Volume 1 — CHAPTER XIII

THE RISE OF THE REFORMED CHURCHES

1. Against the Fanatics. Congregational Churches?

Luther quitted the Wartburg March 1, 1522, after having previously paid a secret visit to Wittenberg between December 3 and 11. He now made his appearance at the birthplace of the Evangel in order to recommence his vigorous and incisive sermons, which had become imperatively necessary for his cause.

The action of Carlstadt, even more than that of the “Prophets of the Kingdom of God,” who had come over from Zwickau, called for his presence in order that he might resist their attacks. In his absence the Mass had already been forcibly abolished, sermons had been preached against confession and infant baptism, and the destruction of the images had commenced. Like Luther himself, those who incited the people to these proceedings, appealed on the one hand to the plain testimony of Holy Scripture as the source of their inspiration, and on the other to direct illumination from above.

Infant baptism, argued the Zwickauers, was not taught in Holy Scripture, but was opposed to the actual words of the Saviour: “He that believes and is baptised.” The “prophets” met, however, with little encouragement. Carlstadt had not yet taken their side either in this matter or in their pseudo-mysticism.

Against the Elector, Carlstadt, however, appealed expressly, as Luther had done, to his duty of proclaiming the understanding of the Bible which he had been granted.

“Woe to me,” he cried with the Apostle St. Paul, “if I do not preach” (1 Cor. ix. 16). He declared that the diversions arose merely from the fact that all did not follow Holy Scripture; but he, at least, obeyed it and death itself would not shift him from this firm foundation; he would remain “firmly grounded on the Word of God.” In demanding the removal of the images he cried: “God’s voice says briefly and clearly in Scripture: ‘Thou shalt not adore them nor serve them’; and hence it is useless to argue: ‘I do not worship the images, I do not honour them for their own sake, but on account of the Saints whom they represent.’”

Carlstadt, it is true, also suggested that it was for “the supreme secular power to decree and effect the removal of the abuse.”[239] When occasion arose he also advised “proceeding without causing a tumult and without giving the foes cause for calumny.” That was his advice,[240] but most of those who thought as he did were little disposed to wait until the authorities, or the “priests of Baal themselves, removed their vessels and idols.”

The first step towards liturgical change in Wittenberg was, however, taken by Melanchthon when, September 29, 1521, he and his pupils received the Sacrament in the Parish Church, the words of institution being spoken aloud and the cup being passed to the laity, because Christ had so ordained it. A few days later the Augustinians, particularly Gabriel Zwilling, commenced active steps against the Mass as a sacrifice, ceasing to say it any longer. Melanchthon and the Augustinians knew that in this they had Luther’s sympathy. As those who agreed with Luther followed Melanchthon’s example concerning the Mass and the Supper, and ceased to take any part in the Catholic Mass, introducing preachers of their own instead, a new order of Divine worship was soon the result. “Alongside of the congregation with the old Popish rites rose the new evangelical community.”[241] But here Carlstadt stepped forward and gave a new turn to events; he was determined not to see the followers of the Gospel left in a corner, and without delay he set about altering the principal service at Wittenberg, which was still celebrated in accordance with Catholic usage, so as to bring it into agreement with the “institution of Christ.” This new service was first celebrated at Christmas, 1521. Those portions which express the sacrificial character of the Mass were omitted, and a new Communion service introduced instead, the laity partaking of the chalice and the words of institution being spoken aloud. Confession was not required of the communicants. The novelty and the ease of receiving communion attracted crowds to the new ritual, which was first held in All Saints’ Church, then in the parish church, and was subsequently introduced by his followers, such as Zwilling, for instance, in the neighbouring parishes.

Great disorders occurred at the very first service of this sort.

Many communicated after eating and drinking freely. In January, 1522, a noisy rabble forced its way into the church at Wittenberg, destroyed all altars, and the statues of the saints, and cast them, together with the clergy, into the street.

The Elector and his Councillors, for instance Hieronymus Schurf, were very angry with the business and with the “pseudo-prophets,” i.e. Carlstadt and his followers; the Zwickauers, who, as a matter of fact constituted an even greater source of danger, held back on this occasion.

Melanchthon, then at Wittenberg, inclined to the belief that the Zwickauers were possessed by a higher spirit, but it was, he thought, for Luther to determine the nature of this spirit. The prophets, on the other hand, argued that Luther was certainly right in most he said and did, though not always, and that another, having a higher spirit, would take his place.

The purer and more profound view of the Evangel upon which they secretly prided themselves was a consequence of their eminently reasonable opposition to Luther’s altogether outward doctrine of justification and the state of grace. To them the idea of a purely mechanical covering over of our sinfulness by the imputation of Christ’s merits, seemed totally inadequate. They wanted to be in a more living communion with Christ, and having once seceded from the Church, they arrived by the path of pseudo-mysticism at the delusion of a direct intercourse with the other world; thereby, however, they brought a danger on the field, viz. religious radicalism and political revolution. “It seems to me a very suspicious circumstance,” so Luther writes of the Zwickau prophets, “that they should boast of speaking face to face with the Divine Majesty.”[242]

Luther, after his period of study at the Wartburg, had at once to define and prove his position, particularly as he disapproved of much of the doctrines of Carlstadt’s party, as well as of his over-hasty action. Without delay, he mounted the pulpit at Wittenberg and staked all the powers of his personality and eloquence against the movement; he was unwilling that the whole work of the Evangel which had begun should end in chaos. In a course of eight sermons he traced back the disorders to “a misapprehension of Christian freedom.” It grieved him deeply, he declared, that, without his order, so much was being altered instead of proceeding cautiously and allowing the faith to mature first. “Follow me,” he cried, “I have never yet failed; I was the first whom God set to work on this plan; I cannot escape from God, but must remain so long as it pleases my Lord God; I was also the first to whom God gave the revelation to preach and proclaim this His Word to you. I am also well assured that you have the pure Word of God.”[243]

What he says is, however, rather spoilt by a dangerous admission. “Should there be anyone who has something better to offer and to whom more has been revealed than to me, I am ready to submit to him my sense and reason and not to force my opinion upon him, but to obey him.”[244] He, of course, felt that he could convict the so-called “fanatics” of error, and was sure beforehand that his professed readiness to submit to others would not endanger his position. His whole cause depended on the maintenance of outward order and his own authority at Wittenberg; he knew, moreover, that he was backed by the Elector.

His success against his adversaries, who, to tell the truth, were no match for him, was complete. Wittenberg was saved from the danger of open adherence to “fanaticism,” though the movement was still to give Luther much trouble secretly at Wittenberg and more openly elsewhere, particularly as Carlstadt, in his disappointment, came more and more after 1522 to make common cause with the Zwickauers.[245]

The success of his efforts against the fanatics secured for Luther the favour of his Ruler and his protection against the consequences of his outlawry by the Empire. Luther was thus enabled to carry on his work as professor and preacher at Wittenberg in defiance of the Emperor and the Empire; from thence, till the very end of his life, he was able, unmolested, to spread abroad, with the help of the Press, his ideas of ecclesiastical revolution.

In view of the movement just described, and of others of a like nature, he published towards the close of his Patmos sojourn the work entitled “A True Admonition to all Spirits to Avoid Riot and Revolt.”[246] This, however, did not prevent him shortly after from furthering the idea of the use of force with all his habitual incautious violence in the tract “Against the Falsely-called Spiritual Estate of the Pope and the Bishops” (1522),[247] in which, in language the effect of which upon the masses it was impossible to gauge, he incites the people to overthrow the existing Church government.

“Better were it,” he cries in the latter work, “that all bishops were put to death, and all foundations and convents rooted out, than that one soul should suffer. What then must we say when all souls are lost for the sake of vain mummery and idols? Of what use are they but to live in pleasure on the sweat and toil of others and to hinder the Word of God?” A revolt against such tyrants could not, he says, be wicked; its cause would not be the Word of God, but their own obstinate disobedience and rebellion against God. “What better do they deserve than to be stamped out by a great revolt? Such a thing, should it occur, would only give cause for laughter, as the Divine Wisdom says, Proverbs i. 25-26: ‘You have despised all my counsel and have neglected my reprehensions. I also will laugh in your destruction.’”[248]

Expressing similar sentiments, the so-called “Bull of Reformation,” comprised in the last-mentioned tract, has it that “all who assist in any way, or venture life or limb, goods or honour in the enterprise of destroying bishoprics and exterminating episcopal rule, are dear children of God and true Christians.... On the other hand all who hold with the rule of the bishops ... are the devil’s own servants.”[249] Such is the teaching of “Ecclesiastes, by the Grace of God,” as Luther calls himself here and frequently elsewhere. They must listen to him; the bishops, for the sake of their idol the Pope, abused, condemned and consigned to the flames him and his noble cause, refusing either to listen to or to answer him, but now he will, so he says, “put on his horns and risk his head for his master,” in defiance of the “idolatrous, licentious, shameless, accursed seducers and wolves.”

