Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    First Principles of the Reformation (95 Theses and Other Works)
    First Principles of the Reformation (95 Theses and Other Works)
    First Principles of the Reformation (95 Theses and Other Works)
    Ebook417 pages6 hours

    First Principles of the Reformation (95 Theses and Other Works)

    By Martin Luther

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In 1517, Martin Luther challenged the Catholic Church, and ultimately altered the course of European history, when he nailed his "95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences" on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. At the time, Renaissance humanists were beginning to oppose the reign of the Church and the wealth it accrued from taxes and the sale of Indulgences to the people. A monk and a scholar, Luther intended to promote independent thinking with the translation of the Bible into the vernacular. He wanted people to read the words and understand God in terms of their own experience. Unsurprisingly, he was ordered by the pope to print a retraction, which he refused; he was ultimately excommunicated, and his action prompted the Protestant Reformation. This edition contains Martin Luther's "95 Theses", as well as the three other primary works of Martin Luther: "To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate", "Concerning Christian Liberty", and "On the Babylonish Captivity of the Church".
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2011
    ISBN9781420943733
    First Principles of the Reformation (95 Theses and Other Works)
    Author

    Martin Luther

    Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a German theologian and one of the most influential figures in the Protestant Reformation. Some of Luther’s best-known works are the Ninety-Five Theses, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and his translation of the Bible into German. 

    Read more from Martin Luther

    Related to First Principles of the Reformation (95 Theses and Other Works)

    Related ebooks

    Christianity For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      The Case Against Junipero Serra

      Oct 2, 2018

      The Case Against Junipero Serra
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Should the Internet Forget Italy's Most Viral Sex Tape?

      May 16, 2018

      Two years after her daughter’s suicide, a mother is still fighting to limit how far a meme can go.

      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Skills You Need To Handle Tough Conversations

      Feb 13, 2021

      THE words nobody in a relationship wants to hear – according to Urban Dictionary, “It’s not you...it’s me” is the biggest lie ever. It truly means, “it’s not me, it’s you”. Ending a relationship is a hard conversation that we all have to have at some

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Office Returns, Scandal Of Lost Children And Building With AI

      Aug 18, 2023

      For those whose jobs allow and homes are spacious, the working from home revolution was seen as a real benefit that came out of the pandemic and a cultural change that workers want to continue. But is the tide now turning back in favour of the office

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Prophet Of Catholic Conservatism

      Jan 26, 2023

      Prophet Of Catholic Conservatism
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Age Of Reason, Sliced And Diced

      Sep 26, 2024

      OCKHAM’S EPONYMOUS RAZOR IS STILL as incisive as it was when first wielded by the English friar and scholastic philosopher six centuries ago. William of Ockham (1287–1347, below) was a pioneer of the theory of knowledge and the great proponent of nom

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Workings Of The Spirit

      May 17, 2024

      The Workings Of The Spirit
      13 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Renaissance

      Feb 11, 2022

      THE Renaissance was a period in European history that falls between the Middle Ages and the Modern Era. Historians define it as starting in the 1300s and ending in the 1600s. The French word renaissance means “rebirth”. During this time there was a r

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Medieval Shock Of Thenew

      May 25, 2023

      IN 1700 A MATHEMATICIAN submitted a paper to the Royal Society in which he attempted to calculate, among other things, the rate at which oral testimony — that is, memory — decayed over long periods of time. It’s a quixotic idea, to be sure, but that

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Preaching The Gospel Of Progressivism

      Jul 28, 2022

      THE LONGEVITY OF ELIZABETH II has (mostly) allowed us to avert our attention from the question of the relationship between church and state for a very long time. Given that her 70 years on the throne have seen the relentless rise of the forces of phi

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Roman Roots Of The English Church

      Apr 1, 2022

      Going to Church in Medieval England Nicholas Orme (Yale University Press, £20) The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History James G. Clark (Yale University Press, £25) THE FALLOUT OVER THE CHURCH of England’s response to Covid-19 is still with u

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Trans: The Middle Ages Had Another Word For It

      Oct 29, 2020

      HISTORY ECHOES. Sometimes, it’s a place that echoes across time. Sometimes, it’s a turn of phrase. Consider these two statements. The first is by John Wycliffe, the fourteenth-century philosopher and heresiarch: So about this white and round priest-c

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Reviews

      Sep 30, 2024

      By Axel E. W. Müller ISBN: 978-1783277315 Boydell & Brewer, 2024 $160.00 (hardback) www.boydellandbrewer.com Firework Book is a type of German technical manuscript produced during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that deals with the technology o

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Benedictines

      Jan 5, 2024

      The Benedictines
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      From Worms To Woke

      May 26, 2022

      HAVE WE BEEN HERE BEFORE? Now, in 2022, with war abroad and woke at home, we contemplate the bitter dissolution of the hopes of the late twentieth century. Five hundred years ago, in 1521, Martin Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms signalled the

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Book of Uncommon Prayer

      May 3, 2023

      Book of Uncommon Prayer
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      ‘Dominion’ Tracks The Influence Of Christianity Across Centuries

      Mar 17, 2020

      Historian Tom Holland has written an engaging chronicle of the ways in which Christian thought gradually spread through the West.

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Renaissance In Europe

      Feb 28, 2020

      The Renaissance In Europe
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Roots Of Conservatism

      Nov 24, 2022

      20 OCTOBER 2022 IS A DATE I SHALL NOT FORGET. It’s the day when Liz Truss stood outside Downing Street to announce her resignation — the fourth Conservative prime minister to be hounded from office by their own party in six years. It was also the day

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Faith And Family

      Oct 28, 2021

      Faith And Family
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Rosicrucianism

      Feb 28, 2020

      Europe in the early 17th century was not a happy place. It was a continent marked by religious divisions and political strife which would escalate into the bloody Thirty Years’ War that led to eight million lives being lost. At the same time, it was

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for First Principles of the Reformation (95 Theses and Other Works)

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      First Principles of the Reformation (95 Theses and Other Works) - Martin Luther

      FIRST PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION

      OR

      THE 95 THESES AND THE THREE PRIMARY WORKS OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER

      EDITED BY HENRY WACE AND C. A. BUCHHEIM

      A Digireads.com Book

      Digireads.com Publishing

      Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4300-9

      Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4373-3

      This edition copyright © 2012

      Please visit www.digireads.com

      CONTENTS

      ADVERTISEMENT

      INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS

      I. ON THE PRIMARY PRINCIPLES OF LUTHER'S LIFE AND TEACHING

      II. THE POLITICAL COURSE OF THE REFORMATION IN GERMANY

      FIRST PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION.

      THE NINETY-FIVE THESES.

      INTRODUCTORY LETTER.

      DISPUTATION OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER CONCERNING PENITENCE AND INDULGENCES.

      THE THREE PRIMARY WORKS OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER.

      I. TO THE CHRISTIAN NOBILITY OF THE GERMAN NATION RESPECTING THE REFORMATION OF THE CHRISTIAN ESTATE.

      DEDICATORY LETTER.

      I. THE THREE WALLS OF THE ROMANISTS.

      II. OF THE MATTERS TO BE CONSIDERED IN THE COUNCILS.

      III. TWENTY-SEVEN ARTICLES RESPECTING THE REFORMATION OF THE CHRISTIAN ESTATE.

      II. CONCERNING CHRISTIAN LIBERTY

      DEDICATORY LETTER OF MARTIN LUTHER TO POPE LEO X.

      CONCERNING CHRISTIAN LIBERTY

      III. ON THE BABYLONISH CAPTIVITY OF THE CHURCH

      CONCERNING THE LORD'S SUPPER

      CONCERNING THE SACRAMENT OF BAPTISM

      CONCERNING THE SACRAMENT OF PENANCE

      OF CONFIRMATION

      OF MATRIMONY

      OF ORDERS

      ON THE SACRAMENT OF EXTREME UNCTION

      ADVERTISEMENT

      The purpose and plan of this publication, which has been prompted by the celebration of the fourth centenary of Luther's birth, is explained in the Introductory Essay. Here it is only necessary to state that, of the works of Luther contained in it, the Address to the Nobility of the German Nation, which was written in German, has been translated by Professor Buchheim, from the text given in the Erlangen, or Frankfort, Edition. The translation of this work offered very great difficulties, as it was written in Luther's earliest German style, before the language had been improved, and rendered comparatively definite, by his translation of the Bible. Dr. Buchheim has endeavoured to make it as literal as was compatible with the genius of the English language, and with the necessity of modifying, now and then, some obscure or obsolete expression; and he has offered a few annotations. He desires, at the same time, to express his great obligations to Dr. Wace, who carefully compared his translation with the original work, and whose suggestions have been of great service to him. The Theses, and the two Treatises, On Christian Liberty, and On the Babylonish Captivity of the Church, have been translated from the original Latin Text, as given in the Frankfort Edition, by the Rev. R. S. Grignon, to whose generous assistance and accurate scholarship the editors feel greatly indebted.

      INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS

      I. ON THE PRIMARY PRINCIPLES OF LUTHER'S LIFE AND TEACHING

      BY DR. WACE

      The present publication is offered as a contribution to the due celebration in this country of the fourth Centenary of Luther's birth. Much has been written about him, and the general history of his life and work is being sketched by able pens. But no adequate attempt has yet been made to let him speak for himself to Englishmen by his greatest and most characteristic writings. The three works which, together with the 95 Theses, are included in this volume, are well known in Germany as the Drei Grosse Reformations-Schriften, or The Three Great Reformation Treatises of Luther; but they seem never yet to have been brought in this character before the English public. The Treatise on Christian Liberty has indeed been previously translated, though not of late years. But from an examination of the catalogue in the British Museum, it would appear that no English translation is accessible, even if any has yet been published, of the Address to the German Nobility or of the Treatise on the Babylonish Captivity of the Church. Yet, as is well understood in Germany, it is in these that the whole genius of the Reformer appears in its most complete and energetic form. They are bound together in the closest dramatic unity. They were all three produced in the latter half of the critical year 1520, when nearly three years' controversy, since the publication of the Theses, on Oct. 31 1517, had convinced Luther of the falseness of the Court of Rome, and the hollowness of its claims; and they were immediately followed by the bull of excommunication in the winter of the same year, and the summons to the Diet of Worms in 1521. Luther felt, as he says at the commencement of his Address to the German Nobility, that the time for silence had passed, and the time for speech had come. He evidently apprehended that reconciliation between himself and the Court of Rome was impossible; and he appears to have made up his mind to clear his conscience, whatever the cost. Accordingly in these three works he spoke out with a full heart, and with the consciousness that his life was in his hand, the convictions which had been forced on him by the conduct of the Papacy and of the Papal theologians.

      Those convictions had been slowly, and even reluctantly, admitted; but they had gradually accumulated in intense force in Luther's mind and conscience; and when the time for speech had come they burst forth in a kind of volcanic eruption. Their maturity is proved by the completeness and thoroughness with which the questions at issue are treated. An insight into the deepest theological principles is combined with the keenest apprehension of practical details. In the Treatise on Christian Liberty we have the most vivid of all embodiments of that life of Faith to which the Reformer recalled the Church and which was the mainspring of the Reformation. In the Appeal to the German Nobility he first asserted those rights of the laity, and of the temporal power, without the admission of which no reformation would have been practicable, and he then denounced with burning moral indignation the numerous and intolerable abuses which were upheld by Roman authority. In the third Treatise, on the Babylonish Captivity of the Church, he applied the same cardinal principles to the elaborate Sacramental system of the Church of Rome, sweeping away by means of them the superstitions with which the original institutions of Christ had been overlaid, and thus releasing men's consciences from a vast network of ceremonial bondage. The rest of the Reformation, it is not too much to say, was but the application of the principles vindicated in these three works. They were applied in different countries with varying wisdom and moderation; but nothing essential was added to them. Luther's genius—if a higher word be not justifiable—brought forth at one birth, with hands and feet, to use his own image, and in full energy, the vital ideas by which Europe was to be regenerated. He was no mere negative controversialist, attacking particular errors in detail. His characteristic was the masculine grasp with which he seized essential and eternal truths, and by their central light dispersed the darkness in which men were groping.

      It occurred therefore to my colleague and myself that a permanent service might perhaps be rendered to Luther's name, and towards a due appreciation of the principles of the Reformation, if these short but pregnant Treatises were made more accessible to the English public; and although they might well be left to speak for themselves, there may perhaps be some readers to whom a few explanatory observations on Luther's position, theologically and politically, will not be unacceptable. My colleague, in the Essay which follows this, has dealt with the political course of the Reformation during his career; and in the present remarks an endeavour will simply be made to indicate the nature and the bearings of the central principles of the Reformer's life and work, as exhibited in the accompanying translations.

      It is by no mere accident of controversy that the Ninty-five Theses mark the starting-point of Luther's career as a reformer. The subject with which they dealt was not only in close connection with the centre of Christian truth, but it touched the characteristic thought of the Middle Ages. From the beginning to the end, those ages had been a stern school of moral and religious discipline, under what was universally regarded as the divine authority of the Church. St. Anselm, with his intense apprehension of the divine righteousness, and of its inexorable demands, is at once the noblest and truest type of the great school of thought of which he was the founder. The special mission of the Church since the days of Gregory the Great had been to tame the fierce energies of the new barbarian world, and to bring the wild passions of the Teutonic races under the control of the Christian law. It was the task to which the necessities of the hour seemed to summon the Church, and she roused herself to the effort with magnificent devotion. Monks and Schoolmen performed prodigies of self-denial and self-sacrifice, in order to realise in themselves, and to impose as far as possible on the world at large, the laws of perfection which the Church held before their vision. The glorious cathedrals which arose in the best period of the Middle Ages are but the visible types of those splendid structures of ideal virtues, which a monk like St. Bernard, or a Schoolman like St. Thomas Aquinas, piled up by laborious thought and painful asceticism. Such men felt themselves at all times surrounded by a spiritual world, at once more glorious in its beauty and more awful in its terrors, than either the pleasures or the miseries of this world could adequately represent. The great poet of the Middle Ages affords perhaps the most vivid representation of their character in this respect. The horrible images of the Inferno, the keen sufferings of purification in the Purgatorio, form the terrible foreground behind which the Paradiso rises. Those visions of terror and dread and suffering had stamped themselves on the imagination of the medieval world, and lay at the root of the power with which the Church overshadowed it. In their origin they embodied a profound and noble truth. It was a high and divine conception that the moral and spiritual world with which we are encompassed has greater heights and lower depths than are generally apprehended in the visible experience of this life; and Dante has been felt to be in an unique degree the poet of righteousness. But it is evident, at the same time, what a terrible temptation was placed in the hands of a hierarchy who were believed, in whatever degree, to wield power over these spiritual realities. It was too easy to apply them, like the instruments of physical torture with which the age was familiar, to extort submission from tender consciences, or to make a bargain with selfish hearts. But in substance the menaces of the Church appealed to deep convictions of the human conscience, and the mass of men were not prepared to defy them.

      Now it was into this world of spiritual terrors that Luther was born, and he was in an eminent degree the legitimate child of the Middle Ages. The turning-point in his history is that the awful visions of which we have spoken, the dread of the Divine judgments, brought home to him by one of the solemn accidents of life, checked him in a career which promised all worldly prosperity, and drove him into a monastery. There, as he tells us, he was driven almost frantic by his vivid realization of the demands of the Divine righteousness on the one hand, and of his own incapacity to satisfy them on the other. With the intense reality characteristic of his nature he took in desperate earnest all that the traditional teaching and example of the Middle Ages had taught him of the unbending necessities of Divine justice. But for the very reason that he accepted those necessities with such earnestness, he did but realize the more completely the hopelessness of his struggles to bring himself into conformity with them. It was not because he was out of sympathy with St. Anselm or St. Bernard or Dante, that he burst the bonds of the system they represented; but, on the contrary, because he entered even more deeply than they into the very truths they asserted. Nothing was more certain to him than that Divine justice is inexorable; no conviction was more deeply fixed in his heart than that righteousness is the supreme law of human life. But the more he realized the truth, the more terrible he found it, for it seemed to shut him up in a cruel prison, against the bars of which he beat himself in vain. In one of his most characteristic passages, in the Introduction to his Latin Works, he describes how he was repelled and appalled by the statement of St. Paul respecting the Gospel, that 'therein is the righteousness, or justice, of God revealed.' For, he says, 'however irreprehensible a life I had lived as a monk, I felt myself before God a sinner, with a most restless conscience, and I could not be confident that He was appeased by my satisfaction. I could not, therefore, love—nay, I hated—a God who was just and punished sinners; and if not with silent blasphemy, certainly with vehement murmuring, I was indignant against God. As if, I said, it were not enough that sinners, miserable and eternally ruined by original sin, should be crushed with all kind of calamity by the law of the Decalogue, but God by the Gospel must needs add grief to grief, and by the Gospel itself must inflict still further on us His justice and anger. I raged with this savage and disturbed conscience, and I knocked importunately at Paul in that place, with burning thirst to know what St. Paul could mean.' Such an experience is not a mere revolt against the Middle Ages. In great measure it is but the full realization of their truest teaching. It is Dante intensified, and carried to the inevitable development of his principles.

      But if this be the case, what it meant was that the Middle Ages had brought men to a deadlock. They had led men up to a gate so strait that no human soul could pass through it. In the struggle, men had devised the most elaborate forms of self-torture, and had made the most heroic sacrifices, and in the very desperation of their efforts they had anticipated the more vivid insight and experience of Luther. The effort, in fact, had been too much for human nature, and the end of it had been that the Church had condescended to human weakness. The most obvious and easy way out of the difficulty was to modify, by virtue of some dispensing authority, the extreme requirements of Divine justice, and by a variety of half-unconscious, half-acknowledged devices, to lessen the severity of the strait gate and of the narrow way. Such a power, as has been said, was an enormous temptation to unscrupulous Churchmen, and at length it led to the hideous abuses of such preaching of indulgences as that of Tetzel. In this form the matter came before Luther in his office as parish priest and confessor; and it will be apparent from the Theses that what first revolts him is the violation involved of the deepest principles which the Church of his day had taught him. He had learned from it the inexorable character of the Divine law, the necessity and blessedness of the Divine discipline of punishment and suffering; he had learned, as his first Thesis declares, that the law of Christian life is that of lifelong penitence; and he denounced Tetzel's teaching as false to the Church herself, in full confidence that he would be supported by his ecclesiastical superiors. When he found that he was not—when, to his surprise and consternation, he found that the Papal theologians of the day, under the direct patronage of the Pope and the bishops, were ready to support the most flagrant evasions of the very principles on which their power had originally been based—then at length, though most reluctantly, he turned against them, and directed against the corrupted Church of the close of the Middle Ages the very principles he had learned from its best representatives and from its noblest institutions.

      Luther, in the course of his spiritual struggles, had found the true deliverance from what we have ventured to call that deadlock to which the grand vision of Divine righteousness had led him. He realised that the strait gate was impassable by any human virtue; but he had found the solution in the promise of a supernatural deliverance which was offered to faith. To quote again his words in the preface to his Latin works already referred to: 'At length by the mercy of God, meditating days and nights, I observed the connection of the words namely therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith, as it is written: The just shall live by faith. Then I began to understand the justice of God to be that by which the just man lives by the gift of God, namely, by faith, and that the meaning was that the Gospel reveals that justice of God by which He justifies us beggars through faith, as it is written: The just shall live by faith. Here I felt myself absolutely born again; the gates of heaven were opened, and I had entered paradise itself. From thenceforward the face of the whole Scriptures appeared changed to me. I ran through the Scriptures, as my memory would serve me, and observed the same analogy in other words—as, the work of God, that is, the work which God works in us; the strength of God, that with which He makes us strong; the wisdom of God, that with which He makes us wise; the power of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God. And now, as much as I had formerly hated that word, the Justice of God, so much did I now love it and extol it as the sweetest of words to me; and thus that place in Paul was to me truly the gate of paradise.' In other words, Luther had realised that the Gospel, while reasserting the inexorable nature of the moral law, and deepening its demands, had revealed a supernatural and divine means of satisfying and fulfilling it. All barriers had thus been removed between God and man, and men had been placed in the position of children living by Faith on His grace and bounty. He offers to bestow upon them the very righteousness He requires from them, if they will but accept it at His hands as a free gift. Their true position is no longer that of mere subjects living under a law which they must obey at their peril. They may, indeed, by their own act remain in that condition, with all its terrible consequences. But God invites them to regard Him as their Father, to live in the light of His countenance, and to receive from Him the daily food of their souls. The most intimate personal relation is thus established between Himself and them; and the righteousness which they could never acquire by their own efforts He is ready to create in them if they will but live with Him in faith and trust. That faith, indeed, must needs be the beginning, and the most essential condition, of this Divine life. Faith is the first condition of all fellowship between persons; and if a man is to live in personal fellowship with God, he must trust Him absolutely, believe His promises, and rest his whole existence, here and hereafter, upon His word. But let a man do this, and then God's law ceases to be like a flaming sword, turning every way, with too fierce an edge for human hearts to bear. It assumes the benignant glow of a revelation of perfect righteousness which God Himself will bestow on all who ask it at His hands.

      This belief is essentially bound up with a distinction on which great stress is laid in the Theses. It touches a point at once of the highest theological import, and of the simplest practical experience. This is the distinction between guilt and punishment; or, in other words, between personal forgiveness, and the remission of the consequences of sins. In our mutual relations, a son may be forgiven by his father, a wrongdoer by the person whom he has injured, and yet it may neither be possible nor desirable that the offender should be at once released from the consequences of his offence. But for all generous hearts, the personal forgiveness is infinitely more precious than the remission of the penalty, and Luther had learned from the Scriptures to regard our relation to God in a similar light. He realized that he must live, here and hereafter, in personal relationship to God; and the forgiveness of God, the removal from him, in God's sight, of the imputation and the brand of guilt, his reception into God's unclouded favour—this was the supreme necessity of his spiritual existence. If this were assured to him, not only had he no fear of punishment, but he could welcome it, whatever its severity, as part of the discipline of the divine and loving hand to which he had trusted himself. His deepest indignation, consequently, was aroused by preaching which, under official sanction, urged men to buy indulgence from punishment, of whatever kind, as practically the greatest spiritual benefit they could obtain; and he devoted his whole energy to assert the supreme blessing of that remission from guilt, of which the preachers of indulgences said practically nothing. It is this remission of guilt, this personal forgiveness, which is the essential element in the justification of which he spoke. It involves of course salvation from the final ruin and doom which sin, and the moral corruption of our nature, would naturally entail; but its chief virtue does not consist in deliverance from punishment, nor does it in any way derogate from the truth that we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad. What it taught men was to accept all God's judgements and discipline in perfect peace of soul, as being assured of His love and favour.

      No divine, in fact, has ever dwelt with more intense conviction on the blessedness of the discipline of suffering and of the Cross. The closing Theses express his deepest feelings in this respect, and a passage in one of his letters, written before the controversy about Indulgences had arisen, affords a most interesting illustration of the manner in which the principles he came forward to assert had grown out of his personal experience. Away, he says, in the 92nd and 93rd Theses, with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, 'Peace, peace,' and there is no peace. Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, 'The Cross, the Cross,' and there is no Cross. These somewhat enigmatic expressions are at once explained in the letter referred to, written to a Prior of the Augustinian order, on the 22nd of June, 1516.{1} He says:—

      "You are seeking and craving for peace, but in the wrong order. For you are seeking it as the world giveth, not as Christ giveth. Know you not that God is 'wonderful among His saints,' for this reason, that He establishes His peace in the midst of no peace, that is, of all temptations and afflictions.' It is said 'Thou shalt dwell in the midst of thine enemies.' The man who possesses peace is not the man whom no one disturbs—that is the peace of the world; he is the man whom all men and all things disturb, but who bears all patiently, and with joy. You are saying with Israel, 'Peace, peace,' and there is no peace. Learn to say rather with Christ: 'The Cross, the Cross,' and there is no Cross. For the Cross at once ceases to be the Cross as soon as you have joyfully exclaimed, in the language of the hymn,

      "'Blessed Cross, above all other,

      One and only noble tree.'"

      One other extract of the same import it may be well to quote from these early letters, as it is similarly the germ of one of the noblest passages in Luther's subsequent explanation of the Ninety-five Theses.{2} The letter was addressed to a brother Augustinian on the 15th of April, 1516. Luther says:—

      The cross of Christ has been divided throughout the whole world, and every one meets with his own portion of it. Do not you therefore reject it, but rather accept it as the most holy relic, to be kept, not in a gold or silver chest, but in a golden heart, that is, a heart imbued with gentle charity. For if, by contact with the flesh and blood of Christ, the wood of the Cross received such consecration that its relics are deemed supremely precious, how much more should injuries, persecutions, sufferings and the hatred of men, whether of the just or of the unjust, be regarded as the most sacred of all relics—relics which, not by the mere touch of His flesh, but by the charity of His most bitterly tried heart and of His divine will, were embraced, kissed, blessed, and abundantly consecrated; for thus was a curse transformed into a blessing, and injury into justice, and passion into glory, and the Cross into joy.{3}

      The few letters, in fact, in our possession, written by Luther before he came forward in 1517, are sufficient to afford the most vivid proof both of the mature thought and experience in which his convictions were rooted, and of their being prompted, not by the spirit of reckless confidence to which they have sometimes been ignorantly ascribed, but by the deepest sympathy with the lessons of the Cross. The purport of his characteristic doctrine of justification by faith was not to give men the assurance of immunity from suffering and sorrow, as the consequence of sin, but to give them peace of conscience and joy of heart in the midst of such punishments. What it proclaimed was that, if men would but believe it, they could at any moment grasp God's forgiveness, and live henceforth in the assured happiness of His personal favour and love. Of this blessing His promise was the only possible warrant, and like all other promises, it could only be accepted by Faith. Every man is invited to believe it, since it is offered to all for Christ's sake; but by the nature of the case, none can enjoy it who do not believe it.

