great cause of truth and regenerate religion spread with electric
speed. The marble tomb of ignorance and error gave way, as it were, of
a sudden; a thousand glorious events and magnificent discoveries
thronged upon each other with pressing haste to behold and
congratulate the mighty birth, the new creation, of which they were
the harbingers, when, with a steady and triumphant step, the peerless
form of human intellect rose erect, and, throwing off from its
freshening limbs the death-shade and the grave-clothes by which it was
enshrouded, ascended to the glorious resurrection of that noontide
lustre which irradiates the horizon of our own day, rejoicing like a
giant to run his race."--John Mason Good's _Book of Nature_, p. 321.


LUTHER'S CONDEMNATION.

After Luther and his friends left Worms the emperor issued an edict
putting him and all his adherents under the ban of the empire,
forbidding any one to give him food or shelter, calling on all who
found him to arrest him, commanding all his books to be burned, and
ordering the seizure of his friends and the confiscation of their
possessions.

It was what Germany got for putting an Austro-Spanish bigot on the
Imperial throne.


LUTHER IN THE WARTBURG.

But the cause of Rome was not helped by it. Luther's person was made
safe by the Elector, who arranged a friendly capture by which he was