“The need of a more adequate exegetical-homiletical treatment of the ancient gospel and epistle selections has long been felt. The manager of the Lutheran Book Concern has commissioned the writer of these lines to meet this need.

“What the Catholic Church is hoping and working for… is the reestablishment… of the ‘Real State,’ a rigid hierarchical system wherein inferiors are subject to superiors. In this system each individual, like a cell in a body, must humbly submit to his fate and occupy his “natural place” which is allotted to him from birth and have no desire to get away from it.

“The Letters of Hus have long been recognized by the best judges as one of the world’s spiritual treasures. The discovery of Hus, if we may so express it, forms more than once a landmark in the spiritual development of Luther.

“The conception of the Evangelical Lutheran church proceeds from the inward spiritual essence of the church, as a communion of faith, love, the Holy Ghost, knit together by means of the word of God and the sacraments, but which also forms itself into a body in an outward manifestation.

“The Church needs to restudy, to re-accept, to reaffirm, to re-experience justification by faith… Has not a large part of the Protestant Church practically lost this Reformation doctrine? …Is she not unconsciously drifting back into the old Romish heresy of justification by works, by service, by doing?