Greatly as he erred in wilfully applying his new, subjective principle of interpretation and in excluding certain of the Sacred Books, still the Bible itself he always declared to be an object of the highest reverence. Thanks to a retentive memory he made his own the words of Scripture, and even adopted its style. His “enthusiasm for the inexhaustible riches and Divine character of Holy Scripture,” of which the earlier Döllinger speaks,[818] has, and with some reason, been held up by Luther’s followers as the model, nay, the palladium of Lutheranism as a whole; on the other hand, however, Döllinger’s accompanying censure on Luther’s “arbitrary misuse” of the Bible-text must also commend itself not only to Catholics but to every serious student of the Bible. High praise for Luther’s acquaintance with Scripture combined with severe blame for his deviation from tradition are forthcoming from a contemporary of the early years of Luther’s public career. In a short, unprinted and anonymous work entitled “Urteil über Luther,” now in the Munich State Library, we read: “In the fine art of the written Word of God, i.e. the Bible, I hold Martin Luther to be the most learned of men, whether of those now living on earth or of those who have departed long since; he is, moreover, well versed in the two languages, both Latin and German. I do not, however, regard him as a Christian--for to be learned and eloquent is not to be a Christian--but as a heretic and schismatic”; he was, it adds, “the scourge of an angry God.”[819] In the field of scriptural activity his German translation of the whole Bible has procured for him enduring fame. Since the birth of Humanism not a few scholars had drawn attention to the languages in which the Bible was originally written; Luther, however, was the first who ventured to make a serious attempt to produce a complete translation of all the Sacred Books on the basis of the original text. Thanks to his German version, from the linguistic point of view so excellent, Protestants down to our own day have been familiar with the Bible. His rendering of the Bible stories and doctrines, at once so able and so natural, was a gain not only to the language of religion but even to profane literature, just as his writings generally have without question largely contributed to the furtherance of the German tongue.