As a demolisher Luther proved himself great and strong. Was he an equally good builder?

The decisive question of how to proceed to the construction of a new ecclesiastical system seems to have been scarcely considered at all by Luther, either at the Wartburg, or even for some time after his return. His mind was full of one idea, viz. how best to fight the Church of Antichrist. He had no real conception of the Church which might have assisted him in an attempt to plan out a new system; his notion of the Church was altogether too dim and indefinite to serve as the basis of a new organisation. Even to-day Protestant theologians and historians are unable to tell us with any sort of unanimity how his ideas of the Church are to be understood; this holds good of him throughout life, but most of all during the earliest days of Protestantism, when the first attempts were made to consolidate it.

One of the most recent explorers in the field of the history of theology in those years, H. Hermelink, concludes a paper on the subject with the words: “Let us hope that we Protestant theologians may gradually reach some agreement concerning Luther’s idea of the Church and concerning the Reformer’s plans for the reorganisation of the Church.”[250]

K. Rieker, K. Sohm, W. Köhler, Karl Müller, P. Drews, Fr. Loofs and many others who have recently devoted themselves to these studies which have aroused so much interest in our day, all differ more or less from each other in their views on the subject.

The fact must not be forgotten that the Apocalyptic tendency of Luther’s mind at that time prevented his dwelling on matters of practical organisation. The reign of Antichrist at Rome seemed to him to portend the end of the world. Apocalyptic influences oppressed him, particularly in the years 1522 and 1523, and we find their traces at intervals even afterwards, for instance, in the years following 1527 and just before his death;[251] in each case they were due to outward and interior “trials.” In the first crisis, at the commencement of the third decade of the sixteenth century, his false eschatology, based on an erroneous understanding of the Bible, led him, for instance, to anticipate the coming of the Last Day in 1524, in consequence of a remarkable conjunction of the planets which was confidently expected to bring about a deluge. His sermon on the 2nd Sunday in Advent fixes the year 1524 as the latest on which this event could occur.[252]

In his work “To the Nobility on the Improving of the Christian State,” Luther still took it for granted that the Emperor, Princes and influential laity would forcibly rescue Christendom from the state of corruption in which it was sunk, and that after Christendom had accepted the evangel, the pre-existing order of things would continue very much as before under a reformed episcopate; should the bishops refuse to come over to the Gospel, plenty “idle parsons” would be found to take their place. As a matter of fact, he had no clear idea in his mind regarding the future shaping of affairs.

At the Diet of Worms it became evident that his fantastic dreams were not to be realised, for the Empire, instead of welcoming him, proclaimed him an outlaw. Luther, accordingly, trusting to his mystical ideas, now persuaded himself that his cause and the reorganisation of Christendom would be undertaken by Christ alone.

In the Wartburg Luther received the fullest and most definite assurance that the temporal powers who were opposed to him at Worms would submit themselves in these latter days to the Word which he preached, and that the weakening of the Church’s authority which had been begun had not proceeded nearly far enough. It was revealed to him that his work was yet at its beginning and that there yet remained to be established new communities of Christians sharing his views. Hence we find him writing to Frederick, his Elector, on March 7, 1522: “The spiritual tyranny has been weakened, to do which has been the sole aim of my writings; now I perceive that God wills to carry it still further as He did with Jerusalem and its twofold government. I have recently learnt that not only the spiritual but also the temporal power must give way to the Evangel, willingly or unwillingly; this is plainly shown in all the Bible narratives.”[253] With the Bible in his hand he seeks to prove, from the passages relating to the end of the world, and the reign of Antichrist, that, before the end of all, Christ will overthrow the anti-Christian powers by the “breath of His mouth.”

“It is the mouth of Christ which must do this.” “Now may I and everyone who speaks the word of Christ freely boast that his mouth is the mouth of Christ.” “Another man, one whom the Papists cannot see, is driving the wheel, and therefore they attribute it all to us, but they shall yet be convinced of it.”[254]

Meanwhile some practical action was necessary, for, as yet, the Evangelicals formed only small groups and unorganised congregations which might at any time drift apart, whilst elsewhere they were scattered among the masses, almost unnoticed and utterly powerless. The mere attacking of Popery was not sufficient to consolidate them. The “meetings” of those who had been touched by the “Word,” Gospel-preaching and a new liturgy, did not suffice. The further growth and permanent organisation of the congregations Luther hoped to see effected by the help of the authorities, by the Town-councillors, who were to play so great a part later, and, better still, by the Princes whom he expected to win over to the new teaching as he had already done in the case of Frederick, the Elector of Saxony. It is true he would have preferred the setting up of churches to have been the work of the newly converted Faithful, i.e. to have taken place from below upwards. Those who had been converted by the Gospel, “the troubled consciences” as he calls them, who were united in faith and charity, were ever to form the nucleus around which he would fain have seen everywhere the congregations growing, without the intervention of the worldly power. The force of circumstances, however, even from the commencement, compelled him to fall back on the authorities.

In short, the ideas he advanced concerning organisation were, not only various, but frequently contradictory. His favourite idea, to which we shall return later, of a community of perfect Christians was utterly incapable of realisation. “To maintain within the Congregation a more select company forming a corporation apart was hardly feasible in the long run.”[255] At the back of his various plans was always the persuasion that the power of the Gospel would in the end do its own work and reveal the right way for the building up of a new organisation, just as of its own power it had shattered the edifice of Antichrist. Instead of searching for the link connecting his discordant utterances, as Protestant[256] theologians have been at pains to do, it will be more practical and more in accordance with history to present them here in disconnected groups. For any lack of clearness which may be the result Luther must be held responsible.

In one and the same work, shortly after his visit to Wittenberg from the Wartburg, the destruction of the Papacy is depicted first as the result of the action of the governments (who accordingly are bound to provide a new, even if only temporary, organisation), then as taking place through no human agency and without a single blow being struck.[257] In writing thus, he was the plaything of those “states of excitement” which constitute a marked feature of his “religious psychology.”[258] Luther was then aware of the threatening movement at Wittenberg and elsewhere, and attempted to stem it with the assurance that the kingdom of Antichrist was already crumbling to pieces; he does not, however, omit to point to the governments as the real agents of which Christ was to make use to achieve the victory: “Hearken to the government; so long as it does not interfere and give the command, keep your hands, your mouth and your heart quiet and say and do nothing. But if you are in a position to move the authorities to intervene and to give the order, you may do so.”[259]

It would seem from all this as though he expected the help necessary for the change of faith to come solely from those in authority, an opinion which he had expressed in his pamphlet to the nobility, the Princes and the gentry; the secular power after making its “submission” to the Evangel was to do all that was required in the interests of the Evangel; it was its duty to see that uniformity prevailed in the “true worship” throughout its dominions, to watch over the public services and exclude false worship. But whether the “Kingdom of God was to be introduced by the Princes, or to rise up spontaneously from the Christian Congregation, he does not clearly state.”[260] From 1522 to 1525 he frequently speaks as though it were to proceed solely from the congregation, which by reason of the common priesthood of its members was possessed of the necessary qualifications.

In any case, we may gather the following regarding Church organisation: no outward government, no power or legislative authority exists in the Church itself; on earth there is but one outward authority, viz. the secular; the Church lives only by the Word of God and supports and governs itself by this alone.

