Characteristic utterances of Luther’s regarding his own gifts and excellencies, the wisdom and courage displayed in his undertaking and the important place he would occupy in history as the discoverer and proclaimer of the Evangelical truth, are to be met with in such plenty, both in his works and in the authentic notes of his conversations, that we have merely to select some of the most striking and bring them together. They form a link connecting his whole public career; he never ceased to regard all his labours from the point of view of his Divine mission, and what he says merely varies in tone and colour with the progress which took place in his work as time went on. It is true that he knew perfectly well that it was impossible to figure a Divine mission without the pediment and shield of humility. How indeed could those words of profound humility, so frequent with St. Paul, have rung in Luther’s ears without finding some echo? Hence we find Luther, too, from time to time making such his own; and this he did, not out of mere hypocrisy, but from a real wish to identify his feelings with those of the Apostle; in almost every instance, however, his egotism destroys any good impulse and drives him in the opposite direction. Luther’s confessions of his faults and general unworthiness are often quite impressive. We may notice that such were not unfrequently made to persons of influence, to Princes and exalted patrons on whom his success depended, and whom he hoped thereby to dispose favourably; others, however, are the natural, communicative outpourings of that “colossal frankness”--as it has been termed--which posterity has to thank for its knowledge of so many of Luther’s foibles. In his conversations we sometimes find him speaking slightingly of himself, for instance, when he says: “Philip is of a better brand than I. He fights and teaches; I am more of a rhetorician or gossip.”[1155] A passage frequently quoted by Luther’s admirers in proof of his humility is that which occurs in his preface to the “Psalter” published by Eobanus Hessus. The Psalms, he says, had been his school from his youth upwards. “While unwilling to put my gifts before those of others, I may yet boast with a holy presumption, that I would not, as they say, for all the thrones and kingdoms of the world, forgo the benefits, that, by the blessing of the Holy Spirit, I have derived from lingering and meditating on the Psalms.” He was not going to hide the gifts he had received from God, and in Him he would be proud, albeit in himself he found reasons enough to make him humble; he took less pleasure in his own German Psalter than in that of Eobanus, “but all to the honour and glory of God, to Whom be praise for ever and ever.”[1156]