RADICALISM AND THE NATIONAL CRISIS. 7 earnest and honest men, having strong convictions and deep feelings, not indeed always right in their ideas or prudent in their measures, yet men of vast power, men whose absence from earth would make a chasm which nothing else could fill. They have done too much for the good of the world to be branded with opprobrious epithets. Rising now to a still higher plane of thought, and observing the spiritual and religious history of mankind, we meet the same class of facts, springing from essentially the same source. When the Man of Sin had for ages spread the pall of moral death over all Europe, corrupting the very fountains of society, and prostituting the pure religion of Jesus to the vilest purposes, who was it that lifted his voice in thunder-tones against this enormous and wide spread iniquity? Who laid the axe at the root of the tree ? Luther,—the bold, the honest, the earnest, the godly, the radical Luther, going to the bottom of things and bringing doctrines and morals to the test of God’s word,—is the man who under God did this work. Who, during the long night of the dark ages refused to bow the knee to the Pope, and in their humble way maintained the pure worship of God amid their mountain-homes, persecuted, but not destroyed ? The radical Albigenses and Waldenses are the men, on whom history has placed this mark of honor. Who were the martyrs in the early ages of the Church, boldly meeting the storm of Pagan persecution, and cheerfully dying in the cause of their Master? They were the men whose religious convictions neither earth nor hell could suppress or conquer. Who first planted Christianity among men, turning the world upside down, and laying the axe at the very roots of Pagan Rome, and a corrupt Judaism ? Who made such a stir in Judea and in various parts of the Roman Empire, some eighteen centuries ago? Tins was the work of Jesus and bis apostles, than whom considered in reference to the existing stains of the age, greater radicalists the world never furnished. Who when he mounted the throne of Judea, cut down the idolatrous groves, and purified the temple and worship of the living God ( This was the work of Josiah,—a young and pious prince who meant to make the remedy as deep and broad as the disease.
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