him to venture out. He was out again on the 13th marking trees to be cut down for the improvement of his estate, and so on the last whole day of his human life this man did a stroke of solid work in this world and then, when next day the end came, his last deed with those ever busy hands was to close his own eyes, and his last words were two little words of one syllable, I will not tell you what they were, because I want those who do not remember them to feel a little ashamed of that, they amount only to seven letters and a comma possibly, but he could not have said more, or better, because they are the sum and substance of his faith and hope.

And now may we hear in one word of four letters the watchword of his life. The watchword was: Duty, not ambition, not pleasure, not ease and quiet, and not gain,- but Duty!

On the farm, in the wilderness, on the battlefield, and in the camp, and President of the republic, boy and man, yeoman and gentleman,- this was the watchword, Fortune, fame and life must all be given at the call from on high. And so he has won this supreme place in the hearts of men on all the earth

"So may we join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead, who live again

In minds made better by their presence-live In pulses stirred to generosity,

In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
Of miserable aims that end with self,

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars."

THE HUMAN HEART OF MARTIN

LUTHER

THERE are very few lives indeed of so deep and pure an interest as the life of Martin Luther, the German peasant, priest, and prince in one. It is a life which abides fresh and fruitful to every generation, and, as the great ones only are, he is more truly a living person after all these years than the vast majority of us who are now on the earth. "Luther's life," Bunsen says, "is both the epos and the tragedy of his age. It is the epos because its first part presents a hero and a prophet who conquers apparently impregnable difficulties and opens a new world to the human mind without any power but that of the divine truth and a deep conviction, or any authority but that of undaunted and unselfish courage. Luther's life is also a tragedy the tragedy of Germany as well as of her son who tried in vain to rescue his country from unholy oppression and to regenerate her from within by means of the gospel." Such is the judgment of one of the ablest men in modern Germany and no doubt it is true. But I have always felt that in the life of this great and good man there is a third element we never fairly remember or weigh, and that is, it was a human life through

and through, human in the sweetest and truest sense of that term; and no estimate of Luther can be true, or any portrait or picture, which does not give this human element a great and noble place. And so I have felt it would be of a real worth to us to touch this human heart of the man this evening and to speak, not of the hero or the reformer, but of the man, Martin Luther, and to see what his manhood had to do with the mighty movements of his time.

And I will begin by saying that it was in the year those hapless princes were done to death in the Tower of London and when Richard Crookback, who figures so balefully in English history, made his hasty and fatal clutch at the English crown, while Columbus was pondering over his problem and was still nine years from its solution, and when the art of printing was only forty-three years old, that Martin Luther was born. It was the custom then in Germany for the poor folks in country places to flock to the great fairs in the fall of the year to sell or barter away what they had gathered in the summer, and to procure what they must have for the winter in return. It seems that Margaret and John Luther had gone to Eisleben on this errand, and there the babe was born, and when they went away with their babe it was to a home as poor as decent poverty could well make it. 'My parents were at first right poor," he tells us. "My father was a poor miner and my mother carried wood on her shoul

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ders and in this way they supported us, their children. It was hard and bitter work and no one has to work so hard now." He says also, “Let no one speak with contempt of the poor fellows who go from door to door singing and begging for bread, for I was once a beggar boy myself, singing and seeking for bread at people's doors." But it was counted no disgrace to sing a song for a crust then in Germany, as it was no disgrace to do this forty years ago in England, when nothing was more common in the hard times than for the poor weavers and spinners out of Lancashire to come singing through our little towns that lived by farming for their bread, and this saved them in our minds and their own also from mere tramphood and beggary.

And it was in one of these rather sad little concerts that a widow saw the child and had compassion on him, took him home-poor little fellow and into her heart and gave him the best she had as long as she could keep him. And so by one means or another he made his way the best he could, for all this was not for mere bread, but also for an education on which he had early set his heart. He was a fair scholar at six years of age and at fourteen was able to enter college where he drank greedily at all the wells of learning, and beside this was wise enough to get hold of some mechanical arts, wood turning among the rest, so that if his head should fail he could fall back on his hands, and that is a hint young schol