Digital Logos Edition
Written around 1350 by an anonymous author, this is a simple yet profound book about life in God as it translates into life in the world. This translation was based on Luther’s German edition of 1518. Modern readers will benefit from this celebrated text, so valued by Martin Luther that he translated it himself.
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“This hidden sorrow over man’s sinful condition is an attribute of God’s that He has chosen and that He is pleased to see in man. But it is God’s attribute above all. Sorrow over sin does not finally belong to man; man is not himself capable of it. Wherever God can bring it about in us, it is the most pleasing and most appropriate but at the same time the most bitter and heavy undertaking on which we can enter.” (Page 110)
“Fourth, we have the illumined ones, guided by the true Light. They do not practice the ordered life in expectation of reward. For they do not want to acquire anything with the aid of it, nor do they hope that something will accrue on account of it. No, they do what they do in the ordered life out of love.” (Page 113)
“When I claim something good as my own achievement, in the belief that I am good, or that I can do the good of myself, or that I know the good, or that I am the one that carries out the good as though it came from me, belongs to me, or is my due, and things along this line, when this happens I usurp merit and honor and commit two evils.” (Pages 63–64)
“But he fell at the moment his presumption occurred and that could have happened even if he had not bitten into a single apple.” (Page 62)
“It is a sign of a hireling that he wishes his work would soon end.” (Page 112)