Wittemberg is as full now of people of various languages as the tower of
Babel must have been after the confusion of tongues. But never was this
more manifest than to-day.
Flemish monks from the Augustine cloisters at Antwerp; Dutch students
from Finland; Swiss youths, with their erect forms and free mountain
gait; knights from Prussia and Lithuania; strangers even from quite
foreign lands,--all attracted hither by Dr. Luther's living words of
truth, passed under our windows about nine o'clock this morning, in the
direction of the Elster gate, eagerly gesticulating and talking as they
went. Then Thekla, Atlantis, and I mounted to an upper room, and watched
the smoke rising from the pile, until the glare of the conflagration
burst through it, and stained with a faint red the pure daylight.
Soon afterwards the crowds began to return: but there seemed to me to be
a gravity and solemnity in the manner of most, different from the eager
haste with which they had gone forth.
"They seem like men returning from some great Church festival," I said.
"Or from lighting a signal-fire on the mountains, which shall awaken the
whole land to freedom," said Christopher, as they rejoined us.
"Or from binding themselves with a solemn oath to liberate their homes,
like the Three Men at Gruetly," said Conrad Winkelried, the young Swiss
to whom Atlantis is betrothed.
"Yes," said Gottfried, "fires which may be the beacons of a world's
deliverance, and may kindle the death-piles of those who dared to light
them, are no mere students' bravado."
"Who did the deed, and what was burned?" I asked.
"One of the masters of arts lighted the pile," my husband replied, "and
then threw on it the Decretals, the false Epistles of St. Clement, and
other forgeries, which have propped up the edifice of lies for
centuries. And when the flames which consumed them had done their work
and died away, Dr. Luther himself, stepping forward, solemnly laid the
Pope's bull of excommunication on the fire, saying amidst the breathless
silence, 'As thou hast troubled the Lord's saints, may the eternal fire
destroy thee.' Not a word broke the silence until the last crackle and
gleam of those symbolical flames had ceased, and then gravely but
joyfully we all returned to our homes."
"Children," said our grandmother, "you have done well; yet you are not
the first that have defied Rome."
"Nor perhaps the last she will silence," said my husband. "But the last
enemy will be destroyed at last; and meantime every martyr is a victor."