Now, therefore, I take comfort and apply this to MYSELF.
And this manner of applying is the very true force and power of
faith. For he died NOT to justify the righteous, but the
UN-righteous, and to make THEM the children of God."[131]
[131] Commentary on Galatians, ch. iii. verse 19, and ch. ii.
verse 20, abridged.
That is, the more literally lost you are, the more literally you
are the very being whom Christ's sacrifice has already saved.
Nothing in Catholic theology, I imagine, has ever spoken to sick
souls as straight as this message from Luther's personal
experience. As Protestants are not all sick souls, of course
reliance on what Luther exults in calling the dung of one's
merits, the filthy puddle of one's own righteousness, has come to
the front again in their religion; but the adequacy of his view
of Christianity to the deeper parts of our human mental structure
is shown by its wildfire contagiousness when it was a new and
quickening thing.
Faith that Christ has genuinely done his work was part of
what Luther meant by faith, which so far is faith in a fact
intellectually conceived of.
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