Rome, Reform and Reaction; Four Lectures on the Religious Situation (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ... you hear tell of the simplicity of the Gospel and the lightness of its yoke, remember these words, "Except your righteousness, your Christian ideal of righteousness, exceed the laborious righteousness of scribe, priest, and Pharisee, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven." The simplicity of Christianity is very searching and very severe. VI The severity of the Gospel was for Luther so great that it broke the soul to pieces and ground it to dust to make the new man. The Church was severe in a way, and its way to perfection was laborious; but it was an unsearching severity, spread thinly over a wide area of life. It was split into a multitude of demands, observances, mortifications, persecutions of human nature. It was ascetic severity. The severity of the Gospel is pointed; it goes to the heart; it is the severity of a sword; it is concentrated, intense, deadly. It is thorough with the old man and his sin, as it is thorough with the new man and his salvation. Luther's work, while it made faith simpler in one way, yet made it much more hard, exacting, and powerful than it had been before. It was the simplicity of concentration, which is intense and irresistible. Luther's work was one of concentration from functions to acts, from acts to the soul. He compelled religion from acts which were mere offices to an act which taxed the whole will and soul, the decisive act of faith and its surrender. His work was a vast concentration; as it withdrew religious effort from a wide range of detailed conduct, it made it converge upon the central man in such a way that the amount of his religion was changed into its quality. There are substances that under intense pressure lose their former constitution, as it were, and from an expansive gas...