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LUS

241

LUT

voted for the complete civil emancipation of the Jews. Dr.

Lushington was one of the counsel of Queen Caroline in her celebrated trial. In 1828 he was made judge of the consistory court, and in 1838 became judge of the admiralty and member of the privy council; the former of these two appointments disqualifying him from sitting in parliament he resigned his seat. He is chancellor of the dioceses of London and Rochester, and commissary of Westminster, Essex, and Herts. His legal sagacity places him in a very high position; and his authority in ecclesiastical law has often been appealed to during the last ten years in matters of controversy concerning the doctrine, discipline, and ritual of the established church.—R. M. LUSIGNAN, Guy de, King of Jerusalem and first king of Cyprus, was born about 1140, and was descended from the ancient French family of Limousin. Like several of his ancestors he took part in one of the crusades, and was selected in 1186 by Sybilla, sister of Baldwin IV., king of Jerusalem, for her second husband, after the suspicious death of her infant son, Baldwin V. As Guy's only recommendation was his handsome person, this choice excited general dissatisfaction; and even his own brother was heard to exclaim—"Since they have made him a king, surely they would have made me a god." War soon after broke out between the crusaders and Saladin. The mahometans laid siege to Tobenas, and the christians, in an attempt to relieve that important place, were defeated with the loss of thirty thousand men, and Lusignan himself and many other knights were taken prisoners. He regained his liberty on surrendering the stronghold of Ascalon; but Jerusalem soon after, October 2, 1187, fell into the hands of Saladin. In 1192 the weak and unfortunate Lusignan resigned his regal honours to Richard Coeur de Lion, and received in return the sovereignty of Cyprus, which he repeopled with refugees from Syria and Palestine. He died in 1194 after a reign of only two years, but the dynasty which he founded lasted for three centuries.—J. T. LUTHER, Martin, the great German reformer, was born at Eisleben on the evening of the 10th of November, 1483. As he was born on St. Martin's Eve, and baptized on the following day, he received the christian name of Martin. His mother, Margaret, a peasant, and his father a poor miner, left Eisleben for Mansfeld when their babe was but a few months old. Here the industrious labourer so prospered that he became possessor of two furnaces, and was enabled thereby to give his son a good early education. After attending the Latin school he was, at the age of fourteen, sent to Magdeburg, to the seminary of the Franciscans. During his residence in this city his poverty forced him to traverse the neighbouring villages, and sing hymns for bread. Next year he removed to Eisenach, and was still pinched with similar straits, till a lady named Cotta, attracted by his appearance and singing, took him under her roof. No wonder that the memory of this early period deeply impressed the mind of Luther, and that many years afterwards he sometimes requested his hearers not to despise the poor boys who sing from door to door and ask bread for the love of God. The elder Luther, who saw the rising talent of his son, was anxious that he should study law, and accordingly he entered the university of Erfurt in 1501. The classics and the schoolmen divided his attention—"the whole university admired his genius"—and he took his degree in 1505. But in the second year of his sojourn at Erfurt, as he was ransacking the volumes in the college library, he found a copy of the Vulgate, a book which he had not seen before, and which contained greatly more portions of scripture than were found in the church lectionaries. He read it, and again and again returned to read it, with strange and rapturous sensations. The spiritual conflict commenced within him; a new realm, lying far beyond intellectual pursuits and gratifications, was laid bare to his vision; and the cravings of his soul were awakened, though for a period they were not to be satisfied. About this time, too, his severe studies threw him into an alarming illness, which quickened all his serious impressions, and these again were deepened through the sudden death of a fellow-student and friend by a stroke of lightning. His religious convictions grew so overpowering that he resolved, according to the custom of the time, to abandon the world and devote himself as a monk to God. After a very brief interval, he summoned his friends to a jovial supper, at which there was no lack of student merrymaking; and no sooner had his companions gone, than, leaving the rest of his property, and taking his Virgil and Plautus under his arm, he entered the convent of the hermits of St. Augustine. Having been enrolled as a novice he soon felt the degradation of his lot; but he shrunk not from it, for he had deliberately chosen it. The master of arts was forced to be a menial drudge, sweeping the rooms, acting as porter, begging for bread, and doing other unnameable offices for his lazy and exacting superiors. By the patronizing interference of the university he was at length enabled to resume his studies, comprising the scholastic philosophy and the diligent perusal of the Bible and Augustine. But he was far from obtaining that spiritual peace and sanctity which he had so earnestly anticipated. He worshipped, prayed, fasted, and did penance in vain. His melancholy grew yet gloomier, so that on one occasion, and because of his non-appearance for some time, the door of his cell was burst open, and the poor pale monk was found on the floor in helpless and unconscious exhaustion, out of which he was charmed only by the song of the choir. So much did "the sorrows of death compass him, and the pains of hell get hold upon him," that his fancy bodied out his guilty fears in the shape of some awful tormentor who was ever haunting him day and night—and ever ready to arraign him or summon him to judgment and doom. There was no salve for his soul in monastic routine or ascetic services. In thorough earnest was he all the while, for his salvation was felt by him to be at stake; and long afterwards he would honestly say—"If ever monk could have won heaven by monkery, that monk was I." But clouds and darkness were not always to be in thick folds on his spirit. and the conversation of Staupitz, the new vicar-general, who had come on an official visit to Erfurt greatly relieved him. Yet though the day had dawned, the mist often returned. The letters and counsels of Staupitz, however, had their influence, and at last the kind and pointed words of an aged monk so truly went home in peace and joy to his heart that he exclaimed—"I felt as if I had been born anew." In his twenty-fourth year, in 1507, Luther was ordained a priest, and celebrated his first mass. Thus ends the first period of Luther's life, his formal consecration to the service of that system which he was soon to challenge and overthrow in Germany and northern Europe.

