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contemporaries felt as serious and vehement eloquence, and an elevated tone of moral feeling: and Luther, not less than Rousseau, was actuated by an almost superstitious hatred of superstition, and a turbulent prejudice against prejudices. In the relation too which their writings severally bore to those of Erasmus and Voltaire, and the way in which the latter co-operated with them to the same general end, each finding its own class of admirers and proselytes, the parallel is complete.

I cannot, however, rest here. Spite of the apparent incongruities, I am disposed to plead for a resemblance in the men themselves, for that similarity in their radical natures, which I abandoned all pretence and desire of shewing in the instances of Voltaire and Erasmus. But then my readers must think of Luther not as he really was, but as he might have been, if he had been born in the age and under the circumstances of the Swiss philosopher. For this purpose I must strip him of many advantages which he derived from his own times, and must contemplate him in his natural weaknesses as well as in his original strength. Each referred all things to his own ideal. The ideal was indeed widely different in the one and in the other and this was not the least of Luther's many advantages, or, to use a favourite phrase of his own, not one of his least favours of preventing grace. Happily for him he had derived his standard from a common measure already received by the

good and wise; I mean the inspired writings, the study of which Erasmus had previously restored among the learned. To know that we are in sympathy with others, moderates our feelings as well as strengthens our convictions: and for the mind, which opposes itself to the faith of the multitude, it is more especially desirable, that there should exist an object out of itself, on which it may fix its attention, and thus balance its own energies.

Rousseau, on the contrary, in the inauspicious spirit of his age and birth-place,* had slipped the cable of his faith, and steered by the compass of unaided reason, ignorant of the hidden currents that were bearing him out of his course, and too proud to consult the faithful charts prized and held sacred by his forefathers. But the strange influences of his bodily temperament on his understanding; his constitutional melancholy pampered into a morbid excess by solitude; his wild dreams of suspicion; his hypochondriacal fancies of hosts of conspirators all leagued against him and his cause, and headed by some arch-enemy, to whose machinations he attributed every trifling mishap

*

Infidelity was so common in Geneva about that time, that Voltaire in one of his letters exults, that in this, Calvin's own city, some half dozen only of the most ignorant believed in Christianity under any form. This was, no doubt, one of Voltaire's usual lies of exaggeration: it is not however to be denied, that here, and throughout Switzerland, he and the dark master in whose service he employed himself, had ample grounds of triumph.

all as much the creatures of his imagination, as if instead of men he had conceived them to be infernal spirits and beings preternatural—these, or at least the predisposition to them, existed in the ground-work of his nature: they were parts of Rousseau himself. And what corresponding in kind to these, not to speak of degree, can we detect in the character of his supposed parallel? This difficulty will suggest itself at the first thought, to those who derive all their knowledge of Luther from the meagre biography met with in the Lives of eminent Reformers, or even from the ecclesiastical histories of Mosheim or Milner: for a life of Luther, in extent and style of execution proportioned to the grandeur and interest of the subject, a life of the man Luther, as well as of Luther the theologian, is still a desideratum in English literature, though perhaps there is no subject for which so many unused materials are extant, both printed and in manuscript.*

The affectionate respect in which I hold the name of Dr. Jortin-one of the many illustrious nurslings of the college to which I deem it no small honour to have belonged-Jesus, Cambridge-renders it painful to me to assert, that the above remark holds almost equally true of a life of Erasmus. But every scholar well read in the writings of Erasmus and his illustrious contemporaries, must have discovered, that Jortin had neither collected sufficient, nor the best, materials for his work and-perhaps from that very cause-he grew weary of his task, before he had made a full use of the scanty materials which he had collected.

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ESSAY II.

Is it, I ask, most important to the best interests of mankind, temporal as well as spiritual, that certain works, the names and number of which are fixed and unalterable, should be distinguished from all other works, not in degree only but even in kind?* And that these, collectively, should form the Book, to which in all the concerns of faith and morality the last recourse is to be had, and from the admitted decisions of which no man dare appeal?—If the mere existence of a book so called and charactered be, as the Koran itself suffices to evince, a mighty bond of union, among nations whom all other causes tend to separate; if moreover the book revered by us and our forefathers has been the fosternurse of learning in the darkest, and of civilization in the

*This is one of the hinges on which the gate of egress from the spiritual Rome turns. Historically, the affirmative to the question has been the constant and close companion of Protestantism :-but whether it be likewise its indispensable support, remains yet to be discussed, at the tribunal of sound philosophy. Hitherto both the aye and the no have been, as it appears to me, but very weakly and superficially argued. But I confess that Chillingworth makes me half a Roman Catholic on this point; lest in acceding to the grounds of his arguments against the Romanists, I should become less than half a Christian, and lose the substantive in my earnestness to tear off its parasitical and suffocating epithet:—that is, cease to be a Catholic in aversion to the Papal bull of Roman Catholic. 1830.

rudest, times; and lastly, if this so vast and wide a blessing is not to be founded in a delusion, and doomed therefore to the impermanence and scorn in which sooner or later all delusions must end; how, I pray you, is it conceivable that this should be brought about and secured, otherwise than by God's special vouchsafement to this one book, exclusively, of that divine mean, that uniform and perfect middle way, which in all points is at safe and equal distance from all errors whether of excess or defect? But again, if this be true-and what Protestant Christian worthy of his baptismal dedication will deny its truth ?-if in the one book we are entitled, or even permitted, to expect the golden mean throughout;—surely we ought not to be hard and over-stern in our censures of the mistakes and infirmities of those, who pretending to no warrant of extraordinary inspiration have yet been raised 'up by God's providence to be of highest power and eminence in the reformation of his Church. Far rather does it behove us to consider, in how many instances the peccant humour native to the man had been wrought upon by the faithful study of that only faultless model, and corrected into an unsinning, or at least a venial, predominance in the writer or preacher. Yea, that not seldom the infirmity of a zealous soldier in the warfare of Christ has been made the very mould and ground-work of that man's peculiar gifts and virtues. Grateful too we should be, that the very faults of famous men have been fitted to the age, on which they were to act: and that thus the folly of man has proved the wisdom of God, and been made the instrument of his mercy to mankind.

WHOEVER has sojourned in Eisenach, will assuredly have visited the Warteburg, interesting by so many historical associations, which stands on a high rock, about two miles to the south from the city gate. To this castle Luther was taken on his return from

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