at the works of love must bestow upon faith its form, its
content and its worth before God, it must have appeared as the
dawn of a new era (Galatians 3:13-35) when Luther in this
treatise declared, and with victorious certainty carried out the
thought, that it is true faith which invests the works, even the
best and greatest of works, with their content and worth before
God.

This preposition, which Luther here amplifies more clearly than
ever before, demanded nothing less than a breach with the whole
of prevalent religious views, and at that time must have been
perceived as the discovery of a new world, though it was no more
than a return to the dear teaching of the New Testament
Scriptures concerning the way of salvation. This, too, accounts
for the fact that in this writing the accusation is more
impressively repelled than before, that the doctrine of
justification by faith lone resulted in moral laxity, and that,
on the other hand, the fundamental and radical importance of
righteousness by faith for the whole moral life is revealed in
such a heart-refreshing manner. Luther's appeal in this treatise
to kings, princes, the nobility, municipalities and communities,
to declare against the misuse of spiritual powers and to abolish
various abuses in civil life, marks this treatise as a forerunner
of the great Reformation writings, which appeared in the same
year (1520), while, on the other hand, his espousal of the rights
of the "poor man"--to be met with here for the first time--shows
that the Monk of Wittenberg, coming from the narrow limits of the
convent, had an intimate and sympathetic knowledge of the social
needs of his time. Thus he proved by his own example that to take
a stand in the center of the Gospel does not narrow the vision
nor harden the heart, but rather produces courage in the truth
and sympathy for all manner of misery.

Luther's contemporaries at once recognized the great importance
of the treatise, for within the period of seven months it passed
through eight editions; these were followed by six more editions
between the years of 1521 and 1525; in 1521 it was translation
into Latin, and in this form passed through three editions up to
the year 1525; and all this in spite of the fact that in those
years the so-called three great Reformation writings of 1520 were
casting all else into the shadow. Melanchthon, in a
contemporaneous letter to John Hess, called it Luther's best
book. John Mathesius,