advice than that of Gamaliel: "If this council or this work be of men, it will come to naught; but if it be of God ye cannot overthrow it." He added, "If my work be not of God, it can endure only two or three years; but if it be of God, it cannot be overthrown." And when the elector inquired whether something could not be effected as to the recantation of certain articles, Luther answered, "Yes, gracious sir, provided they are not those which were condemned at Constance." " Those," said the elector, "are the very articles I intend." As to these," said Luther, "I cannot move, happen what may."*

At length the desired discharge from Worms was granted to him. The official of the electorate of Treves and the emperor's private secretary explained to him that, as he had refused to yield himself to the unity of the church, notwithstanding many admonitions, their majesties must henceforth regard their character as defenders of the catholic faith; they therefore commanded him to betake himself to some place of safety, under safe conduct, within twenty-one days, and meanwhile not to disturb the people by preaching or writing. Luther answered, "As it seemed good unto the Lord so hath it happened: blessed be the name of the Lord." He farther gave hearty thanks to the emperor, electors, and princes of the empire, in the most humble and submissive terms, for the audience he had enjoyed, and for the safe conduct which had been accorded to him and was now continued. For he said he had sought nothing save that the Reformation, according to holy Scripture, for which he had been instant in prayer, should be set on foot and completed. In all things else, he was ready to do and suffer any thing for their majesties and the empire; life and death, honor and disgrace, and to count all these nothing, if only he might freely declare the word of God. And finally he solemnly and respectfully recognised his entire subjection to the emperor and the realm.†

In this manner Luther left Worms on the 26th of April, taking leave of his friends after an early meal. From Friedberg, where he arrived on the 28th, he sent back the herald who had accompanied him, being now in the Hessian territory; and gave him two letters, of which one was to the emperor, and the other to the states of the empire. In these, after a relation of all that had occurred at Worms, he laments that his doctrine had not been examined by means of the Scriptures, and renders courteous thanks for the salvum conductum. He concludes his letter to the emperor with these words: "These things I pray most submissively, not in my own name merely, for I am of no account, but in the name of the whole church; which has also moved me to send back this letter. For with all my heart I desire that your imperial majesty, the whole empire, and the illustrious German nation may be prosperously directed, and kept happy in the grace of God. Nor have I hitherto sought any thing but God's glory and the common salvation of all, not consulting my own profit; whether my adversaries condemned me or not. For if my Lord prayed for his enemies when he was upon the cross, how much rather ought I, with joy and trust in Christ, to be solicitous, to pray and to supplicate for

your majesty, for the whole empire, and for my dear progenitors and the whole German nation, for whom I entertain every good hope, confiding in the foregoing representation."*

At his departure from Worms he was strictly commanded to forbear preaching; but he by no means consented to this condition, reserving to himself that God's word should not be bound, and that he should be free to profess and declare it. He therefore preached at Kirschfeld; where the abbot, who was a Benedictine, and one of the princes of the empire, received him with extraordinary honor, and even constrained him to preach, although Luther reminded him that he might thereby lose his abbacy. At Eisenach also he delivered a discourse. As he now turned aside from his course in order to visit certain friends near Salzungen, he was suddenly seized by a number of horsemen in disguise, taken out of his wagon, set on a horse, and after a circuit of some hours, in the forest, brought about eleven o'clock at night to the castle of Wartburg, near Eisenach. It was here that the ancient landgraves of Thuringia had their residence. Luther soon found that his captors were kind foes, acting agreeably to a plan of the elector, and with the privity of John of Berlepsch, governor at Wartburg, and Burkhard Hund, lord of Altenstein and Waltershausen.

The emperor being a young Spaniard, rather than a German, perpetually surrounded by foreigners, and practised upon by the popish legates, had sent a schedule to the diet, immediately upon Luther's audience, of the following import: "Inasmuch as Luther will not retract, the emperor, following the example of his predecessors, must defend the ancient faith, and the see of Rome, and pronounce a ban upon Luther and his adherents, nevertheless securing their safe conduct."†

As the young and impetuous prince, however, acted in this matter contrary to all the precedents of the diet, and without previously collecting the suffrages of the princes, it was deemed proper to take the business into consideration. Yet this sufficiently evinced the mind of the emperor and of his advisers, and what might be expected

to ensue.

