# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1916_S49
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1916. 49

not of himself conceived the thought of attacking the Pope, and thought about the ways by which he could best do it, with the best prospect of success. When Luther appeared, he thought not at all of attacking the papacy. God himself, when the right time had come, when he wanted to redeem his people from this bondage, prepared his Reformer for himself. And we know how God did this. He led Luther to a deep knowledge of his own corruption, but above all to a deep knowledge of the saving grace of God in the Gospel. This Gospel, whose power he had experienced so vividly in himself, he proclaimed as a called preacher and Doctor of Holy Scripture to his Christians, defended it by word and writing, and thereupon the papacy came in his way with its indulgence trade and other abuses. So it came to the struggle. With the Gospel Luther fought, through the Gospel he overcame the Pope and rescued countless contemporaries from the bondage and tyranny over consciences of the Pope and led them to the blessed liberty of the children of God. This Luther himself also stated again and again. He did not give himself the honor, but God alone and the Gospel. "It is not our work," he writes, for example, X, 368, "that is now going on in the world. It is not possible that a man should begin and carry on such a thing alone. It has come so far without my thought and counsel; it shall also go forth well without my counsel, and the gates of hell shall not hinder it. Another Man it is who drives the little wheel; the papists do not see him, and lay it to our charge; but they shall soon find out. . . . He must be destroyed without hand and by the mouth alone; nothing else avails." Again and again Luther stresses that he is not fighting against the Pope with worldly weapons, with external power and force, or with the weapons of human reason, but solely with the weapons of the divine Word, with the Gospel. So we read in one of those famous eight sermons which Luther preached at Wittenberg when he returned thither from the Wartburg and found the whole city in uproar because people had begun to reform by external force: "Summa summarum: I will preach it, I will say it, I will write it, but compel and press by force I will no one; for faith wants to be willing and unforced and to be accepted without compulsion. Take an example from me. I have stood against the Pope, indulgences and all papists, but with no force, with no violence, with no storming, but I have driven, preached and written God's Word alone; otherwise I have done nothing. The same Word, while I slept, or was of good cheer, has accomplished so much that the papacy has become so weak and powerless that no prince or emperor ever could break so much from it. I did not do it;