No other poems of their class by any single man have ever exerted so great an influence, or have received so great admiration, as these few short lyrics of Martin Luther. And yet at the first reading it is not easy to understand the reason for their celebrity. As poetry they disappoint us; there is no artfully modulated diction, no subtle and far-reaching imagination. Neither do they seem to chime with our devotional needs; there is a jarring note of fanaticism in them. We even find expressions that give positive offence, as when he speaks of the “Lamb roasted in hot love upon the cross.” We say that they are not universal, that they seem the outcome of a temper that belongs to an exceptional condition. This is really the fact; here is the clue to their proper study. They do belong to a time, and not to all time. We must consider that they are the utterance of a mind engaged in conflict, and often tormented with doubt of the outcome. They reveal the motive of the great pivotal figure in modern religious history. More than that—they have behind them the great impelling force of the Reformation. Perhaps the world has shown a correct instinct in fixing upon “Ein’ feste Burg” as the typical hymn of Luther and of the Reformation. Heine, who called it “the Marseillaise of the Reformation;” Frederick the Great, who called its melody (not without reverence) “God Almighty’s grenadier march;” Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, who chose the same tune to symbolize aggressive Protestantism; and Wagner, who wove its strains into the grand march which celebrates the military triumphs of united Germany,—all these men had an accurate feeling for the patriotic and moral fire which burns in this mighty song. The same spirit is found in other of Luther’s hymns, but often combined with a tenderer music, in which emphasis is laid more upon the inward peace that comes from trust in God, than upon the fact of outward conflict. A still more exalted mood is disclosed in such hymns as “Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein,” and “Von Himmel hoch da komm ich her”—the latter a Christmas song said to have been written for his little son Hans. The first of these is notable for the directness with which it sets forth the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone. It is in this same directness and homely vigor and adaptation to the pressing needs of the time that we must find the cause of the popular success of Luther’s hymns. He knew what the dumb, blindly yearning German people had been groping for during so many years, and the power of his sermons and poems lay in the fact that they offered a welcome spiritual gift in phrases that went straight to the popular heart. His speech was that of the people—idiomatic, nervous, and penetrating. He had learned how to talk to them in his early peasant home, and in his study of the folk-songs. Coarse, almost brutal at times, we may call him, as in his controversies with Henry VIII., Erasmus, and others; but it was the