Do not ascribe so much to mere human power, wisdom, craft, fraud, dexterity, or skill. These are far feebler than it is customary in our days to regard them. In general men are duped themselves before they undertake to dupe others. Never yet was there a noted heresiarch who did not believe in his own heresy, and hence there is no instance on record of a real heresiarch, the originator and founder of a new heresy, being reclaimed to the orthodox faith, unless we except the doubtful case of Berengarius. I have never been able to sympathize with those Catholic writers who would persuade us that the Protestant Reformation originated in petty jealousies and rivalries between the Dominican and Augustinian monks. That view is too narrow and superficial; nor can we ascribe it to the pride, the vanity, and the ambition, or the intelligence, the virtue, the wisdom, and the sanctity of the monk Luther. Luther was a man terribly in earnest, a genuine man, and no sham, as Carlyle would say; and so were all the prominent chiefs in that terrible movement of the sixteenth century. The cool, subtle, dark, persevering Calvin, the fiery, energetic, and ferocious John Knox and their compeers were no petty tricksters, no _dilettanti_, no shrewd calculating hypocrites. They were terribly in earnest; they believed in themselves; they believed in the spirit that moved them, that spoke in their words, and struck in their blows against the old Papal edifice. It is nonsense to repeat, age after age, that the denial by the Holy See of the divorce solicited by Henry the Eighth, caused the separation of England from Catholic unity. That wily and lustful monarch, who must live in history as the “wife-slayer,” found in that denial only an occasion of withdrawing his kingdom from its spiritual subjection to Rome, and of uniting in the crown the pontifical with the royal authority. Whoever looks beneath the surface of things, whoever studies, in a truly philosophical spirit, that fearful Protestant movement, must recognize in it a superhuman power, and say that either the finger of God, or the hand of the devil is here, and that its chiefs must have been inspired by the Holy Ghost, or driven onward by infuriated demons.