one of these occasions it might have fared ill with me if a troop of Landsknechts in the service of the empire had not appeared in time to rescue me and my companions.
Yet everywhere the name of Luther was of equal interest. The peasants believed he would rescue them from the tyranny of the nobles; and many of the knights spoke of him as the assertor of German liberties against a foreign yoke. More than one poor parish priest welcomed him as the deliverer from the avarice of the great abbeys or the prelates. Thus, in farm-house and hut, in castle and parsonage, I and my books found many a cordial welcome. And all I could do was to sell the books, and tell all who would listen, that the yoke Luther's words were powerful to break was the yoke of the devil the prince of all oppressors, and that the freedom he came to republish was freedom from the tyranny of sin and self.
My true welcome, however, the one which rejoiced my heart, was when any said, as many did, on sick-beds, in lowly and noble homes, and in monasteries—
"Thank God, these words are in our hearts already. They have taught us the way to God; they have brought us peace and freedom."
Or when others said—
"I must have that book. This one and that one that I know is another man since he read Dr. Luther's words."
But if I was scarcely prepared for the interest felt in Dr. Luther in our own land, true German that he is, still less did I expect that his fame would have reached to Paris, and even further.