He must
live on and work on at his poor dying rate, and hope for the best.

This teaching of the Church of Rome subverts Christianity. It strikes at
the root of the faith that saves. It is a relapse into paganism and an
affront offered to the Savior. It borrows the language of Scripture to
express the most hideous error. By this teaching Rome does not drive men
into purgatory,--which does not exist,--but into hell. It is only by a
miracle of divine grace that sinners are saved where such teaching
prevails: they must forget what is told them about the necessity of
their own works and cling only to the Redeemer, and must thus
practically repudiate the teaching of their Church. Some do this, and
escape the pernicious consequences of the error of their Church. All of
them will rise up in the Judgment to accuse their teachers of a heresy
the worst imaginable.

Rome has, indeed, assailed "the article with which the Church either
stands or falls." All its other errors, crass, grotesque, and repulsive
though they are, are mere child's play in comparison with this damning
and destructive error of justification by works. Luther rightly
estimated the virulence of this abysmal heresy when he said that those
who attacked his teaching of justification by grace through faith alone
were aiming at his throat. Rome's teaching on justification is an
attempt to strike at the vitals of Christian faith and life. It sinks
the dagger into the heart of Christianity.

16. The Fatalist Luther.

Catholic writers have discovered a fatalistic tendency in Luther's
teaching of justification by faith without works. They declare that
Luther's theory of the utter depravity of man by reason of inherited sin
and his incapacity to perform any work that can be accounted good in the
sight of God kills every ambition to virtuous living in man. They argue
that when you tell a person that he is not capable to do good, he is apt
to believe you and make no effort to perform a good deed. The situation
becomes still worse when the divine predestination is introduced at this
point, as has been done, they say, by Luther. If God has determined all
things beforehand by a sovereign decree, if there really is no such
thing as human choice, and all things occur according to a foreordained
plan, man no longer has any responsibility. He is reduced to an
automaton. Free will is denied him; he cannot elect by voluntary choice
to engage in any God-pleasing action; for he