Life of Albert Parsons

of the first chapel built in the realms of the St. Boniface, in the eighth century; his name was Lullus. With this chapel and others that soon followed the poison of Oriental servilism, the gospel of man's degradation, resignation and asceticism was first introduced. The old Cheruskcr and Katten, who had in mortal combat thrust the Roman eagle to the ground were less successful in resisting the mind-infecting poison of pestilential Rome; it came Rowing in incessantly through the channels of the Christian church. It is true, the healthy and robust Germans were not an easy prey to the pessimistic belief of a debauched and dying race (Rome)-they never have been good Christians-but they became sufficiently infected to lose their consciousness and pride of manhood for a while, to fall into the despairing vagaries of the Orient, and as a natural consequence into serfdom. If life had no value, why then aspire to liberty. .? Friend, the ruin of yonder chapel is the monument of an epoch that gave birth to such robberburgs as the one we stand upon. The people would have razed these roosts to the ground long before they did, if the priest had not stood between them and "Law and Order." The priest is an essential indivisible part of the despot and oppressor; he is the conciliatory link between them and their victims....

These two ruins, once sacred as the pedestals of social order, are prophetic monuments. Man will so stand upon the ruins of the present order and will say as you say now-"was it possible. . !"

But now turn around-along this mountain chain, northeast, there, where the earth dips mistily into the horizon, the periphery of our view-<lo you see yonder gray spot, it looks like a small cloud? Yes? That's the Wartburg, you have heard of the Wartburg. It was here, where Dr. Martinus Luther lived and worked, an instrument of the revolutionary forces; the revolutionary forces, my friend, that gradually had developed in these villages.

It is our custom to attribute great movements to single individuals. As being their merit. This is always wrong. and it was so with Luther. The Germanic race could not digest the Byzantinian philosophy, as embodied in the Judaic and Christian teachings. The idea that this world was calculated to be simply a purgatory and our life a martyrdom was repulsive to the common sense of the merry Germans, and what made it still more repulsive to them was; that servitude and despotism were growing from the seed of tile new religion and developing, where once had been the habitation of liberty; developing at such a rate, that patience ceased to be a virtue. The rebellious spirit of the people, their animosity to the doctrine of self-abnegation, imposed upon them by the church, had been successfully calmed and suppressed by the priests for several centuries. But as the iniquities of the "nobility" and the domestic burdens of the people grew unbearable, this spirit burst out in flames, and in Luther found a crystallization point. From the Wartburg then the mighty wave of the reformation rolled forth. It was the Occident struggling