The essence of the doctrine of the Christian redemption is in the fact that he who suffered agony and death was the unique man--that is, Man, the Son of Man, or the Son of God; that he, because he was sinless, did not deserve to have died; and that this propitiatory divine victim died in order that he might rise again and that he might raise us up from the dead, in order that he might deliver us from death by applying his merits to us and showing us the way of life. And the Christ who gave himself for his brothers in humanity with an absolute self-abnegation is the pattern for our action to shape itself on.
All of us, each one of us, can and ought to determine to give as much of himself as he possibly can--nay, to give more than he can, to exceed himself, to go beyond himself, to make himself irreplaceable, to give himself to others in order that he may receive himself back again from them. And each one in his own civil calling or office. The word office, _officium_, means obligation, debt, but in the concrete, and that is what it always ought to mean in practice. We ought not so much to try to seek that particular calling which we think most fitting and suitable for ourselves, as to make a calling of that employment in which chance, Providence, or our own will has placed us.
Perhaps Luther rendered no greater service to Christian civilization than that of establishing the religious value of the civil occupation, of shattering the monastic and medieval idea of the religious calling, an idea involved in the mist of human passions and imaginations and the cause of terrible life tragedies. If we could but enter into the cloister and examine the religious vocation of those whom the self-interest of their parents had forced as children into a novice's cell and who had suddenly awakened to the life of the world--if indeed they ever do awake!--or of those whom their own self-delusions had led into it! Luther saw this life of the cloister at close quarters and suffered it himself, and therefore he was able to understand and feel the religious value of the civil calling, to which no man is bound by perpetual vows.
All that the Apostle said in the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the Ephesians with regard to the respective functions of Christians in the Church must be transferred and applied to the civil or non-ecclesiastical life, for to-day among ourselves the Christian--whether he know it or not, and whether he like it or not--is the citizen, and just as the Apostle exclaimed, "I am a Roman citizen!" each one of us, even the atheist, might exclaim "I am a Christian!" And this demands the _civilizing_, in the sense of dis-ecclesiasticizing, of Christianity, which was Luther's task, although he himself eventually became the founder of a Church.