Note 41 — Chapter XXIX

Cp. Mathesius, “Tischreden,” ed. Kroker, p. 260.—Ammon (“Hdb. der chr. Sittenlehre,” 1, 1823, p. 76) laments that Luther “regarded the moral law merely as a vision of terror,” and that according to him “the essence of the Christian religion consisted, not in moral perfection, but in faith.” De Wette, “Christl. Sittenlehre,” 2, 2, 1821, p. 280 f., thinks that an ethical system might have been erected on the antithesis set up by Luther between the Law and the Gospel and on his theories of Christian freedom, “but that Luther was not equal to doing so. He was too much taken up with his fight against the Catholic holiness-by-works to devote all the attention he should to the moral side of the question and not enough of a scholar even to dream of any connection between faith and morality being feasible.”