Scriptures and showed him a more excellent way. "Only one haven of salvation is left for our souls,"
he says, "and that is the mercy of God in Christ. We are saved by grace—not by our merits, not by
our works." He consulted not with flesh and blood, and burned the bridge after him. He renounced
all prospects of a brilliant career, and exposed himself to the danger of persecution and death. He
exhorted and strengthened the timid Protestants of France, usually closing with the words of Paul
If God be for us, who can be against us?" He prepared in Paris a flaming address on reform, which
was ordered to be burned; he escaped from persecution in a basket from a window, like Paul at
Damascus, and wandered for two years as a fugitive evangelist from place to place until he found
his sphere of labor in Geneva. With his conversion was born his Pauline theology, which sprang
from his brain like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. Paul never had a more logical and theological
commentator than John Calvin.^381
But the most Paul-like man in history is the leader of the German Reformation, who
combined in almost equal proportion depth of mind, strength of will, tenderness of heart, and a
fiery vehemence of temper, and was the most powerful herald of evangelical freedom; though
inferior to Augustin and Calvin (not to say Paul) in self-discipline, consistency, and symmetry of
character.^382 Luther’s commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, though not a grammatical or
logical exposition, is a fresh reproduction and republication of the Epistle against the
self-righteousness, and bondage of the papacy. Luther’s first conversion took place in his twenty-first
year (1505), when, as a student of law at Erfurt, on his return from a visit to his parents, he was so
frightened by a fearful thunder-storm and flashes of lightning that he exclaimed: "Help, dear St.
Anna, I will become a monk!" But that conversion, although it has often been compared with that
of the apostle, had nothing to do with his Paulinism and Protestantism; it made him a pious Catholic,
it induced him to flee from the world to the retreat of a convent for the salvation of his soul. And
he became one of the most humble, obedient, and self-denying of monks, as Paul was one of the
most earnest and zealous of Pharisees. "If ever a monk got to heaven by monkery," says Luther, "I
ought to have gotten there." But the more he sought righteousness and peace by ascetic self denial
and penal exercises, the more painfully he felt the weight of sin and the wrath of God, although
unable to mention to his confessor any particular transgression. The discipline of the law drove
him to the brink of despair, when by the kind interposition of Staupitz he was directed away from
himself to the cross of Christ, as the only source of pardon and peace, and found, by implicit faith
in His all-sufficient merits, that righteousness which he had vainly sought in his own strength.^383
This, his second conversion, as we may call it, which occurred several years later (1508), and
gradually rather than suddenly, made him an evangelical freeman in Christ and prepared him for
the great conflict with Romanism, which began in earnest with the nailing of the ninety-nine theses
against the traffic in indulgences (1517). The intervening years may be compared to Paul’s sojourn
in Arabia and the subordinate labors preceding his first great missionary tour.(^381) See my History of the Creeds of Christendom, I. 426 sqq.
(^382) This is fully recognized by Renan, who, however, has little sympathy either with the apostle or the reformer, and fancies
that the theology of both is antiquated. "That historical character," he says, "which upon the whole bears most analogy to St.
Paul, is Luther. In both there is the same violence in language, the same passion, the same energy, the same noble independence,
the same frantic attachment to a thesis embraced as the absolute truth." St. Paul, ch. XXII. at the close. And his last note in this
book is this: "The work which resembles most in spirit the Epistle to the Galatians is Luther’s De Captivitate Babylonica
Ecclesiae."
(^383) For particulars of his inner conflicts during his Erfurt period, see Köstlin’s Martin Luther (1875), I. 40 sqq. and 61 sqq.
A.D. 1-100.