If legislation and external authority were called for in the Church, then this would have to be borrowed from the State, or, as Rudolf Sohm expresses it: “If legislation and judicial authority were needed in the Church of Christ, then, according to Luther’s principles, the government of the Church would have to be set up by the ruler of the land.” For, according to Luther, the authority of the Church is intended merely to foster piety,[261] and a spiritual governing authority would result in compulsion and simply make people “impious.” “The ecclesiastical authority to rule of the parson, i.e. his teaching office, is not a legal power.” In his treatise on canon law, Sohm is one of the principal supporters of this principle.[262] To judge from the praise bestowed upon him by Hermelink, he had “penetrated deeply into Luther’s thought,” and “on the whole saw things in a right light,” although he was possibly too fond of simplifying them in the interests of a system.[263] It is perfectly true that in Sohm and other Protestant Canonists, the contradictions in Luther’s opinions are left in the background; Luther’s views of the formation of congregations having their own rights and their own authority, which appear side by side with his other schemes, receive, as a rule, little attention.

In any case, Luther at that time made use of “every artifice to prove that it was the right of each individual Christian to judge of the preaching of the Gospel and of the avoiding of false prophets.”[264]

In those early days Luther was so full of the ideal of the congregation that, in order to support it, he even appeals to the natural law. In order to save souls every congregation, government or individual has by nature the right to make every effort to drive away the wolves, i.e. the clergy of Antichrist; no apathy can be permitted where it is a question of eternal salvation; the alleged rights and the handed-down possessions of the foes, on which they base their corruptive influence, must not be spared: “We must not fall upon and seize the temporal possessions of others, above all not of our superiors—except where it is a question of doctrine and the salvation of souls; but if the Gospel is not preached, the spiritual authorities have no right to the revenues.”[265] “According to Luther,” says Hermelink, “the authorities of Altenburg had a perfect right to drive away the Provost and his people from Altenburg as ravening wolves”; they were only to wait “a little” to see whether the monks would hold their tongues or perhaps even preach the pure Gospel. When thereupon Luther cries: “Their authority is at an end, abrogated by God Himself, if it be in conflict with the Gospel,”[266] Hermelink admits the presence of a certain “antagonism between the right of each individual Christian and the common law of society.”

Luther, however, generally prefers to give expression to other less violent thoughts anent the building up of the congregations to be formed from the Church of Antichrist.

The holy Brotherhood of the Spirit, he says in his idealistic way, was to arise, knowing no constraint but only charity, and having a ministry (“ministerium”), but no “power.”[267] “The freedom of the Spirit which must reign, makes things which are merely corporal and earthly, indifferent and not necessary.” “All things are indifferent and free (‘omnia sunt indifferentia et libera’).” “Paul demands the preservation of unity, but this is unity of the spirit, not of place, of persons, of things or of bodies.”[268] We here again note the advent of that mysticism which had formerly dragged him down to the depths of a passive indifference. How these pseudo-mystical ideas were to further the building up of the new ecclesiastical system it is hard to understand.

The Brotherhood, however, is not intended to introduce an altogether new ecclesiastical system. We are simply “Christians,” the true Christians, members of the Churches which have always existed, but purified from a thousand years of deformation. “To create sects is stupid and useless”;[269] according to Luther, it is not even necessary for the task of uniting under the Christian name, before the end of the world, all the faithful and the pious consciences elected from the Kingdom of Antichrist.

At that time he wished all his followers to be known simply as “Christians”; and in the first days of the Protestant Churches he very frequently makes use of this term.[270] Even at a later date he was loath to hear them called after himself, in spite of his practical action to the contrary, because they “share with the rest the common teaching of Christ.”[271] The term “Evangelicals” does not appear to have been much in use in Luther’s immediate surroundings.[272] As “Christians” and “Evangelicals” they had not left the “Church,” indeed, Luther always insists on the fact that it was they who really constituted and represented the “Church.” According to the Augsburg Confession in 1530 they belonged to the Catholic Church; they wished to define their position rather as that of a party within the Church, fighting for its existence, a party which accepted the Church’s recognised articles of belief, sheltered itself under the testimony of recognised Catholic authorities, and which had merely introduced certain innovations for the removal of the abuses which had crept in.[273]

Although, according to Luther, the inward organisation of the Brotherhood referred to above was a matter of indifference, and the approaching end of the world admonished him to suffer and wait to see what Christ willed to do with it, yet we read in other passages of his writings that it is necessary to work and to make great efforts to provide every city with a bishop or elder to preach the Gospel; “every Christian” is bound to help towards this end, both by personal exertion and with his goods, and more particularly the secular power, the authorities, whose duty it is to protect the pious. Those who are now already parsons may, indeed must, at once “withdraw from their obedience, seeing that they promised obedience to the devil and not to God.”[274]

This is certainly “something more than passive suffering and waiting for the end.”[275]

The apostasy of the clergy, which had begun, made the question of definite, external organisation a pressing one, for the new preachers and the clergy who were coming over had, after all, to be responsible to someone and had also to be maintained; it was also necessary that they and their followers should receive external recognition for their Churches and extricate themselves from the numerous ties which united so closely the spiritual with the secular in Catholic life. The appointment of pastors and the representation of the faithful by them was one of the factors which called for further organisation of the Churches: another factor, as we may notice in the case of Wittenberg, was the manner of celebrating the Supper. It was, as a matter of fact, the trouble at Wittenberg under Carlstadt which impelled Luther to take into serious consideration the establishment of an independent ecclesiastical organisation in that town, and which called for a definite system of appointing the Lutheran pastors even elsewhere, so as to prevent Carlstadt’s followers from getting the upper hand throughout the country.

After Luther had set aside Carlstadt’s innovations at Wittenberg, with the approval of the Elector who had forbidden them, he appointed the celebration of the Supper for those of the new faith at Wittenberg on the lines previously followed by Melanchthon; the communion became the principal part of the ceremony, the offertory was omitted and the words of consecration were spoken aloud either with or without certain of the prayers of the Mass. Thus the abuses introduced by Carlstadt were, in his opinion, removed, and the swarms of worldly minded and fanatical nominal Christians, “Christian in name but almost heathen at heart,” were no longer brought in contact with the true Evangelicals; the employment of force towards those weak in the faith, whose convictions Luther did not consider ripe for the purely congregational ritual of Carlstadt, was also put an end to. All the external forms which had been introduced, and to which, Luther feared, the people would have clung in an unevangelical fashion as had formerly been the case in Popery, were removed.

In order more particularly to avoid any compromising abuse of the Sacrament of the Altar, Luther sought to establish a Christian congregation in which confession should exist, though not as a compulsory practice, and in which a certain supervision was exercised.

In order to proceed cautiously and in accordance with the Elector’s ideas, he refrained from directing the bestowal of the chalice in the order of Divine Service drawn up for the use of his followers; at any rate, this was the case at Easter, 1522, though in the autumn of that same year the chalice was again in general use.[276] In spite of this, up to 1523, a special form of communion with the cup was in use for true Evangelical believers, who were subject to a special form of supervision. This arrangement agreed with Luther’s idea of an “Assembly of true Christians,” on which he was to enlarge in 1523 in his Maundy-Thursday sermon (see below). The special communion was, it is true, speedily abandoned, but the idea of the select Assembly ever remained dear to him.[277]

The other factor which called even more urgently for internal organisation was the appointment of pastors.

The induction of new pastors could not well take place independently of the authorities, indeed, it imperatively demanded their co-operation. At Wittenberg the later alteration in the liturgy and the final prohibition of the Mass, after it had been insisted on by Luther, was carried out by a threatening mob with the connivance of the Government.[278] Yet, in spite of the impossibility of dispensing with the secular power, until 1525, Luther was for various reasons more inclined to the Congregational ideal, which was less subject to Government interference.

This congregational ideal tended to promote his plan of an “Assembly of true Christians.”

In the newly erected congregations the “true believers,” according to what Luther repeatedly says, formed the nucleus. It is to these that he appeals in his instructions in 1523 (“iis qui credunt, hæc scribimus”); “those whose hearts God has touched are to meet together,” so he says, in order to choose a “bishop,” i.e. “a minister or pastor.” Even though the congregation numbers only half a dozen, yet they will draw after them others “who have not yet received the Word”; the half a dozen, though but a handful and perhaps not distinguished by piety, so long as they do not live as obstinate and open sinners, are the real representatives of the true Church at their home. They must also rest assured, that if in their choice they have prayed to God for enlightenment, they “will be moved, and not act of themselves (‘vos agi in hac causa, non agere’).” “That Christ acts through them is quite certain (‘plane certum’).”[279] “Hence even a small minority of the truly pious among the congregation possess not only the right but also the duty to act; for to stand by and let things take their course is contrary to the faith.”[280] The election derives its “true validity solely from the half-dozen.”[281] Of any election by the remaining members of the congregation or of any action of the magistracy Luther says nothing whatever; he is speaking only to those within the body of the congregation whose hearts God has touched.

