of need of Church reform, though his plans took the grotesque form of
getting himself made Pope, and taking all into his own hands.

Perhaps it was unwise to have ever so faintly sketched Ebbo's career
through the ensuing troubles; but the history of the star and of the
spark in the stubble seemed to need completion; and the working out
of the character of the survivor was unfinished till his course had
been thought over from the dawn of the Wittenberg teaching, which
must have seemed no novelty to an heir of the doctrine of Tauler, and
of the veritably Catholic divines of old times. The idea is of the
supposed course of a thoughtful, refined, conscientious man through
the earlier times of the Reformation, glad of the hope of cleansing
the Church, but hoping to cleanse, not to break away from her--a hope
that Luther himself long cherished, and which was not entirely
frustrated till the re-assembly at Trent in the next generation.
Justice has never been done to the men who feared to loose their hold
on the Church Catholic as the one body to which the promises were
made. Their loyalty has been treated as blindness, timidity, or
superstition; but that there were many such persons, and those among
the very highest minds of their time, no one can have any doubt after
reading such lives as those of Friedrich the Wise of Saxony, of
Erasmus, of Vittoria Colonna, or of Cardinal Giustiniani.

April 9, 1836.



CHAPTER I: MASTER GOTTFRIED'S WORKSHOP