A Calamitous Man

Patrick Collinson

  • Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death by Richard Marius
    Harvard, 542 pp, £19.95, March 1999, ISBN 0 674 55090 0

Imagine a dream in which you are climbing a church tower in the dark. Stumbling, you reach out for something to hang on to and find that you are pulling at a bell rope, that the bell is waking up the entire town, and soon other towns far beyond. Within weeks you, the inadvertent bell-ringer, are both famous and infamous, and famous not for a few minutes but for ever. Three centuries later, Thomas Carlyle will write that but for you there would have been no French Revolution, no America.

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