roval. Thou art
Master; do Thou boss my business. If Thou overrulest my plans, I have
nothing to say; Thou knowest better. Not my will, but Thine, be done.

This is the whole truth in a nutshell that Luther drives home in that
part of his reply to Erasmus which treats of contingency. If ever
statements garbled from the context are unfair to the author, what the
Catholics are constantly doing in quoting Luther on the Bondage of the
Will is one of the most glaring exhibitions of unfairness on record.
This treatise of Luther deserves to be studied thoroughly and
repeatedly, and measured against the facts of the common experience of
all men. For a profitable study of this treatise there is, moreover,
required a very humble mind, a mind that knows its sin, and is sincere
in acknowledging its insufficiency.

The generation of Luther and the generations after him have had this
particular teaching of Luther before them four hundred years. What
effect has it had on human progress in every field of secular activity
in Protestant lands? Has it created that chaos and confusion which
Catholics claim it must inevitably lead to? Quite the contrary has
happened. And now let the patrons of the theory of human free will
measure their own success as recorded by history against that of
Protestants.

25. "The Adam and Eve of the New Gospel of Concubinage."

This is the honorary title which Catholics bestow upon Martin Luther and
Catherine von Bora, who were married June 13, 1525, during the Peasants'
War. Luther was forty-two years old at the time and his bride past
twenty-six. She had left the cloister two years before her marriage, and
had found employment during that time in the home of one of the citizens
of Wittenberg. Their first child, Hans, was born June 7, 1526.

The grounds on which Catholics object to this marriage are, chiefly,
three. In the first place, they declare the marriage the outcome of an
impure relation which had existed between Luther and Catherine prior to
their marriage. The marriage had virtually become a matter of necessity,
to prevent greater scandal. Moreover, in this impure relationship Luther
with his lascivious and lustful mind, in which fleshly desires were
continually raging, had been the prime mover. The second ground on which
Catholics object to Luther's marriage is, because Luther held
professedly low views of the virtue of chastity and the state of
matrimony. He had stripped matrimony of its sacr