As for Luther’s then attitude towards the Bible, he actually exaggerates its importance at the expense of reason by asserting that reason, whilst well aware of the contradictions and the foolishness of the truths of revelation, was nevertheless obliged to accept them. The incomprehensibility, ever taught by theologians, of many of the mysteries of the faith, for the understanding of which human reason alone does not suffice, Luther represents as an open contradiction with reason; reason and philosophy, owing to original sin, must necessarily be in opposition to God, and hence faith does actual violence to reason, forcing it to submit, contrary to its present nature and to that of man. Hence, in his estimate of Holy Scripture, far from being a rationalist, he was, as a modern Protestant theologian puts it, really an “irrationalist,” holding as he did that an “unreasonable obedience to Holy Scripture”[11] was required of us. According to this same theologian, Luther starts from “an irrational conception of God’s veracity,” indeed it is God, Who, according to Luther, “by the gift of faith, produces in man the irrational belief in the truth of the whole Divine Word.” Thus does Luther reach his “altogether irrational, cut-and-dry theology.”[12] If the Wittenberg Professor asserts later, that no religion is so foolish and contrary to reason as Christianity, and that nevertheless he believes “in one Jew, Who is called and is Jesus Christ,”[13] this belief, so singularly expressed, was already present to him in his first period, and the same may be said, so the authority above referred to declares, of his apparent adoption in later years of more positive views, “since Luther’s theological convictions never underwent any essential change.”[14] If from the positive we pass to the negative side of Luther’s teaching, we do indeed find the latter more predominant during the first period of his career. An almost revolutionary assertion of religious freedom is found side by side with the above utterances on faith, so that Adolf Harnack could with some justice say that “Kant and Fichte both are concealed in this Luther.”[15] “Neither Pope, nor bishop, nor any man,” according to what Luther then says, “has a right to dictate even a syllable to the Christian without his own consent.”[16] If you have grasped the Word in faith, then “you have fulfilled all the commandments and must be free from all things”; the believer becomes “spiritually lord of all,” and by virtue of his priestly dignity, “he has power over all things.”[17] “No laws can be imposed upon Christians by any authority whatsoever, neither by men, nor by angels, except with their own consent, for we are free of all things.”[18] “What is done otherwise is gross tyranny.... We may not become the servants of men.” “But few there are who know the joy of Christian liberty.”[19]