argument must have appeared to all thoughtful and earnest souls
as a revelation, when he so clearly amplified the proposition
that only those works are to be regarded as good works which God
has commanded, and that therefore, not the abandoning of one's
earthly calling, but the faithful keeping of the Ten Commandments
in the course of one's calling, is the work which God requires
of us. Over against the wide-spread opinion, as though the will
of God as declared in the Ten Commandments referred only to the
outward work always especially mentioned, Luther's argument must
have called to mind the explanation of the Law, which the Lord
had given in the Sermon on the Mount, when he taught men to
recognize only the extreme point and manifestation of a whole
trend of thought in the work prohibited by the text, and when he
directed Christians not to rest in the keeping of the literal
requirement of each Commandment, but from this point of vantage
to inquire into the whole depth and breadth of God's will --
positively and negatively -- and to do His will in its full
extent as the heart has perceived it. Though this thought may
have been occasionally expressed in the expositions of the Ten
Commandments which appeared at the dawn of the Reformation, still
it had never before been so clearly recognized as the only
correct principle, much less had it been so energetically carried
out from beginning to end, as is done in this treatise. Over
against the deep-rooted view that the works of love must bestow
upon faith its form, its content and its worth before God, it
must have appeared as the dawn of a new era (Galatians 3:22-25)
when Luther in this treatise declared, and with victorious
certainty carried out the thought, that it is true faith which
invests the works, even the best and greatest of works, with
their content and worth before God.