The above thoughts find their first expression in the writing “De instituendis ministris ecclesiæ,” which Luther sent to the Utraquists or Calixtines of Prague.[282]

The Utraquists of Bohemia acknowledged the Primacy of the Holy See and obeyed the Catholic Hierarchy, though certain Lutheran tendencies prevailed amongst them, which, however, had been grossly exaggerated by Cahera, who informed Luther of the fact; Cahera even represented the greater part of the Council of Prague as predisposed in Luther’s favour, which was certainly not true. In instructing the burghers, and more particularly the Council of Prague, how to proceed in founding congregations of their own by means of elections, Luther was also thinking of Germany, and above all of Saxony. This explains why, without delay, he had the Latin writing published also in German.

To the people of Prague he wrote that those whose hearts God had touched were to assemble in the city for the election. They were first to remind themselves in prayer that the Lord had promised that where two or three were gathered together in His name, there He would be in the midst of them; then they were to select capable persons for the clerical state and the ministry of the Word, who were then to officiate in the name of all; these were then to lay their hands on the best amongst them (“potiores inter vos”), thus confirming them, after which they might be presented to “the people and the Church or congregation as bishops, servants or pastors, Amen.” “It all depends on your making the venture in the Lord, then the Lord will be with you.” In the congregations scattered throughout the land the faithful were to proceed in like manner, firing others by their example; if they were few in number, there was all the more reason why they should make the venture. But as all was to be done spontaneously and under the influence of the Spirit of God, such Councils as were favourably disposed were not to exercise any constraint. He, too, for his own part, merely gave “advice and exhortation.”[283] Where a large number of congregations had appointed their “ministers” in this way, then these latter might, if they so desired, meet to elect Superintendents who would make the visitation of their Churches, “until Bohemia finally returns to the legitimate and evangelical Archiepiscopate.”

At about that same time, in a writing intended for the congregation at Leisnig, Luther expressed his views on the congregational Churches to be established by the people. The confusion of his mind is no less apparent in this work; under the influence of his idealism he fails to perceive the endless practical difficulties inherent in his scheme, and above all the impossibility of establishing any real congregation when every member had a right to criticise the preacher and to interpret Scripture according to his own mind.[284]

He here assumes that the liberty to preach the Word, and likewise the right of judging doctrines, is part of the common priesthood of Christians. Whoever preaches publicly can only do this “as the deputy and minister of the others,” i.e. of the whole body.[285] The congregation must see that no one seduces them with the doctrines of men, and therefore no one may be a preacher except by their choice. Where there is no bishop to provide for them, who holds Christian and evangelical views, they are themselves to give the call to the right preacher; but if they catch him erring in his doctrine, then anyone may get up and correct him, so long as “all done is done decently and in order.”[286] For St. Paul says concerning those who speak during Divine Worship [St. Paul is really alluding to the charismata of the early Christians], “If anything be revealed to another sitting, let the first hold his peace” (1 Cor. xiv. 30). “Indeed, a Christian has such authority that he might well rise up and teach uncalled even in the midst of the Christians.... For this reason, that necessity knows no law.” Therefore to preserve the purity of the evangelical teaching, “every man may come forward, stand up and teach, to the best of his ability.”[287]

The experience with the fanatics which speedily followed was calculated to dispel such platonic ideas. Luther does not appear to have asked himself on which side the “Christian congregation” and the Church was to be sought when dissensions, doctrinal or other, at that period inevitable, should have riven the fold in twain. The “Christian congregation” he teaches—merely restating the difficulty—“is most surely to be recognised where the pure Gospel is preached.... From the Gospel we may tell where Christ stands with His army.”[288]

How bold the edifice was which he had planned in the evangelical Churches is plain from other statements contained in the writing addressed to the Leisnig Assembly.

The president was indeed to preside, but all the members were to rule. “Whoever is chosen for the office of preacher is thereby raised to the most exalted office in Christendom; he is then authorised to baptise, to say Mass and to hold the cure of souls.”[289] Yet he is subject both to the community and to every member of it. “In the world the masters command what they please and their servants obey. But amongst you, Christ says, it shall not be so; amongst Christians each one is judge of the other, and in his turn subject to the rest.”[290]

He might say what he pleased against the abuses of the old Church, such systematic disorder never prevailed within her as that each one should teach as he pleased and even correct the preacher publicly, or that the Demos should be acknowledged as supreme. It is in vain that, in the writing above referred to, he mocks at this city set on a hill, with her firmly established hierarchy, saying: “Bishops and Councils determine and settle what they please, but where we have God’s Word on our side it is for us to decide what is right or wrong and not for them, and they shall yield to us and obey our word.”[291] We may well explain the saying “to obey our word” by Luther’s own eloquent paraphrase: “Pay no heed to the commandments of men, law, tradition, custom, usage and so forth, whether established by Pope or Emperor, Prince or Bishop, whether observed by half the world or by the whole, whether in force for one year or for a thousand!” “Obey our word!” For we declare that we have the “Word of God on our side.”[292]

The new congregations will, in spite of their own and every member’s freedom to teach, agree with Luther, so he assures them with the most astounding confidence, because “his mouth is the mouth of Christ,” and because he knows that his word is not his, but Christ’s. We must emphasise the fact, that here we have the key to many of the strange trains of thought already met with in Luther, and also a proof of the endurance of his unpractical ultra-spiritualism.

Luther, in fact, declares that he had “not merely received his teaching from heaven, but on behalf of one who had more power in his little finger than a thousand popes, kings, princes and doctors.”[293] Before receiving his enlightenment he had had to learn what was meant by being “born of God, dying often and surviving the pains of hell.”[294] Whoever differed from him, as the fanatics did, had not been through such an experience. “Wouldst thou know where, when and how we are vouchsafed the divine communications? When that which is written takes place: ‘As a lion, so hath He broken all my bones’ (Isa. xxxviii. 13).... God’s Majesty cannot speak in confidence with the old man without previously slaying.... The dreams and visions of the saints are dreadful.”[295] Such was the mysticism of the Wartburg.

2. Against Celibacy. Doubtful Auxiliaries from the Clergy and the Convents

In establishing his new ecclesiastical organisation Luther thought it his duty to wage war relentlessly on the celibacy of the clergy and on monastic vows in general. Was he more successful herein than in his project of reforming the articles of faith and the structure of the Church?

According to Catholic ideas his war against vows and sacerdotal celibacy constituted an unwarrantable and sacrilegious interference with the most sacred promises by which a man can bind himself to the Almighty, for it is in this light that a Catholic considers vows or the voluntary acceptance of celibacy upon receipt of the major orders. Luther was, moreover, tampering with institutions which are most closely bound up with the life of the Church and which alone render possible the observance of that high standard of life and that independence which should distinguish the clergy. Yet his mistaken principles served to attract to his camp all the frivolous elements among the clergy and religious, i.e. all those who were dissatisfied with their state and longed for a life of freedom. As a matter of fact, experience speedily showed that nothing was more calculated to bring the Reformation into disrepute. Lutheranism threw open the doors of the convents, burst the bonds imposed by vows, and reduced hundreds of the clergy to a moral debasement against which their own conscience raised a protest. In outward appearance it was thereby the gainer, for by this means it secured new adherents in the shape of preachers to spread the cause, but in reality the positive gain was nil; in fact, the most vital interests of the new work were endangered owing to the low moral standard of so many of its advocates. Apart from the preachers, many followers of the new Evangelical teaching, fugitive religious and more especially escaped nuns, played a very lamentable part.

In various writings and letters Luther sought to familiarise the clergy and monks with the seductive principles contained in his books “On the Clerical State” and “On Monastic Vows.” His assurances all went to prove that the observance of priestly celibacy and the monastic state was impossible. He forgot what he had once learnt and cheerfully practised, viz. that the sexual renunciation demanded in both professions was not merely possible, but a sacrifice willingly offered to God by all who are diligent in prayer and make use of the means necessary for preserving their virtue, and the numerous spiritual helps afforded by their state.