The elector of Saxony, on account of indisposition, had left Worms, and a number of other princes had also departed. The emperor passed immediately into Spain, where war and insurrection required his presence. On the 26th of May this imperial edict was published, bearing the appearance much more of a papal bull than a decree of the empire. By virtue of this, Luther (and his adherents were included) was declared to be an open heretic, under ban and outlawry; his books were prohibited, and all who should protect him were subjected to the same penalty. All his crimes are rehearsed, and his books and their theological contents reviewed. Among other things it is said that Luther's doctrine is contrary to the doctrine of the seven sacraments, of holy matrimony, the holy eucharist, confession, priestly orders, the see of Rome, the mass, fasting and prayer, the fathers and councils.

We have, of course, preferred the original Latin letter, De Wette, vol. i, ep. 312, date Ap. 28, 1521.

+ Seckendorf, p. 355.

Sleidan, p. 170; Robertson, ii, p. 250.

Moreover, he had written nothing but what tended to uproar, discord, war, murder, robbery, conflagration, and the total downfall of the Christian faith. For he inculcated a licentious, self-willed life, loosed from all law, utterly brutish,-showing himself to be a licentious, self-willed, and brutish man, who condemned and trampled on all laws, as he had been neither ashamed nor afraid to denounce decrees and spiritual enactments. "And, in fine, to omit the remainder of Luther's innumerable wickednesses, he has, not like a man, but rather the evil spirit himself, in man's form and with the assumption of a monkish cowl, gathered together sundry gross, longhidden, and condemned heresies of many heretics, into one stinking pool, and added to these others of his own invention; and all this under pretext of preaching that faith which he uses his utmost labor to impair, and under the name and guise of evangelical doctrine to overturn and suppress all evangelical peace, love, and good order." It was also said that the powers now convened at Worms had agitated the subject with the greatest care, and with the clearest determination had concurred in this decision.* But in reality the diet had been already dissolved with all formality before this edict saw the light. The subsequent meetings of those who adhered to it were held not in the council-hall, but in the emperor's private chamber. They moreover appended to the edict the date of May 8, to cause a belief that the assembled electors, princes, and states of the empire had taken part in it. That this could never have been the case, is plain enough from the nature of the transaction, and still more from the unfavorable reception which the edict met almost throughout all Germany, even before the ink with which it was written was dry, as the Cardinal Julius de Medici, afterward Pope Clement VII., expressed himself. Sleidan says explicitly that it was the work of a few. The contents and temper of the instrument may be judged by any one who is informed that it was drafted by Aleander. He had here expressed and made public, as if officially, all the venom which had been boiling in his breast. For what though a league of more than four hundred nobles (as Pallavicini relates) was formed for Luther, or that the troops of Francis of Sickingen were in readiness, or that Hartmuth of Kronenberg, one of the most accomplished cavaliers of the age, had in utter disgust renounced his service to the emperor, which had brought him in two hundred ducats; still, as this imperial-papal edict exactly reached the end of setting the German princes with their people at variance among themselves, it accomplished precisely what Aleander had intended and declared: "Even though you Germans choose to cast off the Roman yoke, we shall nevertheless effect such a havoc in Germany by this edict, that you will tear one another to pieces, and be strangled in your own blood."§ It was not, as Frederick Schlegel says, Luther's appearance at the diet, but

* Luth. Op. XV, 2264.

+ Sleidan, p. 163.

Sarpi Hist. du Conc. de Trente. ed. le Courayer. I, 35.

§ Seckend., Lat., I, p. 158. Eia, si nihil adeo præclare his Comitiis effecimus, tamen certum est, nos magnum hoc edicto in Germania lanienam concitare, qua Alemanni, ipsi in viscera sua sævientes propediem in proprio sanguine suffocabuntur. Scult. Annal. I, p. 75.

