We are all inspired and influenced by others, sometimes that inspiration becomes a legacy, tossed between others with ideas of their own, sometimes dropped and then caught up again but constantly moving forward.
- Martin Luther 1483 – 1546, an ordained Augustinian friar, who, after visiting Rome was disgusted by the corruption he witnessed.
- He wrote several thesis openly attacking Rome and the papal abuses.
- He wrote with passion and through his position as Doctor in Theology at the University at Wittenberg and the development of printing, his ideas quickly spread throughout Europe.
Luther was directed to appear before the ‘Diet of Worms’, an assembly of the Holy Roman Empire, where he refused to recant and so declared a heretic. Such was the force of his argument and his refusal to recant that the seeds of Protestantism were born in Europe.
- Thomas Carlyle 1795 – 1881, was a strict Calvanist, although he lost his belief in God after University.
- He was a mathematician and brilliant scholar whose writings and reflections about society, religion and injustice spun throughout Europe.
- He was greatly influenced by the writings of others particularly by German Idealism.
- He moved in great literary circles and was closely involved with the essayist John Stuart Mill.
- Carlyle considered Luther’s appearance at Worms as being the pivotal point in Modern European History after which nothing was the same again and that had an extraordinary influence on Carlyle’s work.
Thomas Carlyle’s work, in turn inspired the writing of Charles Dickens, who used Carlyle’s work on the History of the French Revolution in his book ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.
Dickens, William Morris and Ruskin were also inspired by the work of Thomas Carlyle in their pursuit of Social Reform.
All those intriguing connections……….
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