DEAREST AND TRULY HONOURED BROTHER,--Grace, mercy, and peace be to you. I have seen no letter from you since I came to Aberdeen. I will not interpret it to be forgetfulness. I am here in a fair prison: Christ is my sweet and honourable fellow-prisoner, and I His sad and joyful lord-prisoner,[294] if I may speak so. I think this cross becometh me well, and is suitable to me in respect of my duty to suffer for Christ, howbeit not in regard of my deserving to be thus honoured. However it be, I see that Christ is strong, even lying in the dust, in prison, and in banishment. Losses and disgraces are the wheels of Christ's triumphant chariot. In the sufferings of His own saints, as He intendeth their good, so He intendeth His own glory, and that is the butt His arrows shoot at. And Christ shooteth not at rovers, He hitteth what He purposeth to hit; therefore He doth make His own feckless and weak nothings, and those who are the contempt of men, "a new sharp threshing instrument, having teeth, to thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and to make the hills as chaff, and to fan them" (Isa. xli. 15, 16). What harder stuff, or harder grain for threshing out, than high and rocky mountains? But the saints are God's threshing instruments, to beat them all into chaff. Are we not God's leem vessels? and yet when they cast us over a house we are not broken into sherds. We creep in under our Lord's wings in the great shower, and the water cannot come through those wings. It is folly then for men to say, "This is not Christ's plea, He will lose the wad-set; men are like to beguile Him:" that were indeed a strange play. Nay, I dare pledge my soul, and lay it in pawn on Christ's side of it, and be half-tiner, half-winner with my Master! Let fools laugh the fool's laughter, and scorn Christ, and bid the weeping captives in Babylon "sing us one of the songs of Zion, play a spring to cheer up your sad-hearted God!" We may sing upon luck's-head beforehand, even in our winter-storm, in the expectation of a summer sun, at the turn of the year. No created powers in hell, or out of hell, can mar the music of our Lord Jesus, nor spoil our song of joy. Let us then be glad, and rejoice in the salvation of our Lord; for faith had never yet cause to have wet cheeks, and hanging down brows, or to droop or die. What can ail faith, seeing Christ suffereth Himself (with reverence to Him be it spoken) to be commanded by it, and Christ commandeth all things? Faith may dance because Christ singeth; and we may come into the choir, and lift our hoarse and rough voices, and chirp, and sing, and shout for joy with our Lord Jesus. We see oxen go to the shambles, leaping and startling; we see God's fed oxen, prepared for the day of slaughter, go dancing and singing down to the black chambers of hell; and why should we go to heaven weeping, as if we were like to fall down through the earth for sorrow? If God were dead (if I may speak so, with reverence of Him who liveth for ever and ever), and Christ buried, and rotten among the worms, we might have cause to look like dead folks; but "the Lord liveth, and blessed be the Rock of our salvation" (Ps. xviii. 46). None have right to joy but we; for joy is sown for us, and an ill summer or harvest will not spill the crop. The children of this world have much robbed joy that is not well-come. It is no good sport they laugh at: they steal joy, as it were, from God; for He commandeth them to mourn and howl (James v. 1). Then let us claim our leal-come and lawfully conquessed joy.
[294] In Luther's style, he playfully speaks of himself as if raised to nobility among prisoners.