The greatest stress is laid by the champion of the “enslaved will” on the alleged importance of this doctrine for the personal assurance of salvation.
It is this doctrine alone, he says, which can impart to timorous man the pacifying certainty that he will find a happy eternity at the hands of the Almighty, Who guides him; on the other hand, the assumption of free-will shows man a dangerous abyss, ever yawning, into which the abuse of his freedom threatens to plunge him. Better to trust to God than to our own free-will.
“Since God,” he writes, “has taken my salvation upon Himself and wills to save me, not by my own works but by His grace and mercy, I am certain and secure (‘securus et certus’) that no devil and no misfortune can tear me out of His hands.... This is how all the pious glory in their God.”[781]
With enthusiasm he describes this consciousness, carefully refraining, however, from looking at the other side, where perchance predestination to hell, even without free-will, may lie.[782] When it presses on him against his will he at once drowns the thought with the consoling words of St. Paul on the greatness of the inscrutable ways of God. His justice must indeed be unsearchable, otherwise there would be no faith, but in the light of eternal glory we shall realise what we cannot now understand.[783]
The not over-enthusiastic critic, whom we have frequently had occasion to quote, remarks: “Seeing that faith according to Luther is no act of our will, but a mere form given to it by God, ... Luther is right in saying, that the very slightest deviation from determinism is fatal to his whole position. His ‘fides’ is ‘fides specialissima.’” It is the assurance of personal salvation. But even though “combined with a courageous certainty of salvation, Luther’s views, taken as they stand, would still offer no consolation to the tempted, so that when Luther has to deal with such he is forced to put these views in the background.” The critic goes on to wonder: “How if the thought, which Luther himself is unable to overcome, should trouble a man and make him believe that he is of the number of those whom the ‘voluntas maiestatis’ wills to hand over to destruction?” His conclusion is: “The certainty of salvation, about which Luther is so anxious, cannot be reached by starting from his premises.”[784]
At the end of his “De servo arbitrio,” summing up all he had said, Luther appeals to God’s rule and to His unchangeable predestination of all things, even the most insignificant; likewise to the empire of the devil and his power over spirits. His words on this matter cannot be read without amazement.
“If we believe that Satan is the Prince of this world, who constantly attacks the Kingdom of Christ with all his might and never releases the human beings he has enslaved without being forced to do so by the power of the Spirit of God, then it is clear that there can be no free-will.”[785] Either God or Satan rules over men; to this pet thought he adds: “The matter stands simply thus ... when God is in us, the devil is absent and then we can will only what is good; but when God is not there, the devil is, and then we can will only what is evil. Neither God nor Satan leaves us with an indifferent will.”[786] “When the stronger of the two comes upon us,”[787] he says, “and makes a prey of us, snatching us away from our former ruler, we become servants and prisoners to such an extent that we desire and do gladly what he wills (‘ut velimus et faciamus libenter quæ ipse velit’). Thus the human will stands,” Luther continues, using a simile which has become famous, “like a saddle-horse between the two. If God mounts into the saddle, man wills and goes forward as God wills ... but if the devil is the horseman, then man wills and acts as the devil wills. He has no power to run to one or the other of the two riders and offer himself to him, but the riders fight to obtain possession of the animal.”[788]
With frightful boldness he declares this view to be the very core and basis of religion. Without this doctrine of the enslaved will, the supernatural character of Christianity cannot, so he says, be maintained; the work of redemption falls to the ground, because whoever sets up free-will cheats Christ of all His merit;[789] whoever advocates free-will brings death and Satan into the soul.[790]