The subversive doctrines which he had now at length fully developed in the quiet of his monastery held the first place among the factors which drove him onwards; in so far as these doctrines were in very truth his own production, born of his own heart and brain amid incredible anxieties and struggles, we may, nay must, say that it was a new and independent task which he undertook, and that his was the labour and his the results. What Luther with his subversive theology propounded from that time forward, what he, with his chief doctrine of justification by faith and the appropriation of salvation, began to set in the place of the old teaching, was “in no way the necessary product of the various factors which had assisted in his education, but rather something new, original and never before known, only to be accounted for by Luther’s own extraordinary genius.”[1043] In this sense the entire lack of originality with which he has frequently been reproached must also be relegated to the domain of legend. In attacking him to-day, the tactics which commended themselves to the older theologians, who knew little of his history, or at any rate of the course of his interior development, should no longer be resorted to. Their plan was to range all his doctrines under some one or other of the older heresies—even though only the germ of his errors was to be found in former ages—and then sapiently to declare he had merely gone about collecting his errors from the various olden heretics. It is quite a different matter that like errors are so frequently met with in history even in most unexpected quarters; it is due to their many-sidedness and to their windings and aberrations. The truth which is vouched for by the Church pursues its own straight, undeviating path, from the earliest disciples of Christ down to our own times, and in its quiet, immutable splendour is infinitely more original than any error, however new and modern it may claim to be.
END OF VOL. I.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Luther, von Hartmann Grisar, S.J. (Herdersche Verlagshandlung, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1911-12).
[2] “Historien,” Bl. 3´.
[3] Account from the mouth of Luther’s friend, Justus Jonas (anno 1538), made public by P. Tschackert in “Theolog. Studien und Kritiken,” Jahrg., 1897, p. 578.
[4] Ibid.
[5] “Colloquia,” ed. Bindseil, 3, p. 187.