of all intelligent men, even of intelligent pagans, and no philosophy of free will will wipe it out.  The wise farmer, after he has finished sowing his field, says, “God willing, I shall reap a good crop.”  The wise merchant says, “God willing, I shall be in New York to-morrow.”  And God approves of this wise reservation which causes the prudent to submit their most ordinary actions to divine revision.  He says in Jas. 4, 13-16:  “Go to now, ye that say, To-day or to-morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain, whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow.  For what is your life?  It is even a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.  For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.  But now ye rejoice in your boastings:  all such rejoicing is evil.”  Let Luther’s Catholic critics wrestle with these and similar texts of Scripture, with these and similar facts of daily life.  Luther has rightly declared the sovereignty of God a mighty ax and thunderbolt that shatters the assertion of human free will.

We have shown that Luther is no fatalist.  His warning, on the one hand, not to disregard the secret will of God, and on the other, not to seek to find it out, is a masterpiece of wisdom.  In view of the absolute sovereignty of God and man’s absolute dependence upon it, Luther urges man to go to work in his chosen occupation in childlike reliance upon God.  He is to employ to the utmost capacity all his God-given energies of mind and body and work as if everything depended on his industry, strength, prudence, thrift, planning, and arranging.  Having done all, he is to say:  Dear Lord, it is all subject to Thy approval.  Thou art Master; do Thou boss my business.  If Thou overrulest my plans, I have nothing to say; Thou knowest better.  Not my will, but Thine, be done.

This is the whole truth in a nutshell that Luther drives home in that part of his reply to Erasmus which treats of contingency.  If ever statements garbled from the context are unfair to the author, what the Catholics are constantly doing in quoting Luther on the Bondage of the Will is one of the most glaring exhibitions of unfairness on record.  This treatise of Luther deserves to be studied thoroughly and repeatedly, and measured against the facts of the common experience of all men.  For a profitable study of this treatise there is, moreover, required a very humble mind, a mind that knows its sin, and is sincere in acknowledging its insufficiency.

The generation of Luther and the generations after him have had this particular teaching of Luther before them four hundred years.  What effect has it had on human progress in every field of secular activity in Protestant lands?  Has it created that chaos and confusion which Catholics claim it must inevitably lead to?  Quite the contrary has happened.  And now let the patrons of the theory of human free will measure their own success as recorded by history against that of Protestants.