ABSTRACT
THE deepest part of Luther's life was his religion. Any picture which failed to give a strong idea of this would be like Hamlet with the prince left out. To him the relation of the individual to God was not only the most serious fact in life, but also the most practical, the atmosphere in which he lived and moved and had his being. His formal writings are mainly concerned with religion, his letters are saturated with it, and his table-talk reveals the constancy with which his thoughts were occupied with this subject. To his contemporaries these sayings were mainly interesting as authoritative expositions of dogma, to posterity they are hardly less valuable as keys to the heart of a great prophet. The dogmatic system of the Evangelic Church may be best studied in the treatises of its leader and in those of his disciple Melanchthon, but the ethical part, taking the word in its broadest sense as that which concerns the man's YjOos, comes out most strongly in his incidental remarks. Luther is greater than his work. His dogmatic system has lost part of its hold upon mankind, and seems likely to lose still more, but his influence on the ideals and culture of many an age to come will remain.
