“Small and insignificant as they [Luther’s and the preachers’ reforms] are, they have done more good in the Churches than all the Popes and lawyers with all their decrees.”[1173]
“No one has expounded St. Paul better” than you, Philip (Melanchthon). “The commentaries of St. Jerome and Origen are the merest trash in comparison with your annotations” (on Romans and Corinthians). “Be humble if you like, but at least let me be proud of you.” “Be content that you come so near to St. Paul himself.”[1174]
“In Popery such darkness prevailed that they taught neither the Ten Commandments, nor the Creed, nor the Our Father; such knowledge was considered quite superfluous.”[1175]
“The blindness was excessive, and unless those days had been shortened we should all have grown into beasts! I fear, however, that after us it will be still worse, owing to the dreadful contempt for the Word.”[1176]
“Before my day nothing was known,” not even “what parents or children were, or what wife or maid.”[1177]
“Such was then the state of things: No one taught, or had heard or knew what secular authority was, whence it came, or what its office and task was, or how it must serve God.”—“But I wrote so usefully and splendidly concerning the secular authorities as no teacher has ever done since Apostolic times, save perhaps St. Augustine; of this I may boast with a good conscience, relying on the testimony of the whole world.”[1178]
Similarly, “we could prove before the whole world that we have preached much more grandly and powerfully of good works than those very people who abuse us.”[1179]
“Not one of the Fathers ever wrote anything remarkable or particularly good concerning matrimony.... In marriage they saw only evil luxury.... They fell into the ocean of sensuality and evil lusts.” “But [by my preaching] God with His Word and by His peculiar Grace has restored, before the Last Day, matrimony, secular authority and the preaching office to their rightful position, as He instituted and ordained them, in order that we might behold His own institutions in what hitherto had been but shams.”[1180]
The Papists “know nothing about Holy Scripture, or what God is ... or what Baptism or the Sacrament.”[1181] But thanks to me “we now have the Gospel almost as pure and undefiled as the Apostles had it.”[1182]
“Not for a thousand years has God bestowed such great gifts on any bishop as He has on me; for it is our duty to extol God’s gifts.”[1183]