The Nuttall Encyclopædia / Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge

by P. Austin Nuttall

[Lusatia], a district of Germany, between the Elbe and the Oder, originally divided into Upper and Lower, belongs partly to Saxony and partly to Prussia; it swarmed at one time with Wends.

[Lusiad] or Lusiades, a poem of Camoëns in ten cantos, in celebration of the discoveries of the Portuguese in the East Indies, and in which Vasco da Gama is the principal figure; it is a genuine national epic, in which the poet passes in review all the celebrated exploits and feats that glorify the history of Portugal.

[Lusitania], the ancient name of Portugal, still used as the name of it in modern poetry.

[Lustrum], a sacrifice for expiation and purification offered by one of the censors of Rome in name of the Roman people at the close of the taking of the census, and which took place after a period of five years, so that the name came to denote a period of that length.

[Lutetia], the ancient name of Paris, Lutetia Parisiorum, mud-town of the borderers, as Carlyle translates it.

[Luther, Martin], the great Protestant Reformer, born at Eisleben, in Prussian Saxony, the son of a miner, was born poor and brought up poor, familiar from his childhood with hardship; was sent to study law at Erfurt, but was one day at the age of 19 awakened to a sense of higher interests, and in spite of remonstrances became a monk; was for a time in deep spiritual misery, till one day he found a Bible in the convent, which taught him for the first time that "a man was not saved by singing masses, but by the infinite grace of God"; this was his awakening from death to life, and to a sense of his proper mission as a man; at this stage the Elector of Saxony was attracted to him, and he appointed him preacher and professor at Wittenberg; on a visit to Rome his heart sank within him, but he left it to its evil courses to pursue his own way apart; if Rome had let him alone he would have let it, but it would not; monk Tetzel arrived at Wittenberg selling indulgences, and his indignation was roused; remonstrance after remonstrance followed, but the Pope gave no heed, till the agitation being troublesome, he issued his famous "fire-decree," condemning Luther's writings to the flames; this answer fired Luther to the quick, and he "took the indignant step of burning the decree in 1520 at the Elster Gate of Wittenberg, Wittenberg looking on with shoutings, the whole world looking on"; after this Luther was summoned to the Diet of Worms, and he appeared there before the magnates, lay and clerical, of the German empire on April 17, 1521; how he demeaned himself on that high occasion is known to all the world, and his answer as well: "Here stand I; I can do no other; so help me God"; "it was the grandest moment in the modern history of man"; of the awakening this produced Luther was the ruling spirit, as he had been the moving one, and he continued to be so to the end of his life; his writings show the man as well as his deeds, and amid all the turmoil that enveloped him he found leisure to write and leave behind him 25 quarto volumes; it is known the German Bible in use is his work, executed by him in the Castle of Wartburg; it was begun by him with his back to the wall, as it were, and under the protestation, as it seemed to him, of the prince of darkness himself, and finished in this obstructive element pretty much throughout, the New Testament in 1522, the Pentateuch in 1523, and the whole, the Apocrypha included, in 1534; he was fond of music, and uttered many an otherwise unutterable thing in the tones of his flute; "the devils fled from his flute," he says; "death-defiance on the one hand, and such love of music on the other, I could call these," says Carlyle, "the two opposite poles of a great soul, between these two all great things had room.... Luther," he adds, "was a true great man, great in intellect, in courage, in affection, and integrity,... great as an Alpine mountain, but not setting up to be great at all—his, as all greatness is, an unconscious greatness" (1488-1546).

[Lutheranism], that form of Protestantism which prevails in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Northern Germany. See [Lutherans].

[Lutherans], the name given to that school of the Protestant Church which accepted Luther's doctrine, especially that of the Eucharist, in opposition to that of the members of the Reformed Church, who assented to the views in that matter of Zwingli, the Swiss Reformer; the former maintaining the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and that the grace of Christ is communicated in the celebration of it, and the latter maintaining that it is a merely commemorative ordinance, and the means of grace to the believing recipient only.

[Lutterworth], a small town in Leicestershire, on the Swift, 8 m. NE. of Rugby, of the church of which Wiclif was rector, and where he was buried, though his bones were afterwards, in 1428, dug up and burned, and the ashes cast into the river.

[Lützen], a small town in Prussian Saxony, the vicinity of it the scene of a victory of Gustavus Adolphus in 1632, and of another by Napoleon over the combined forces of Russia and Prussia in 1813.