The powerful and seductive language he knows how to employ appears, for instance, in his letter to Wolfgang Reissenbusch, an Antonine monk,[296] who was already wavering, and in whose case Luther’s strenuous efforts were crowned with success. The letter, which is dated March 27, 1525, was written shortly before Luther’s union with Catharine von Bora.

The writer in the very first lines takes pains to convince this religious, that “he had been created by God for the married state and was forced and impelled by Him thereto.” The religious vow was worthless, because it required what was impossible, since “chastity is as little within our power as the working of miracles”; man was utterly unable to resist his natural attraction to woman; “whoever wishes to remain single let him put away his human name and fashion himself into an angel or a spirit, for to a man God does not give this grace.”

Elsewhere Luther, nevertheless, admits that some few by the help of God were able to live unmarried and chaste. In view of the sublime figures to be found in the history of the Church, and which it was impossible to impeach, he declares that “it is rightly said of the holy virgins that they lived an angelical and not a human life, and that by the grace of the Almighty they lived indeed in the flesh yet not according to it.”

He proceeds to heap up imaginary objections against the vow of chastity, saying that whoever makes such a vow is building “upon works and not solely on the grace of God”; trusting to “works and the law” and denying “Christ and the faith.” In the case of Reissenbusch, the only obstacle lay in his “bashfulness and diffidence.” “Therefore there is all the more need to keep you up to it, to exhort, drive and urge you and so render you bold. Now, my dear Sir, I ask of you, why delay and think about it so long, etc.? It is so, must be and ever shall be so! Pocket your scruples and be a man cheerfully. Your body demands and needs it. God wills it and forces you to it. How are you to set that aside?” He points out to the wavering monk the “noble and excellent example which he will give”; he will become the “cloak of marriage” to many others. “Did not Christ become the covering of our shame?... Among the raving madmen [the Papists], it is accounted a shameful thing, and though they do not make any difficulty about fornication they nevertheless scoff at the married state, the work and Word of God. If it is a shameful thing to take a wife, then why are we not ashamed to eat and drink, since both are equally necessary and God wills both?” Thus he attributes to the Catholics, at least in his rhetorical outbursts, the view that it was a “shameful thing to take a wife,” and accuses them of scoffing at the “married state,” and of “not objecting to fornication.” He did not see that if anyone strives to observe chastity in accordance with the Counsel of Christ without breaking his word and perjuring himself, this constancy is far from being a disgrace, but that the disgrace falls rather on him who endeavours to entice the monk to forsake his vows.

“The devil is the ruler of the world,” Luther continues. “He it is who has caused the married state to be so shamefully calumniated and yet permits adulterers, feminine whores and masculine scamps to be held in great honour; verily it would be right to marry, were it only to bid defiance to the devil and his world.”

In the closing sentence he aims his last bolt at the monk’s sense of honour: “It is merely a question of one little hour of shame to be succeeded by years of honour. May Christ, our Lord, impart His grace so that this letter ... may bring forth fruit to the glory of His name and word, Amen.”

The letter was not intended merely for the unimportant person to whom it was addressed, and whose subsequent marriage with the daughter of a poor tailor’s widow in Torgau did not render him any the more famous. Publicity was the object aimed at in this writing, which was at once printed in German and Latin and distributed that it might “bear fruit.” The lengthier “Epistola gratulatoria to one about to marry,” immediately reprinted in German, was despatched by Luther’s Wittenberg friend Bugenhagen at the time of Reissenbusch’s wedding. It had been agreed upon to utilise the action of Reissenbusch for all it was worth in the propaganda in favour of the breaking of vows and priestly celibacy.

Luther was then in the habit of employing the strongest and most extravagant language in order to show the need of marriage in opposition to the celibacy practised by the priests and monks. It is only with repulsion that one can follow him here.

“It is quite true,” he says, in 1522, to the German people, “that whoever does not marry must misconduct himself ... for God created man and woman to be fruitful and multiply. But why is not fornication obviated by marriage? For where no extraordinary grace is vouchsafed, nature must needs be fruitful and multiply, and if not in marriage, where will it find its satisfaction save in harlotry or even worse sins?”[297] Luther carefully refrained from mentioning the countless number who were able to control the impulses of nature without in any way touching the moral filth to which, in his cynicism, he is so fond of referring. What he said filled with indignation those who were zealous for the Church, and called forth angry rejoinders, especially in view of the countless numbers, particularly of women, to whom marriage was denied owing to social conditions.

It is true that after such strong outbursts as the above, Luther would often moderate his language. Thus he says, shortly after the utterance just quoted: “I do not wish to disparage virginity nor to tempt people away from it to the conjugal state. Let each one do as he is able and as he feels God has ordained for him.... The state of chastity is probably better on earth as having less of trouble and care, and not for its own sake only, but in order to allow one to preach and wait upon the Word of God, as St. Paul says 1 Corinthians vii. 34.”[298]

But then he continues, following up the idea which possesses him: “He who desires to live single undertakes an impossible struggle”; such people become “full of harlotry and all impurity of the flesh, and at last drown themselves therein and fall into despair; therefore such a vow is invalid, being contrary to the Word and work of God.”[299] Most of the younger religious, he declares elsewhere in a description which is as repulsive as it is untrue, were unable to control themselves, for it is not possible to take from fire its power of burning; among them, and the clergy, there prevailed “either harlotry under the name of a spiritual and chaste life, or an impure, unwilling, wretched, forlorn chastity, so that the wretchedness is greater than anyone could believe or tell.”[300]

What Luther says would leave us under the impression—to put the most charitable interpretation upon his words—that he had lived in sad surroundings; yet what we know of the Augustinian monasteries at Erfurt and Wittenberg affords as little ground for such an assumption as the conditions prevailing in the other friaries, whether Franciscan or Dominican, with which he was acquainted. He speaks again and again as though he knew nothing of the satisfaction with their profession which filled whole multitudes who were faithful to their vows, and which was the result of serious discipline and a devout mind. He goes on: “They extol chastity loudly, but live in the midst of impurity.... These pious foundations and convents, where the faith [according to his teaching] is not practised stoutly and heartily,”[301] must surely be gates of hell. Those who refrain from marriage for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven are, he considers, “so rare, that among a thousand men there is scarcely to be found one, for they are a special miracle of God’s own.”[302] He who enters a monastery, he writes (not in the least afraid of speaking as though this had been his own experience), can, in reality, never avoid sinning against his vow. The Pope leaves such a one to be, as it were, burnt and roasted in the fire; he accordingly might well be compared to the sacrifice which the children of Israel offered to Moloch the fiery idol. “What a Sodom and Gomorrha,” he cries in another passage, “has the devil set up by such laws and vows, making of that rare gift chastity a thing of utter wretchedness. Neither public houses of ill fame, nor indeed any form of allurement to vice, is so pernicious as are these vows and commandments invented by Satan himself.”[303] Such are his words in his “Postils,” written for general, practical use.

His “larger Catechism” was also used as a means to render popular his most extravagant polemics on this subject. The sixth Commandment makes of chastity a duty, and Christ’s counsel of voluntary continence was to serve for the preserving and honouring of this very command. Yet Luther says: “By this commandment all vows of unmarried chastity are condemned, and all poor, enslaved consciences which have been deceived by their monastic vows are thereby permitted, nay ordered, to pass from the unchaste to the conjugal state, seeing that even though the monastic life were in other particulars divine, it is not in their power to preserve their chastity intact.”[304] Thus “the married state” is, at least, according to this passage, prescribed for all without exception in the Ten Commandments.

