Life of Luther. Julius Köstlin
they had possibly been acquainted at the school at Magdeburg. The new life and activity awakened at Wittenberg attracted clever young monks more and more from a distance. The convent, not yet quite finished, had scarcely room enough for them, or means for their maintenance.
When in 1515 the associated convents had to choose at Gotha, on a chapter-day, their new authorities, Luther was appointed, Staupitz being still Vicar-General, the Provincial Vicar for Meissen and Thuringia. He obtained by this office the superintendence of eleven convents, to which in the next year he paid the customary visitation. In person, by word of mouth, and equally by letters, we see him labouring with self-sacrificing zeal for the spiritual welfare of those committed to his care, for the correction of bad monks, for the comfort of those oppressed with temptations, as also for the temporal and domestic, and even the legal business of the different convents.
In addition to his academical duties, he performed double service as a preacher. In the first place he had to preach in his convent, as he had already done at Erfurt. When the new convent at Wittenberg was opened, the church was not yet ready; and in a small, poor, tumbledown chapel close by, made up of wood and clay, he began to preach the gospel and unfold the power of his eloquence. When, shortly after, the town-priest of Wittenberg became weak and ailing, his congregation pressed Luther to occupy the pulpit in his place. He performed these different duties with alacrity, energy, and power. He would preach sometimes daily for a week together, sometimes even three times in one day; during Lent in 1517 he gave two sermons every day in addition to his lectures at the university. The zeal which he displayed in proclaiming the gospel to his hearers in church, was quite as new and peculiar to himself as the lofty interest he imparted to his professorial lectures on the Scriptures.
Melancthon says of these first lectures by Luther on the Psalms and the Epistle to the Romans, that after a long and dark night, a new day was now seen to dawn on Christian doctrine. In these lectures Luther pointed out the difference between the law and the gospel. He refuted the errors, then predominant in the Church and schools, the old teaching of the Pharisees, that men could earn forgiveness by their works, and that mere outward penance would justify them in the sight of God. Luther called men back to the Son of God; and just as John the Baptist pointed to the Lamb of God who bore our sins, so Luther showed how, for his Son's sake, God in His mercy will forgive us our sins, and how we must accept such mercy in faith.
In fact, the whole groundwork of that Christian faith on which the inner life of the Reformer rests, for which he fought, and which gave him strength and fresh courage for the fight, lies already before us in his lectures and sermons during those years, and increases in clearness and decision. The 'new day' had, in reality, broken upon his eyes. That fundamental truth which he designated later as the article by which a Christian Church must stand or fall, stands here already firmly established, before he in the least suspects that it would lead him to separate from the Catholic Church, or that his adopting it would occasion a reconstruction of the Church. The primary question around which everything else centred, remained always this—how he, the sinful man, could possibly stand before God and obtain salvation. With this came the question as to the righteousness of God; and now he was no longer terrified by the avenging justice of God, wherewith He threatens the sinner; but he recognised and saw the meaning of that righteousness declared in the gospel (Rom. i. 17, iii. 25), by which the merciful God justifies the faithful, in that He of His own grace re-establishes them in His sight, and effects an inward change, and lets them thenceforth, like children, enjoy His fatherly love and blessing. Luther, in teaching now that justification proceeds from faith, rejects, above all, the notion that man by any outward acts of his own can ever atone for his sins and merit the favour of God. He reminds us, moreover, with regard to moral works especially, that good fruits always presuppose a good tree, upon which alone they can grow, and that, in like manner, goodness can only proceed from a man, if and when, in his inward being, his inward thoughts, tendencies, and feelings, he has already become good; he must be righteous himself, in a word, before he works righteousness. But it is faith, and faith alone, which in the inward man determines real communion with God. Then only, and gradually, can a man's own inner being, trusting to God, and by means of His imparted grace, become truly renovated and purged from sin. Had Luther, indeed, made salvation depend on such a righteousness, derived from a man's own works, as should satisfy the holy God, the very consciousness of his own sins and infirmities would have made him despair of such salvation. Moreover, all the working of the Holy Spirit, and His gifts in our hearts, presuppose that we are already participators of the forgiving mercy and grace of God, and are received into communion with Him. To this, as Luther teaches after St. Paul, we can only attain through faith in the joyful message of His mercy, in His compassion, and in His Son, whom He has sent to be our Redeemer. Thus he speaks of faith, even in his earliest notes on the Psalter, as the keystone, the marrow, the short road. The worst enemy, in his sight, is self-righteousness; he confesses having had to combat it himself.
Herein also Luther found the theology of St. Augustine in accord with the testimony of the great Apostle. While studying that theology, his conviction of the power of sin and the powerlessness of man's own strength to overcome it, grew more and more decided. But St. Paul taught him to understand that belief somewhat differently to St. Augustine. To Luther it was not merely a recognition of objective truths or historical facts. What he understood by it, with a clearness and decision which are wanting in St. Augustine's teaching, was the trusting of the heart in the mercy offered by the message of salvation, the personal confidence in the Saviour Christ and in that which He has gained for us. With this faith, then, and by the merits and mediation of the Saviour in whom this faith is placed, we stand before God, we have already the assurance of being known by God and of being saved, and we are partakers of the Holy Spirit, who sanctifies more and more the inner man. According to St. Augustine, on the contrary, and to all Catholic theologians who followed his teaching, what will help us before God is rather that inward righteousness which God Himself gives to man by His Holy Spirit and the workings of His grace, or, as the expression was, the righteousness infused by God. The good, therefore, already existing in a Christian is so highly esteemed that he can thereby gain merit before the just God and even do more than is required of him. But to a conscience like Luther's, which applied so severe a standard to human virtue and works, and took such stern count of past and present sins, such a doctrine could bring no assurance of forgiveness, mercy, and salvation. It was in faith alone that Luther had found this assurance, and for it he needed no merits of his own. The happy spirit of the child of God, by its own free impulse, would produce in a Christian the genuine good fruit pleasing in God's sight. It was a long time before Luther himself became aware how he differed on this point from his chief teacher amongst theologians. But we see the difference appear at the very root and beginning of his new doctrine of salvation; and it comes out finally, based on apostolic authority, clear and sharp, in the theology of the Reformer.
And inseparably connected with this is what Melancthon said about the Law and the Gospel. Luther himself always declared in later days, that the whole understanding of the truth of Christian salvation, as revealed by God, depends on a right perception of the relation of one to the other, and this very relation he explained, shortly before the beginning of his contest with the Church, upon the authority of St. Paul's Epistles. The Law is to him the epitome of God's demands with regard to will and works, which still the sinner cannot fulfil. The Gospel is the blessed offer and announcement of that forgiving mercy of God which is to be accepted in simple faith. By the Law says Luther, the sinner is judged, condemned, killed; he himself had to toil and disquiet himself under it, as though he were in the hands of a gaoler and executioner. The Gospel first lifts up those who are crushed, and makes them alive by the faith which the good message awakens in their hearts. But God works in both; in the one, a work which to Him, the God of love, would properly be strange; in the other, His own work of love, for which, however, he has first prepared the sinner by the former.
Whilst Luther was prosecuting his labours in this path, he became acquainted in 1516 with the sermons of the pious, deep-thinking theologian Tauler, who died in 1361; and at the same time an old theological tract, written not long after Tauler, fell into his hands, to which he gave the name of 'German Theology.' Now for the first time, and in the person of their noblest representatives, he was confronted with the Christian and theological views which were commonly designated as the practical German mysticism of the middle ages. Here, instead of the value