that it is natural right you vindicate; for the Christian religion commands you to suffer [in 'all things and to complain only to God."
So far Luther was right; both among Catholics and Heretics, among peasants as well as among princes, all kinds of evil had come from confusing the laws of the visible world with those of the kingdom of Heaven. But he himself shows how deeply this error is implanted in Christendom, since throughout his remonstrance he falls into the same mingling of the two spheres. To introduce into this great social and political struggle one of the laws of the kingdom of Heaven the most opposed to the laws of Nature; "Resist not evil, but if a man strike thee on the one cheek, turn to him the other also;" to quote texts enforcing Christian patience on men enduring a load of injustice, which had crushed the life out of them and their ancestors for ages; to cry, "To suffer, to suffer, the cross, the cross, behold what the law of Christ teacheth," was to show that the great Doctor of the Bible had not himself understood its teaching, but was still enthralled in mediaeval confusions.
The doctrine of Grace, which he as well as all great Christian teachers in every age have proclaimed, ought to have made it clear to him that these admonitions of the New Testament were only intended for those who have received grace to understand and obey them; and that to represent them as binding on other men is the surest way of destroying all their influence in the world. His remonstrance, therefore, instinct as it is with a fervent desire for the glory of God, the peace of Germany, and the welfare of its oppressed people, really proposed that the sword of justice should be sheathed, and that the greatest criminals should be left unpunished, simply because they were the masters. It was endorsing, at a supreme crisis in European history, Wiclif's frightful paradox, "God must serve the Devil." Anabaptism of the fiercer type was the reply to this monstrous proposition, and is another instance of the truth of the words, " By thine own sins will I correct thee."
What drove the Christian conscience into still more inextricable confusion was that Luther owed his extraordinary position to the fact that he had taught with unusual force the doctrine called "Evangelical," and had therefore intensified the idea that all who