# Vorlesungen u. d. neuere Geschichte.

the manner in which he was treated, that gave the first occasion for the dissolution of the German empire, and the disruption of the German people, which of necessity took place afterward. At this diet there was seen no vestige of ancient German freedom, and of the laudable institution which made such diets truly national councils; for in order that it might not consist of mere secular lords and stupid dunces, there sat in the princes' council archbishops, bishops, and abbots.* But it was their duty to consult for the wellbeing of church and state in the German empire, and seriously and intelligently to discuss religious affairs. Even if this was not the proper time for disputation, yet both time and place were in the highest degree proper for considering the spiritual and eternal welfare of the German states, connected as for centuries this had been with their external prosperity. From the tenor of the imperial writs it had been expected that these religious affairs would constitute a leading topic of the discussions; for the words of the emperor imported that the diet was convened almost solely for this end. But now at length this edict was fabricated at the very close, as something supplementary; it was done in darkness, in a partial manner, and by few persons, and was then promulgated as the decision of the diet. "What grief has been experienced," says Ulrich von Hutten in a frank epistle to the noble Counsellor Pirkheimer, of Nuremberg, "by every German heart, at the wretched issue of this diet. His refusal to retract is enough, it seems, to subject this man of God to extreme condemnation. Blessed God! where will these things end? I truly believe that it will now be made apparent, whether Germany is governed by princes, or by well dressed stocks. For the ecclesiastics determine nothing in Luther's case but superlative wickedness and villany. Over Luther's last letter to me, I could do nothing but weep, when I read how unjustly he had been treated. Among other things, this was one, that he received his discharge under a command not to preach the word of God on his way home. O abominable outrage! O crime demanding the remediless wrath of God! thus to trammel God's word, and to stop the mouth of an evangelical teacher. Look to this, ye Christian princes! What will foreign countries say of this? I blush for the land of my fathers."t

"What a

In the preface to the Exposition of the 37th Psalm, Luther himself speaks thus concerning the transactions at Worms. mockery have they introduced! I had hoped that the doctors and bishops there present would have given me a righteous examination; instead of this, the sole judgment was that I must v recant. Through God's grace, this proposal was not agreed to by all the princes and nobles, or I should have been mortally ashamed of Germany, that she should have yielded herself to be thus befooled by the popish tyranny." He also wrote to Master Lucas Kranach, the artist, then at Wittemberg: "I supposed that his imperial majesty would have convened some fifty doctors, and have clearly refuted the monk. Instead of this, the whole transaction was no more than this, Are the books thine ?—Yes.-Wilt thou

Beside the emperor and the Archduke Ferdinand, there were six electors, who were also prelates, twenty-four dukes, eight margraves, thirty bishops, &c. + Luth. Works, XV, p. 2322.

in war.

recant or not?—No.-Away with thee. Alas for us blind Germans !"* And farther to Spalatin: "It is no wonder that Charles is involved The unhappy young man, who at Worms, at the instigation of evil counsellors, openly rejected the truth, will never more have prosperity, and will receive his punishment in the wickedness of foreigners; he will also involve Germany in his disaster, since she concurred in his ungodliness. But the Lord knoweth them that are his."

From the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine.

OLD METHODISM.

"Thus saith the Lord, Stand in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein; and ye shall find rest to your souls."

A LIVING divine, of great celebrity, has described Methodism as "Christianity in earnest;" a description which public opinion proves to be no less just than laudatory. Whenever any man, in any country, professes to feel the constraining power of divine love, and under its influence zealously devotes himself to the service of God, and the salvation of his fellow-creatures, he is forthwith styled a "Methodist." This general and instinctive proneness to identify whatever savours of experimental religion, or is singularly holy and benevolent in human conduct, with our connectional name, is highly honourable to the morality and piety of our people and our heart's desire is, that we may more fully deserve the distinction, whether it be awarded in the spirit of eulogy or of scorn.

Religion is the life of God in the soul: The change which it effects in its subjects is fitly represented as a "regeneration;" by which "all things are made new;" as a "passing from death unto life," and from a state of "bondage" into "glorious liberty." Being quickened by the Spirit of life, and stimulated by the lofty motives of the gospel, those who experience this change are led to deny themselves of all "ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world." They "lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset" them; and they "run with patience the race which is set before" them, "looking unto Jesus."

Among other branches of holy and self-denying conduct, in which the fathers of our Connection sedulously followed their divine Exemplar, was that of RISING EARLY TO ENGAGE IN DEVOTIONAL EXERCISES. The venerable Wesley regularly rose at four o'clock; and, with his zealous coadjutors in the work of the ministry, he ordinarily preached at five. In his Treatise on Christian Perfection, after enumerating various instances of enthusiasm, he says, "Others thought they had not so much need of hearing, and so grew slack in attending the morning preaching. O take warning, you who are con cerned herein! You have listened to the voice of a stranger. Fly back to Christ, and keep in the good old way, which was once delivered to the saints;' the way that even a heathen bore testimony of: 'That the Christians rose early every day to sing hymns to Christ as

* Luth, Works, XV, p. 2173.