If we turn from intellectual powers to sentiments, which are the soul of powers, we shall find renewed proofs that the spirit which animates the kingdoms of mind is the youthful spirit of health and hope and energy and cheer. In the regretful tenderness with which all great thinkers have looked back upon their youth do not we detect the source of their most kindling inspirations? Time may have impaired their energies, clipped their aspirations, deadened their faith; but there, away off in the past, is the gladdening vision of their youthful years; there the joyous tumult of impulses and aims; there the grand and generous affections; there the sweet surprise of swift-springing thoughts from never-failing fountains; there the pure love of truth and beauty which sent their minds speeding out beyond the limits of positive knowledge; and there the thrills of ecstasy as new worlds opened on their view. What, to them, is the assured possession of fame, compared with that direct perception of truth and that immediate consciousness of power?
But the question arises, Cannot this youth be preserved, or, at least, perpetually renewed? We have seen, in this rapid glance at history, that it is preserved as long as the mind retains its hold on the life of things; and we have seen, both in men of action and in men of meditation, this hold weakened by age. But would it be weakened, if the loftiest meditation issued in deeds instead of thoughts? Would youth depart, if the will acted on the same high level that the mind conceived? This, also, is a question which has been historically answered. It has been answered by heroes, reformers, saints, and martyrs,--by men who have demonstrated, that, the higher the life, the more distant the approaches of age,--by men whose souls on earth have glanced into that region of spiritual ideas and spiritual persons where youth is perpetual, where ecstasy is no transient mood, but a permanent condition, and where dwell the awful forces which radiate immortal life into the will. In these men, contemplation, refusing to abide in the act by which it mounts _above_ the world, reacts with tenfold force _on_ the world. Using human _ends_ simply as divine _means_, they wield war, statesmanship, literature, art, science, and philosophy with almost superhuman energy in the service of supernatural ideas; and history gleams with an imperfect passage, through human agents, of the life of God into the life of man. The subject is too vast, the agents too various and numerous, to be more than hinted here; and in the limitation of our theme, not only to the young in years, but to the male in sex, we are precluded from celebrating one who stands in history as perhaps the loveliest human embodiment of all that is more winning and inspiring in youth,--one whose celestial elevation of sentiment, ecstatic ardor of imagination, and power at once to melt the heart and amaze the understanding, will forever associate the saintliest heroic genius with the name of Joan of Arc. But among the crowd of great men in this exalted sphere of influence, let us select one who was the head and heart of the most memorable movement of modern times,--the German peasant, Martin Luther. With a nature originally rougher, more earth-born, and of less genial goodness than that of Joan of Arc, but with a shaping imagination of the same realizing intensity, the beautiful myths of Romish superstition, which her innocent soul transfigured into gracious ministering spirits of seraphic might and seraphic tenderness, glared in upon his more morbid spiritual vision as menacing angels, or grinning imps, or scoffing fiends. But still the tortured soul toiled sturdily on through the anguish of its self-created hells, the mind crazed and shattered, the heart hungry for peace, the will resolute that it should have no peace until it found peace in truth. Yet, our of this prodigious mental and moral anarchy, with its devil's dance of dogmas and delusions, the young Luther organized, before he was thirty, the broadest, raciest, and strongest character that ever put on the armor and hurled the bolts of the Church Militant. Casting doubt and fear under his feet, and growing more practically efficient as he grew more morally exalted, at the age of thirty-seven he had hooted out of Germany the knavish agent of a deistical Pope,--had nailed to the Wittenberg Church his intellectual defiance of the theory of Indulgences,--had cast the excommunication and decretals of the Pontiff into the flames,--and, before the principalities and power of the Empire, one German against all Germany, had simply and sublimely indicated the identity of his doctrine with his nature, by declaring that he not merely _would_ not, but _could_ not, recant.