and merit damnation, so there are preachers afraid, actually afraid, to preach the full Gospel, without any limiting clauses and provisos.  Just as there are teachers of Christianity who promptly put on the soft pedal when they reach the critical point in their public deliverances where they must reprove sin, and who hate intensive preaching of the Ten Commandments, so there are evangelical teachers who dole out Gospel grace in dribbles and homeopathic doses, as if it were the most virulent poison, of which the sinner must not be given too much.  Luther tells Melanchthon:  If you are afraid to draw every stop in the organ when you play the tune of Love Divine, All Love Excelling, you had better quit the organ.  There are some sinners in this world that will not understand your faint evangelical whispers; they need to have the truth that Christ forgives their sins, all their sins,—­their worst sins, blown into them with all the trumpets that made the walls of Jericho fall.  If Melanchthon did not require a strong faith in the forgiving grace of God for himself, he needed it as a teacher of that grace to others; he must, therefore, familiarize himself with the immensity and power of that grace.

In conclusion, it should be noted that the Catholic writers who express their extreme disgust at the immoral principles of Luther belong to a Church whose theologians have made very questionable distinctions between venial sins and others.  Papal dispensations and decisions of Catholic casuists, especially in the order of the Jesuits, have startled the world by their moral perverseness.  Yea, the very principles of probabilism and mental reservation which the Jesuits have espoused are antiethical.  In accordance with the principle last named, “when important interests are at stake, a negative or modifying clause may remain unuttered which would completely reverse the statement actually made.  This principle justified unlimited lying when one’s interest or convenience seemed to require it.  Where the same word or phrase has more than one sense, it may be employed in an unusual sense with the expectation that it will be understood in the usual. [This is called “amphibology” by them.] Such evasions may be used under oath in a civil court.  Equally destructive of good morals was the teaching of many Jesuit casuists that moral obligation may be evaded by directing the intention when committing an immoral act to an end worthy in itself; as in murder, to the vindication of one’s honor; in theft, to the supplying of one’s needs or those of the poor; in fornication or adultery, to the maintenance of one’s health or comfort.  Nothing did more to bring upon the society the fear and distrust of the nations and of individuals than the justification and recommendation by several of their writers of the assassination of tyrants, the term ‘tyrant’ being made to include all persons in authority who oppose the work of the papal church or order.  The question has been much discussed, Jesuits always