These men are those who are hidden reefs in your love feasts when they feast with you without fear, caring for themselves; clouds without water, carried along by winds; autumn trees without fruit, doubly dead, uprooted; wild waves of the sea, casting up their own shame like foam; wandering stars, for whom the black darkness has been reserved forever.
* * *
These men think they must be the best part and the jewel, as it were, of Christendom, while they are merely an abomination. They do not feed the sheep, but are themselves the wolves that devour the sheep. They are clouds that hang over us in the air, sit up high in the churches as those that should preach, and yet they do not preach at all, but let themselves be driven by the devil this way and the other. So too (he says) they are lifeless, fruitless trees, like the trees of autumn. There is with them neither word nor work, but all is dead to the sea, that is, as the wind tosses and throws up the waves and billows upon the water, so these, too, go just as the devil leads them. They foam at their own shame like a heated pot, they are so full of pollution that they run over. They are wandering stars, planets as they are commonly called, that go backward and not in a steady, straight course, so that they make no true progress. Their life and doctrine is mere error in which they lead themselves astray, and all that follow after them. Therefore for them is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.
They open wide their ravenous jaws,
And threaten to devour us.
But thanks to God, who rules our cause,
They shall not overpower us:
Their snares He yet will bring to naught,
And overthrow what they have taught;
God is too mighty for them.
-- Cuda.
aka Pastor Robin Fish To be Lutheran is to be Christian -- and Vice Versa!
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