on the chapel of the castle at Wittenberg, in so large a
hand that it could be read at Scheinitz ; the pen began to
expand as he looked, and gradually grew longer and
longer, till at last it reached to Rome, touched the Pope's
triple crown, and made it totter. He inquired of the monk
where he had got such a pen, and was answered that it
once belonged to the wing of a goose in Bohemia. Pres-
ently other pens sprang out of the great pen, and seemed
all busy writing ; a loud noise was heard, and Frederick
awoke. The dream, mythical or not, foreshadowed the
great crisis at hand. The hundred years had revolved,
and Huss's saying had come true. " To-day you burn a
goose; 1 a hundred years hence a swan shall arise whom
you will not be able to burn." The movement, long going
on beneath the surface, and breaking out here and there
ineffectually, had at length found a worthy champion ; and
all these forming impulses of the time gathered to Luther,
welcomed him and helped him. The Humanists, Reuch-
lin, Erasmus, and others, expressed their sympathy; the
war-party, Htitten and Sfcckingen, uttered their joy ; above
all, the great heart of the German people responded ; and
while the monk of Wittenberg seemed, as he said after-
wards, to stand solitary in the breach, he was in reality ,
encompassed by a cloud of witnesses, a great army of
truth-seekers, at whose head he was destined to win for
the world once more the triumph of truth and righteous-
ness.
