While in the Wartburg he was forbidden to issue any writings. Leisure
was thus afforded for one of the most important things connected with
the Reformation. Those ten months he utilized to prepare for Germany
and for the world a translation of the Holy Scriptures, which itself
was enough to immortalize the Reformer's name. Great intellectual
monuments have come down to us from the sixteenth century. It was an
age in which the human mind put forth some of its noblest
demonstrations. Great communions still look back to its Confessions as
their rallying-centres, and millions of worshipers still render their
devotions in the forms which then were cast. But pre-eminent over all
the achievements of that sublime century was the giving of God's Word
to the people in their own language, which had its chief centre and
impulse in the production of Luther's _German Bible_. Well has it been
said, "He who takes up that, grasps a whole world in his hand--a world
which will perish only when this green earth itself shall pass away."
It was the Word that kindled the heart of Luther to the work of
Reformation, and the Word alone could bring it to its consummation.
With the Word the whole Church of Christ and the entire fabric of our
civilization must stand or fall. Undermine the Bible and you undermine
the world. It is the one, true, and only Charter of Faith, Liberty,
and salvation for man, without which this race of ours is a hopeless
and abandoned wreck. And when Luther gave forth his German Bible, it
was not only a transcendent literary achievement, which created and
fixed the classic forms of his country's language,[15] but an act of
supremest wisdom and devotion; for the hope of the world is for ever
cabled to the free and open Word of God.