Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1507-1521.djvu/96

 have erred I will willingly confess my error without shame.

Jt if I see you excited and bitter against me, I will try,

ith the counsel of good teachers and of friends, to defend

Jiyself, as much as truth urges, in those studies which are

most regarded throughout Christendom. But I prefer to

avoid this business. It will be yours to consider this, and

after due consideration to advance. Farewell, Carlstadt,

whom I truly wish to fare well.

65. LUTHER TO JOHN STAUPITZ.

Enders, L 196. Wittenberg, May jo, 15 18.

This letter is one preface to Luther's Resolutions, a defence of the Theses, reprinted Weimar, i. 522. Another prefatory letter was to Leo X., translated, Smith, pp. 44fiF.

I remember, reverend Father, among those happy and wholesome stories of yours, by which the Lord used wonderfully to console me, that you often mentioned the word "penitence,"* whereupon, distressed by our consciences md by those torturers who with endless and intolerable pre- cept taught nothing but what they called a method of con- fession, we received you as a messenger from Heaven, for penitence is not genuine save when it begins from the love of justice and of God, and this which they consider the end and consummation of repentance is rather its commencement.

Your words on this subject pierced me like the sharp arrows of the mighty,' so that I began to see what the Scriptures had to say about penitence, and behold the happy result: the texts all supported and favored your doctrine, in so much that, while there had formerly been no word in almost all the Bible more bitter to me than "penitence" (although I zealously simulated it before God and tried to express an asstuned and forced love), now no word sounds sweeter or more pleasant to me than that. For thus do the commands of God become sweet when we understand that they are not to be read in books only, but in the wounds of the sweetest Saviour.

^''Poenitentia" means both "penance" and "repentance," it was apparently taken ia tbe former sense by the "torturers" and in the latter by Staupits. Preserved Snith, op. cii., p. 40.


 * Ptalm cxx. 4.

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