The Law of Spiritual Growth [pp. 608-640]

Law of Spiritual Growth.
body (of sin) is dropped," yet Luther himself, in a letter to
George Spenlein, dated April 7, 1516, not less than five years
after his return from Rome, declares, concerning the lingering
tendency which he still discovered in his nature to seek for a
personal righteousness and purity by his own good works, that
"he was yet struggling unceasingly against it, and had not yet
entirely triumphed over it." He has expressed the same sentiment in still clearer and stronger terms in his commentary on
the Epistle to the Galatians, first published in October, 1519.
In commenting on the twentieth verse of the second chapter,
he says to the young men to whom he was lecturing: "Ye are
not infected with these pernicious errors, wherein I have been
so nursled and so drowned even from my youth, that at the very
hearing of the name of Christ my heart hath trembled and
quaked for fear; for I was persuaded that he was a severe
judge. Wherefore it is to me a double travail and trouble to
correct and reform this evil: first to forget, to condemn, and to
resist this old grounded error, that Christ is a lawgiver and a
judge; for it always returneth and plucketh me back; then to
plant in my heart a new and a true persuasion of Christ that he
is a Justifier and a Saviour."
No comments of ours can add to the annihilating force with
which these simple facts encounter the statements upon which
our author rests the truth of his theory. That Luther was
fettered in many respects by the prejudices of early education,
which it was very difficult for him to throw off, is quite manifest from his own confessions quoted above; but, in regard to
his view of Christ as the great central sun of the gospel system, the one and only source of spiritual light and life, the eye
of his faith, when once fairly turned to behold him, was ever,
from the hour of his first believing apprehension, as clear and
keen as the eagle's. Isaac Taylor has truly said of him, that
"he threw off the errors of the church, article by article, from
the interior force of a spiritual vitality; or as a husk which
the ripened fruit rejects. The false principles and corrupt
usages in which he had been bred, and to which he had been
most firmly attached, shaled away one by one from his mind,
from his conduct, from his creed, as exuviae which the energy
of a genuine piety could no longer endure."
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