“(The purpose of this book) is to prove the truth of revealed religion in general, and of the Christian in particular, from the completion of those prophecies in the Old and New Testaments which relate to the Christian Church, especially to the apostasy of Papal Rome.
“[Luther] felt that many things were wanting in this extemporaneous explication… But as he was satisfied that the sense and substance of each Psalm were everywhere faithfully given, and that a very important part of the true religion was here copiously handled; he was, under these assurances, the more willing to overlook any thing that might be wanting in the way of greater correctness, and loftier language and expression.
Many people have opinions about Martin Luther, but few have actually read his words. This small volume includes what church scholars Henry Wace and C. A. Buchheim consider Luther’s three primary works.
Edward Bishop Elliott (1793-1875) “graduated from Cambridge in 1816 and he served in various positions as a minister for the Church of England. He ultimately settled at St. Marks Church in Brighton.
“…the book is to deepen devotion, but there is one class of people above all others, for whose help it is most adapted. It is ‘an admirable handbook for the parish priest, because written by one who himself labored through the greater part of his ministerial career as a[n Anglican] parish priest.
“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.
“They who declared that reason would not allow them to believe that God could once become Incarnate, saw no reason to doubt the manifold Reincarnation of Man. They who complained that they found the straight and level highway of Christianity too difficult a road for them to follow, or that there was no sure foothold therein, were content to lose themselves among the mazes of Superstition, or to flounder and stumble among the stony wastes of Unbelief.
“There can be no doubt of the force and freshness of most of the book, of the fine literary quality of some of the chapters, and of the interest of the whole.
William Tisdall was an expert in Islam and the Koran, and fluent in Arabic, Persian, and other languages. One of his most valuable books is Islamic Objections to Christianity, which will be re-released later this year by The Lutheran Library.
“The Bible to the early church was not a book merely; it was a grand zoön, a living creature, a thing instinct in every part with a mysterious, manifold and superabundant life.