Professor Francke's Lecture.

Asst. Professor Francke delivered, yesterday afternoon, the third of the series of introductory lectures on German literature. His subject was "Luther as a Writer." The history of the German people in the sixteenth century, said Professor Francke, was wonderfully strange and sad. At the beginning of the century Germany stood at the head of the movement for truth and light; at the end, the Catholic church was there, in the very home of Protestantism, slowly and surely gaining ground. The chief reason for this was that the question of reforming the church was becoming political. When Luther left the Diet of Worms the heart of the people went with him. Princes, cities, and peasantry all took up the new teaching. But there was no united national feeling, and the struggles of first one class and then another for freedom ended in nothing. All the sadder was this sixteenth century because even the great man who had called the struggle of faith against dogma into being was himself led away by the strong force of circumstances from the ideas of his early manhood, and brought to sacrifice freedom to authority.

Luther's first great blow at Rome was the Theses, written in 1517 against the Indulgences. "No one can step between me and my conscience," said Luther. "Only by regeneration of myself can I come to salvation. The Theses were followed in 1520 by the Address on the Improving of Christian Society, In this pamphlet Luther attacked the whole body of canonic law, and preached, as he knew well, nothing less than a complete revolution in the church and in society. Two more pamphlets published in the same year entitled "The Babylonian Captivity," and "The Liberty of the Christian Man" gave proof of Luther's wonderful productivity. In these three works of 1520 were set forth what is truly vital and permanent in Luther's doctrine. But the people of Germany were not ready for the new teaching, and Luther himself seeing the confusion he had wrought among them, and terrified at the consequences of the doctrine of the Anabaptists and others, who claimed like himself to have cast aside all authority and to teach from divine inspiration, began to doubt his own position. The agony of his soul's struggle we can but faintly understand. At the end of it he was no longer the champion of reason and religious individualism but their greatest defamer. It was in this spirit that he urged the persecution of the peasants, and disputed with Zivingli at Marburg concerning the Eucharist. There was something naively terrible in the vehemence with which he devoted himself to contending with his old followers.

One year he took from these controversies and gave to his translation of the Bible, marvelous as a piece of literary and artistic work, the parent of modern literature.