'Praise be to God the Creator, who out of a dead world makes all alive again. See those shoots how they burgeon and swell. Image of the resurrection of the dead! Winter is death—summer is the resurrection. Between them lie spring and autumn, as the period of uncertainty and change. The proverb says—
Trust not a day
Ere birth of May.
Let us pray our Father in heaven to give us this day our daily bread.'
'We are in the dawn of a new era,' he said another time; 'we are beginning to think something of the natural world which was ruined in Adam's fall. We are learning to see all round us the greatness and glory of the Creator. We can see the Almighty hand—the infinite goodness—in the humblest flower. We praise Him—we thank Him—we glorify Him—we recognise in creation the power of His word. He spoke and it was there. The stone of the peach is hard; but the soft kernel swells and bursts it when the time comes. An egg—what a thing is that! If an egg had never been seen in Europe, and a traveller had brought one from Calcutta, how would all the world have wondered!'
And again:—
'If a man could make a single rose, we should give him an empire; yet roses, and flowers no less beautiful, are scattered in profusion over the world, and no one regards them.'
There are infinite other things which I should like to tell you about Luther, but time wears on. I must confine what more I have to say to a single matter—for which more than any other he has been blamed—I mean his marriage.
He himself, a monk and a priest, had taken a vow of celibacy. The person whom he married had been a nun, and as such had taken a vow of celibacy also.
The marriage was unquestionably no affair of passion. Luther had come to middle age when it was brought about, when temptations of that kind lose their power; and among the many accusations which have been brought against his early life, no one has ventured to charge him with incontinence. His taking a wife was a grave act deliberately performed; and it was either meant as a public insult to established ecclesiastical usage, or else he considered that the circumstances of the time required it of him.