under very particular
circumstances Luther has learned from his Bible and under the guidance
of the Holy Ghost.

That contempt is a mark of every evangelical preacher to-day. If
ministers of the Gospel to-day do not denounce the Law when falsely
applied, they betray a sacred trust and become traitors to Christ and
the Church. For every one who teaches men to seek their salvation in any
manner and to any degree in their own works serves not Christ, but
Antichrist. This is such a fearful calamity that no terms should be
regarded as too scathing in which to rebuke legalistic tendencies. These
tendencies are the bane and blight of Christianity; if they are not
rooted out, Christianity will perish from off the face of the earth.
Workmongers are missionaries of the father of lies and the murderer from
the beginning: so far as in them lies, they slay the souls of men by
their false teaching of the Law.

However, Luther reveals another attitude toward the Law. At three
distinct times in his public career he had to do with people who had
assumed a hostile attitude to the Law of God. If the contention of
Luther's Catholic critics were true, Luther ought to have hailed these
occasions with delight and made common cause with the repudiators of the
Law. While he was at the Wartburg, a disturbance broke out at
Wittenberg. Under the leadership of Carlstadt, a professor at the
University, men broke into the churches and smashed images. Church
ordinances of age-long standing were to be abrogated, the cloisters were
to be thrown open, and a new order of things was to be inaugurated by
violence. Against the will of the Elector of Saxony, who had afforded
Luther an asylum in his castle, Luther, at the risk of his life, came
out of his seclusion, boldly went to Wittenberg, and preached a series
of sermons by which he quelled the riotous uprising. Even before his
return to Wittenberg he had published a treatise in which he warned
Christians to avoid tumult and violent proceedings. The eight sermons
which he preached to the excited people of Wittenberg are an invaluable
evidence that Luther meant to proceed in the way of order. The mass and
the confessional would have been abolished at that time, had it not been
for Luther's interference. He made some lifelong enemies by insisting
that the reformatory movement must be conservative. He held that before
men's consciences had been liberated by the teaching of Christ, they
were not qualified f