Chap. I. p. 1, 2.
That the Bible is the word of God (said Luther) the same I prove as followeth: All things that have been and now are in the world; also how it now goeth and standeth in the world, the same was written altogether particularly at the beginning, in the first book of Moses concerning the creation. And even as God made and created it, even so it was, even so it is, and even so doth it stand to this present day. And although King Alexander the Great, the kingdom of Egypt, the Empire of Babel, the Persian, Grecian and Roman monarchs; the Emperors Julius and Augustus most fiercely did rage and swell against this Book, utterly to suppress and destroy the same; yet notwithstanding they could prevail nothing, they are all gone and vanished; but this Book from time to time hath remained, and will remain unremoved in full and ample manner as it was written at the first.
A proof worthy of the manly mind of Luther, and compared with which the Grotian pretended demonstrations, from Grotius himself to Paley, are mischievous underminings of the Faith, pleadings fitter for an Old Bailey thieves’ counsellor than for a Christian divine. The true evidence of the Bible is the Bible,—of Christianity the living fact of Christianity itself, as the manifest ‘archeus’ or predominant of the life of the planet.
Ib. p. 4.
The art of the School divines (said Luther) with their speculations in the Holy Scriptures, are merely vain and human cogitations, spun out of their own natural wit and understanding. They talk much of the union of the will and understanding, but all is mere fantasy and fondness. The right and true speculation (said Luther) is this, Believe in Christ; do what thou oughtest to do in thy vocation, &c. This is the only practice in divinity. Also, ’Mystica Theologia Dionysii’ is a mere fable, and a lie, like to Plato’s fables. ’Omnia sunt non ens, et omnia sunt ens’; all is something, and all is nothing, and so he leaveth all hanging in frivolous and idle sort.
Still, however, ‘du theure Mann Gottes, mein verehrter Luther’! reason, will, understanding are words, to which real entities correspond; and we may in a sound and good sense say that reason is the ray, the projected disk or image, from the Sun of Righteousness, an echo from the Eternal Word—’the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world’; and that when the will placeth itself in a right line with the reason, there ariseth the spirit, through which the will of God floweth into and actuates the will of man, so that it willeth the things of God, and the understanding is enlivened, and thenceforward useth the materials supplied to it by the senses symbolically; that is, with an insight into the true substance thereof.
Ib. p. 9.