that Law continually.  Even in that false view of the Law which they had been taught, and which did not at all exhaust its meaning, there was no ease of conscience, no assurance of divine favor, no rest for their souls.  Christ with His gracious summons told them, in effect:  You must forget the Law and the ordinances of your elders and your miserable works of legal service.  You must turn your back upon Moses.  In Me, only in Me, is your help.

Moses himself never conceived his mission to be what the Catholics declare it to be by their doctrine of salvation by faith plus works.  Moses directed his people to the greater Prophet who was to come in the future, and told them:  “Unto Him shall ye hearken” (Deut. 18, 15).  Jesus was pointed out to the world as that Prophet of whom Moses had spoken, when the Father at the baptism and the transfiguration of Christ repeated from heaven the warning cry of Israel’s greatest teacher under the old dispensation (Matt. 3, 17; 17, 5).

But was it necessary, in speaking of the inability of the Law to save men, to use such strong and contemptuous terms as Luther has used?  Yes.  The Catholics do not seen to know in what strong terms the Bible has rejected the Law as a means of salvation.  Paul denounces the Galatians again and again as “foolish,” “bewitched,” and bastards of a bondwoman, because they think they will be saved by their works done according to the Law (chap. 3, 1. 3; 4, 21 ff.).  He calls them godless infidels, slaves, silly children still in their nonage, because they imagine that they become acceptable to God by their own righteousness (chap. 4, 9; 3, 23 ff.).  Yea, he reprobates their legal service when he says:  “As many as are of the works of the Law are under the curse” (chap. 3, 10).  How contemptuous does it not sound to hear him call the legal ordinances which the Galatians were observing “beggarly elements” (chap. 4, 9), and the law a “schoolmaster” (chap. 3, 24), that is, a tutor fit only for little abecedarians who cannot be treated as full-grown persons that are able to make a right use of their privileges as children and heirs of God.  Why do not the Catholics turn up their nose at Paul, as they do at Luther, when Paul calls all his legal righteousness “dung” (Phil. 2, 8), or when he speaks slightingly of the observance on which the Colossians prided themselves as “rudiments of the world” (Col. 2, 20)?  Why does he call the Law “the handwriting of ordinances that has been blotted out” (Col. 2, 14) but to declare to the Colossians that they are to fear the Law as little as a debtor fears a canceled note that had been drawn against him?  What was it that Paul rebuked Peter for when he told him that he was building again the things which they both had destroyed (Gal. 2, 18)?  Mark you, he says, “destroyed.”  Why, it was this very thing for which Luther is faulted by Rome, the Law as an instrument for obtaining righteousness before God.  Could a person renounce the Law in