United States or San Marino ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There will be no more Caesar Borgias, no more Luthers and Mohammeds, no more Joanna Southcotts, no more Comstocks.
My mother may bring me to birth, but it is I who am born, and no me else." "Thus no one is saved by the faith of another, but solely by his own faith." The treatise is found in Weimar Ed., II, 724-737; Erlangen Ed., XXI, 229-244; St. Louis Ed., X, 2113-2116; Clemen and Leitzmann, Luthers Werke, I, , 185-195. Mount Airy, Philadelphia. Erl. Ed., op. var. arg., III, 394-410. Erl. Ed., XXVI, 256-294.
There have been thousands of evident cooperations waters divided and burned by celestial fire, Pharaohs rebuked, Ninevehs warned, exiles recalled, Jerusalems rebuilded, Luthers upheld, preachers of today changed from waning, not desired, half-over-the-dead-line ministers into vigorous, flaming heralds of the Gospel, who possessed tenfold power to what they had before; we ourselves personally helped in manifest and undeniable instances, and so have come to believe that God can do anything, anywhere, if he can get the right kind of a man.
Why is it that Protestantism, after carrying everything before it in a time of comparatively little knowledge and little freedom, should make no perceptible progress in a reasoning and tolerant age; that the Luthers, the Calvins, the Knoxes, the Zwingles, should have left no successors; that during two centuries and a half fewer converts should have been brought over from the Church of Rome than at the time of the Reformation were sometimes gained in a year?
Research in the official court-dockets at Salzungen, the seat of the judicial district to which Moehra belonged, shows that brawls were frequent in that village, and some Luthers were involved in them.
So long as histories are written of separate individuals, whether Caesars, Alexanders, Luthers, or Voltaires, and not the histories of all, absolutely all those who take part in an event, it is quite impossible to describe the movement of humanity without the conception of a force compelling men to direct their activity toward a certain end.
For you wish to disquiet yourself about your God, just as if He were not Almighty, and able to create ten Martin Luthers for one old one drowned perhaps in the Saale, or fallen dead by the fireplace, or on Wolf's fowling-floor. Leave me in peace with your cares; I have a better protector than you and all the angels. He my Protector lies in the manger, and hangs upon a Virgin's breast.
The slave lad who became the Old World's greatest statesman, the shepherd boy who became its noblest King, and the young farmer who stood among its mightiest prophets, are but the types and forerunners of the Luthers and Lincolns and Garfields of more modern days.
She lost no time in catching and burning all dissenters, real or suspected; and as many of these were honest persons who lived among the people, and were known and approved by them, and as they uniformly endured their martyrdom with admirable fortitude and good-humor, falling asleep in the crackling flames like babes at the mother's breast, Puritanism received an advertisement such as nothing since Christianity had enjoyed before, and which all the unaided Luthers, Melanchthons and Calvins in the world could not have given it.
All prophets and reformers till to-day have had the same feeling. Men who can do such work as the Jeremiahs, Pauls, Luthers, Cromwells, can do, are never forward to begin it. Self-confidence is not the temper which God uses for His instruments. He works with 'bruised reeds, and breathes His strength into them. It is when a man says 'I can do nothing, that he is fit for God to employ.
Word Of The Day