any crowd of bystanders he would have been first to go to the rescue
where need was, and quickest to see the need not obvious to all. The
aloofness of the mere observer was not his; he was too completely one
with all he saw to stand apart and let it go its way alone. Fearful and
distrustful of himself he long was, but his timidity was only the
natural shrinking before new and untried duties of a soul that saw more
clearly and felt more keenly than most. The imperative demands
inevitably made upon him by every situation led him instinctively to
dread putting himself where he could not help responding to the call of
unfamiliar tasks; but once there, the summons was irresistible, and he
threw himself into the new responsibilities with a forgetfulness of self
possible only to him who has denied its claims, and with a fearlessness
possible only to him who has conquered fear. He might interpret his
confidence as trust in God, won by the path of a complete contempt of
his own powers; but however understood, it gave him an independence and
a disregard of consequences which made his conscience and his vision
effective for reform."

McGiffert suggests a comparison of Luther with, let us say, Erasmus. Had
he been a humanist, he would have laughed the whole thing [Tetzel's
selling of indulgences] to scorn as an exploded superstition beneath the
contempt of an intelligent man; had he been a scholastic theologian, he
would have sat in his study and drawn fine distinctions to justify the
traffic without bothering himself about its influence upon the lives of
the vulgar populace. But he was neither humanist nor schoolman. He had a
conscience which made indifference impossible, and a simplicity and
directness of vision which compelled him to brush aside all equivocation
and go straight to the heart of things. With it all he was at once a
devout and believing son of the Church, and a practical preacher
profoundly concerned for the spiritual and moral welfare of the common