“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.
“Brought up as a gentleman, Andrew Fairfax, on the death of his benefactor, is reduced to the position of a farm laborer, from which he raises himself by the writing of a successful novel.
“What we propose for you, dear reader, is a plain discussion on the subject of Baptism. We are led to this because of the persistent effort which is being made to undermine your faith and lead you to believe that you were baptized at the wrong time, and in the wrong way, and with a wrong notion as to the benefits which your baptism is designed to bring to you.
“Luther was in the habit of talking much to the friends who gathered round him at the evening meal in his home at Wittenberg. In these talks he revealed himself with a frankness which has few parallels in history.
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”.
“Sweet First Fruits is a delightful 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.
“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.