Page:Thirty-five years of Luther research.djvu/77

Rh velopment, a development, that had to pass through all stages of alleged certainty of gaining salvation and the bitter knowledge that external guarantees do not allay doubt until it found its way to the truly blessed certainty of God's paternity through Jesus Christ.

Braun visualizes the internal development of Luther up to 1521, wherefore we must return to his work later on. We must, however, in this connection, consider that Braun very definitely brings out that it was not weakness for carnal sins that contaminated Luther all these years, and brought about the end of his relation with Rome. On the contrary, it was his eminently tender conscience, the very opposite of the "Kautschukconscience" trained by the Church, his conscience which would not allow itself to be soothed either through the at that time customary reference to the "Monk's Baptism" (i. e., to the power of order to make up for sins) or through sacramental magic, but which would trouble itself before and after dispensation of grace because of the consciousness of inherent lusts, until the New Testament conception of grace, with its mercy of God, that reckons no sins to the faithful, came into its own, and through faith in it peace entered the heart. Braun says "the Luther personality that becomes apparent to us through his theological endeavors is none other than the one we already know from his mode of life. His unbending veracity that is never guilty of distortion of justice, that by the scholastic distinctions of sins of omission, of weaknesses, of excusable ignorance, the scholastic assertion of the validity of good intentions, and whatever the rest of softening phrases, may be called, does not allow its moral convictions to be confused, but abides by the dictum of the conscience and calls sin sin, — his excellent psychological understand-