Of these charges it is hard to say which is the most unjust. His assertion that the Word of God had not been preached and that there was no Bible-preaching, has been refuted anew by every fresh work of research in the history of preaching at that time. Nor was the Bible-element in preaching entirely lacking, though it might not have been so conspicuous. The truth is, that, in many places, sermons were extremely frequent.[540] Luther’s second assertion, viz. that Catholic worship was full of lying legends, does not contain the faintest trace of truth, more particularly there where he was most radical in his work of expurgation, i.e. in the Canon. The Canon was a part of the Mass-service, which had remained unaltered from the earliest times. It was only into the sermons that legends had found their way to a great extent. If finally, as seems likely, Luther, by his third charge, viz. that the olden Church sought to “win salvation and God’s Grace” through her worship, means that this was the sole or principal aim of Catholic worship, here, too, he is at sea. The real object had always been the adoration and thanksgiving which are God’s due, offered by means of the sublime sacrifice united with the spiritual sacrifice of the whole congregation. Adoration and thanksgiving found their expression above all in the sublime Prefaces of the Mass. The thought already appears in the “_Sursum corda_, _Gratias agamus_, etc., _Dignum et iustum est_,” whereupon the priest, taking up again the “_Dignum et iustum est_,” proceeds: “_Æquum et salutare, nos tibi semper et ubique gratias agere ... per Christum Dominum nostrum_.” It is not without significance that “_dignum_,” “_iustum_” and “_æquum_” stand first, and that “_salutare_” comes after; praise and thanksgiving are what it becomes us first of all to offer in presence of God’s Majesty, but they are also profitable to us because they render God gracious to us.[541] The ritual of the Catholic sacrifice, dating as it does from the Church’s remotest past, expresses adequately the highest thoughts of Christian ethics, viz. the adoration of the Creator by the creature through the God-man Christ, Who alone worthily honours Him. To this idea Luther’s attempt at a liturgy does not do justice. 10. Schwenckfeld as a Critic of the Ethical Results of Luther’s Life-work Caspar Schwenckfeld, the Silesian nobleman (see above, p. 78 ff.), is a type of those men who attached themselves to Lutheranism with the utmost enthusiasm, but, who, owing to the experience they met with and in pursuance of those very principles which Luther himself had at first advocated, came to strike out new paths of their own.