more determined, one might almost say, ruthless fashion, than by saying:  “I am dead to the Law, that I might live unto God”?  Paul is the person who thus speaks of the Law (Gal. 2, 19).  The Catholics have again taken hold of the wrong man when they assail Luther for repudiating the Law of God; they must start higher up; they will find the real culprit whom they are trying to prosecute among the holy apostles.  Yea, even the apostles will decline the honor of being the original criminals, they will pass the charges preferred against them higher up still; for what contemptuous terms were used by them in speaking of the Law were inspired terms which they received from God the Holy Ghost.  That contempt for the Law which Luther voices under very particular circumstances Luther has learned from his Bible and under the guidance of the Holy Ghost.

That contempt is a mark of every evangelical preacher to-day.  If ministers of the Gospel to-day do not denounce the Law when falsely applied, they betray a sacred trust and become traitors to Christ and the Church.  For every one who teaches men to seek their salvation in any manner and to any degree in their own works serves not Christ, but Antichrist.  This is such a fearful calamity that no terms should be regarded as too scathing in which to rebuke legalistic tendencies.  These tendencies are the bane and blight of Christianity; if they are not rooted out, Christianity will perish from off the face of the earth.  Workmongers are missionaries of the father of lies and the murderer from the beginning:  so far as in them lies, they slay the souls of men by their false teaching of the Law.

However, Luther reveals another attitude toward the Law.  At three distinct times in his public career he had to do with people who had assumed a hostile attitude to the Law of God.  If the contention of Luther’s Catholic critics were true, Luther ought to have hailed these occasions with delight and made common cause with the repudiators of the Law.  While he was at the Wartburg, a disturbance broke out at Wittenberg.  Under the leadership of Carlstadt, a professor at the University, men broke into the churches and smashed images.  Church ordinances of age-long standing were to be abrogated, the cloisters were to be thrown open, and a new order of things was to be inaugurated by violence.  Against the will of the Elector of Saxony, who had afforded Luther an asylum in his castle, Luther, at the risk of his life, came out of his seclusion, boldly went to Wittenberg, and preached a series of sermons by which he quelled the riotous uprising.  Even before his return to Wittenberg he had published a treatise in which he warned Christians to avoid tumult and violent proceedings.  The eight sermons which he preached to the excited people of Wittenberg are an invaluable evidence that Luther meant to proceed in the way of order.  The mass and the confessional would have been abolished at that time, had it not