n must stand or fall. Undermine the Bible and you undermine
the world. It is the one, true, and only Charter of Faith, Liberty,
and salvation for man, without which this race of ours is a hopeless
and abandoned wreck. And when Luther gave forth his German Bible, it
was not only a transcendent literary achievement, which created and
fixed the classic forms of his country's language,[15] but an act of
supremest wisdom and devotion; for the hope of the world is for ever
cabled to the free and open Word of God.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Chevalier Bunsen says; "It is Luther's genius applied to the
Bible which has preserved the only unity which is, in our days,
remaining to the German nation--that of language, literature, and
thought. There is no similar instance in the known history of the
world of a single man achieving such a work."

LUTHER'S CONSERVATISM.

Up to the time of Luther's residence in the Wartburg nothing had been
done toward changing the outward forms, ceremonies, and organization
of the Church. The great thing with him had been to get the inward,
central doctrine right, believing that all else would then naturally
come right in due time. But while he was hidden and silent certain
fanatics thrust themselves into this field, and were on the eve of
precipitating everything to destruction. Tidings of the violent
revolutionary spirit which had broken out reached him in his retreat
and stirred him with sorrowful indignation, for it was the most
damaging blow inflicted on the Reformation.

It is hard for men to keep their footing amid deep and vast commotions
and not drift into ruinous excesses. Storch, and Muenzer, and
Carlstadt, and Melanchthon himself, were dangerously affected by the
whirl of things. Even good men sometimes forget that society cannot be
conserved by mere negations; that wild and lawless revolution can
never work a wholesome and abiding reformation; that the perpetuity of
the Church is an historic chain, each new link of which depends on
those which have gone before.

There was precious gold in the old conglomerate, which needed to be
discriminated, extracted, and preserved. The divine foundations were
not to be confounded with the rubbish heaped upon them. There was
still a Church of Christ under the hierarchy, although the hierarchy
was no part of its life or essence. The Zwickau prophets, with their
new revelations and revolts against civil authority; the Wittenberg
iconoclasts, with their r