sitate to demand the sacrifice of reason when it conflicted, or
appeared to conflict, with the demands of faith: and that, indeed, as
"the all-acceptablest sacrifice and service that can be offered to God."
In a sermon in 1546, the last he delivered at Wittenberg, Luther gave
vent, in language that even one of his modern admirers finds too gross
for quotation, to his bitter hatred and contempt for reason, at all
events when it conflicted with his own interpretation of the Scriptures,
or with any of the fundamental dogmas and doctrines he had himself
formulated or accepted. While even in milder moments he did not hesitate
to teach that[4:1]--

"It is a quality of faith that it wrings the neck of reason and
strangles the beast, which else the whole world, with all
creatures, could not strangle. But how? It holds to God's word:
lets it be right and true, no matter how foolish and impossible it
sounds. So did Abraham take his reason captive and slay it....
There is no doubt faith and reason mightily fell out in Abraham's
heart, yet at last did faith get the better, and overcame and
strangled reason, the all-cruelest and most fatal enemy to God. So,
too, do all other faithful men who enter with Abraham the gloom and
hidden darkness of faith; they strangle reason ... and thereby
offer to God the all-acceptablest sacrifice and service that can
ever be brought to Him."

However, whatever may have been the personal desires and tendencies of
those associated with its earlier manifestations, the forces of which
the Reformation was the outcome were not to be controlled by them. The
spirit of which they were the product was not to be controlled by any
fetters they could forge. The Reformation emancipated the intellect of
Europe from the yoke of tradition and blind obedience to authority; it
let loose the illuming flood of thought which had been accumulating
behind the more rigid barriers of the Church, and swept away as things
of straw the feebler barriers the early Reformers would have erected to
confine the thoughts of future generations. The futility of all such
efforts we can gauge, they could not. Blind obedience to authority, in
matters spiritual and temporal, had been the watchword and animating
principle of the power against which they had rebelled; liberty and
reason were the watchwords and animating principles of the movement of
which they, owing to their rebelli