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

justification by faith. May we not hope that after the warfare of life,
Charles, the most ambitious of the Emperors of his age, and Luther, the
greatest disturber of his plans of ambition, have reached a common
consummation.
Luther characterized.
It is a hopeful thing that the German heart, through all religious and
civil convulsions, has remained true to the memory of Luther. Romanists
have emulated Protestants in his praise; Rationalists have seemed to
venerate him whilst they were laboring to undo his work. After three
centuries of birth-throes, Germany feels that she has given to the world no
second Luther.
Lessing.
The womb of Time bears such fruit but once in thousands of years.
"In such reverence do I hold Luther," says LESSING, “that I rejoice in
having been able to find some defects in him; for I have, in fact, been in
imminent danger of making him an object of idolatrous veneration. The
proofs, that in some things he was like other men, are to me as precious as
the most dazzling of his virtues."--"What a shame," says Hamann, (1759,)
"to our times, that the spirit of this man, who founded our Church, so lies
beneath the ashes! What a power of eloquence, what a spirit of
interpretation, what a prophet!"--"We are not able to place ourselves even
up to the point from which he started."
Heine.
"He created the German language," says HEINE. "He was not only
the greatest, but the most German man of our history. In his character all
the faults and all the virtues of the Germans are combined on the largest
scale. Then he had qualities which are very seldom found united, which we
are accustomed to regard as irreconcilable antagonisms. He was, at the
same time, a dreamy mystic and a practical man of action. His thoughts
had not only wings, but hands. He spoke and he acted. He was not only
the tongue, but the sword of his time. When he had plagued himself all day
long with his doctrinal distinctions, in, the evening he took his flute and
gazed at the stars, dissolved in melody and devotion. He could be soft as a
tender maiden. Sometimes he was wild as the storm that uproots the oak,
and then again he was gentle as the zephyr that dallies with the