In Rom. III, 28: “For we account a man to be justified by faith, without the works of the law,”(826) Luther deliberately inserted the word “alone.” The context shows that this is a falsification. The Apostle contrasts justifying faith, not with those preparatory acts of salvation which spring from it, but with the sterile “works of the law” (_i.e._ the Old Testament), which, as such, possessed no more power to justify than the good works of the heathen. Keeping this contrast in mind, it would not be incorrect to say, and St. Paul might well have said, that “supernatural faith alone (_i.e._ only) justifies, while the works of the law do not.” But if faith be taken in contradistinction to the other acts operative in the process of justification, such as fear, hope, contrition, love,—and this is the sense in which Luther takes it,—then it is false and contrary to the mind of St. Paul to say: “Faith alone justifies, nothing else is required.” For in this sense faith is merely the beginning, the foundation, the root of justification and cannot justify the sinner until it has absorbed the other preparatory acts required by Holy Scripture and transformed them into perfect love. This fact was already pointed out by St. Augustine. “Unintelligent persons,” he says, “with regard to the Apostle’s statement: ‘We conclude that a man is justified by faith without the works of the law,’ have thought him to mean that faith is sufficient for a man, even if he leads a bad life and has no good deeds to allege. It is impossible that such a character should be deemed ‘a vessel of election’ by the Apostle, who, after declaring that ‘in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision,’ adds the important remark: ‘but faith that worketh by charity.’ It is such faith which separates the faithful children of God from unclean devils,—for even these ‘believe and tremble,’ as the Apostle James says, but they do no good works. Therefore they possess not the faith by which the just man lives,—the faith which operates through love in such wise that God recompenses it according to its works with eternal life.”(827) There is another sense in which faith alone may be said to justify, _viz._: if the term be taken to include all those things which God has ordained for our salvation, that is to say, the sum-total of “revelation” or “the true religion” as opposed to “heresy.” The term πίστις (_fides_) is sometimes employed in this sense by the Fathers, but never in Sacred Scripture.(828)