Still further to strengthen his seductive appeals to the clergy and religious, Luther, as he himself informs us, advised those who were unable to marry openly “at least to wed their cook secretly.”[305]

To the Prince-Abbots he gave the advice that on account of the laws of the Empire they should, for the time being, “take a wife in secret,” “until God, the Lord, shall dispose matters otherwise.” In 1523 he advised all the Knights of the Teutonic Order, who were vowed to chastity, “not to worry” about their “weakness and sin” even though they had contracted some “illicit connections”; such connections contracted outside of matrimony were “less sinful” than to “take a lawful wife” with the consent of a Council, supposing such a permission were given.[306] This last letter, too, was at once printed by Luther for distribution.[307]

His spirit of defiance led him to clothe his demands in outrageous forms. On one occasion he declared in language resembling that which he made use of concerning the laws of fasting: “Even though a man has no mind to take a wife he ought, nevertheless, to do so in order to spite and vex the devil and his doctrine.”[308]

The Fathers of the Church accordingly found little favour with him when they required of the clergy, monks and nuns, not merely the observance of celibacy, but also the use of the means enjoined by asceticism for the preservation of chastity; or when they betrayed their preference for the vow of chastity, though without by any means disparaging marriage. They quoted what Our Lord had said of this doctrine: “He that can take it, let him take it” (Matt. xix. 12). The Fathers, in the spirit of St. Paul, who, as one “having obtained mercy of the Lord,” joyfully acquiesced in His “Counsel” of chastity (1 Cor. vii. 25), frequently advocated the doctrine of holy continence. But Luther asks: Of what use were their penitential practices for the preservation of their chastity to the Fathers, even to Augustine, Jerome, Benedict, Bernard, etc., since they themselves allow that they were constantly troubled by temptations of the flesh? In his opinion, as we already know, the attacks of sensuality, the movements of the carnal man and the enduring sense of our own concupiscence are really sins.

Jerome in particular, the zealous advocate of virginity, received at Luther’s hands the roughest treatment. This saint is erroneously reckoned among the Fathers of the Church; he is of no account at all except for the histories he compiled; he was madly in love with the virgin Eustochium; his writings give no proof of faith or true religion; he had not the least idea of the difference between the law and the Gospel, and writes of it as a blind man might write of colour, etc. His invitations to the monastic life are described by Luther as impious, unbelieving and sacrilegious. Scoffing at the Saint’s humble admission of his temptations in his old age and the severe mortifications he practised to overcome them, Luther says: The virgin Eustochium would have been the proper remedy for him. “I am astounded that the holy Fathers tormented themselves so greatly about such childish temptations and never experienced the exalted, spiritual trials [those regarding faith], seeing that they were rulers in the Church and filled high offices. This temptation of evil passions may easily be remedied if there are only virgins or women available.”[309]

All these fell doctrines and allurements which without intermission were poured into the ears of clergy and religious alike, many of whom were uneducated, already tainted with worldliness, or had entered upon their profession without due earnestness, were productive of the expected result in the case of the weak. The sudden force of Luther’s powerful and well-calculated attack upon the clergy and upon monasticism has been aptly compared to the effect of dynamite. But whoever fell, did so of his own free will. Such language was nothing but the bewitching song of the Siren addressed to the basest though most powerful instincts of man.

The historic importance of the attack upon ecclesiastical celibacy is by no means fully gauged if we merely regard it as an effective method of securing preachers, allies and patrons for the new Evangel. It was, indeed, closely bound up with Luther’s whole system, and his early theories on holiness by works and self-righteousness. His war on vows was too spontaneous, too closely connected with his own personal experience, to be accounted for merely by the desire of increasing the number of his followers. The aversion to the practice of good works which marked the commencement of his growth, his loathing for the sacrifices entailed by self-denial, the very stress he lays on the desires of nature as opposed to the promptings of grace, the delusion of evangelical freedom and finally his hatred of those institutions of the old Church which inspired her adherents with such vigorous life wherever they were rightly understood and practised—all this served as an incentive in the struggle.

A strange element which, according to his own statements, formed an undercurrent to all this and which indicates his peculiar state of mind, was that he looked upon the temptations of the flesh as something altogether insignificant in comparison with the exalted spiritual assaults of “blasphemy and despair” of which he had had personal experience.[310] In the passage already referred to, where he chides the Fathers with their “childish temptations,” he says: Why on earth did they make such efforts for the preservation of their beloved chastity, or exert themselves for something entirely, or almost entirely, impossible of attainment? The temptations of the flesh are nothing at all, he proceeds, “compared with the Angel of Satan who buffets us; then indeed we are nailed to the cross, then indeed childish things such as the temptations which worried Jerome and others become of small account.” In Paul’s case, according to him, the “angelus colaphizans” (the angel who buffeted him, 2 Cor. xii. 7) was not a sting of the flesh at all, but exalted pangs of the soul, such as those to which the Psalmist alluded when he said: “God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” where he really means: “God, Thou art become my enemy without a cause,” or again, that a sword has pierced his bowels (pains of the soul). He himself, Luther, had endured such-like things, but “Jerome and the other Fathers never experienced anything of the sort.”[311]

Luther complains as early as 1522, i.e. at the very outset of this “Evangelical” movement, of the character of the auxiliaries who had been attracted to him by his attack on priestly and monastic continence.

In a letter sent to Erfurt he expresses his great dissatisfaction at the fact that, where apostate Augustinians had become pastors, their behaviour, like that of the other preachers drawn from the ranks of the priesthood, had “given occasion to their adversaries to blaspheme” against the evangel. He says he intends sending a circular letter to the “Church at Erfurt” on account of the bad example given.[312] The person to whom these bitter words were addressed, Luther’s intimate friend, Johann Lang, the Erfurt Augustinian, had himself shortly before forsaken the monastery. The circumstances attending his leaving were very distasteful to Luther.

The evangelical life at Erfurt, where many of the priests were taking wives, must be improved, so he writes, even though the “understanding of the Word” had increased greatly there. “The power of the Word is either still hidden” he says, of the new evangel, “or it is far too weak in us all; for we are the same as before, hard, unfeeling, impatient, foolhardy, drunken, dissolute, quarrelsome; in short, the mark of a Christian, viz. abundant charity, is nowhere apparent; on the contrary, the words of Paul are fulfilled, ‘we possess the kingdom of God in speech, but not in power’” (1 Cor. iv. 20).[313] In the same letter he complains of the monks who had left their convents to reinforce the ranks of his party: “I see that many of our monks have left their priory for no other reason than that which brought them in: they follow their bellies and the freedom of the flesh. By them Satan will set up a great stench against the good odour of our work. But what can we do? They are idle people who seek their own, so that it is better they should sin and go to destruction without the cowl than with it.”

Luther complained still more definitely of his “parsons and preachers” in the Preface to the “Larger Catechism” which he composed for them in 1529: Many, he says, despise their office and good doctrine: some simply treated the matter as though they had become “parsons and preachers solely for their belly’s sake”; he would exhort such “lazy paunches or presumptuous saints” to diligence in their office.[314] What he had predicted in 1522 became more and more plainly fulfilled: “It is true that I fear some will take wives or run away, not from Christian conviction, but because they rejoice to find a cloak and reason for their wickedness in the freedom of the evangel.” His consolation, however, is, that it was just as bad and even worse in Popery, and if needs be “we still have the gallows, the wheel, sword and water to deal with such as will not do what is right.”[315]

In later years, as his pupil Mathesius relates in the “Historien” of his conversations with him, Luther was anxious to induce the Elector to erect a “Priests’ Tower” “in which such wild and untamed persons might be shut up as in a prison; for many of them would not allow themselves to be controlled by the Evangel; ... all who once had run to the monasteries for the sake of their belly and an easy life were now running out again for the sake of the freedom of the flesh.”[316] According to Lauterbach’s “Tagebuch,” however (1538), the Elector had before this decided to rebuild the University prison as a jail for such of the clergy of Luther’s camp who misbehaved themselves,[317] and the Notes of Mathesius recently edited by Kroker allow us to infer that the prison had already been built in 1540.[318] Thus the account given by Mathesius in the “Historien” and quoted by him in sermons at a later date must be amended and amplified accordingly.

Even Luther’s own followers looked askance at many of the recruits from the clergy and the monasteries, who came to swell the ranks of the preachers and adherents of the new Evangel. We are in possession of statements on this subject made by Eberlin, Hessus and Cordus.

“Scarcely has a monk or nun been three days out of the convent,” writes Eberlin of Günzburg, “than they make haste to marry some woman or knave from the streets, without any godly counsel or prayer; in the same way the parsons too take whom they please, and then, after a short honeymoon, follows a long year of trouble.”[319]

Eobanus Hessus, the Humanist, writes in 1523 from Erfurt to J. Draco that the runaway monks neglected education and learning and preached their own stupidities as wisdom; the number of such priests and nuns was increasing endlessly. “I cannot sufficiently execrate these fugitives. No Phyllis is more wanton than our nuns.”[320]

A third witness, also from Erfurt, Euritius Cordus, complains in similar fashion in a letter written in 1522 to Draco: No one here has been improved one little bit by the evangel; “on the contrary, avarice has increased and likewise the opportunities for the worst freedom of the flesh”; priests and monks were everywhere set upon marrying, which in itself is not to be disapproved of, and the young students were more lawless than soldiers in camp.[321]

Protestant historians are fond of limiting the moral evils to the period which followed the Peasant Wars of 1525 as though they had been caused by the disorders of the time. The above accounts, given by followers of the new movement, extend, however, to earlier years, and to these many others previous to 1525 will be added in the course of our narrative.

