Europe, based upon Christianity. The resultant antipathy was
further heightened by the extremely violent polemical treatise
written by Luther against Henry VIII, the founder of the English
national church.

Anglicans and Roman Catholics have viewed Luther as
an extreme revolutionary. Nineteenth-century liberalism in
Germany, and also on occasion in France, hailed him as a
liberator, freeing the world from the domination of priesthood
and dark medieval superstition; but this, too, as first France
and later Germany discovered, was a misconception. To the
forward-looking liberal, now estranged from Christian dogma,
Luther's Reformation was soon to appear simply as a half-
measure; it even preached the old dogma and was far removed
from that view of the world, secular and freed from religious
'prejudices', which the enlightenment of the eighteenth
century, as first conceived in England, was to project to the
world. Of political freedom of speech, in the sense of liberalism,
Luther had not the remotest conception. On the contrary: the
greatest reproach which the liberals of Western Europe level
against Luther is that, in his sermon 'Of the grace of God', he
persuaded the Germans to maintain an attitude of pious obedience
vis-à-vis the authorities, causing them to become servile lackeys
of the princely class and quite devoid of any sense of freedom.
It was, indeed, the very memory of Luther which, in the period
of nationalism, served to sharpen yet further the contrasts
between Germany and Western Europe.

Given these circumstances, does it not seem a hazardous
undertaking, to offer to the English-speaking world a biography
of Luther, written by a German historian of Lutheran persuasion?

The task would be, perhaps, a hopeless one, had not present-
day research on Luther advanced beyond the level it occupied
in the nineteenth century and had not the terrible first half of
the twentieth brought about considerable change in the spiritual
climate of Europe. An attempt has been made in the last

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