“The Cynic puts all human actions into only two classes, — openly bad, and secretly bad. All virtue, and generosity, and disinterestedness, are merely the appearance of good, but selfish at the bottom.
Joseph Hocking is the Lutheran Librarian’s favorite Christian novelist. Though mostly forgotten now, during his lifetime he was widely read and greatly beloved throughout the English speaking world. Most of his books deal in some way with the struggles and conflicts of living as a Christian in the modern world.
“Another quality that strikes us… is Luther’s unfailing sense of humor. Reformers are usually deficient in humor. Their earnestness seldom permits them to laugh. Luther was the most earnest man of his century, and lived in more earnest times than any Europe had witnessed since the close of the first century.
“Sweet First Fruits is a… story primarily designed to give scope and opportunity for presenting to the Muslim reader the proofs of the Christian faith, the purity and genuineness of our Bible, its attestation by the Koran, and the consequent obligation on Muslims to obey its precepts.
“In approaching this subject, the first thing to be done is to answer unreasonable objections, produce the Scriptural authority for the Baptism of Infants, and show how history sustains the usage.
“Luther’s Smaller Catechism is the best text book for religious instruction that has yet been offered to the church. For nearly 400 years it has held this place in our church and millions have drank this “milk of the Gospel” as the very best food for spiritual babes.
In 1893 an attempt was made by liberal elements in the General Synod to remove Dr. Luther Gotwald from Wittenberg Seminary. He was said to be guilty of teaching the Augsburg Confession as, “a correct expression or exhibition of fundamental divine truth”.
“A writer possessing not only a fine literary gift, and a marvelous power of intense emotional realization, but a fresh, strange, and fascinating imaginative outlook. We know of nothing published in recent years which, in lurid impressiveness and relentless veracity of rendering, is to be compared with the realization of the fatally dominant alcoholic craving in the study entitled ‘A Literary Gent.