This is the only true salvation, every other is fictitious.  It teaches man both to face the fearful odds against him because of his corruption, and to relish all the more the points in his favor by reason of God’s redeeming and regenerating grace.  It starts its work with crushing man’s pride and self-confidence utterly, and hurling him into the abyss of despair, but it lifts him out of despair with a mighty power that breaks the power of evil in him.  This change is brought about in such a gentle, tender way that the sinner has no sensation of being coerced into the new life by some farce which he cannot resist.  It wins him over to God and his Christ in spite of his resistance, and makes out of his unwilling heart a willing one, which gladly coincides with the leadings of grace.

The Roman scheme of salvation might be called the ostrich method:  it teaches men the foolish strategy of the bird of the desert, which hides its head in the sand when it sees an enemy approaching, and then imagines the enemy does not exist.  Original sin may be disputed out of the Bible by a false interpretation, but it is not thereby ruled out of existence.  When face to face with his God—­if no sooner, then in the hour of death—­every man feels that he is utterly corrupt and worthless, and he will curse any teacher that caused him to believe otherwise.  Free will is not created by assertions.  Let the apostles of free will only try, and they will find out that their freedom is nil.  Catholics denounce Luther for having declared the free will of man to be nothing than a word without substance:  we hear the sound when the word is pronounced, and grasp its grammatical meaning, but we do not realize it in ourselves.  Every person, however, who has truly come to know himself will side with Luther, or rather with the Bible.  Furthermore, to the same extent to which the Roman view exalts man’s natural powers for good, it lowers and limits the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and begets a false confidence and security that is rudely shaken when the first slip and fall occurs in the person’s Christian life.  He has never really laid hold of the grace of God, because he has not been taught to trust only to the grace of God to lead and preserve him in the way of life.  He will begin to distrust the Gospel as a very inefficient instrument, and this will lead him to become indifferent to it, and finally fall away from it entirely.  A real danger of apostasy and despair exists wherever the Roman dogma of man’s natural free will is proclaimed.

It is, however, doing Luther a flagrant injustice when he is made to deny that man has no longer any natural reason and will in the secular affairs of this life.  Luther used to divide the entire life of man into two hemispheres, the upper embracing man’s relation to God, holy things, the interests of the soul here and hereafter, and the lower, embracing the purely human, temporal, and secular interests of man.  It is only in the higher hemisphere that