writers now say of the following passage, which occurs with reference to Melancthon, whom Luther boasts that he raised miraculously from the dead? “Melancthon,” says Sir William Hamilton, to whose essay I am indebted for the extracts here given, “had fallen ill at Weimar from contrition and fear for the part he had been led to take in the Landgrave’s polygamy: his life was even in danger.” “Then and there,” said Luther, “I made our Lord God to smart for it. For I threw down the sack before the door, and rubbed his ears with all his promises of hearing prayer, which I knew how to recapitulate from Holy Writ, so that he could not but hearken to me, should I ever again place any reliance on his promises.” Martin Luther, with his absolute denial of free-will, and with his double code of morality for princes and peasants—easy for one and harsh for the other—may be fairly left now with those who desire to vaunt his orthodoxy; here his name is used to illustrate the popular impetus given to nonconformity by his quarrel with the papal authorities. Luther protested against the Romish Church, but established by the very fact the right for some more advanced man than Doctor Martin Luther to protest in turn against the Lutheran Church. The only consistent church in Christendom is the Romish Church, for it claims the right to think for all its followers. The whole of the Protestant Churches are inconsistent, for they claim the right to think and judge against Rome, but deny extremer Nonconformists the right to think and judge against themselves. Goethe, says Froude, declares that Luther threw back the intellectual progress of mankind by using the passions of the multitude to decide subjects which should have been left to the learned. But at least some of the multitude once having their ears fairly opened, listened to more than the appeal to their passions, and examined for themselves propositions which otherwise they would have accepted or rejected from habit and without inquiry. Martin Luther’s public discussions with pen and tongue, in Wittemberg, Augsburg, and Lichtenburg, and the protest he encouraged against Rome, were the commencement of a vigorous controversy, in which the public (who heard for the first time sharp controversial sermons preached publicly in the various pulpits by Lutheran preachers on free-will and necessity, election and predestination, etc.) began to take real part and interest which is still going on, and will in fact never end until the unholy alliance of Church and State is everywhere annulled, and each religion is left to sustain itself by its own truth, or to fall from its own weakness, no man being molested under the law on account of his opinions on religious matters. While Luther undoubtedly gave an impetus to the growth of Rationalism by his own appeal to reason and his reliance on reason for himself, it is not true that he contended for the right of general freedom of inquiry, nor would he have left unlimited the