regarded by him as "an
epistle of straw." But his objection to particular portions never
shook his faith in the whole. His belief was inflexible that the Holy
Scriptures, excepting a few books, contained a divine revelation in
every word and letter. It was for him the dearest thing on earth, the
foundation of all his learning. He had put himself so in sympathy
with it that he lived among its figures as in the present. The more
urgent his feeling of responsibility, the warmer the passion with
which he clung to Scripture; and a strong instinct for the sensible
and the fitting really helped him over many dangers. His
discrimination had none of the hair-splitting sophistry of the ancient
teachers. He despised useless subtleties, and, with admirable tact,
let go what seemed to him unessential; but, if he was not to lose his
faith or his reason, he could do nothing, after all, but found the new
doctrine on words and conditions of life fifteen hundred years old,
and in some cases he became the victim of what his adversary Eck
called "the black letter."

Under the urgency of these conditions his method took form. If he had
a question to settle, he collected all the passages of Holy Scripture
which seemed to offer him an answer. He sought earnestly to understand
all passages in their context, and then he struck a balance, giving
the greatest weight to those which agreed with each other, and for
those which were at variance patiently striving to find a solution
which might reconcile the seeming contradiction. The resulting
conviction he firmly established in his heart, regardless of
temptations, by fervent prayer. With this procedure he was sometimes
bound to reach conclusions which seemed, even to ordinary human
understanding, vulnerable. When, for instance, in the year 1522, he
undertook, from the Scriptures, to put matrimony on a new moral basis,
reason and the needs of the people were certainly on his side when he
subjected to severe criticism the eighteen grounds of the
Ecclesiastical Law for forbidding and annulling marriages and
condemned the unworthy favoring of the rich over the poor. But it was,
after all, strange when Luther tried to prove from the Bible alone
what degrees of relationship were permitted and what were forbidden,
especially as he also took into consideration the Old Testament, in
which various queer marriages were contracted without any opposition
from the ancient Jehovah. God undoubtedly had sometimes