e tells his friends. Ah, says our Catholic critic,
but was he not free to change his mind? We say: You may talk as much as
you wish about the person's freedom; the fact remains that the person
would not have changed his mind unless he had to. - Let us follow this
merchant a little further: He actually starts on his trip two days
later. He is to arrive at his destination at two o'clock in the
afternoon of the next day, and very much depends on his arriving just at
that time. But he does not even get to Cincinnati. "Something happened,"
he wires to his friend. And now his human free will goes into operation
again: he changes his mind. - "Man proposes, but God disposes," this
belief is ineradicably written into the consciousness of all intelligent
men, even of intelligent pagans, and no philosophy of free will will
wipe it out. The wise farmer, after he has finished sowing his field,
says, "God willing, I shall reap a good crop." The wise merchant says,
"God willing, I shall be in New York to-morrow." And God approves of
this wise reservation which causes the prudent to submit their most
ordinary actions to divine revision. He says in Jas. 4, 13-16: "Go to
now, ye that say, To-day or to-morrow we will go into such a city, and
continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain, whereas ye know
not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a
vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For
that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or
that. But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil."
Let Luther's Catholic critics wrestle with these and similar texts of
Scripture, with these and similar facts of daily life. Luther has
rightly declared the sovereignty of God a mighty ax and thunderbolt that
shatters the assertion of human free will.

We have shown that Luther is no fatalist. His warning, on the one hand,
not to disregard the secret will of God, and on the other, not to seek
to find it out, is a masterpiece of wisdom. In view of the absolute
sovereignty of God and man's absolute dependence upon it, Luther urges
man to go to work in his chosen occupation in childlike reliance upon
God. He is to employ to the utmost capacity all his God-given energies
of mind and body and work as if everything depended on his industry,
strength, prudence, thrift, planning, and arranging. Having done all,
he is to say: Dear Lord, it is all subject to Thy app