# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S71
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1884. 69

held ourselves more enlightened than the dogmaticians. No, it happens only because Scripture stands higher for us.) "If you had therefore cited what you adduced from his letter to Jubaianus from a canonical writing of the apostles or prophets, I should have absolutely nothing to reply to it. But since what you adduce is not canonical, I do not accept, according to the liberty to which the Lord has called us, even what a man has held contrary to it, whose praise I cannot attain, with whose many writings I do not compare my own, whose genius I esteem highly, in whose speech I delight, whose love I admire, whose martyrdom I revere." (Contra Crescorianum Grammaticum partis Donati. Lib. II. c. 31. 32. Vid. Opp. ed. a Benedict. Tom. XII, p. 543 sq.)

A true shining example of a humble Christian, yet subject in matters of faith to God alone!

Dr. M. Luther owes it next to God to Augustine that he too stood just so. The same writes: "How and why Origen, Jerome and some more fathers have also drawn and forced this saying: 'The letter kills, the spirit gives life,' in such a way, I let stand for now; they have drawn many more sayings so, in order to resist the Jews and heretics, as everybody knows publicly and can show. But one should let that pass to their credit and not follow them in it, as the unclean beasts do, who make no distinction in the fathers' work and teaching, snatch up everything they find, so long that they follow them only in the places where the dear fathers stumbled as men, and let them go where they acted well; as I could easily prove in all teachings and lives that are now held to be the very best." (Answer to the superchristian, etc., book of Goat Emser. From the year 1521. XVIII, 1606.)

Luther, however, judges not only so modestly of the church fathers in order down to the sixth century; he judges the teachers of the so-called Middle Ages too, who are no longer called church fathers but scholastics (so-called school teachers, that is, professors at universities), in the same manner. Such a scholastic was, for example, St. Bernard, a pious monk, a man of deep experience in his intercourse with the Saviour, a truly pious holy man, who shines like a star in the darkest time, in the twelfth century. Of him Luther writes among other things: "St. Bernard (died 1153) says he would rather drink from the well itself, less from the little brook. As all men do: where they can drink from the spring, they forget the little brook, except that they find it useful to use the little brook to come to the well. Thus Scripture must remain master and judge; but where one follows the little brooks too much, they lead us too far from the well, and both lose taste and strength, until they flow away into the salt sea