the respect of princes, even of those opposed to him. Thus when shortly after the commencement of the Reformation, a general insurrection of peasants broke out, which renewed all the excesses of the Hussites; Luther so far from exciting the rebels, like some of the new Gospellers, opposed them with all the powers of his commanding eloquence, and all the weight of his high authority; for he was by no means in politics an advocate for democracy, like Zuinglius and Calvin, but he asserted the absolute power of princes, though he made his advocacy subservient to his own religious views and projects. It was by such conduct, and the influence which he thereby acquired, as well as by the sanction of the civil power, that the Reformation was promoted and consolidated. Without this, Protestantism would have sunk into the lawless anarchy which marked the proceedings of the Hussites, and to which the war of the peasants rapidly tended; and it would inevitably have been suppressed, like all the earlier popular commotions--for under the latter form, Protestantism may be said to have sprung up several centuries before. And besides, none of the other heads and leaders of the new religious party had the power, or were in a situation to uphold the Protestant religion--its present existence is solely and entirely the work and the deed of one man, unique in his way, and who holds unquestionably a conspicuous place in the history of the world. Much was staked on the soul of that man, and this was in every respect a mighty and critical moment in the annals of mankind, and the march of time. The real problem for the age would have been to terminate this unhappy confusion of doctrines, that is to say, that disorder and not unfrequent confusion in the relations of the ecclesiastical and civil powers, (occasioned by the general state of things in Europe, and by the circumstances which first promoted the political and intellectual civilization of the West)--in a word, to compose the old dispute between church and state, and bring it to a just Christian settlement by a peaceful and amicable arrangement. Then the many existing, though scattered, rays of true Christian piety, humility, and self-denial, as well as the new discoveries in science would have acquired a more intense and more extended power--an event which was now entirely prevented by a great civil war between two religious parties, and was not brought to a full accomplishment till a much later period. But the total rejection of the traditions of the past (and here was the capital vice and error of this Revolution), rendered the evil incurable, and even for Biblical learning and philology now so highly valued, the true key of interpretation, which sacred tradition alone can furnish, was irretrievably lost, as the sequel has but too well proved. And even if this were not the case, how could mere learned institutes of Biblical philology, united with