l denounces the Galatians
again and again as "foolish," "bewitched," and bastards of a bondwoman,
because they think they will be saved by their works done according to
the Law (chap. 3, 1. 3; 4, 21 ff.). He calls them godless infidels,
slaves, silly children still in their nonage, because they imagine that
they become acceptable to God by their own righteousness (chap. 4, 9; 3,
23 ff.). Yea, he reprobates their legal service when he says: "As many
as are of the works of the Law are under the curse" (chap. 3, 10). How
contemptuous does it not sound to hear him call the legal ordinances
which the Galatians were observing "beggarly elements" (chap. 4, 9), and
the law a "schoolmaster" (chap. 3, 24), that is, a tutor fit only for
little abecedarians who cannot be treated as full-grown persons that are
able to make a right use of their privileges as children and heirs of
God. Why do not the Catholics turn up their nose at Paul, as they do at
Luther, when Paul calls all his legal righteousness "dung" (Phil. 2, 8),
or when he speaks slightingly of the observance on which the Colossians
prided themselves as "rudiments of the world" (Col. 2, 20)? Why does he
call the Law "the handwriting of ordinances that has been blotted out"
(Col. 2, 14) but to declare to the Colossians that they are to fear the
Law as little as a debtor fears a canceled note that had been drawn
against him? What was it that Paul rebuked Peter for when he told him
that he was building again the things which they both had destroyed
(Gal. 2, 18)? Mark you, he says, "destroyed." Why, it was this very
thing for which Luther is faulted by Rome, the Law as an instrument for
obtaining righteousness before God. Could a person renounce the Law in
more determined, one might almost say, ruthless fashion, than by saying:
"I am dead to the Law, that I might live unto God"? Paul is the person
who thus speaks of the Law (Gal. 2, 19). The Catholics have again taken
hold of the wrong man when they assail Luther for repudiating the Law of
God; they must start higher up; they will find the real culprit whom
they are trying to prosecute among the holy apostles. Yea, even the
apostles will decline the honor of being the original criminals, they
will pass the charges preferred against them higher up still; for what
contemptuous terms were used by them in speaking of the Law were
inspired terms which they received from God the Holy Ghost. That
contempt for the Law which Luther voices