Take Martin Luther, for instance, who found a Bible while he was a student in a convent, and studied it diligently. He became convinced that the sale of indulgences was sinful and endeavored to reform the Roman Catholic Church on this point. As a consequence of this effort he was excommunicated. Naturally, he started an independent movement. His purpose was to get back to the Bible and throw off all human authority, taking the Bible as his only guide. If he and all of his followers had been true to this noble ideal, there would be no Lutheran Church on the earth today. They would have become Christians and Christians only. I am convinced that Martin Luther did not intend to start a denomination. He pleaded with the people not to wear his name, but rather to call themselves Christians. He had strong convictions, and was willing to suffer for the sake of them. But, friends, Martin Luther had become well saturated with error before he began to study the Bible for himself. He could hardly have been expected to discover all the truth immediately. He knew that the Roman Catholics were wrong on indulgences, but they were also wrong on a great many other points which he did not discover. If he and his followers had continued to study the Bible and to make reformations as the need for them was discovered, then they would have kept getting back closer and closer to the original plan. This they did not do. Instead they made the tragic error of formulating a creed or confession of faith. This they probably did with good intentions, hoping thereby to protect their followers against the snares of Roman Catholicism and other errors, but they defeated their purpose. It was not long until the creed began to be recognized as authoritative—if not as equal to the Bible at least as a subordinate authority. Naturally the creed was erroneous and ambiguous. It was written by uninspired men and by men blinded and prejudiced by Roman Catholicism. The creed makers were wearing the colored glasses of Roman Catholicism. They who had had Romanism drilled into them from infancy could not instantly and entirely disabuse themselves of it. In some cases they retained Roman error; in other cases they were driven into opposite extremes. Naturally, after a generation or so, they acquired members who were in the movement not because of conviction, but because of convenience, or because their parents were. This condition, with the deadening effect of a creed—of a human creed—made progress back to the Bible very difficult, if not impossible. Each step of reformation called for a revision of the creed, and creeds are hard to revise. People become attached to them; they come to think more of them than they think of the Bible itself, if they aren’t very careful. They develop a patriotic attitude toward the creed which is very difficult to overcome. Consequently, we have the Lutheran Church with us today.