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The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine

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Excerpt: ...to Luther! Eternal honour to the blessed man to whom we owe the salvation of our most precious possessions, and whose benefactions we still enjoy. It ill becomes us to complain of the narrowness of his views. The dwarf, standing on the shoulders of the giant, particularly if he puts on spectacles, can, it is true, see farther than the giant himself; but for noble thoughts and exalted sentiments a giant heart is necessary. It were still more unseemly of us to pass a harsh judgment on his faults, for those very faults have benefited us more than the virtues of thousands of other men. The refinement of Erasmus, the mildness of Melanchthon, could never have brought us so far as the godlike brutality of Brother Martin. .From the day on which Luther denied the authority of the Pope, and publicly declared in the Diet "that his teachings must be controverted through the words of the Bible itself, or with sensible reasons," there begins a new era in Germany. The fetters with which Saint Boniface had chained the German Church to Rome are broken. This Church, which has hitherto formed an integral part of the great hierarchy, now splits into religious democracies. The character of the religion itself is essentially changed: the Hindoo-Gnostic element disappears from it, and the Judaic-theistic element again becomes prominent. We behold the rise of evangelical Christianity. By recognising and legitimising the most importunate claims of the senses, religion becomes once more a reality. The priest becomes man, takes to himself a wife, and begets children, as God desires. .If in Germany we lost through Protestantism, along with the ancient miracles, much other poetry, we gained manifold compensations. Men became nobler and more virtuous. Protestantism was very successful in effecting that purity of morals and that strictness in the fulfilment of duty which is generally called morality. In certain communities, indeed, Protestantism assumed a tendency which in the...