Of this confidence we have a remarkable example in a sermon devoted to the explanation of the 1st Epistle of St. John. At the same time the exceptional boldness of his language and the resolute testimony he bears in his own favour constitute striking proof of how the very firmness of his attitude impressed his followers and exercised over many a seductive spell. The weakness of the Reformer’s ethics seems all at once to vanish before his mighty eloquence. The discourse in question, where at the same time he vindicates his own conduct, belongs to 1532. About that time he preached frequently at Wittenberg on St. John’s sublime words concerning the love of God and our neighbour (1 Jo. iv. 16-21). His object was to cleanse and better the morals of Wittenberg, the low standard of which he deplores, that the results of justification by faith might shine forth more brightly. At that very time he was treating with the Elector and the Saxon Estates in view of a new visitation of all the parishes to be held the next year, which might promote the good of morality. The sermons were duly reported by his pupil Cruciger, whose notes were published at Wittenberg in 1533 under the general title of “A Sermon on Love.”[346] Dealing therein with ethical practice he starts by proclaiming that, according to the “pious Apostle” whose doctrines he was expounding, everything depends on Christians proving by their fruits whether they really “walk in love.” Of many, however, who not only declared themselves well acquainted with the principles of faith and ethics but even professed to be qualified to teach them, it was true that, “if we applied and manifested in our lives their ethics after their example, then we should be but poorly off.”[347] Such men must, nevertheless, be tested by their works. Nor does he exempt himself from this duty of putting ethics to a practical test. Nowhere else does he insist more boldly than in these sermons on proof by actual deeds, even in his own case. According to the words of John, so he says, a life of love would give them “confidence in the Day of Judgment” (iv. 17). Confidence, nay, a spirit of holy defiance, even in the presence of death and judgment, must fill the hearts of all who acted aright, owing to the very testimony of their fellow-men to the blamelessness of their lives. “We must be able to boast [with Christ, ‘the reconciliation for our sins’] not before God alone but before God and all Christendom, and against the whole world, that no one can truthfully condemn or even accuse us.” “We must be able to assure ourselves that we have lived in such a way that no one can take scandal at us”; we must have this testimony, “that we have walked on earth in simplicity and godly piety, and that no one can charge us with having been given to ‘trickery.’” In this wise had Paul countered false doctrines by boasting, just as Moses and Samuel had already done under the Old Covenant.[348]