We may not limit Providence. The work was to be done. Every interest
of the world and of the kingdom of God demanded it. And if there had
been no Luther at hand, some one else would have been raised up to
serve in his place. But there _was_ a Luther, and, as far as human
insight can determine, he was the only man on earth competent to
achieve the Reformation. And he it was who did achieve it.
Looked at in advance, perhaps no one would have thought of him for
such an office. He was so humbly born, so lowly in station, so
destitute of fortune, and withal so honest a Papist, that not the
slightest tokens presented to mark him out as the chosen instrument to
grapple with the magnitudinous tyranny by which Europe was enthralled.
But "God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the
things that are mighty." Moses was the son of a slave. The founder of
the Hebrew monarchy was a shepherd-boy. The Redeemer-King of the world
was born in a stable and reared in the family of a village carpenter.
And we need not wonder that the hero-prophet of the modern ages was
the son of a poor toiler for his daily bread, and compelled to sing
upon the street for alms to keep body and soul together while
struggling for an education.
It has been the common order of Providence that the greatest lights
and benefactors of the race, the men who rose the highest above the
level of their kind and stood as beacons to the world, were not such
as would have been thought of in advance for the mighty services which
render their names immortal. And that the master spirit of the great
Reformation was no exception all the more surely identifies that
marvelous achievement as the work of an overruling God.