Note 525 — Chapter XIV

In Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 697, after a reference to the oppression of the peasantry, their insolence and desire for innovation, we read: “In addition to all this there now supervened the preaching of the new Evangel.... A higher warrant was bestowed upon the complaints and the demands concerning secular and material matters.... The Christian liberty of which the New Testament speaks and which Luther proclaimed was applied directly to temporal questions. Paul’s words that in Christ there is neither bond nor free became a weapon.... Even the Old Testament was also appealed to. From the circumstance that God had granted to our first parents dominion over the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and the beasts of the field, they concluded that at least the right to fish and hunt was common to all. Great opposition was raised, above all, to the taxes due to the monasteries and clergy, and even the very existence of the monastic state and temporal authority of the clergy was called into question. Such ideas were readily fostered among the excited masses when the new preaching found its way amongst them by word of mouth or in writings”; p. 701: “Luther, however, was the man of the Evangel on whom the eyes of the great mass of the peasants in southern Germany were directed when their rising commenced.” The editors of the Weimar edition of Luther’s writings (18, 1908) remark in the first introduction to the same (p. 279): “The rebellion found its encouragement and support in Luther’s victorious gospel of ecclesiastical reformation; ultimately, however, it secularised the new gospel. Whence it came to pass that in the end, not Luther, but rather the religious fanatics, above all, Thomas Münzer, drew the excited masses under their spell and impressed their stamp on the whole movement.” Concerning Luther’s attitude towards the revolt at the time it was preparing, we read on p. 280: “Up to that time [the spring of 1525], Luther had taken no direct part in the social movement. He was, however, without doubt indirectly engaged; his writings had fallen like firebrands on the inflammable masses, who misunderstood them, interpreted them according to their own ideas and forged from them weapons for their own use.”