ng one, which gladly coincides with the leadings
of grace.

The Roman scheme of salvation might be called the ostrich method: it
teaches men the foolish strategy of the bird of the desert, which hides
its head in the sand when it sees an enemy approaching, and then
imagines the enemy does not exist. Original sin may be disputed out of
the Bible by a false interpretation, but it is not thereby ruled out of
existence. When face to face with his God--if no sooner, then in the
hour of death--every man feels that he is utterly corrupt and worthless,
and he will curse any teacher that caused him to believe otherwise. Free
will is not created by assertions. Let the apostles of free will only
try, and they will find out that their freedom is nil. Catholics
denounce Luther for having declared the free will of man to be nothing
than a word without substance: we hear the sound when the word is
pronounced, and grasp its grammatical meaning, but we do not realize it
in ourselves. Every person, however, who has truly come to know himself
will side with Luther, or rather with the Bible. Furthermore, to the
same extent to which the Roman view exalts man's natural powers for
good, it lowers and limits the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and
begets a false confidence and security that is rudely shaken when the
first slip and fall occurs in the person's Christian life. He has never
really laid hold of the grace of God, because he has not been taught to
trust only to the grace of God to lead and preserve him in the way of
life. He will begin to distrust the Gospel as a very inefficient
instrument, and this will lead him to become indifferent to it, and
finally fall away from it entirely. A real danger of apostasy and
despair exists wherever the Roman dogma of man's natural free will is
proclaimed.

It is, however, doing Luther a flagrant injustice when he is made to
deny that man has no longer any natural reason and will in the secular
affairs of this life. Luther used to divide the entire life of man into
two hemispheres, the upper embracing man's relation to God, holy things,
the interests of the soul here and hereafter, and the lower, embracing
the purely human, temporal, and secular interests of man. It is only in
the higher hemisphere that Luther denies the existence of free will.
Throughout his writings Luther asserts the existence, the actual
operation, and the necessity of human free will, though sadly weakened
by sin, in the