Excerpt from Bi-Centenary Commemoration, Sunday, March 21, 1880, of the Re pening of the First Baptist Meeting-House in Boston, After Its Doors Had Been "Nailed Up" By Order of the Governor and Council of the Colony of Massachusetts, March, 8th, 1680: Historical Discourse by the Pastor, Cephas B. Crane, D.D., With Other Exercises

On the 31_st day of October, in the year of our Lord 1517, the old town of Wittenberg in Saxony was startled by the resounding blows of a notable hammer. A sturdy monk, Martin Luther by name, with eyes whose beams were like bars of steel, with a ponderous and resolute face, with a massive neck like that of a bull, was nailing to the door of the schloss-kirche, the church which the Elector had built and filled with relics, his famous ninety-five theses against the doctrine of indulgences. Not alone was the door of the church in Wittenberg shaken by the blows of that hammer: the foundations of the scholastic philosophy, the foundations of the Papal throne, the foundations of the Roman Catholic establishment, the foundations of many a royal dynasty, were also mightily shaken. The prophetic dream of Frederic, the good Elector of Saxony, was fulfilled; the long pen, with which the sturdy monk wrote his theses, reached even to Rome, wounded the ears of a lion (pope Leo X.) that was couched there, shook the triple crown of the boasted successor of St. Peter, and threw into convulsions all the States of the holy Roman Empire.

Our monk had sufficient occasion for the writing and publishing of his theses. Pope Leo X, a scholar and a voluptuary, having little knowledge of religion and no inclination for piety, maintain ing an expensive establishment and feeding an army of parasites, was in great want of money. By the advice of a cousin, the astute Cardinal Pucci, he proclaimed a general indulgence, the product of which should be appropriated, he said, to the building of St. Peter's Church, that splendid monument of ecclesiastical magnificence. But the needy pope, justifying himself I know not how, appropriated to his own uses a considerable portion of the revenue that accrued from this audacious operation in the devil's stock exchange.

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