Even with such care, the translation is not perfect. In places a variant reading is possible, a variant interpretation plausible. We can only claim that an honest effort has been made to be both accurate and clear, and submit the result of our labors to a fair and scholarly criticism. Critics can hardly be more severe than we have been to one another. If they find errors, it may be that we have seen them, and preferred the seeming error to the suggested correction; if not, we can accept criticism from others as gracefully as from each other.
The sources from which our translations have been made are the best texts available in each case. In general, these are found in the Weimar Edition (D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesammtausgabe. Weimar. Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1883 ff.), so far as this is completed. A more complete and fairly satisfactory edition is that known as the Erlangen Edition, in which the German and Latin works are published in separate series, 1826 ff. The text of the Berlin Edition (Luthers Werke, herausgegeben von Pfarrer D. Dr. Buchwald, etc., Berlin, C. A. Schwetschke und Sohn, third edition, 1905, ten volumes) is modernized, and where it has been used it has been carefully compared with the more critical texts. The two editions of Walch—the original, published 1740–1753, in twenty-four volumes, at Halle, and the modern edition, known as the St. Louis, Mo., edition, 1880 ff.—are entirely German, and somewhat modernized. For our purpose they could be used only as helps in the interpretation, and not as standard texts for translation. A very convenient and satisfactory critical text of selected treatises is to be found in Otto Clemen, Luthers Werke in Auswahl, Bonn, 4 vols., of which two volumes appeared in 1912.
