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

we give the words of the Spirit to the hand of a translator who had not the
“mind of the Spirit." Luther, the man of faith, of fervent prayer, the man
who was as lowly toward God as he was inflexible toward men--Luther
was called to that work of translation in which generations of the past have
found a guide to heaven, and for which millions of our race, in generations
yet to come, will rise up and pronounce him blessed.
V. A11 these gifts and graces as a translator found their channel in
his matchless German. In this he stood supreme. The most German of
Germans, towering above the great, yet absolutely one of the people, he
possessed such a mastery of the tongue, such a comprehension of its
power, such an ability to make it plastic for every end of language, as
belonged to no other man of his time--to no other man since. His German
style is the model of the scholar, and the idol of the people.
The first Protestant Version of the New Testament. Its Early History.
The plan of a great human life is not something which the man
makes--it is something which makes the man. The wide and full-formed
plans which men make before they begin to act, are always failures. The
achievements of the great masters in the moral revolutions of our race have
invariably, at first, had the semblance of something fragmentary. The men
themselves were not conscious of what their own work tended to. Could
they have seen the full meaning of their own first acts, they would have
shrunk back in dismay, pronouncing impossible those very things with the
glorious consummation of which their names are now linked forever. So
was it with Luther in the work of the Reformation. The plan of it was not
in his mind when he began it. That plan in its vastness, difficulties, and
perils would have appalled him, had it been brought clearly before him. So
was it also in regard to his greatest Reformatory labor--the translation of
the Bible. At a period when he would have utterly denied his power to
produce that very translation which the genius and learning of more than
three centuries have failed to displace, he was actually unconsciously
taking the first step toward its preparation. Like all great fabrics, Luther's
translation was a growth.