In the year 1517, when it had not yet occurred to Henry's sensitive conscience that his marriage with Katharine, his brother's widow, was illegal, and while Charles V., that sedate young man, who "looked so modest, and soared so high," was revolving plans for the extension of his empire, Pope Leo X., the pious Vicar of Christ upon earth, and elegant patron of Michael Angelo and Raphael, found his income all too small for his magnificent tastes. It does not seem to have occurred to him that his tastes were too costly for his income; he simply recognized that something must be done, and at once, to fill his empty purse. But what should it be? A simple and ingenious expedient solved the perplexing problem. He would issue a proclamation to his "loving, faithful children," that he would grant absolution for all sorts of crimes, the prices graduated to suit the enormity of the offence. We have not seen the proclamation, but doubt not it was in most caressing Latin, for can anything exceed the velvety softness of the gloves worn on the hands which sign papal decrees? Simple lying and slander were cheap; perjury and sins against chastity more costly; while the use of the stiletto, of poison, and the hired assassin could be enjoyed only by the richest. It worked well. In the hopeful words of a pious dignitary, "as soon as the money chinks in the coffer, the soul springs out of purgatory." Who could resist such promise? Money flowed in swollen streams into the thirsty coffers, many even paying in advance for crimes they intended to commit! Martin Luther was the one man who dared to stand up and denounce this tax upon crime, this papal trade in vice. The people had at last found a voice and a leader. Protestantism sprang into existence without the slow process of growth. It had long been maturing in silence and darkness, and at the trumpet tones of Luther, declared itself a power upon the earth. Here was a revolt beyond the reach of thumbscrew and stake! You could not burn a million people! CHAPTER VIII. The Church gathered herself for one supreme effort to stem this fatal tide, which was loosening her foundations. Just one hundred years from the birth of Protestantism, pope and emperor, putting their spiritual and temporal heads together, planned a crusade against twenty-five million Protestants. The desultory war against the new heresy had been ineffectual. As it was stamped out in one place, it blazed up afresh in others. Now it should be, at whatever cost, exterminated in the German Empire.