Luther's dominant quality was force, and that was a quality which Froude, like Carlyle, honoured above all others.

Luther was not in all respects like a modern Protestant.

He had a great respect for authority, when it was genuine, and he believed in transubstantiation, which Leo X.
regarded as a juggle to deceive the vulgar.

If Luther's appearance before the Diet of Worms was, as Froude says, "the finest scene in human history," it is so because this solitary monk stood not for one form of religion against another, but for truth against falsehood, for earnest belief in divine things against a Church governed by unbelievers.

The Renaissance in its most Pagan form had invaded the Vatican, and the Vicar of Christ appeared to Luther as Anti-Christ himself.