It has also frequently been said that the confusion which always accompanies popular movements which stir men’s minds must be taken into account when considering the disastrous moral effects so evident in the camp of the Reformers. But this view of the matter, if not false, is at least open to doubt. The disorders just described were not at all creditable to a work undertaken in the name of religion. The results were also felt long after. If all revolutions easily led to such consequences, in this instance the lamentable moral outcome was all the more inevitable, seeing that “freedom” was the watchword.

The undeniable fact of the existence of such a state of things was all the more disagreeable to its authors, i.e. Luther and his friends, since they were well aware that the great ecclesiastical movements in former days, which had really been inspired by God, usually exhibited, more particularly in their beginnings, abundant moral benefits. “The first fruits of the Spirit,” as they had been manifested in the Church, were very different from those attending the efforts of the Wittenberg Professor, who, nevertheless, had himself designated this period as the “primitiæ spiritus.”[322] It was but poor comfort in their difficulty to strive to reassure themselves by considerations such as Cordus brings forward to meet the complaints we quoted above: “Maybe the Word of God has only now opened our eyes to see clearly, to recognise as sin, and abhor with fear, what formerly we scarcely heeded.” This strange fashion of soothing his conscience he had learnt from Luther. (See vol. iv., xxiv.)

It is worth while to observe the impression which the facts just mentioned made on Luther’s foes.

Erasmus, who at the commencement was not unfavourably disposed towards the movement, turned away from it with disgust, influenced, in part at least, by the tales he heard concerning the apostate priests and religious. “They seek two things,” he wrote, “an income (censum) and a wife; besides, the evangel affords them freedom to live as they please.”[323] In a letter to the Strasburg preacher, Martin Bucer, he said: “Those who have given up the recital of the Canonical Hours do not now pray at all; many who have laid aside the pharisaical dress are really worse than they were before.”[324] And again: “The first thing that makes me draw back from this company is, that I see so many among this troop becoming altogether estranged from the purity of the Gospel. Some I knew as excellent men before they joined this sect; what they are now, I know not, but I hear that many have become worse, and none better.”—The evangel now prospers, he says elsewhere, “because priests and monks take wives contrary to human laws, or at any rate contrary to their vow. Look around and see whether their marriages are more chaste than those of others upon whom they look as heathen.”[325]

Valentine Ickelsamer, an Anabaptist opponent of Luther’s, reminds him in his writing in defence of Carlstadt in 1525,[326] that Holy Scripture says: “By their works you shall know them.” Even while studying at Wittenberg [a few years before] he had been obliged to appeal to this “text of Matthew septimo,” out of disgust at the riotous life people led there; “they had, however, always found a convenient method of explaining it away, or got out of the difficulty by the help of some paltry gloss.” “You also,” he says to Luther, “loudly complained that we blamed only the faults on your side. No, we do not judge, or blame any sinner as you do; but what we do say is that where Christian faith is not productive of Christian works, there the faith is neither rightly preached nor rightly accepted.”

It is true that this corrector of the public morals could only point to a pretence of works among his own party, and in weighing his evidence against Luther allowance must be made for his prejudice against him. Still, his words give some idea of the character of the protests made against the Wittenberg preachers in the prints of that time. He approves of the marriage of the clergy who had joined Luther’s party, and refuses to open his eyes to what was taking place among the Anabaptists themselves: “They” [your preachers], he says, “threaten and force the poor people by fair, or rather foul and tyrannical, means, to feed their prostitutes, for these clerical fellows judge it better to keep a light woman than a wedded wife, because they are anxious about their external appearance.... Such declare that whoever accuses them of keeping prostitutes lies like a scoundrel.... But if such are not the worst fornicators and knaves, let the fiend fly away with me. I often wonder whether the devil is ever out of temper now, for he has the whole of the preacher folk on his side; on their part there has been nothing but deception.” Were the people to seize the preachers “by the scruff of their neck” on account of their wickedness, then they would call themselves martyrs, and say that Christ had foretold their persecution; true enough the other mad priests [the Catholics] were “clearly messengers and satellites of the devil”; nevertheless he could not help being angered by Luther’s “rich, uncouth, effeminate, whoremongering mob of preachers,” who were so uncharitable in their ways and “who yet pretended to be Christians.”[327]

It is obvious that Ickelsamer and his party went too far when they asserted that not one man who led an honest life was to be found among the Lutheran preachers, for in reality there was no lack of well-meaning men who, like Willibald Pirkheimer and Albrecht Dürer, were bent on making use of their powers in the interests of what they took to be the pure Gospel. This, however, was less frequently the case with the apostate priests and monks. The thoughts of the impartial historian revert of their own accord to the moral disorders prevalent in the older Church. We are not at liberty to ignore the fact that it was impossible for the Catholics at that time to point to any shining examples on their side which might have shamed the Lutherans. They were obliged to admit that the abuses rampant in clerical and monastic life had, as a matter of fact, prepared the way for and facilitated the apostasy of many of those who went over to Luther and became preachers of the new faith. The Church had to lament not only the fate of those who turned their back on her, but the earlier decay of many of her own institutions; under the influence of the spirit of the age this decay was hourly growing worse. At the same time the secession of so many undesirable elements was itself a reason for not despairing of recovery.

A great contrast to the lives of the apostate monks and clergy is nevertheless presented in an account which has been preserved by one of the adherents of the new faith of the conditions prevailing in certain monasteries where the friars, true to the Rule of their founder, kept their vows in the right spirit. The Franciscan Observants of the Province of Higher Germany were then governed by Caspar Schatzgeyer, a capable Bavarian Friar Minor, and, notwithstanding many difficulties, numbered in 1523 no less than 28 friaries and 560 members. In the course of the fifteenth century the Franciscan Observantines had spread far and wide as a result of the reform inaugurated within the Order and approved of by Rome. The Franciscan foundations at Heidelberg, Basle, Tübingen, Nuremberg, Mayence, Ulm, Ingoldstadt, Munich and other cities had one after the other made common cause with the Observants and, unlike the Conventuals, observed the old Rule in all its primitive strictness.

It was Johann Eberlin of Günzburg, a Franciscan who had apostatised to Lutheranism, who, in 1523, in a tract “Against those spurious clergymen of the Christian flock known as barefooted friars or Franciscans,” was compelled to bear witness to the pure and mortified life of these monks with whom he was so well acquainted, though he urges that the devil was artfully using for his own purposes their piety, which was altogether devoid of true faith, “in order to entangle the best and most zealous souls in the meshes of his diabolical net.” “They lead a chaste life in words, works and behaviour,” says Eberlin, speaking of them generally; “if amongst a hundred one should act otherwise, this is not to be wondered at. If he transgresses [in the matter of chastity], he is severely punished as a warning to others. Their rough grey frock and hempen girdle, the absence of boots, breeches, vest, woollen or linen shirt, their not being allowed to bathe, being obliged to sleep in their clothes and not on feather-beds but on straw, their fasts which last half the year, their lengthy services in choir, etc., all this shows everyone that they have little or no care for their own body. Their simplicity in dress and adornment, their great obedience, their not assuming any titles at the University however learned they may be, their seldom riding or driving luxuriously, shows that they are not desirous of pomp or honour. Their possessing nothing, whether in common or individually, their taking no money and refusing even to touch it, their not extorting offerings or dues from the people, but living only on alms with which the people supply them of their own accord; this shows their contempt for the riches of the world. The world is astonished at these men who do not indulge in any of the pleasures of feminine company, or in eating and drinking—for they fast much and never eat flesh meat—or in soft clothing, or long sleep, etc. Hence the world believes them to be more than human; it also sees how these virtuous men preach and hear confessions, scare others from sin, exhort them to virtue, move them to fear hell and God’s judgments, and to desire the Kingdom of Heaven; ever with the Word of God and His judgments on their lips, so that they appear to be well-versed in Scripture, and to be carrying out in their whole life and practice what they teach.... Countless godly men have entered this state; from all ranks, places and countries, people have hastened to join this Order; every corner of Christendom is full of Franciscan friaries.”[328]

