Ib. p. 291.

Ambition and pride (said Luther), are the rankest poison in the Church when they are possessed by preachers.  Zuinglius thereby was misled, who did what pleased himself * * * He wrote, “Ye honorable and good princes must pardon me, in that I give you not your titles; for the glass windows are as well illustrious as ye.”

One might fancy, in the Vision-of-Mirza style, that all the angry, contemptuous, haughty expressions of good and zealous men, gallant staff-officers in the army of Christ, formed a rick of straw and stubble, which at the last day is to be divided into more or fewer haycocks, according to the number of kind and unfeignedly humble and charitable thoughts and speeches that had intervened, and that these were placed in a pile, leap-frog fashion, in the narrow road to the gate of Paradise; and burst into flame as the zeal of the individual approached,—­so that he must leap over and through them.  Now I cannot help thinking, that this dear man of God, heroic Luther, will find more opportunities of showing his agility, and reach the gate in a greater sweat and with more blisters ‘a parte post’ than his brother hero, Zuinglius.  I guess that the comments of the latter on the Prophets will be found almost sterile in these tiger-lilies and brimstone flowers of polemic rhetoric, compared with the controversy of the former with our Henry viii., his replies to the Pope’s Bulls, and the like.

By the by, the joke of the ‘glass windows’ is lost in the translation.  The German for illustrious is ‘durchlauchtig’, that is, transparent or translucent.

Ib.

  When we leave to God his name, his kingdom and will, then will he also
  give unto us our daily bread, and will remit our sins, and deliver us
  from the devil and all evil.  Only his honor he will have to himself.

A brief but most excellent comment on the Lord’s Prayer.

Ib. p. 297.

  There was never any that understood the Old Testament so well as St.
  Paul, except only John the Baptist.

I cannot conjecture what Luther had in his mind when he made this exception.

Chap.  XXVII. p. 335.

I could wish (said Luther) that the Princes and States of the Empire would make an assembly, and hold a council and a union both in doctrine and ceremonies, so that every one might not break in and run on with such insolency and presumption according to his own brains, as already is begun, whereby many good hearts are offended.

Strange heart of man!  Would Luther have given up the doctrine of justification by faith alone, had the majority of the Council decided in favor of the Arminian scheme?  If not, by what right could he expect OEcolampadius or Zuinglius to recant their convictions respecting the Eucharist, or the Baptists theirs on Infant Baptism, to the same authority?  In fact, the wish expressed in this passage must be considered as a mere flying thought shot out by the mood and feeling of the moment, a sort of conversational flying-fish that dropped as soon as the moisture of the fins had evaporated.  The paragraph in p. 336, of what Councils ought to order, should be considered Luther’s genuine opinion.