must come with Him, must satisfy God by Him, and do all that we
have to transact with God through Him, and in His name. That is the
thought implied here by St. Peter, and he would also say, we surely
expect this life, although we are still on earth. But all comes in no
other way than through the resurrection of Christ, since He has
arisen and ascended to heaven, and is seated at the right hand of
God. For on this account He ascended, in order to bestow upon us His
Spirit, that we might be born again, and now through Him might come
to the Father and say, "Behold, I come before thee and pray, not
because I rely on my own request, but because my Lord Christ has gone
before me and is become my intercessor." These are all glowing words
wherever there is a heart that believes; where there is not, all is
cold and unimpressive.

Hence we may determine what genuine Christian doctrine or preaching
is. If the Gospel is to be preached, it must concern the resurrection
of Christ. Whoever does not preach this is no Apostle; for it is the
head article of our faith. And those books are truly the noblest
which teach and enforce such doctrine, as was said above. So that we
may easily discover that the Epistle of James is no true Apostolic
Epistle[2] for it contains scarcely a letter of these things in it,
while the greatest importance belongs to this article of faith. For
were there no such thing as the resurrection, we should have neither
comfort nor hope, and all beside that Christ has endured or suffered
would have been in vain.

[Footnote 2: The well-known views of Luther in regard to the Epistle
of James, and the grounds upon which he rejected it from the canon of
the New Testament, are presented in this passage. He was too
impatient of the _seeming_ contradiction between Paul and James upon
the subject of faith, and too hastily concluded that they were
irreconcilable. A careful consideration of the scope of the argument
in the Epistle of James, removes the difficulty, as may be seen at
large in later commentators. There is no historical reason for
casting discredit upon the Epistle of James. The early Christian
writers furnish very decided testimony in its favor. Clement of Rome
has alluded to it twice. Hermas has not less than seven allusions to
it, according to Lardner fully sufficient to prove its antiquity.
Origen, Jerome, Athanasius, and most of the subsequent ecclesiastical
writers quote from it, and it is found in all the