Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1521-1530.djvu/138

 Liberty, 1521, for which he was nunnioned before the Inquisition. Qemen, op. cit,, ReaUncyk^ and RGG.

Greeting to the Christian Reader. If in scholastic theology nothing else were wanted than eloquence and genius, I should never have dared to move a feather or to peep (as Isaiah^ says) lest I should judge the mote in another's eye and not see my own beam/ for I confess that I am a barbarian and of slender genius. But truly, when I compare scholastic with sacred theology, that is with Holy Scripture, it seems full of impiety and vanity and dangerous in all ways to be put before Christian minds not forearmed with the armor of God. So I raised up my horn, and, desirous of my brother's salvation as well as of my own. I agitated against this kid ' of the goats perhaps more boldly and more caustically than ten- der ears can bear, or than beseems my profession. But as I aever cared for my reputation, I have found it easy to throw it away by either harshness or mildness, provided only that the salvation of Christians were thereby helped. So some diseases which cannot be cured by emolients must be cured by the knife. But let it pass — I deserve no indulgence. Let all my books perish, if the booksellers will hear my entreaty. My glory is nothing. Yet I rejoice that others arise and are found enemies of this impiety, and that the treasures of Ger- many are brought to light. The Lord's will is done by their hands. In truth, I see that the purer theology has been and is hidden among the Germans. Recently John Tauler* came out, a quondam Thomist, if I may call him so, but a writer the like of whom I think has hardly been born since the age of the Apostles. Joined to him is a tract of like sort and language, the German Theology." After these Wessel* of

ilsaiali X, 14. •Matthew vii, 5.

•Not Euiser is meant, but Aristotle, so^alled by Luther in his Asterisks, Weimar i, 291, as the type of scholasticism. Kohler, loc. cit. Cf. Daniel vii, 8ff.


 * On Tauler cf. VoL I, p. 41. His sermons appeared at Augsburg, 1508.

• The German Theology, an anonymous tract edited by I^uther first in 151 6 in part and fully in 1518.

•Weasel Gansfort. (1420-89), of Groningen, a Brother of the Common Ufe, who anticipated the doctrine of salvation by grace so exactly that Luther said: "Had I read Weasel previously my opponents would have t»aid that I had taken every- tkiny from him, so closely do our spirits agree/* Two volumes of his writings appeared in issa. RGG. Luther wrote a preface to his Farrago August JO^ IS^'* Weimar, x*. 316.

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