.

Catholic writers charge Luther with having perverted the meaning of
justifying faith. Luther held that justifying faith is essentially the
assurance that since Christ lived on earth as a man, labored, suffered,
died, and rose again in the place of sinners, the world _en masse_ and
every individual sinner are without guilt in the estimation of God. "God
was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their
trespasses unto them." (2 Cor. 5, 19.) To this reconciliation the sinner
has contributed nothing. It has been accomplished without him. He cannot
add anything to it. God only asks the sinner to believe in his salvation
as finished by Jesus Christ. To believe this fact does not mean to
perform a work of merit in consideration of which God is willing to
bestow salvation on the believer, but it means to accept the work of
Christ as performed in our place, to rejoice therein, and to repose a
sure confidence in this salvation in defiance of the accusations of our
own conscience, the incriminations which the broken Law of God hurls at
us, and the terrors of the final judgment. The believer regards himself
as righteous before God not because of any good work that he has done,
but because of the work which Christ has performed in his place. The
believer holds that, when God, by raising Christ from the dead, accepted
His work as a sufficient atonement for men's guilt and an adequate
fulfilment of the divine Law, He accepted each and every sinner. The
believer is certain that through the work of his Great Brother, Christ,
he has been restored to a child relationship with God and enjoys child's
privileges with his Father in heaven. The idea that he himself has done
anything to bring about this blessed state of affairs is utterly foreign
to this faith in Christ.

Catholic writers assert that the doctrine which we have just outlined is
not Scriptural, but represents the grossest perversion of Scripture.
They say this doctrine originated in "the erratic brain of Luther."
Luther "was not an exact thinker, and being unable to analyze an idea
into its constituents, as is necessary for one who will apprehend it
correctly, he failed to grasp questions which by the general mass of the
people were thoroughly and correctly understood. . . . He allowed
himself to cultivate an unnecessary antipathy to so-called 'holiness by
works,' and this attitude, combined with his tendency to look at the
worst side of things, and his k