# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 09 14_S11
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

11

point, would it then be Christian to fall upon us so mercilessly on that account? Is that the mind of Christ?

But perhaps Mr. v. Rohr will go into himself and let this his zeal without understanding serve him for a salutary shame, when we now simply prove to him that not we, but he himself is in error; for however much he may in his blind fanaticism accuse us of lying and fraud without fear of God, we are willing to accept his oversight gladly as a mere error, very pardonable precisely in him.

The matter stands thus. In the first place, the whole content of the preface already shows that it cannot have been written in the year 1545. For, to mention only a few things, Luther therein first offers, if it should please his ecclesiastical superiors (majoribus ecclesiae), to give up his office and his teaching calling, since his words are so disagreeable and hateful; and then he declares that he must defend himself against his enemies on account of a sermon on the power of the ban held in the year 1518, and give it to the press to ward off evil report. What blindness it takes, then, to believe that Luther wrote this 27 years after the delivery of the little sermon, after he had already overthrown the papacy, and in the same year in which he had written the work: "The Papacy at Rome, Founded by the Devil!" What blindness it takes to persuade oneself that the Papists had forgotten everything else, and after 27 years had still carried about with them that sermon, held at Wittenberg, so mild in the highest degree, and on that account had made evil report against Luther! Truly, whoever, with such a state of the case, can still hit upon the idea that the year of that confirming preface was the last year before Luther's death, to his critical genius one might well credit the assumption that the Grabauan Pastoral Letter is nothing else than the 95 Theses which Luther nailed to the castle church at Wittenberg against Tezel's indulgence-traffic.

Mr. v. Rohr will indeed say that, as a good Lutheran, he is an enemy of the newer so-called internal criticism; that he therefore will let himself be argued out of nothing by such godless science, and that one should please keep it off his person. Let him, however, set his mind at rest. For there happen also to be historical proofs that the confirming preface is not, as Mr. von Rohr asserts, of the year 1545, but dates from the year 1518, proofs so palpable that even an enemy of internal criticism cannot dispute them. The old Valentin Ernst Löscher, namely, as he writes in his "Reformations-Akten," p. 377, possessed a copy of our Lutheran sermon on the power of the ban, printed at Leipzig in the year 1518, in which the confirming preface, which Mr. v. Rohr transposes into the year 1545, was already found word for word. Löscher has also taken the sermon together with the preface completely into the Acts, where Mr. v. Rohr can read and compare it. Every doubt, however, as to whether Löscher too, that great antiquarian and connoisseur of literature, saw rightly, or perhaps mistook the date, will vanish when our honored Herr opponent shall only have read the heading of the preface, which runs thus: "F. Martinus Lutherus. Pio lectori salutem," that is, "Brother Martin Luther offers to the pious reader greeting." Luther was therefore still a monk when he wrote this preface, wherefore he calls himself frater Martinus, that is, Brother Martin. But Luther, as is well known, was no longer a monk a year before his blessed death. (Vide hist. Lutheranismi aut. Seckendorfio.)

That Luther, however, according to the preface to the sermon of 1518, published it for the sake of his adversaries, came about thus: When Luther had delivered the sermon orally to his Wittenbergers at the beginning of July of the year 1518, a great uproar arose over it. In order to ruin Luther, word of it was written to Augsburg, to the members of the Diet then assembled there, and the content horribly distorted. So Luther thought it best to publish the sermon through the press, as much of it as he still had in memory, and, lest it be thought that he did this from fear of losing his office, he declared himself in the preface itself ready to lay down his office if his ecclesiastical superiors should find it good.

All this Löscher reports not only in the cited Reformationsacten, but it is also evident from Luther's letters which he wrote at that time. Compare Luther's Works, Halle ed., Tom. XXI, 598, where Luther, without any guile, testifies that the sermon was drawn up with such modesty that he hoped it would "be held in esteem even by those who themselves have a liking for tyranny. For," he adds, "there is nothing taught therein by me that they themselves have not taught and still teach." Compare further Tom. XV., Appendix, page 24, where Luther himself tells the whole history. Löscher himself says that Luther drew up the sermon so mildly "in order to spare the Roman court somewhat."—

It remains now still to explain what is to be thought of the report upon which Mr. v. Rohr unfortunately hit and which led him astray to raise his, truly! little honorable, hasty and vain shout of victory. The case is as follows. In the year 1559 our sermon, so far as we have been able to discover, was published for the first time in the German language* and indeed by an obscure author; but on the title-page of this edition it says: "And such a sermon was confirmed in 1545, the year before his death, translated from the Latin first volume of his books into German." What now the obscure translator and editor means to say with this "confirmation" is, to be sure, not to be ascertained with complete certainty. The most probable, however, is that the good man supposed that, because the sermon was included in the year 1545 in the first volume of Luther's Latin works with his consent, Luther had thereby "confirmed" it. For the man may well have been a critic in his time, of whom there are many now. For if one wishes to know how Luther "confirmed" his earlier writings included in that Latin first volume of his works, and so also his sermon, one need only read the preface which Luther—and that is beyond doubt precisely in the much-named year 1545—wrote to that volume. Therein it says among other things as follows:

*At least the sermon is not found in German in either the Jena or the Wittenberg German edition of Luther's works.

"I beg the Christian reader above all things, and beg him for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, that he will read them very thoughtfully and with great compassion, and know that before this time I was a monk and one of the right senseless, raving Papists, who in the beginning of these matters was so full and drunk, yea so thoroughly drowned in the Pope's doctrine, that I was ready to murder, wherever it had been in my power, or would at least have had pleasure in it and helped to bring it about that all those should be murdered who would not have rendered obedience to the Pope even in the least syllables. Such a zealous Saul was I at that time, as there are still many today; and I was by no means so altogether ice-cold and frozen in defending the papacy as Eck and his like were, so that I thought that they defended the Pope more for their belly's sake than that they should take the matter seriously to heart. Yea, I hold that they, as Epicureans, only mock at the Pope; but I took up the matters in earnest, as one who feared and was dismayed anxiously before the last day, and yet desired from the bottom of my heart to be saved. Therefore thou wilt find, Christian reader, in these my first writings, how many and great articles I humbly granted and conceded to the Pope, which afterward and at this time I have held and condemned as the highest blasphemies and abominations, and so still hold and condemn. Wilt thou therefore ascribe this my error, or (as my adversaries maliciously interpret it) unequal, contradictory speeches, to the time and my ignorance. I was at first quite alone and, to tell the truth, in handling such weighty matters altogether unskilled and far too unlearned; for I came unawares and without any thought or will of mine into this strife and quarrel, whereof I call God himself to witness . . . Now see and learn, Christian teacher, from my fall, how hard it is to extricate oneself from such errors or to