Heaven

Little Holy Roman Empire hadn't really paid attention to the turmoil that had been steadily gaining strength in his house. He knew that stuff like revolutions always happened at England and France's house, but he never had the slightest thought something like this would happen to him.

He supposed he should have been prepared when he saw that man standing in front of the church in Wittenberg.

"What are you doing sir?" the little Holy Roman Empire questioned the man, who appeared to be hammering something into the door.

"Oh, hello little boy," the older man said, smiling graciously. "I just had some concerns I wanted to bring to the church's attention is all."

The younger boy crossed his arms over his chest, making a face. "You don't have to talk to me like I'm a juvenile! I understand important things you know!"

The man chuckled and patted the boy on the head. "Of course you do!" he said with a smile. He crouched down to the boy's height and said to him quite seriously, "the church is doing some things that go against the teachings of Christ. They're trying to sell passes into heaven, and that's not right. Surely you understand that?"

The boy cocked his head to the side, hiding his confusion by trying to look contemplative. "But the church has sold indulgences for centuries," he said, trying to put some conviction in his words. "Why is it wrong now?"

"Well," the older man said, "Just because you do something bad for a long time doesn't make it good," he said conclusively. He pat the boy on the head and stood back up. "We get into heaven by the blood of Jesus Christ. Not by the donation of earthly goods or by kind works. And not by the church."

Blasphemy! Surely the church was going to burn this man as a heretic! "Mister! You can't say things like that!"

The man only smiled though as he began to walk away. "You'll understand one day, Holy Roman Empire. You and the rest of the world."

Yes, it was that man and his papers that had sewn the seeds of revolution in his people. Before he knew it, it was not just his empire that was endangered. The continent itself was splitting apart, between the new and the old, the idealists and the fundamentalists, the heretics and the church itself.

Or were they heretics at all? As he grew older, the young boy did in fact find himself agreeing with what the old man had told him all those years ago...

xxx

That Man is, obviously, Martin Luther, the number one most famous reformer of the Catholic Church, um, ever. He wasn't the first to point out the Church was rotten to the core, but it was his '95 Theses Against the Sale of Indulgences' that finally got people all riled up about it. Nowadays, the church more or less agrees with Martin Luther's conclusions, but it was the source of much angst all across Germany, and indeed, all of Europe at the time.