THE GERMAN BIBLE

 THE EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK: THE GOSPEL IN ALL LANDS 1902.

THE EXCERPT IS PRESENTED AS IT IS, FOUND IN GOOGLE'S BOOKS.

THE GERMAN BIBLE

BY  LAURA M. LATIMER 

 MARTIN LUTHER had just received degree of doctor of philosophy. University of Erfurth was at that time most celebrated in all Germany, and the ceremony had been conducted with great pomp. A torchlight procession came to his to pay honor to him. He was only twenty one, and the splendor and magnificence of the festival was enough to turn the head any young man. It was the summer of year 1505. 

He went to Mansfield to spend the vacation with his parents, and on his return, when crossing the mountain a short distance from Erfurth, a fearful thunderstorm, which had been gathering over the Thuringian forest, suddenly burst over his head. He was alone and far from shelter, Peal after peal of thunder shook the mountain until it trembled under his feet. The forked lightning tore up the ground in front of him and threw him upon his knees. "Encompassed with anguish and terror of death," as he himself says, he prayed to God to protect him, he promised the Lord that if he would deliver him he would give up all his cherished plans of earthly glory and devote himself entirely to God.

The storm passed by and he reached the city in safety. But a great gloom was over the university. Students teachers and masters were flying to the forests from the plague stricken city, for the pestilence had entered alike the homes of the rich and the poor.

In the midst of so much sorrow, one evening Martin Luther invited his friends to a supper in his room. They were young men who were looking forward to a life of earthly glory and fame, and with gay, witty conversation and joyous songs they passed the evening, until the university hour for repose had nearly arrived, and then at the very moment when they were giving way without restraint to their gaiety, Luther, with a serious look upon his face that startled them and hushed song and jest, announced to them that this was his farewell.

Tomorrow the walls of a monastery would shut him in forever from the world and them. He had decided to become a monk. They plead with him to change his resolution until the heavy bell of the rang out the hour for retiring, and then, with tears, they went to their homes.

He went out alone into the darkness of midnight, knocked at the Convent of the hermits of St. Augustine. The massive gates opened and shut him in, and he entered a new life that changed the history of world.

 After Luther had been three years in cloister at Erfurth, his friend Frederick, Elector of Saxony, invited him to become professor at the University of Wittenberg. The little Augustine chapel could not hold the people who flocked there to hear him preach, and so the Council of Wittenberg nominated Luther their chaplain; but the great city church was also too small to hold the crowds who came from far and near to hear him explain the Scriptures.

How he longed to give the Word of God to the people of his native land. There were no German Bibles then. Only a few of the learned had access to the chained Latin Bible in the convents. He himself, had never seen the Holy Scriptures until he was 20 years old.He happened to find one in the University library the year he graduated. With eagerness and indescribable emotion he turned over the leaves, and read the story of Hannah and Samuel. The Bible was in Latin, bound in red leather. He also found one in the convent,chained to the wall, which became his guide and comfort during those years of humiliation and trial, when he was sent out bare-footed every morning to beg food for the monks.

In the year 1521 Luther was summoned to appear before the most august assembly in the world, to be tried for heresy. Never had a man appeared before so imposing an assembly of kings, dukes, bishops, thirty archbishops, abbots margraves embassadors, princes, counts, barons, and papal nuncios, etc. From the galleries and antichambers and embrasures of the windows, five thousand spectators looked down upon Luther while he presented to the Emperor Charles V, the pure gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.  

I wonder if he remembered the words our Saviour to his disciples. "Before governors and kings shall ye stand for my sake, for a testimony unto them."     

The people and the Emperor were bent upon his destruction, and everybody was forbidden to give him shelter, or food, or drink or by word or deed to give him any succor whatsoever.

On his way home from the city of Worms, with his brother and a friend, as they skirted the woods of Thuringia, five horsemen, masked, and armed from head to foot, sprang upon the travelers. They seized Luther, pulled him violently from the wagon, threw a military cloak over his shoulders and placed him on a lead horse, and then vanished with him into the gloomy forest. They took him up a high mountain, on the summit of which, was an old castle, the lofty and isolated fortress of Wartburg, surrounded by the black forests that cover the mountains of Thuringia.

He was a prisoner within the ramparts of this carefully guarded fortress for nearly a year, hidden by friends from his enemies, who were determined to kill him. His friend,Frederick, Elector of Saxony, had taken this way to save his life. His foes supposed that he had been murdered by robbers.

In this quiet retreat he began the translation of the Bible into German, the literary work of his life. He gave to his fatherland a book, which has made the German Empire one of the greatest nations of the world. The historian tells that up to this time there was no one language accepted throughout the empire.The learned wrote in Latin, and others used dialects Saxon, Franconian, etc. The lyric poets, who were the Troubadours of Germanny, wrote in Swabian.

"Luther passing by the diction of the theological schools and the courts, sought the expressive phrases employed by the people. For this purpose he visited the market-place, and social gatherings, often spending days over a single phrase. No sentence was admitted into the translation until it had crystallized into pure, idiomatic German. The Bible became the model of style and its High German the standard of cultivated conversa tion and polite literature."

 In the year 1534, his complete translation of the whole Bible was published.He exclaimed: "O, my dear Germans, the divine Word is now in abundance offered to you. God knocks at your door. Open it to Him."