“He lives in a different world,” says Luther, “where he must know nothing either of sin or of merit; if however he feels his sin, he is to look at it as clinging, not to his own person, but to the person (Christ) on whom God has cast it, i.e. he must regard it, not as it is in itself and appears to his conscience, but rather in Christ by Whom it has been atoned for and vanquished. Thus he has a heart cleansed from all sin by the faith which affirms that sin has been conquered and overthrown by Christ.... Hence it is sacrilege to look at the sin in your heart, for it is the devil who puts it there, not God. You must say, my sins are not mine; they are not in me at all; they are the sins of another; they are Christ’s and are none of my business.”[35] Elsewhere he describes similarly the firm consolation of the righteous with regard to the Law and its accusations of sin: “This is the supreme comfort of the righteous, to vest and clothe Christ with my sins and yours and those of the whole world, and then to look upon Him as the bearer of all our sins. The man who thus regards Him will soon come to scorn the fanatical notions of the sophists concerning justification by works. They rave of a faith that works by love (‘_fides formata caritate_’), and assert that thereby sins are taken away and men justified. But this simply means to undress Christ, to strip Him of sin, to make Him innocent, to burden and load ourselves with our own sins and to see them, not in Christ, but in ourselves, which is the same thing as to put away Christ and say He is superfluous.”[36] The confidence with which Luther says such things concerning the transgression of the Divine Law by the righteous is quite startling; nor does he do so in mere occasional outbursts, but his frequent statements to this effect seem measured and dispassionate, nor were they intended simply for the learned but even for common folk. It was for the latter, for instance, that in his “Sermon von dem Sacrament der Puss” he said briefly: “To him who believes, everything is profitable and nothing harmful, but, to him who believes not, everything is harmful and nothing profitable.”[37] “Whosoever does not believe,” i.e. has failed to lay hold of the certainty of salvation, deserves to feel the relentless severity of the Law; let him learn that the “right understanding and use of the Law” is this, “that it does no more than prove” that all “who, without faith, follow its behests are slaves, stuck [in the Law] against their will and without any certainty of grace.” “They must confess that by the Law they are unable to make the slightest progress.” “Even should you worry yourself to death with works, still your heart cannot thereby raise itself to such a faith as the Law calls for.”[38] Thus, by the Law alone, and without the help of Luther’s “faith,” we become sheer “martyrs of the devil.”