LUTHER AND HITLER
Stn,—Your reviewer, Mr. J. 0. Cobham, has attacked me with a sur- prising vehemence in his review of Gordon Rupp's Martin Luther. I hope you will generously allow me to defend myself. Your reviewer accuses me of having depended entirely on " secondary and inaccurate sources " in my own earlier pamphlet on the German reformer. I challenge him to prove this to me by one single quotation. Of all the quotations in my pamphlet none has produced more comment, nauseated and horrified more people than the one in which Luther accuses Him of having committed adultery. The blasphemy, the faith-destroying mockery of this saying is unsurpassed by anything Streicher & Co. have uttered. Here is the passage: "Christ," says Luther, "committed adultery first of all with the woman at the well, about whom Saint John tells us. Was not everybody about . Him saying. ' Whatever has he been doing with her '? Secondly, with Mary Magdalene, and thirdly with the woman taken in adultery whom He dismissed so lightly. Thus even Christ, who was so righteous, must heve been guilty of fornication before He died."
I merely suggested that a man who is capable of such thoughts might somehow be at the bottom of the anti-Christian German religion of hate and race, murder and destruction. It merely occurred to me that the man who could sink so low would be the least qualified person to serve as a reformer, as an example. The above quotation is to be found in Luther's table-talks, Weimar Edition, Volume II, page 107. I defy Mr. Cobham to prove to me that it is " select,'" " secondary " or " inaccurate." If he succeeds, I shall apologise without regret.—Yours
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