Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. tur anb As the two systems, the good and the evil, a developed Christianity and a matured Popery, come together, so, too, did the two men who were to stand at the head of these respective systems. Luther came first into the world, Loyola arrived only three years later. Their births, so near in point of time, were separated by a vast social distance. Luther was a miner’s child, and drew his first breath in an humble cottage on the Thuringian Plain. Loyola, whose proper name was Don Inigo Lopez de Recaldo, was the son of a Spanish grandee, and first saw the light in the castle of Loyola, on the shores of the Bay of Biscay, where his father kept court, with the customary ceremonial, of the feudal barons of these days. This was in the year 1491. Nature had endowed these two men with qualities not unlike. Both felt the stirrings of a great enthusiasm, ? the miner’s son under the cold sky of Germany not less than the young grandee in the warm and impulsive air of Spain. But the renown which the future was to bring them was to be of a kind, and achieved in a way wholly different from that which either pictured to himself. It was through darkness, discipline, and great suffering that both were to come to the fulfilment of their early dreams. There are few contrasts in history so striking and instructive as that which is seen in the lives of these two men. Its study would repay a longer consideration than we can here give it. It places us beside the fountain heads of the two mighty movements ? the Reformation and Jesuitism ? which continue to this day, beyond all other influences, to mould the condition of the world. Far separated by distance of place, and totally unaware of the existence of each other, as were these two men, there was, nevertheless, a secret link establ…