# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 01 11_S38
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— I was hovering, all but ready to say in despair, ah, of this the smug spirits who afterward attacked the pope's majesty with such great pride and presumption know but little.*)

*) Would to God that many a braggart, who here in this free country has a big mouth against the pope and in the same breath scolds Luther as a wretched priestling and lackey of princes, would take note of this. Had Luther not first attacked and overcome the papacy through God's Word "with great trembling and fear of conscience," as he himself confesses, then perhaps many such big-mouthed hero would still, with a very different fear — namely a cowardly trembling — be kissing the pope's slippers. (Note of the editor.)

When the pope saw that he could not by force suppress Dr. Luther's steadfast confession, he tried a gentler way, and in the year 1519 sent, through Sir von Miltitz, a consecrated golden rose to the elector as a token of his goodwill; but the recipient made nothing but mockery and sport of it. This papal envoy did not, as he himself confessed to Luther, trust himself to carry out his commission of bringing Luther to Rome even with 5,000 armed men; "for," he said to him, "I have learned so much on my journey that where one man stands on the pope's side, a good three others stand on your side against the pope." This Sir von Miltitz asked Luther kindly, in a conference held with him at Altenburg, that he would help toward peace, and promised that he would also move the pope to do the same. Dr. Luther gladly agreed to such a request, so far as he could do so with a good conscience and without harm to the truth. The envoy also summoned the shameless bawler Tetzel before him, commanded him to cease his indulgence trade, and put such a fright into him that he soon afterward died; no one took pity on the wretched man, who now saw himself forsaken by God and men, except Luther, who addressed a letter of comfort to him and preached to him too the grace of Christ.

Had human prudence been able to halt what God had resolved to carry out through Luther, then without doubt Miltitz would have been the man to do it. Luther himself is said to have remarked that if Miltitz's counsel had been adopted at the very beginning, the matter could have been settled; but that it ran instead into such an uproar was the fault of the Bishop of Mainz alone, whom his own cleverness and cunning deceived — cunning by which he had thought to suppress Luther's teaching while keeping the proceeds from the indulgence trade undiminished. For Luther did not by any means enter the struggle because he had recognized the Roman papacy in its antichristian nature. In a letter which, after the negotiations with Miltitz, he sent to the pope, he accordingly wrote: "I testify before God and all creatures that I have never intended, nor am I even now, in earnest, resolved to attack in any way the power of the Roman church and of Your Holiness, or to diminish anything by any kind of cunning. Indeed, I freely confess that this church's power is above all things, and that nothing, neither in heaven nor on earth, may be preferred to it, save Jesus Christ the Lord over all." It was thus Christ alone, with his pure Gospel, that Luther would not let be taken from him; and because he now saw this threatened by the preaching of indulgences, he therefore rose up. In this struggle, however, Luther first came to know the papacy, and only then did he first contend openly against it, when it became clear to him that the Gospel of Christ could not stand together with it, and that the pope was the greatest enemy of Christ.

Here we see that the Lutheran Reformation was not a work begun and carried out according to any human plan or counsel, but a work of God, which even its enemies, precisely through their resistance and their false wisdom, were compelled to further.

Exceedingly important for Luther's preparation for ever greater struggles was also the following, which occurred in the year 1519. For after he had read Holy Scripture with great diligence for seven years, so that he knew almost all of it by heart, and therefore had in particular a great desire to understand rightly the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, he found himself hindered in this by a single word alone, namely this: the righteousness of God, of which Paul says (Romans 1:17) that it is revealed in the Gospel. Until then he had understood by this righteousness that by which God punishes all sinners and the unrighteous. That God should reveal this righteousness not only in the Law but also in the Gospel, and thereby increase still further the terror of the Law and so rob sinners of all comfort — over this Dr. Luther was often dismayed in his troubled conscience. But when he nevertheless persisted day and night in pondering this saying, he at last recognized, through the words standing beside it, "the righteous shall live by his faith," by God's grace, that the righteousness of God revealed in the Gospel is none other than that which avails before God and consists in this, that God, out of grace and sheer mercy, justifies us through faith, or forgives sin. Of this he himself writes: "Here I felt at once that I was altogether born anew, and that I had now found a wide-open door into paradise itself; the dear Holy Scripture now looked upon me quite differently than it had before. — I began to hold the phrase 'the righteousness of God' dear and to treasure it highly as my very own most beloved and comforting word, and that passage in St. Paul truly became for me the very gate of paradise."*)

*) From this we may see how falsely Luther has commonly been portrayed in more recent times. For he has now mostly been depicted as a man who possessed an outstanding natural courage and who therefore, recognizing the abuses and superstition of the papal church, fearlessly attacked pope, bishops, priests, monks, etc. in biting writings, swept the people along with him by the fire of his eloquence, won over even the great ones of the earth by his heroic bearing, and thus won a victory over gross superstition that is glorious for all time, and broke the path for those who now again praise the old pagan doctrines as the true enlightenment of mankind. Hence it has unfortunately come about that even the most brazen unbelievers have almost always praised Luther. A Lutheran reads their praises with shame; for praise from the mouths of those who blaspheme the Most High is the greatest desecration that our dear Luther can still suffer even in the grave. God grant that it may become ever clearer to the scoffers as well, through the present portrayal of Luther in his true inward and outward form, that Luther did not go before them on their accursed path, but was a humbly believing Christian. Yes, come out then, you scoffers, as much as you please! Expel our Luther from your unclean guild as disgracefully as you are able! Do your worst, as far as it lies in your power. By nothing will Luther be better cleansed of the stain that has been hung upon him by the praise which the enemies of God and of Christ have so often bestowed on him against his thanks and ours. (Note of the editor.)

Among the noteworthy events of this year of Luther's life (1519) belongs also the well-known Leipzig Disputation. Duke George of Saxony, who was of papist mind and disturbed by the unheard-of doctrine now resounding from Wittenberg, arranged matters so that Dr. Eck, a zealous papist professor at the University of Ingolstadt, should publicly confer with Luther and Carlstadt, at that time a professor at Wittenberg, concerning the controversies that had broken out. For such a disputation Eck had issued theses that were set in opposition to Luther's theses on indulgences. Luther was therefore obliged to appear. The most important thing here was that Luther, on this occasion, was for the first time called upon to demonstrate before all the world that the pope is not, by divine right, the head of the church. This assertion, of whose truth Luther was already then utterly convinced, drew him ever more deeply into the struggle that, according to God's counsel, he was to fight out to the end.

In the year 1520 Dr. Luther wrote, among other things, the important book "On Christian Liberty," which he sent to the pope, and in which he demonstrated in particular that Christian liberty has its foundation in Holy Baptism, in that every baptized person therein swears obedience to the Triune God alone in all matters pertaining to God, and that therefore a baptized member of Christ owes obedience to no human ordinance that strives against the clear Word of God, and that if he renders such obedience, he thereby forfeits his share in the kingdom of heaven.
(To be continued.)

Contributions
toward the Defense of the Christian Religion against the Most Common Objections of the Scoffers and Blasphemers of Our Day.
(Continued.)

There are, in our day, scoffers who, when they write against Christianity, show themselves so vulgar and shameless that even the most unbelieving, who still hold to honor, decency, and morality, are ashamed to be classed together with them. Our age, however, has through unbelief sunk so low morally that even those who, among the more decent opponents of Christianity,