For henceforth the husband, the father, and the citizen,
became the reformer also of the domestic life of his nation; and the
very blessing of their earthly life which Protestants and Catholics
share alike today is due to the marriage of an excommunicated monk
with a runaway nun.
For twenty more busy years he was destined to work as an educator of
his nation. During this time his greatest work, the translation of the
Bible, was completed, and in this work, which he accomplished in
cooeperation with his Wittenberg friends, he acquired a complete
control of the language of the people--a language whose wealth and
power he first learned to realize through this work. We know the lofty
spirit which he brought to this undertaking. His purpose was to create
a book for the people, and for this he studied industriously turns of
phrases, proverbs, and special terms which made up the people's
current language. Even Humanists had written an awkward, involved
German, with clumsy sentences in unfortunate imitation of the Latin
style. Now the nation acquired for daily reading a work which, in
simple words and short sentences, gave expression to the deepest
wisdom and the best intellectual life of the time. Along with Luther's
other works, the German Bible became the foundation of the modern
German language, and this language, in which our whole literature and
intellectual life has found expression, has become an indestructible
possession which, in the gloomiest times, even corrupted and
distorted, has reminded the various German strains that they have
common interests.
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