About this period Frederick, the elector of Saxony, had founded a university in Wittemberg; and in 1508, and by the influence of Staupitz, Luther was invited to fill the chair of philosophy in it. The dialectics which he now taught had little charm for him. They might furnish a salutary mental discipline; but theological truth entranced him. It was no evanescent subtlety, but a living and fresh reality, which scripture unfolded, and his soul could apprehend and rely on. So that in the second year of his professorship, Luther, on becoming a bachelor of theology, set himself to the exposition of the divine word, obtaining at the same time more spiritual serenity and deeper and more comprehensive views of the plan of redemption. His new opinions startled not a few among his colleagues; but as long as they were confined in their utterance to the chair they were comparatively harmless in result. His good genius Staupitz again interfered; and seeing his popular gifts—his earnestness, imagination, and fire—urged him to preach. At length, with great reluctance, and with a solemn sense of responsibility, he rose from the chair into the pulpit. At last had he reached his right place—his throne of power, as a public teacher of a Christianity drawn directly from the word of God and realized in his own spiritual history—a Christianity fresh as spring leaves when contrasted with the faded foliage and dry faggots of the mediæval theology. His popularity was great and immediate; the college chapel was found at once to be too small; and on the invitation of the civic council he removed to the parish church. His audiences were enchained while they were startled; the oratory of the open-minded and noble-souled Teuton could not but tell on the masses; for his words, born in his own heart, reached with magnetic quickness and sureness the responding sympathies of all hearts before him. But as yet, like Staupitz, he was only an evangelist within the church, and imagined that the gospel as proclaimed by him was the true lesson of that church to the people, though, as he innocently supposed, many preachers had not risen to the full proclamation of it.

Luther had now got his first lesson as to evangelical freedom, and he had longed and striven for it; but his next lessons, which led him to revolt against what he felt to be ecclesiastical delusion and domination, were in providence forced upon him. Either in 1510 or 1511 he was sent to Rome, probably on

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