Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1521-1530.djvu/351

 Again, we never said that the body and blood of Christ are a matter of indifference or do not confer salvation, but we have said that they must be preached by the Word as the true food of the soul. The Spirit, therefore, gives them a third warning. Let them beware, for they have fallen so far that they have made an unprofitable and negligible matter out of a thing that is necessary, and then falsely impute this teaching to us.

In a word, either they or we must be ministers of Satan. There is no room here for negotiation or mediation. Each party must confess what it believes. We pray them not to conceal it from the common people that they disagree with us. This is the fourth warning of the Spirit, for He does not thus dissimulate. If they go on with their pretending it is our duty to confess that we differ from one another, that their spirit and ours are in conflict, for what agreement has Christ with Belial?* We gladly embrace peace, so long as the peace with God, which Christ has won for us, is pre- served.

The arguments which they advance are worthless. We do not admit the figure of speech " and they do not prove it, and I pray that they yield this point to the Spirit, Who is warning them. It must be proved that in this place the word "is" must be taken to mean "signifies." They prove that elsewhere in the Scriptures it means "signifies." Everybody knows that. Since they are evidently blind to the meaning of other passages of Scripture, they ought to be afraid that they may be in error regarding this one also. They are blind, for instance, regarding the passage which says, "The rock was Christ."* For Paul does not speak of a material rock, but of a spiritual. For the passage reads, "They drank of the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ." Was not this rock, namely the spiritual rock, Christ? How then is the word "was" in this passage to be interpreted as "signified"? Is not this evidently a mistake?

Again, there is a manifest mistake regarding that other pas-

^11 Corinthians ▼!, 1$,

figurative sense, and meant "This signifies my body." But vide infra,
 * Zwingli taught that the words "This is my body" were to be taken in a
 * I Corinthians x, 4.

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