The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

vessel to hold a little of the living water, and became a fountain through
which it sprang to refresh and gladden others. As with Luther, so was it
with Melanchthon, his noble coworker, with Zwingle in Switzerland, at a
later period with Calvin in France, with Tyndale and Cranmer in England,
with Knox in Scotland. The Word of God was the fire in their souls which
purified them into Christians--and the man who became a Christian was
already unconsciously a Reformer.
Luther’s Bible
The fire which the Word of God kindled in the Reformers they could
not long conceal. "They believed--therefore they spoke." One of the first,
as it was one of the greatest, revelations of the revived power of the Word
of God, was, that it sought an audience for itself before the people, in their
own language. Every new Pentecost revives the miracle and wonder of the
first Pentecost: men marvelling, say of the apostles to whom the Holy
Ghost has again given utterance: "We do hear them speak in our tongues
the wonderful works of God." Foremost in this imperishable work of the
Sixteenth Century, was the man who was first and chief in more works,
and in greater ones, than ever fell to any of our race, in the ordinary
vocation of God. Great monuments has the Sixteenth Century left us of the
majesty revealed by the human mind, when its noblest powers are
disciplined by study, and sanctified by the Spirit of God. Great are the
legacies of doctrinal, polemical, historical and confessional divinity which
that century has left us. Immortal are its confessions, its devotional,
practical, hymnological and liturgical labors. It was the century of
Melanchthon's Loci and of Calvin's Institutes, of the Examen of Chennitz,
and the Catalogus Testium of Flaccius, and of the Magdeburg Centuries.
Its confessions are still the centres of great communions, its hymns are still
sung by devout thousands, its forms still mould the spirit of worship among
millions. But its grandest achievement was the giving of the Bible to the
nations, and the centre and throne of this achievement is LUTHER'S
TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE, the greatest single work ever
accomplished by man in the department of theological literature. The
Word of God, in whole or in part, has been translated into several hundred
of