"If we fall, Christ falls with us, that is to say, the Master of the world. I would rather fall with Christ, than remain standing with Cæsar."
Thus wrote Luther. The faith which animated him flowed from him like torrents of living water. He was indefatigable; in a single day he wrote to Melancthon, Spalatin, Brenz, Agricola, and John Frederick, and they were letters full of life. He was not alone in praying, speaking, and believing. At the same moment, the Evangelical Christians exhorted one another everywhere to prayer.[553] Such was the arsenal in which the weapons were forged that the confessors of Christ wielded before the Diet of Augsburg.
RECOLLECTIONS AND CONTRAST.
VII. At length the 25th June arrived. This was destined to be the greatest day of the Reformation, and one of the most glorious in the history of Christianity and of mankind.
As the chapel of the Palatine Palace, where the Emperor had resolved to hear the Confession, could contain only about two hundred persons,[554] before three o'clock a great crowd was to be seen surrounding the building and thronging the court, hoping by this means to catch a few words; and many having gained entrance to the chapel, all were turned out except those who were not, at the least, councillors to the princes.
Charles took his seat on the throne. The Electors or their representatives were on his right and left hand; after them the other princes and states of the Empire. The legate had refused to appear in this solemnity, lest he should seem by his presence to authorize the reading of the Confession.[555]
Then stood up John Elector of Saxony, with his son John Frederick, Phillip Landgrave of Hesse, the Margrave George of Brandenburg, Wolfgang Prince of Anhalt, Ernest Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg, and his brother Francis, and last of all the deputies of Nuremberg and Reutlingen. Their air was animated and their features radiant with joy.[556] The apologies of the early Christians, of Tertullian and Justin Martyr, hardly reached in writing the sovereigns to whom they were addressed. But now, to hear the new apology of resuscitated Christianity, behold that puissant Emperor, whose sceptre, stretching far beyond the columns of Hercules, reaches the utmost limits of the world, his brother the King of the Romans, with electors, princes, prelates, deputies, ambassadors, all of whom desire to destroy the Gospel, but who are constrained by an invisible power to listen, and, by that very listening, to honour the Confession!
One thought was involuntarily present in the minds of the spectators,—the recollection of the Diet of Worms.[557] Only nine years before, a poor monk stood alone for this same cause in a hall of the town-house at Worms, in presence of the Empire. And now in his stead, behold the foremost of the Electors, behold princes and cities! What a victory is declared by this simple fact! No doubt Charles himself cannot escape from this recollection.
THE CONFESSION—PROLOGUE.