It is the 494th birthday of the Protestant movement.  

Reading William James this afternoon, I encountered this appreciation for Luther in James' chapter on "The Value of Saintliness" where he criticizes many older notions of sainthood:

When Luther, in his immense manly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the very notion of a debt and credit account kept with individuals by the Almighty, he stretched the soul's imagination and saved theology from puerility.

So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual conceptions which might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit.