Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 3

There was a short but glorious period--the years from 1517 to 1523--during which it seemed as though the spiritual and intellectual travail of the three preceding centuries was to consummate in the birth of a movement that would draw together and unify all the liberating forces which had slowly become available. The Humanists of the Renaissance, no less than Columbus, were finding a new world.[1] They had boldly travelled out beyond the {2} boundaries which the medieval mind had set to human interests, and had discovered that man was more than the abstract being whose "soul" had alone concerned ecclesiastics and schoolmen. Man, the Humanists saw, is possessed in his own right of great powers of reason. He is a creative and autonomous being, he has vast capacities for life and enjoyment to which the Church had failed to minister. They stood amazed at the artistic and literary culture, the political and intellectual freedom and the great richness of life which the newly discovered cla.s.sical literature revealed as having existed in the pre-Christian world, and at the wonderful comprehension of life revealed in the Gospels. With commendable pa.s.sion they proposed to refresh and reshape the world through the new models, the new ideals, and the new spirit which they had discovered.

First of all they would wipe out the old Augustinian cleavage which had carried its sharp dualism wherever it ran. They would no longer recognize the double world scheme--a divine realm set over against an undivine realm, the "sacred" set over against the "secular," the spiritual set over against the natural, the Church set against the world, faith set in contrast to reason, the spirit pitted against the flesh, "the other world" put in such light that "this world" by contrast lay dull in the shadow. Those who were broadened and liberated by the new learning found not only a new world in cla.s.sical literature, but they also found a new gospel in the Gospel. As they studied the New Testament doc.u.ments themselves and became freed from the bondage of tradition they discovered that the primitive message dealt with life and action rather than with theology. They found the key to the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Parables of Jesus, and they shifted the emphasis from doctrine to ethics. This change of emphasis quite naturally involved another change. It brought man into greater prominence, and the Church as an ecclesiastical system into less prominence; for life, they discovered, was settled in the teaching of Christ by the {3} att.i.tude of the will and by the formation of character, rather than by the mediation of a priesthood external to man. "I wish," Erasmus wrote to Capito in 1518, "that there could be an end of scholastic subtleties, or, if not an end, that they could be thrust into a second place and Christ be taught plainly and simply.

The reading of the Bible and the early Fathers will have this effect.

Doctrines are taught now which have no affinity with Christ, and only darken our eyes."[2] Again in 1521 he wrote to a friend, words which appear again and again in his letters: "It would be well for us if we thought less about our dogmas and more about the gospel,"[3] or, as he often puts it, "if we made less of dogmatic subtleties and more of Scripture." So far as Humanism was a religious force it was pushing toward a religion of the lay-type, with man himself--man with his momentous will--as the centre of interest.

Another important influence was slowly but pervasively filtering down into the life of the people and preparing the way for a religion of greater personal vitality and spiritual inwardness; I mean the testimony of the great mystics. One has only to study the life and writings of such a scholar as Nicolaus Chrypffs--generally called Cusa.n.u.s, or Nicholas of Cusa--who died shortly before Luther was born,[4] to see what a live force the mystical teaching was even in this period of Renaissance. G.o.d is for him, as for his great masters, Plotinus, Erigena, Eckhart, and Tauler, the infinite and indescribable subsoil of the universe, in whose Reality all the roots of life and all the reality of things are grounded. The soul, by nature spiritual and immortal, at its apex rises above the contradictions which lower knowledge everywhere meets and comes into possession, by a "learned ignorance," of Truth itself and into an unspeakable union with G.o.d.

But it was not merely among scholars like Nicholas that mysticism formed the elemental basis of life and thought; it had, through the circles of the {4} "Brothers of the Common Life,"[5] and through such masterpieces as the _Imitation of Christ_, the _Theologia Germanica_, and the Sermons of Eckhart and of John Tauler, become a part of the spiritual atmosphere which serious-minded men breathed. Every one of the men who belong in my list of "Spiritual Reformers" read and loved "the golden book of German Theology," and most of them knew the other writings of the great fourteenth-century mystics. There are unmistakable evidences of a subtle formative influence from these rich sources, which explains the simultaneous sporadic outbreak of similar views in widely sundered places.

There was, thus, abroad at the opening of the Reformation a deep yearning among serious people for a religion of inward experience, a religion based not on proof-texts nor on external authority of any kind, but on the native capacity of the soul to seek, to find and to enjoy the living G.o.d who is the Root and Sap of every twig and branch of the great tree of life. The general trend of this mystical tendency, as also of the Humanistic movement, was in the direction of lay-religion, and both movements alike emphasized the inherent and native capacity of man, whose destiny by his free choice is in his own hands.

There were, too, at work many other deep-lying tendencies away from the bondage and traditions of the past; aspiration for economic and social reforms to liberate the common people and give them some real chance to be persons--tendencies which all the Reformers treated in this book deeply felt and shared.

All these movements toward intellectual, spiritual, and social freedom seemed at first to find their champion in the dynamic hero, whose ninety-five theses on the door at Wittenberg shook the world awake in 1517. He was by birth and spirit a child of the people--"ein Kind des Volkes"--and he seemed to be a prophet, divinely called to voice their dumb aspirations. He possessed, {5} like all great prophets, a straightforward moral honesty and sincerity, an absolute fearlessness, a magnetic and commanding personality, an unusual mastery of the vernacular speech, and an abundant power of pathos, humour, and satire.

All the world loves a hero who can say in the face of real danger, "I would go forward to Worms if there were as many devils there as there are tiles on the roof!" or again, "I would go to Leipzig if it rained Duke Georges for nine days running!"[6]

He had, too, unusual religious depth and power which sprang, as in the case of the great mystics, from a profound inward experience. Luther, like St. Paul and St. Augustine, and many another spiritual guide of the race, came upon his supreme insights in sudden epoch-making revelations or illuminations by which he found himself on a new level, with the line of march shifted and all values altered. His conversion and dedication to religion was an instance of this type. So, too, was his discovery of the way of Faith. Legend has very likely coloured our accounts of this experience, but for purposes of valuation it is of little moment to us whether the dynamic flash came to him in his cell at Wittenberg as he was studying the Epistle to the Romans, or whether it came while he was climbing the penitential stairway in Rome.[7] When all legendary coverings are stripped away we have left an inner event of the first importance, a _live idea_ bursting into consciousness like a new star on the field of vision. By processes much deeper and richer than those of logical argument, his mind leaped to the certainty of infinite grace and forgiving love in G.o.d as revealed in Christ. In a word, this baffled and despairing monk, striving in vain to heap up merits enough to win {6} divine favour, suddenly discovered a new G.o.d who filled his whole world with a new light and freedom and joy. His name for this discovery was Faith ["Glaube"], but Faith in its first intention for Luther meant a personal experience or discovery of G.o.d, brought into full view and clear apprehension in Christ. "No one can understand G.o.d or G.o.d's Word," Luther once wrote, "unless he has it revealed immediately ["on Mittel"] by the Holy Ghost, but n.o.body can receive anything from the Holy Ghost unless he experiences it. In experience the Holy Ghost teaches as in His own school, outside of which nothing of value can be learned."[8]

Not only was Faith for Luther thus possessed of a mystical character as an inward discovery and as a personal experience which laid hold on G.o.d immediately, but it also owed its illuminating birth in his consciousness largely to the influence of the writings and the lives of the mystics. However suddenly the "revelation" seemed to burst into his mind, there had nevertheless been a long period of psychological gestation and preparation for it before the epoch-making moment finally came. He had already in his early convent days come under the spell of St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Gerson, and many another guide into the deep regions of inward personal religion, and his intimate friend, the Vicar-general Staupitz, had been to him in some sense a personal embodiment of this type of religion. But the German mystics of the fourteenth century, with their mighty experience and their extraordinary depth, carried him still farther in this direction. He was so enthusiastic over that beautiful anonymous cla.s.sic of mystical religion, the _Theologia Germanica_, that he twice edited and published it, declaring in his Preface that he had learned from it "more of what G.o.d and Christ and man and all things are" than from any other book except the Bible and St. Augustine. John Tauler, the great Dominican preacher of Strasbourg, impressed him no less profoundly. "Neither in the Latin nor the German language," he {7} wrote to Spalatin in 1516, "have I ever found purer or more wholesome teaching, nor any that so agrees with the Gospel." Both these great teachers of spiritual religion helped him to see that complete confidence in and surrender to the will of G.o.d is salvation--"Put off thy own will and there will be no h.e.l.l."

In Luther's earlier writings we come frequently upon pa.s.sages which reveal the way in which experience still saturates Faith for him, and which exhibit the mystical depth of his Christianity at this period.

Commenting on the phrase, "Christ liveth in me" (Gal. ii. 20), in his _Commentary on Galatians_[9] he says, "He [Christ] is my form, my furniture, and perfection, adorning and beautifying my faith as the colour, the clear light, the whiteness, do garnish and beautify the wall. Thus are we constrained grossly to set forth this matter. For we cannot _conceive_ that Christ is so nearly joined and united unto us as the colour or whiteness is unto the wall. But Christ thus joined and united unto me and abiding in me, liveth this life in me which now I live; yea, Christ Himself is this life which now I live. Wherefore Christ and I in this behalf are both one."[10] And in a famous pa.s.sage in the tract "On Christian Liberty," he declares that "Faith has the incomparable grace of uniting the soul to Christ as bride to husband, so that the soul possesses whatever Christ Himself possesses."

Not only was this Luther of the early period the hero of the people and the prophet of a deep and inward religion, he seemed also to have found, even more emphatically than had the Humanists, a far-reaching principle of individualism which took the key from the Church and put it into the hands of the Christian man himself. Salvation in its essence, he sees, is conferred upon no one from without. The soul is dependent for it upon no organization, no traditions, no dogma, no sacred performances. It is a transaction between the {8} individual soul and G.o.d, and the person who lays hold on G.o.d in living faith thereby has salvation, a.s.surance, and joy. With this principle of individualism there came naturally to Luther a new conception of the Church altogether.[11] It was for him, in ideal at least, a community or congregation ["Gemeinde"] of believers, each member a spiritual priest, ministering to the spiritual and social life of all: "I believe that there is on earth, wide as the world is, not more than one holy universal Christian Church, which is nothing else than the community or a.s.sembly of the saints. . . . I believe that in this community or Christendom, all things are common, and each one shares the goods of the others and none calls anything his own. Therefore all the prayers and good works of the entire community help me and every believer, and support and strengthen us at every time in life and in death."[12]

This ideal of a priesthood of believers, ministering to each other in mutual service and practising neighbourly love in daily life, would, if it had been actually carried into effect, have marked a great step in the direction in which the Humanists were going, namely, the transfer of the emphasis from dogma to life, from doctrine to ethics, from ecclesiasticism to personality. Luther's great discovery that personal faith is the only thing which counts toward G.o.d, and that love and service are the only things in the human sphere which have religious significance would have introduced, if it had been put full into play, a new era of personal freedom and a new stage in the progress of the Kingdom of G.o.d as a world-wide brotherhood of men engaged in mutual service.

{9}

II

But the young Luther of these glowing ideals is not the actual Luther of the Protestant Reformation, any more than the Augustine of the mighty spiritual experiences portrayed in the _Confessions_ is the St.

Augustine of history. The historical Luther had the hero-spirit in him in high degree; he had mystical depth and inward experience as we have seen, and he possessed the prophetic power of vision and forereach which makes him often seem far in advance of his time; but these dynamic traits were more than overbalanced by his fundamentally conservative disposition and by his determination not to go faster or farther than he could carry Germany, especially the n.o.bility, with him.

He was, in a very real sense, a child of his time, a product of medieval Europe, and he never succeeded in liberating himself from the tight swaddling-bands in which his youth was wrapped. He could not comprehend, as we shall see, the bold spirits who were dedicated to the task of reinterpreting Christianity in terms of the new age; he loved the old, in so far as it seemed to him unspoiled by apostacy and corruption, and he naturally kept reverting to the ancient dogma and the accepted theology of the old Church instead of leading the way into a fresh, vital, spiritual form of Christianity adapted to the social aspiration of the time.

In spite of the fact that Luther knew and loved the German mystics and had himself received a powerful inward experience of Christ as the bridegroom of his soul--an experience which quickened all the forces of his will and raised him to the rank of a world-hero--nevertheless his normal tendency was toward a non-mystical type of Christianity, toward a Christianity thoroughly based on Scripture, logically constructed out of concepts of the nature of G.o.d and Man, so ancient, sacred, and orthodox, that they seemed to him axioms of theology and capable of being formulated into a saving {10} system of truth, as universal and as unalterable as the multiplication table.

However unconscious Luther himself may have been of the shift of emphasis that was taking place in him as the movement progressed, the historical observer has no difficulty in noting the change from the Luther who is endeavouring to sound the deeps of life itself, and whose religion is the creation of the inward stream of life within him; and the Luther who wanders far afield from experience, draws curious conclusions from unverified concepts, piles text on text as though heaven could be scaled by another Pelion on Ossa, and once more turns religion back to the cooled lava-beds of theology. He never could succeed in getting the G.o.d of his heart's glowing faith into the theologies which he laboriously builded. As soon as he started constructing he invariably fell back upon the building-material which had already been quarried, and which lay at hand. His experimental Faith discovered a G.o.d of all Grace, but his inherited _concept_ of G.o.d, the G.o.d of the Old Testament and of theology, was vastly different, and remained to the end unrevolutionized by his heart's insight. This background conception of G.o.d comes to extreme expression in his _De servo arbitrio_ ["The Unfree Will"] of 1525: "This is the acme of faith, to believe that G.o.d who saves so few and condemns so many is merciful; that He is just who at His own pleasure has made us necessarily doomed to d.a.m.nation, so that . . . He seems to delight in the tortures of the wretched and to be more deserving of hatred than of love. _If by any effort of reason I could conceive how G.o.d, who shows so much anger and harshness, could be merciful and just, there would be no need of faith._" There could, in his thought, be no salvation for man, no hope, and no joy, until some way of escape was found from the stern judgments of this angry and wrathful G.o.d. This way of escape is found in what Luther calls "the Word of G.o.d," by which he means "the Gospel of G.o.d concerning His Son, incarnate, suffering, risen, and glorified."[13] {11} This Word of G.o.d is for him the sum total of "the promises that G.o.d is _for us_": "the pure Gospel" of a pardoning, forgiving G.o.d; the revelation in the Cross of Christ that no self-merit counts or is needed, but that on Christ's account G.o.d forgives the sinner and bestows His Grace upon him.

Speaking theologically, Faith consists in believing in the G.o.d whom Christ has historically revealed--believing without any doubt that He will be and will do to us according to the things which are said of Him in "the Word of G.o.d." It must be said that for Luther himself, Faith was an "active, powerful thing," "a deliberate confidence in the grace of G.o.d," which made him "joyous and intrepid" and "for which he could die a thousand deaths";[14] but there was always an irresistible tendency in the Lutheran teaching for faith to drop to the lower level of doctrine, and to consist in the acceptance of a scheme of justification.

This tendency was, I say, easy and irresistible just because Luther did not normally and naturally think of G.o.d as being inherently and essentially loving, gracious, tender, and forgiving, that is to say, _fundamentally a Father_ and in his deepest nature like the self-giving Christ. For him, as for so many other theologians, G.o.d _becomes_ forgiving and gracious on account of Christ's merit and righteousness and thus no longer imputes sin to us. Because of what Christ did, G.o.d now beholds us with an att.i.tude of mercy, grace, and forgiveness, and, on condition of our faith, imputes to us the righteousness of Christ.

Salvation is, thus, a plan by which we escape from the G.o.d of justice and wrath and have our dealings with a G.o.d who has become merciful because our sin has been balanced off by somebody else's merit and righteousness.

Not only did Luther continue this medieval fiction of G.o.d's nature and character, he had also always in mind a fict.i.tious and constructed "man." Man for him is a being devoid of "merit," a creature whose personal {12} goodness in and of itself is of no value. Even Faith itself, by which salvation is received, is not an att.i.tude or function of man's own will or reason. It is, like everything else connected with salvation, something divinely given, supernaturally initiated, a work of G.o.d, an _opus operatum_--"Mit unserer Macht ist nichts gethan"--and therefore "faith" and "reason" belong in totally different compartments of the human being. Nor, furthermore, when he is absorbed with his system, is salvation ever synonymous for him with an inwardly-transformed and spiritually-renewed self. Salvation means for him _certainty of divine favour_. It does not inherently carry with it and involve in its intrinsic meaning a new life, a joyous adjustment of will to the Will of G.o.d. If man is to attain to a moral transformation of life, he must receive an added gift of supernatural grace, that is, the power of sanctification through the Holy Spirit. This conception made it impossible for him to look for the coming of a divine kingdom by slow processes now at work in the world.

Luther did not intend to make the "Word of G.o.d" synonymous with the Scriptures, and in his great Prefaces to St. Paul's _Epistles_ he does not identify the two. The Word of G.o.d is, as we have seen, the revelation, the message, the gospel, of Grace through Christ Jesus, wherever expressed, enunciated, or preached. But the pledged Word of G.o.d found in the Scriptures seemed to him the main miracle of the ages, and as, in his contests with Zwickau "Prophets," "Anabaptists," and "Spiritualists," he found himself forced to produce a fixed touchstone of faith and a solid authority to take the place left vacant by the Old Church, he swung naturally toward the dogma of the absolute authority of Scripture, and he laid, without wishing to do so, the foundation for the view of the second generation of Protestantism, that the infallible Scripture is G.o.d's final communication to helpless man, and is the ultimate and only basis of authority in religion.

His conception of the sacraments in like manner, {13} because of his crude supernaturalism and his inadequate intellectual and spiritual penetration, drifted to a semi-medieval view. He intended to transform these ceremonies and to have them fit "the pure Word of G.o.d." In his primary _intention_ they were to be no longer objective works of grace, but were to have a subjective value only, a faith-significance. They were to be conceived as pictorial, symbolic ways of learning the one important truth of salvation--G.o.d's grace and forgiveness; for G.o.d deigns, he said, to speak to his immature creatures by signs and pictures. But the imperial sway of the past powerfully moved him; his own conservative disposition carried him along paths which an enlightened reason would not have taken, and the heat of the controversy often blinded him to some of the precious truths that had seemed clear to him in the creative period of Faith. In the bitter controversy with the "spiritual prophets" on the question of sacraments, he wrote words which seem strangely out of harmony with his earlier views and with his own experience: "External things in religion must precede internal experiences which come through [_i.e._ are mediated by] external things, for G.o.d has resolved to give n.o.body the internal gifts except through the external things. He will give n.o.body the Spirit and Faith without the use of external word and sign."[15]

Without meaning to surrender the precious jewel of a religion spiritually grounded, he once more introduced "the awful mystery" of the sacraments, and opened the door for the conception of the rite as an _opus operatum_--a grace of G.o.d objectively real. He retained infant baptism as _an efficacious act_, and, obsessed as he was by the literal words, _Hoc est corpus_--"this is my body"--he went back into the abandoned path of scholasticism,[16] and restored the mysterious and miraculous real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.[17] It is true, as Loofs has said, that {14} "Luther re-discovered Christianity as religion," but it is also unfortunately true as well that he lacked the insight, faith, and boldness of spirit to trust the people of his age and of the future with "Christianity as religion," and instead gave them a Christianity theologically constructed, deeply marred with residual superst.i.tions and mysteries, and heavily laden with the inheritances of dark and medieval ages.

III

There are two types of religious genius, both of which play great roles in history. There is first the genius who, inspired by the ideal of some earlier prophet, or made wise because he has himself discovered the trend of celestial currents, sees through the complex and tangle of his time, and forecasts a truth which all men in a happier coming age will recognize. When he has once seen it, this vision transforms all his ideas and aims, and spoils forever for him all meaner gains, all half truths, all goods which must be won through surrender of a possible better. He will be obedient to that vision regardless of all cost. He will bear witness to the full light which he has seen even though he can compel n.o.body else in the heedless world of his generation to see it. He may only cry in the wilderness, but at all events he will _cry_, and he will cry of that highest thing his heart knows.

There is, on the other hand, the genius who understands his own age like an open book. He is almost hypersensitive to the movings of his time. He feels the silent yearnings and strivings of the dumb mult.i.tudes about him; he antic.i.p.ates in his thought what the rest are incipiently thinking--he is the clear voice and oracle of the spirit of his age. He knows to a nicety how far his contemporaries will allow themselves to be carried. {15} He will not over-hurry, he will not outrun their possible speed, and he will sacrifice everything to carry his epoch with him toward the goal which he sees. He is contented to keep his roots deep in the past, and he tempers all his creative insights with a judicious mixture of the experience of the past and the ideas which time has made sacred. He will not satisfy the idealist who wants leaps, and he will not please the radical in any period; but if he is brave, wise, and sincere, and, withal, possessed of rare gifts of interpretation and unusual powers of leadership, he may be able to shape the course of history no less effectively, perhaps more surely, than the genius who insists upon an immediate march straight across country to Canaan the moment he glimpses it from his Pisgah.

Luther was a reformer of this second type. He was beset by very real limitations. Dr. McGiffert does not overstate the facts when he says: "He cared little for clearness and consistency of thought. A satisfactory and adequate world-view was not of his concern. Of intellectual curiosity he had scarcely any; of interest in truth for truth's sake none at all. . . . He remained entirely without intellectual difficulties, finding no trouble with the most extreme supernaturalism."[18] In many respects, as Harnack has insisted, his Christianity was a "medieval phenomenon."[19] Only in one thing was he supremely the master of his age and the hero of a new time--in his discovery of a way of Faith which makes a man "intrepid" even in the wreck of worlds and "in a thousand deaths." On the lower levels of life, where most of his work was done, he was strangely under the sway of the past, a distruster of reason, a restorer of ancient doctrine, a conservative in thought and action, a friend of rulers, a guardian, as far as he could be, of the _status quo_--a leader who anathematized radicals and enthusiasts and who staved off and postponed for nearly four hundred years the truly liberating and thoroughly {16} adequate reformation. He was determined to be the repairer of the "Old Church,"

not the builder of a "New Church," and he was resolved not to travel farther nor faster than the substantial men of his time considered safe and wise.

But less was perhaps more. There will at least always be those who think that the sinuous way of progress is the most certain way of advance. The slow incline, the gradual spiral, each wind of the curve "ever not quite" the old level--that is the most approved method of leaving an outworn past and of moving forward into a new stage of history. It may be so. It certainly is true that through Luther's _insight_ new reliance upon G.o.d came to men, new energy of faith was won, and by his work of repair, conservative and cautious though it was, in the long sweep of time a liberated Christianity has come, a vital social gospel has become effective, and great vistas of progress are opening out before the Church of Christ. But it is impossible to forget that other group--those men of the other type--who even in Luther's day saw the way straight across into Canaan, the men who saw their vision fade away unrealized, and who failed to behold the fruit of their spiritual travail largely because Luther misunderstood them, refused to give them aid and comfort, and finally helped to marshal the forces which submerged them and postponed their victory. We may not blame him, but it is not fair to these heroic souls that they should longer lie submerged in the oblivion of their defeat. I shall try in these pages to bring up into the light the principles and ideas which they proclaimed to Europe, perhaps ahead of their time.

[1] In the South the movement showed a tendency to drift back into a refined paganism. In the North, however, it was deeply Christian in interest, in feeling, and in its moral aspirations. Erasmus was by far the greatest figure and the most influential person in the group of Humanists of this latter type.

[2] Epistle CCVII.

[3] Epistle DLx.x.xVII.

[4] 1401-1464.

[5] Nicholas belonged to one of these circles. "The Brethren of the Common Life" are treated in my _Studies in Mystical Religion_, chap.

xiv.

[6] Letter to the Elector Frederick, March 5, 1522.

[7] The story that Luther, climbing the _Scala Santa_ in 1510, suddenly was impressed by the words, "The just shall live by faith," is based on a reminiscence of Luther's son Paul. Luther's own reference to the ascent of the _Scala Santa_ makes no allusion to any such experience.

He merely says that when he reached the top of the stairs, which he climbed in the hope of getting the soul of an ancestor out of Purgatory, he thought to himself, "Who knows whether this prayer will avail?" Luther began his lectures on _Romans_ in 1515, and his dynamic experience probably belongs near this date.

[8] Preface to the _Magnificat_ written in 1521.

[9] First given as Lectures in 1516-17, and published in 1519.

[10] A _Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians_.

[11] Dilthey says in _Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie_, Bd. v.

Heft 3, p. 358: "The Justification of which the medieval man had inward experience was the descending stream of objective forces upon the believer from the transcendental world, through the Incarnation, in the channels of the ecclesiastical inst.i.tutions, priestly consecration, sacraments, confession, and works. It was something which took place in connection with a super-sensible regime. The Justification by faith of which Luther was inwardly aware was the personal experience of the believer standing in the continuous line of Christian fellowship, by whom a.s.surance of the Grace of G.o.d is experienced in response to personal faith, an experience derived from the appropriation of the work of Christ."

[12] _Sammtliche Werke_ (Erlangen edition), xxii. p. 20.

[13] On Christian Liberty, _Primary Works_, p. 106.

[14] See his Preface to _The Epistle to the Romans_.

[15] _Wider die himlichen Propheten vom Sacrament_, ii. Anno 1525.

[16] See P. Loofs, _Dogmengeschichte_ (Vierte Auflage, 1906), pp.