Living in habits of intimacy with princes and cardinals, he never addressed them in adulatory language, but talked and acted like a nobleman of nature, whose inborn and superior greatness could be tested only by the ages. He placed art on the highest pinnacle of the temple of humanity, but dedicated that temple to the God of heaven in whom he believed. His person was not commanding, but intelligence radiated from his features, and his earnest nature commanded respect. In childhood he was feeble, but temperance made him strong. He believed that no bodily decay was incompatible with intellectual improvement. He continued his studies until he died, and felt that he had mastered nothing. He was always dissatisfied with his own productions. Excelsior was his motto, as Alp on Alp arose upon his view. His studies were diversified and vast. He wrote poetry as well as carved stone, his sonnets especially holding a high rank. He was engineer as well as architect, and fortified Florence against her enemies. When old he showed all the fire of youth, and his eye, like that of Moses, never became dim, since his strength and his beauty were of the soul,--ever expanding, ever adoring. His temper was stern, but affectionate.
He had no mercy on a fool or a dunce, and turned in disgust from those who loved trifles and lies. He was guilty of no immoralities like Raphael and Titian, being universally venerated for his stern integrity and allegiance to duty,--as one who believes that there really is a God to whom he is personally responsible. He gave away his riches, like Ambrose and Gregory, valuing money only as a means of usefulness. Sickened with the world, he still labored for the world, and died in 1564, over eighty-nine years of age, in the full assurance of eternal blessedness in heaven.
His marbles may crumble down, in spite of all that we can do to preserve them as models of hopeless imitation; but the exalted ideas he sought to represent by them, are imperishable and divine, and will be subjects of contemplation when "Seas shall waste, the skies to smoke decay, Rocks fall to dust, and mountains melt away."AUTHORITIES.
Grimm's Life of Michael Angelo; Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects; Duppa's Life of Michael Angelo; Bayle's Histoire de la Peinture en Italie.
MARTIN LUTHER.
A. D. 1483-1546.
THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION.
Among great benefactors, Martin Luther is one of the most illustrious. He headed the Protestant Reformation. This movement is so completely inter-linked with the literature, the religion, the education, the prosperity--yea, even the political history--of Europe, that it is the most important and interesting of all modern historical changes. It is a subject of such amazing magnitude that no one can claim to be well informed who does not know its leading issues and developments, as it spread from Germany to Switzerland, France, Holland, Sweden, England, and Scotland.
The central and prominent figure in the movement is Luther; but the way was prepared for him by a host of illustrious men, in different countries,--by Savonarola in Italy, by Huss and Jerome in Bohemia, by Erasmus in Holland, by Wyclif in England, and by sundry others, who detested the corruptions they ridiculed and lamented, but could not remove.
How flagrant those evils! Who can deny them? The papal despotism, and the frauds on which it was based; monastic corruptions;penance, and indulgences for sin, and the sale of them, more shameful still; the secular character of the clergy; the pomp, wealth, and arrogance of bishops; auricular confession; celibacy of the clergy, their idle and dissolute lives, their ignorance and superstition; the worship of the images of saints, and masses for the dead; the gorgeous ritualism of the mass; the substitution of legends for the Scriptures, which were not translated, or read by the people; pilgrimages, processions, idle pomps, and the multiplication of holy days; above all, the grinding spiritual despotism exercised by priests, with their inquisitions and excommunications, all centring in the terrible usurpation of the popes, keeping the human mind in bondage, and suppressing all intellectual independence,--these evils prevailed everywhere. Isay nothing here of the massacres, the poisonings, the assassinations, the evil doings of various kinds of which history accuses many of the pontiff's who sat on papal thrones. Such evils did not stare the German and English in the face, as they did the Italians in the fifteenth century. In Germany the vices were mediaeval and monkish, not the unblushing infidelity and levities of the Renaissance, which made a radical reformation in Italy impossible. In Germany and England there was left among the people the power of conscience, a rough earnestness of character, the sense of moral accountability, and a fear of divine judgment.