Catholic writers have found so much to censure in the character and
writings of Luther that one is amazed, after reading them, how Luther
ever could become regarded as a great and good man. Criminal blindness
must have held the eyes, not only of Luther's associates, but of his
entire age, yea, of men for centuries after, if they failed to see
Luther's constitutional baseness. Quite recently a Catholic writer has
told the world in one chapter of his book that "the apostate monk of
Wittenberg" was possessed of "a violent, despotic, and uncontrolled
nature," that he was "depraved in manners and in speech." He speaks of
Luther's "ungovernable transports, riotous proceedings, angry conflicts,
and intemperate controversies," of Luther's "contempt of all the
accepted forms of human right and all authority, human and divine," of
"his unscrupulous mendacity," "his perverse principles," "his wild
pronouncements." He calls Luther "a lawless one," "one of the most
intolerant of men," "a revolutionist, not a reformer." He says that
Luther "attempted reformation and ended in deformation." He charges
Luther with having written and preached "not for, but against good
works," with having assumed rights to himself in the matter of liberty
of conscience which "he unhesitatingly and imperiously denied to all who
differed from him," with having "rent asunder the unity of the Church,"
with having "disgraced the Church by a notoriously wicked and scandalous
life," with having "declared it to be the right of every man to
interpret the Bible to his own individual conception," with "one day
proclaiming the binding force of the Ten Commandments and the next
declaring they were not obligatory on Christian observance," with having
"reviled and hated and cursed the Church of his fathers."

These opprobrious remarks are only a part of the vileness of which the
writer has delivered himself in his first chapter. His whole book
bristles with assertions of Luther's inveterate badness. This coarse and