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Updated: July 13, 2025
The great question of all time pressed upon his mind with peculiar force, "What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" And it shows that religious life in Germany still burned in many a heart, in spite of the corruptions of the Church, that a young man like Luther should seek the shades of monastic seclusion, for meditation and study.
That this is care or love of them, we cannot pretend, whenas, in those popish places where the laity are most hated and despised, the same strictness is used over them. Wisdom we cannot call it, because it stops but one breach of licence, nor that neither: whenas those corruptions, which it seeks to prevent, break in faster at other doors which cannot be shut.
Man's weakness is such that he is unable of himself to conquer either spiritual enemies without, or his own corruptions within. Through Christ needed aid is offered to him; he is invited to the throne of grace, and assured that he shall not seek in vain, but "obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.
And, again, considering the corruptions of these, and the affections incidental to the heavens and the earth, I at length appeared to myself so unskillful in these speculations that nothing could be more so.
The difficult passages in the plays, then, are to be regarded either as corruptions, or else as phenomena in the natural history of Imagination, whose study will enable us to arrive at a clearer theory and better understanding of it.
That made Islam, and is the secret of its power to-day, amidst its many corruptions. Because these wild desert tribes were all stiffened, or I might say inflamed, by that profound conviction, the sovereign will of God, they came down like a hammer upon that corrupt so-called Christian Church, and swept it off the face of the earth, as it deserved to be swept.
So that, if I have seemed to speak lightly of those doings that are now denominated corruptions, I hope it was discerned therein that I did so rather to intimate that such things were, than to consider them as in themselves commendable.
But we must admit that the corruptions of the sacred text are insignificant in comparison with the deviations that we find in our own lives from the original thought of God concerning us. Registered and chronicled in heaven is the mind and will of our Father about us; registered and chronicled also are the defects which have marred the handiwork of God in the soul.
As these historic generalizations dissolve in national decay, art breaks up in individual portrayal of less embracing types; the glorification of the Greek man in Achilles yields place to the corruptions of the homunculus; and in general the literature of nationality gives way to the unmeaning and transitory literature of a society interested in its vices, superstitions, and sensations.
In the thirteenth century, as the Scholastic philosophy was reaching its fullest development, we notice the establishment of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the withholding the cup from the laity, and the necessity of confession as the condition of receiving the communion, which corruptions increased amazingly the power of the clergy over the minds of superstitious people, and led to still more flagrant evils, like the sale of indulgences and the perversion of the doctrine of penance, originally enforced in order to aid the soul to overcome the tyranny of the body, but finally accepted as the expiation for sin; so that the door of heaven itself was opened by venal priests only to those whom they could control or rob.
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