absolution he looked for, could, in spite of such refusal, participate in God's forgiveness to the full. Herewith was broken at once the most powerful bond by which the dominant Church enslaved the souls to the organs of her hierarchy. Luther has humbled man to the lowest before God, through Whose grace alone the sinner, in meek and believing trustfulness, can be saved. But in God and through this grace he teaches him to be free and certain of salvation. Christ, he says, has not willed that man's salvation should lie in the hand or at the pleasure of a man. As for the outward acts and punishments which the Church and the Pope imposed, he did not seek to abolish them. In this external province at least he recognised in the Pope a power originating direct from God. Here, in his opinion, the Christian was bound to put up with even an abuse of power and the infliction of unjust punishment. The whole contest turned ultimately on the question as to who should determine disputes about the truth, and where to seek the highest standard and the purest source of Christian verity. Gradually at first, and manifestly with many inward struggles on the part of Luther, his views and principles gained clearness and consistency. Even within the Catholic Church the doctrine as to the highest authority to be recognised in questions of belief and conduct was by no means so firmly established as is frequently represented by both Protestants and Roman Catholics. The doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope, and of the absolute authority attaching thereby to his decisions, however confidently asserted by the admirers of Aquinas and accepted by the Popes, was not erected into a dogma of the Roman Catholic Church until 1870. The other theory, that even the Pope can err, and that the supreme decision rests with a General Council, had been maintained by theologians whom, at the same time, no Pope had ever ventured to treat as heretics. It was on the ground of this latter theory that the University of Paris, then the first university in Europe, had just appealed from the Pope to a General Council. In Germany opinions were on the whole divided between this and the theory of Papal absolutism. Again, the view that neither the decisions of a Council nor of a Pope were _ipso facto_ infallible, but that an appeal therefrom lay to a council possibly better informed, had already been advanced with impunity by writers of the fifteenth century. The only point as to which no doubt was expressed, was that the decisions of previous General Councils, acknowledged also by the Pope, contained absolutely pure Divine truth, and that the Christian Universal Church could never fall into error; but even then, with reference to this Church, the question still remained as to who or what was her true and final representative.