The Frightful Roll

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 14, 1865

The Frightful Roll.

It is recorded of Luther, that during a serious illness, the Evil One seemed to enter his sick room, and looking at him with a triumphant smile, unrolled a vast roll which he carried in his arm. As the fiend threw one end of it on the floor, and it unwound itself with the impetus he had given it, Luther's eyes were fixed on it, and to his consternation he read there the long and fearful record of his own sins, clearly and distinctly enumerated. There stood before his very eyes "the sins and offenses of his youth," and all "his transgressions in all his sins."

There they were in letters as black as he felt his sins to be, and as plain as he knew they would be if God should "set them before him in the light of his countenance." "His heart failed him" as he looked. That stout heart which never quailed before man—that firm, honest eye, which could look cardinals and bishops, princes and palatines, in the face, did quail before that ghastly roll. "His sins took such a hold upon him that he was not able to look up."

Suddenly it flashed into his mind that there was one thing not written there. He said aloud, "One thing you have forgotten; the rest is all true, but one thing you have forgotten, 'The blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanseth us from all sin;'"; and as he said this, the "Accuser of the brethren," and his heavy roll of "lamentation and mourning and woe," disappeared together.