      The ground, however, on which this promise was based affords another striking illustration of the way in which Luther's teaching was connected with that of the Middle Age. Together with that keen apprehension of the divine judgments and of human sin just mentioned, the awful vision of our Lord's sufferings and of His atonement overshadowed the whole thought of those times. St. Anselm, in the Cur Deus Homo, had aroused deeper meditation on this subject than had before been bestowed upon it; and in this, as in other matters, he is the type of the grand school of thought which he founded. As in his mind, so throughout the Middle Age, in proportion to the apprehension of the terrible nature of the Divine justice, is the prominence given to the sacrificial means for averting the Divine wrath. The innumerable Masses of the later Middle Ages were so many confessions of the deep-felt need of atonement; and formal as they ultimately became, they were in intention so many cries for forgiveness from the terrorstruck consciences of sinful men and women. Luther was a true child of the Church in his deep apprehension of the same need, and it was precisely because he realised it with exceptional truth and depth that he was forced to seek some deeper satisfaction than the offering of Masses could afford. He reasserted the truth that the need had been met and answered once for all by the Sacrifice on the Cross; and by proclaiming the sufficiency of that one eternal offering he swept away all the Sacrifices of Masses, while at the same time he provided the answer to the craving to which they testified. The doctrine of the Atonement, as asserted at the Reformation, is the true answer to that cry of the human conscience which the Church of the preceding age had vainly endeavoured to satisfy. The Sacrament, of which the Mass was a perversion, was thus restored to its true character on a pledge and an instrument of blessings bestowed by God, instead of a propitiatory offering on the part of men. The Cross of Christ, the favourite symbol of the mediæval Church, was thus held aloft by the Reformer in still deeper reality, as the central symbol of the Church's message, and as the one adequate ground for the faith to which he called men.

      Now the view of the Christian life involved in this principle of Justification by Faith found its most complete and beautiful expression in the Treatise On Christian Liberty, translated in this volume; and a brief notice of the teaching of that treatise will best serve to explain the connection between Luther's cardinal doctrine and the other principles which he asserted. As is explained at the close of the introductory letter to Leo X. (p. 101), he designed it as a kind of peaceoffering to the Pope, and as a declaration of the sole objects he had at heart, and to which he desired to devote his life. It is a small matter, he says, if you look to its bulk, but unless I mistake, it is a summary of the Christian life in small compass, if you apprehend its meaning. In fact, it presents the most complete view of Luther's theology, alike in its principles and in its practice, almost entirely disembarrassed of the controversial elements by which, under the inevitable pressure of circumstances, his other works, and especially those of a later date, were disturbed. Perhaps the only part of his works to compare with it in this respect is the precious collection of his House-postills, or Exposition of the Gospels for the Sundays of the Christian Year. They were delivered within his domestic circle, and recorded by two of his pupils, and though but imperfectly reported, they are treasures of Evangelical exposition, exhibiting in a rare degree the exquisitely childlike character of the Reformer's faith, and marked by all the simplicity and the poetry of feeling by which his mind was distinguished. It is by such works as these, and not simply by his controversial treatises or commentaries, that Luther must be judged, if we wish either to understand his inner character, or to comprehend the vast personal influence he exerted. But in its essence, the Gospel which he preached, the substance of what he had learned from the temptations, the prayers, the meditations—tentationes, orationes, meditationes—of his life as a monk, is sufficiently embodied in the short Treatise on Christian Liberty.

      The argument of the Treatise is summed up, with the antithetical force so often characteristic of great genius, in the two propositions laid down at the outset. A Christian man is the most free lord of all and subject to none: A Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one. The first of these propositions expresses the practical result of the doctrine of Justification by Faith. The Christian is in possession of a promise of God, which in itself, and in the assurance it involves, is a greater blessing to him than all other privileges or enjoyments whatever. Everything sinks into insignificance compared with this word and Gospel. Let us, he says, hold it for certain and firmly established that the soul can do without everything except the word of God, without which none of its wants are provided for. But, having the word, it is rich and wants for nothing, since it is the word of life, of truth, of light, of peace, of justification, of salvation, of joy, of liberty, of wisdom, of virtue, of grace, of glory, and of every good thing. If it be asked, What is this word? he answers that the Apostle Paul explains it, namely that it is the Gospel of God, concerning His Son, incarnate, suffering, risen, and glorified through the Spirit, the Sanctifier. To preach Christ is to feed the soul, to justify it, to set it free, and to save it, if it believes the preaching . . . For the word of God cannot be received and honoured by any works, but by Faith alone. This is the cardinal point around which not merely Luther's theology, but his whole life turns. God had descended into the world, spoken to him by His Son, His Apostles, the Scriptures, and the voice of the Church, and promised him forgiveness in the present, and final deliverance from his evil in the future, if he would but trust Him. The mere possession of such a promise outweighed in Luther's view all other considerations whatever, and absolute faith was due to it. No higher offence could be offered to God than to reject or doubt His promise, and at the same time no higher honour could be rendered Him than to believe it. The importance and value of the virtue of Faith is thus determined entirely by the promise on which it rests. These promises of God are words of holiness, truth, righteousness, liberty, and peace, and are full of universal goodness, and the soul which cleaves to them with a firm faith is so united to them, nay, thoroughly absorbed by them, that it not only partakes in, but is penetrated and saturated by all their virtue. For if the touch of Christ was health, how much more does that most tender spiritual touch, nay, absorption of the word, communicate to the soul all that belongs to the word? In this way, therefore, the soul through faith alone, without works, is by the word of God justified, sanctified, endued with truth, peace, and liberty, and filled full with every good thing, and is truly made the child of God . . . As is the word, such is the soul made by it; just as iron exposed to fire glows like fire on account of its union with the fire. Moreover, just as it is faith which unites husband and wife, so faith in Christ unites the soul to Him in indissoluble union. For if a true marriage, nay, by far the most perfect of all marriages, is accomplished between them—for human marriages are but feeble types of this one great marriage—then it follows that all they have becomes theirs in common, as well good things as evil things; so that whatsoever Christ possesses, the believing soul may take to itself and boast of as its own, and whatever belongs to the soul, Christ claims as his . . . Thus the believing soul, by the pledge of its faith in Christ, becomes free from all sin, fearless of death, safe from hell, and endowed with the eternal righteousness, life and salvation of its husband Christ.

      It is essential to dwell upon these passages, since, the force of the Reformer's great doctrine cannot possibly be apprehended as long as he is supposed to attribute the efficacy of which he speaks to any inherent quality in the human heart itself. It is the word and promise of God which is the creative force. But this summons a man into a sphere above this world, bids him rest upon the divine love which speaks to him, and places him on the eternal foundation of a direct covenant with God Himself in Christ. As in the Theses, so in this Treatise, Luther reiterates that it in no way implies exemption from the discipline of suffering. Yea, he says, the more of a Christian any man is, to so many the more evils, sufferings, and deaths is he subject; as we see in the first place in Christ the first-born and in all His holy brethren. The power of which he speaks is a spiritual one which rules in the midst of enemies, in the midst of distresses. It is nothing else than that strength is made perfect in my weakness, and that I can turn all things to the profit of my salvation; so that even the cross and death are compelled to serve me and to work together for my salvation. It is a lofty and eminent dignity, a true and Almighty dominion, a spiritual empire in which there is nothing so good, nothing so bad, as not to work together for my good, if only I believe.

      If we compare this language with those conceptions of spiritual terror by which Luther had been driven into a monastery, and under which, like so many in his age, he had groaned and struggled in despair, we can appreciate the immense deliverance which he had experienced. The Divine promise had lifted him out of darkness and out of the shadow of death, and had broken his bonds in sunder. It is this which is the source of the undaunted and joyful faith which marks the whole of the Reformer's public career. Whose heart, he exclaims, "would not rejoice in its inmost core at hearing these things? Whose heart, on receiving so great a consolation, would not become sweet with the love of Christ: a love to which it can never attain by any laws or works? Who can injure such a heart, or make it afraid? If the consciousness of sin, or the horror of death rush in

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1