alatians, ch. iii. verse 19, and ch. ii. verse
20, abridged.

That is, the more literally lost you are, the more literally you are
the very being whom Christ's sacrifice has already saved. Nothing in
Catholic theology, I imagine, has ever spoken to sick souls as straight
as this message from Luther's personal experience. As Protestants are
not all sick souls, of course reliance on what Luther exults in calling
the dung of one's merits, the filthy puddle of one's own righteousness,
has come to the front again in their religion; but the adequacy of his
view of Christianity to the deeper parts of our human mental structure
is shown by its wildfire contagiousness when it was a new and
quickening thing.

Faith that Christ has genuinely done his work was part of what Luther
meant by faith, which so far is faith in a fact intellectually
conceived of. But this is only one part of Luther's faith, the other
part being far more vital. This other part is something not
intellectual but immediate and intuitive, the assurance, namely, that
I, this individual I, just as I stand, without one plea, etc., am saved
now and forever. [132] Professor Leuba is undoubtedly right in
contending that the conceptual belief about Christ's work, although so
often efficacious and antecedent, is really accessory and
non-essential, and that the "joyous conviction" can also come by far
other channels than this conception. It is to the joyous conviction
itself, the assurance that all is well with one, that he would give the
name of faith par excellence. "When the sense of estrangement," he
writes, "fencing man about in a narrowly limited ego, breaks down, the
individual finds himself 'at one with all creation.' He lives in the
universal life; he and man, he and nature, he and God, are one. That
state of confidence, trust, union with all things, following upon the
achievement of moral unity, is the Faith-state. Various dogmatic
beliefs suddenly, on the advent of the faith-state, acquire a character
of certainty, assume a new reality, become an object of faith. As the
ground of assurance here is not rational, argumentation is irrelevant.
But such conviction being a mere casual offshoot of the faith-state, it
is a gross error to imagine that the chief practical value of the
faith-state is its power to stamp with the seal of reality certain
particular theological conceptions.[133] On the contrary, its value
lies solely in the fact that it is t