Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1521-1530.djvu/125

 Gracious Lord! Philip has asked me to write you* about the matter of the images, of which your Grace wrote to him, and although your Grace can gather my opinion well enough from my book,* I have wished to grant his request and do your Grace a service, and so write to you myself.

Your Grace may believe for certain that this clumsy way of dealing with the images' does not please me. Even though the situation were worse than it is, this way of abolishing them would do no good. There are some people who abuse wine and bread and silver and gold, and make idols of them, as St. Paul says, "Whose God is their belly" ; shall we, then, attack and revile all bellies and gold and wine? Then we should have to tear the sun and the moon and the stars out of heaven, for the prohibition of the Scriptures against the worship of these things is stricter than against the worship of anything else; nay, we could not allow any rulers, or even fathers or mothers, to live, for we honor them on bended knees as we do God, and oftentimes we fear and love them more than God Himself. But the true worship of God is in the heart, and consists of faith and love.

To be sure, I wish the images were out of the churches; not because of the danger that they will be worshiped (for I am afraid the saints are worshiped more than the images), but because of the false confidence men have that they are doing a good work and a service to God when they spend on wood and stone the money they ought to be applying to their neighbor's need.

But we must destroy this and other false beliefs by preach- ing, so that men's hearts may be drawn away from them by the pure Gospel; the external thing would then go to pieces of its own accord, because it helps nobody. So long, now, as men's hearts cleave to these things, we cannot tear them out without tearing men's hearts out too. We are Christians (sad to say!) in the breaking of images, the eating of meat and other outward things, but faith and love, which are the really powerful things, are never in evidence. I hope your Grace

> yon bfider Gestalt des Sacraments, etc, Vide supra, no. $44* P« > i9> n. x. ^ 2,e,, putting them out of the churches by force, as had been done in Witten- berg.

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