JOURNEY TO ROME

ILLNESS.

29

yet prepared to see, or to make, both to the church and to his own heart and life. But the principle of justification by faith was no longer a hidden one to him, and it infused a new life and a new power into his soul and his teachings. He applied it with sunbeam clearness to the forgiveness of sins. He saw how God could be just, and yet justify him that believeth in Jesus, however great his sins might be. Selected not long after to represent seven convents in matter of difference between them and the Vicar General, at the court of the Roman Pontiff he set off, led by the hand of God into Rome itself, to witness with his own eyes and ears the blasphemous hollowness, and putrid corruptions of the church. On the way he was again taken ill, and again brought to look down into the grave and up to the Judgment Bar of God. His sins troubled him. The old Erfurth horror of darkness returned upon him. But in the midst of it the words of the prophet, "The just shall live by faith" came again to him with a new force and filled him with the light of heaven. And yet again, while looking upon the ruins of ancient Rome, and almost overwhelmed by the conviction that the Rome which then was would one day be also in ruins, the holy city would pass away, lie in ashes, the same words came to his relief and comfort again, "The just shall live by faith." The church shall live though Rome should die. Christ lives, and the gates of hell shall never pre

vail against his church. Luther had not yet learned to take the Lord Jesus for his sanctification. He had one process for the forgiveness of sins, that of faith, and another for the pursuit of holiness, that of works. He believed in Jesus, and trusted that for the sake of Jesus who had died, and risen again for his justification, his sins were all freely forgiven. But he longed for a holy heart and a holy life, and sought them by means not by faith. The truth that Jesus is all to the sinner, that in Jesus he has all if he takes him for all, he had not yet perceived. Christ a propitiation he accepted, but Christ a sanctification he rejected. Strange that having Christ, and believing in him, and having in him the fountain of holiness, indeed our own holiness, just as really and fully as he is our own sacrifice for sin, we should go about to work out, or seek for holiness of heart imparted to us from God aside from, not in Christ. Yet so it is. So it was with Luther. At Rome he performed all holy offices, and visited every sacred place, hungering and thirsting after righteousness. One day he sought to secure a special indulgence promised to all holy pilgrims who should climb Pilate's stair case, so called, on their knees. This Pilate's stair case was said to have been transported bodily by miracle, in the night, from Jerusalem to Rome. As Luther crept painfully from stone to stone upward, suddenly he heard, as he thought, a voice of thunder in the depths of his heart, "The just shall live by faith."

These words

LUTHER MADE COMPLETE IN JESUS.

31

had often before told him that the just are made alive by faith, but now they thundered through his soul the truth that even so "the just shall live (be kept alive) by faith." By faith they shall be kept by the power of God; by faith they shall make progress onward and upward; by faith their sins shall be forgiven; and by faith their hearts and lives shall be made holy.

Ah! well might the historian say of Luther that "this was a creative word for the reformer," now for the first time he was freed from all false processes of salvation, and fully established in the true. Faith now, as the condition, and Jesus as the salvation he saw was the whole. Full salvation was in Jesus, and Jesus was the soul's in full, through full trust in him. When this word resounded in this new force through his soul, it is no wonder that Luther sprang to his feet upon the stone steps up which he had been crawling like a worm, horrified at himself, and struck with shame for the degradation to which superstition had debased him, and fled from the scene of his folly. Luther himself says, "Then I felt myself born again as a new man, and I entered by an open door into the very paradise of God. From that hour I saw the precious and holy Scriptures with new eyes. I went through the whole Bible. I collected a multitude of passages which taught me what the work of God was. Truly this text of St. Paul was to me the very gate of heaven."

CHAPTER III.

EXAMPLES COMPARED.

YE ARE MY WITNESSES.

THE experience of Luther has been given at length because the great reformer stands in forefront of Protestantism, a true and noble type of the real ripe, whole-souled Christian, very much abridged, and condensed, however, from the accounts given by his biographers. It is entitled to great weight as an example. Let not its force be broken by the thought that Luther was great, and a special instrument of God specially endowed. So far as salvation is concerned, Luther stood with us precisely. He was a man, and a sinner, as we all are. Faith in him and in us is the same thing, and Jesus is the same to all and for all in all time. The same rays of the sun of righteousness shining through the same tears of penitence, cause the same bow of the covenant to arch the same clouds of despair, in all ages and nations, and the same eye of faith discerns the promise and rests joyously upon it, in all persons, alike the great and the small.

32

MERLE D'AUBIGNE.

33

It will be observed that Luther's first light and comfort was in the forgiveness of sins; and the last and greatest, in the full apprehension of Christ as his sanctification. We shall have occasion to see the same thing in every instance as we go on. How this comes to pass we shall see very clearly when we come to speak of the philosophy of Christian experience.

With some, the force of Luther's example may be broken by the fact that he was bred in all the superstitions of Rome, and had a second shell to break through, after he was out of the first. We will, therefore, take another example: one from the ranks of those bred in the full blaze of the light of the Protestant day, three centuries after Luther's time.

MERLE D'AUBIGNE

Was educated at Geneva, the home of Calvin and the stronghold of the Reformation. Calvin himself is not a better representative of the reformed religion, or a nobler champion than Merle D'Aubigne, the famous historian of the Reformation. His conversion was at Geneva, while in the university. The subsequent deeper work was several years later at Kiel in Germany. His conversion, together with others, a noble band, was by the instrumentality of one of the Lord's Scottish noblemen, Robert Haldane. In some sort it was the payment of an old debt of three hundred years' standing due from Scotland to