others of the gentler way, for the very illumination of his soul showed him the Mary-world of living nature, all-pervading, ever near, and ever helpful. Luther, who knew himself only and not men, set postulated heroism in place of actual weakness. For him life was desperate battle against the Devil, and that battle he called upon everyone to fight. And everyone who fought it fought alone.
The Reformation abolished the whole bright and consoling side of the Gothic myth — the cult of Mary, the veneration of the saints, the relics, the pilgrimages, the mass. But the myth of devildom and witchcraft remained, for it was the embodiment and cause of the inner torture, and now that torture at last rose to its supreme horror.[1] Baptism was, for Luther at least, an exorcism, the veritable sacrament of devil-banning. There grew up a large, purely Protestant literature about the Devil.[2] Out of the Gothic wealth of colour, there remained black; of its arts, music, in particular organ-music. But in the place of the mythic light-world, whose helpful nearness the faith of the common people could not, after all, forgo, there rose again out of long-buried depths an element of ancient German myth. It came so stealthily that even to-day its true significance is not yet realized. The expressions "folk-tale" and "popular custom" are inadequate: it is a true Myth that inheres in the firm belief in dwarfs, bogies, nixies, house-sprites, and sweeping clouds of the disembodied, and a true Cult that is seen in the rites, offerings, and conjurings that are still practised with a pious awe. In Germany, at any rate, the Saga took the place, unperceived, of the Mary-myth: Mary was now called Frau Holde, and where once the saints had stood, appeared the faithful Eckart. In the English people what arose was something that has long been designated "Bible-fetishism."
What Luther lacked — and it is an eternal fatality for Germany — was the eye for facts and the power of practical organization. He did not bring his doctrines to a clear system, nor did he lead the great movement and choose its aim. The one and the other were the work of his great successor Calvin. While the Lutheran movement advanced leaderless in central Europe, he viewed his rule in Geneva as the starting-point of a systematic subjection of the world under a Protestantism unfalteringly thought out to its logical conclusion. Therefore he, and he alone, became a world-power; therefore it was the decisive struggle between the spirit of Calvin and the spirit of Loyola that dominated, from the Spanish Armada on, the world-politics of the Baroque
- ↑ See, for instance, H. T. Buckle, Hist. Civilization in England, Vol. III, ch. iv, for the Scottish outlook, which at times attributed all this horror, not even to an anti-God, but to God himself. "Consider, who is the contriver of these torments. There have been some very exquisite torments contrived by the wit of men ... but all these fall as far short of the torments ye are to endure as the wisdom of man falls short of that of God. ... Infinite wisdom has contrived that evil" (The Great Concern of Salvation, by T. Halyburton, 1722). — Tr.
- ↑ M Osborn, Die Teufelsliteratur des 16. Jahrh. (1893).
