Julius II. opposed council with council, and assembled in the basilic of the Lateran the prelates who remained faithful to him. But even there, before this pontiff, who possessed no other knowledge than that of arms, Œgidius de Viterbo, general of the order of the Augustines, accuses the priests of having abandoned prayer for the sword, and of haunting, after battle, houses of prostitution. “Can we contemplate,” he asks, “without shedding tears of blood, the ignorance, the ambition, the immodesty, the impiety reigning in the holy places, whence they ought to be for ever banished?” As they hearkened to these cries of distress descending from such high places, the troubled nations appealed to a new general council, as if experience had not taught them that these great assemblies, so prodigal of words, were barren for a work of reformation! But the multitude knew not whence deliverance might come, and, in its anxiety, it clung to the illusions of its old recollections. In the midst of this universal and restless expectation, the enemy grew bold. Reuchlin maintained the rights of knowledge against the barbarous teaching of the universities. The noble Ulrich of Hutten, the representative of chivalry in this grand struggle, announced by appeals from the sword to public reason, the advent of a new civilization. Erasmus, the Voltaire of the epoch, excited the laughter of kings, lords, cardinals, and even the pope, at the expense of the monks and doctors, and opened the door by which the modern world must pass. Then Martin Luther appeared. It is not part of my task to write the history of the Reformer. Sent to Rome respecting the affairs of the order of the Augustines, he found there a vast and profound incredulity, a revolting immorality. Luther returned to Germany heartbroken, his conscience agitated with bitter doubts. An old Bible, which he discovered in the convent of Erfurt, revealed to him a religion wholly different from that which he had been taught. Still the thought was not yet born within him to undertake the reformation of the Church. Pastor and professor at Wittenberg, he confined himself to spreading around him healthy doctrines and good examples. But John Tetzel, a vender of indulgences, audacious to effrontery, covetous to cynicism, whilom condemned to prison for notorious crimes, and menaced with drowning in the Inn by the inhabitants of the Tyrol, dared to interpose his vile traffic between the word of Luther and the souls confided to him. Luther became indignant: he re-perused his Bible; and in 1517 he affixed to the door of the cathedral of Wittenberg those ninety-five theses destined soon to raise throughout all Europe such a formidable echo.