made that article of the Christian faith with which the Church either stands or falls the issue of his lifelong conflict with Rome—­the article of the justification of a sinner before God.  It is, therefore, convenient to review the misrepresentations which Luther has suffered from Catholic writers because of his teaching on the subject of justification at this early stage in our review, though in doing so a great many things will have to be anticipated.

Catholic writers charge Luther with having perverted the meaning of justifying faith.  Luther held that justifying faith is essentially the assurance that since Christ lived on earth as a man, labored, suffered, died, and rose again in the place of sinners, the world en masse and every individual sinner are without guilt in the estimation of God.  “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them.” (2 Cor. 5, 19.) To this reconciliation the sinner has contributed nothing.  It has been accomplished without him.  He cannot add anything to it.  God only asks the sinner to believe in his salvation as finished by Jesus Christ.  To believe this fact does not mean to perform a work of merit in consideration of which God is willing to bestow salvation on the believer, but it means to accept the work of Christ as performed in our place, to rejoice therein, and to repose a sure confidence in this salvation in defiance of the accusations of our own conscience, the incriminations which the broken Law of God hurls at us, and the terrors of the final judgment.  The believer regards himself as righteous before God not because of any good work that he has done, but because of the work which Christ has performed in his place.  The believer holds that, when God, by raising Christ from the dead, accepted His work as a sufficient atonement for men’s guilt and an adequate fulfilment of the divine Law, He accepted each and every sinner.  The believer is certain that through the work of his Great Brother, Christ, he has been restored to a child relationship with God and enjoys child’s privileges with his Father in heaven.  The idea that he himself has done anything to bring about this blessed state of affairs is utterly foreign to this faith in Christ.

Catholic writers assert that the doctrine which we have just outlined is not Scriptural, but represents the grossest perversion of Scripture.  They say this doctrine originated in “the erratic brain of Luther.”  Luther “was not an exact thinker, and being unable to analyze an idea into its constituents, as is necessary for one who will apprehend it correctly, he failed to grasp questions which by the general mass of the people were thoroughly and correctly understood. . . .  He allowed himself to cultivate an unnecessary antipathy to so-called ’holiness by works,’ and this attitude, combined with his tendency to look at the worst side of things, and his knowledge of some real abuses then prevalent in the practise of works, doubtless contributed