In man, because he is “depraved by sin, all works, all words, all thoughts, in a word his whole life, is wicked and ungodly. If God is to work and live in him all these vices and this wickedness must be stamped out.” This he calls “the keeping of the day of rest, when our works cease and God alone acts within us.” We must, indeed, “resist our flesh and our sins,” yet “our lusts are so many and so diverse, and also at times under the inspiration of the Wicked One so clever, so subtle and so plausible that no man can of his own keep himself in the right way; he must let his hands and feet go, commend himself to the Divine guidance, trusting nothing to his reason.... For there is nothing more dangerous in us than our reason and our will. And this is the highest and the first work of God in us, and the best thing we can do, for us to refrain from work, to keep the reason and the will idle, to rest and commend ourselves to God in all things, particularly when they are running smoothly and well.” “The spiritual Sabbath is to leave God alone to work in us and not to do anything ourselves with any of our powers.”[311] He harks back here to that idea of self-surrender to the sole action of God, under the spell of which he had formerly stood: “The works of our flesh must be put to rest and die, so that in all things we may keep the ghostly Sabbath, leaving our works alone and letting God work in us.... Then man no longer guides himself, his lust is stilled and his sadness too; God Himself is now his leader; nothing remains but godly desires, joy and peace together with all other works and virtues.”[312]
Though, according to the peculiar mysticism which speaks to the “unschooled laity” out of these pages, all works and virtues spring up of themselves during the Sabbath rest of the soul, still Luther finds it advisable to introduce a chapter on the mortification of the flesh by fasting.
Fasting is to be made use of for the salvation of our own soul, so far but no further, as or than each one judges it necessary for the repression of the “wantonness of the flesh” and for the “putting to death of our lust.”[313] We are not to “regard the work in itself.” Of corporal penance and mortification, and fasting in particular, he will have it, that they are to be used exclusively to “quench the evil” within us, but not on account of any law of Pope or Church. Luther dismisses in silence the other motives for penance recommended by the Church of yore, in the first place satisfaction for sins committed and the desire to obtain graces by reinforcing our prayers by self-imposed sacrifices.[314]
He fancies that a few words will suffice to guard against any abuse of the new ascetical doctrine: “People must beware lest this freedom degenerate into carelessness and indolence ... into which some indeed tumble and then say that there is no need or call that we should fast or practise mortification.”[315]
When, in the 3rd Commandment, he comes to speak of the practice of prayer one would naturally have expected him to give some advice and directions concerning its different forms, viz. the prayer of praise, thanksgiving, petition or penitence. All he seems to know is, however, the prayer of petition, in the case of temporal trials and needs, and amidst spiritual difficulties.[316]
Throughout the writing Luther is dominated by the idea that faith in Christ the Redeemer, and in personal salvation, must at all costs be increased. At the same time he is no less certain that the Papists neither prayed aright, nor were able to perform any good works because they had no faith.
His exhortations to a devout life (some of them fine enough in themselves, for instance, what he says on the trusting prayer of the sinner, on the prayers of the congregation which cry aloud to heaven and on patience under bitter sufferings), are, as a rule, intermingled to such an extent with polemical matter, that, instead of a school of the spiritual life, we seem rather to have before us the turmoil of the battlefield.[317] To understand this we must bear in mind that he wrote the book amidst the excitement into which he was thrown by the launching of the ban.
In the somewhat earlier writing on the Magnificat, which might equally well have served as a medium for the enforcing of virtue and which in some parts Luther did so use,[318] we also find the same unbridled spirit of hatred and abuse. Nor is it lacking even in his later works of edification. The most peaceable ethical excursus Luther contrives to disfigure by his bitterness, his calumnies and, not seldom, by his venom.
In the Sermon on Good Works as soon as he comes to speak of prayer he has a cut at the formalism of the prayer beloved of the Papists;[319] he then proceeds to abuse the churches and convents for their mode of life, their chanting and babbling, all performed in “obstinate unbelief,” etc. At least one-half of his instruction on fasting consists in mockery of the fasting as practised by the Papists. His anger, however, reaches its climax in the 4th Commandment, where he completely forgets his subject, and, losing all mastery over himself, wildly storms against the spiritual authorities and their disorders.[320] The only allusion to anything that by any stretch of imagination would be termed a work, is the following:[321] The rascally behaviour of the Church’s officers and episcopal or clerical functionaries “ought to be repressed by the secular sword because no other means is available.” “The best thing, and the only remaining remedy, would be, that the King, Princes, nobles, townships and congregations should take the law into their hands, so that the bishops and clergy might have good cause to fear and therefore to obey.” For everything must make room for the Word of God.
“Neither Rome, nor heaven, nor earth” may decree anything contrary to the first three Commandments.