3. Reaction of the Apostasy on its Author. His Private Life (1522-1525)

The moral results of Luther’s undertaking and its effect upon himself have been very variously represented. The character of the originator of so gigantic a movement in the realm of ideas could not escape experiencing deeply the reaction of the events in progress; yet the opinion even of his contemporaries concerning Luther’s morals in the critical years immediately preceding his marriage differ widely, according to the view they take of his enterprise. While by his adherents he is hailed as a second Elias,[329] some of his opponents do not hesitate to accuse him of the worst moral aberrations. Ickelsamer, however, one of the spokesmen of the “fanatics,” who did not scruple to raise an angry voice against Luther’s preachers, and even against Luther himself, was unable to adduce against him any evidence of sexual misconduct during those years. It is also very remarkable that Ickelsamer’s friend, Thomas Münzer, in his violent and bitter controversial attack upon Luther dating from that time, was also unable to bring forward charges of immorality. Both would doubtless have gladly availed themselves of any offences against the moral code of which Luther might have been guilty between 1522 and 1524, but in spite of their watchfulness they failed to detect any such.

Nevertheless, accusations of Ickelsamer’s, in which he speaks more in detail of Luther’s “faulty life,” are not lacking.

He finds fault with his “defiant teaching and his wilful disposition,” also with the frightful violence of the abuse with which in his writings he overwhelms his adversaries; recklessly and defiantly he flung abroad books filled with blasphemies. He blames him for the proud and tyrannical manner in which he sets up a “Papal Chair” for himself so as to suppress without mercy the new teachers who differ from him. Concerning his administration, he admits that Luther “exerted himself vigorously to put down evil living, in which efforts it was easy to detect the working of the Christian faith,” but he adds that the “public fornication” of certain masters and college fellows, as well as others who were in high favour, was winked at;[330] he, Ickelsamer, would say of the Wittenberg Professors what had long before been said of Rome: the nearer they live to Wittenberg the worse Christians are. He also reminds Luther of the “scandal and offence” the latter had given him by his excuses for the “mad and immoral goings on” at Wittenberg: “You said, ‘We can’t be angels.’” Of his private life he merely remarks that it annoyed him that Luther, “neglectful of so many urgent matters,” “could sit in the pleasant room overlooking the water,” “drinking cheerfully,” “among the beer-swillers.” Finally, with the usual hypocritical severity of the Anabaptists, he reproaches him concerning other matters, his extravagance in dress, and the pomp displayed at the promotion of Doctors.[331]

Thomas Münzer in his violent “Schutzrede”[332] speaks at great length of Luther’s pride, who, he says, wished to be a new Pope while making a show of humility; he “excited and urged on the people like a hound of hell,” though protesting that he did not wish to raise a revolt, “like a serpent that glides over the rocks.” Luther, in the very title of his work, he describes, as “that dull, effeminate lump of flesh at Wittenberg.” In the course of the same work he speaks of him scornfully as “Martin, the virgin,” and exclaims, “Ah, the chaste Babylonian virgin.” He classes him, on account of his sermons on “freedom,” with those teachers “who are pleasing to the world, which likes an easy life”; he speaks of him sarcastically as a “new Christ” with a “fine subject for his preaching,” viz. “that priests may take wives.”[333] He does not accuse him of any particular moral excess, but nevertheless remarks that “the disgraced monk” was not likely to suffer very severely under the persecution of which he boasted “when enjoying good Malvasian and feasting with light women.”[334] The latter allusion probably refers merely to Luther’s love of a good dinner, and his merry ways at his meals, which, to a strict Anabaptist like Münzer, seemed as deserving of execration as feasting with dissolute women.

It has recently been asserted by an eminent Protestant controversialist that Luther’s contemporaries never accused him of moral laxity or of offences against chastity, and that it was only after his death that people ventured to bring forward such charges; so long as he lived “the Romans,” so we read, “accused him of one only deed against the sixth commandment, viz. with his marriage”; Pistorius, Ulenberg and “Jesuits like Weislinger who copied them,” were the first to enter the lists with such accusations.

To start with, we may remark that Weislinger was not a Jesuit and that Ulenberg does not mention any moral offence committed by Luther apart from his matrimony. In fact the whole statement of the controversialist just quoted must be treated as a legend. As a matter of fact, serious charges regarding this matter were brought against Luther even in his lifetime and in the years previous to his union with Catherine von Bora.

In 1867 a less timorous Protestant writer, who had studied Luther’s history, brought forward the following passage from a manuscript letter written in 1522 by a Catholic, Count Hoyer von Mansfeld, to Count Ulrich von Helfenstein: “He had been a good Lutheran before that time and at Worms, but had come to see that Luther was a thorough scoundrel, who drank deeply, as was the custom at Mansfeld, liked the company of beautiful women, played the lute and led a frivolous life; therefore he [the Count] had abandoned his cause.”[335] From that time Hoyer von Mansfeld resolutely opposed Luther, caused a disputation to be held against him in 1526, and, to the end of his life (1540), kept a part of the Mansfeld estates loyal to the Catholic faith. Hoyer was an opponent of Luther when he wrote the above, but he must have received a very bad impression of Luther’s private life during the period subsequent to the latter’s stay at the Wartburg if this was the reason of his deserting Luther’s cause. It is conceivable that at the time of the Diet of Worms, when Hoyer declares he was still a “good Lutheran,” the contrast between Luther’s behaviour and the monastic habits of his earlier life had not yet become so conspicuous. (See above, p. 79.) After his stay at the Wartburg and subsequent to his attacks both literary and practical on the vow of chastity and on celibacy, a change such as that which Hoyer so distinctly refers to may have taken place. Wittenberg, the rallying point of so many questionable allies and escaped nuns in search of a refuge, was, in view of Luther’s social, not to say jovial, disposition, scarcely a suitable place for him. His want of self-restraint and the levity of his bearing were censured at that time by others, and even by Melanchthon. (See below, p. 144.)

The following year, 1523, after the arrival at Wittenberg of the nuns who had been “liberated” from their convents, there is no doubt that grave, though grossly exaggerated reports, unfavourable to Luther’s life and behaviour, were circulated both in Catholic circles and at the Court of Ferdinand the German King. Luther’s attacks upon the Church caused these reports to be readily accepted. An echo from the Court reached Luther’s ears, and he gives some account of it in a letter of January 14, 1524. According to this, it had been said in the King’s surroundings “that he frequented the company of light women, played dice and spent his time in the public-houses”; also that he was fond of going about armed and accompanied by a stately retinue; likewise, that he occupied a post of honour at the Court of his sovereign Prince. The tale regarding his bearing arms and occupying posts of honour Luther was able easily to repudiate by the testimony of his friends. He also confidently declared the remaining statements to be merely lies.[336]

Proof is wanting to substantiate the charge of “fornication” contained in a letter written from Rome by Jacob Ziegler to Erasmus on February 16, 1522. Ziegler there relates that he had been invited by a bishop to dinner and that the conversation turned on Luther: “The opinion was expressed that he was given to fornication and tippling, vices to which the Germans were greatly addicted.”[337] Abroad, and more particularly in the great Catholic centres, such reports met with a more favourable reception than elsewhere. The Germans were always held up as examples of drunkenness, and, regarding Luther, such accusations were at a later date certainly carried too far. (See vol. iii., xvii. 7, “The Good Drink.”)

In order to judge objectively of Luther’s behaviour, greater stress must be laid upon the circumstances which imposed caution and reticence upon him than has been done so far by his accusers.

Luther, both at that time and later, frequently declared that he himself, as well as his followers, must carefully avoid every action which might give public scandal and so prejudice the new Evangel, seeing that his adversaries were kept well informed of everything that concerned him. He ever endeavoured to live up to this principle, for on this his whole undertaking to some extent depended. “The eyes of the whole world are on us,” he cries in a sermon in 1524.[338] “We are a spectacle to the whole world,” he says; “therefore how necessary it is that our word should be blameless, as St. Paul demands (Tit. ii. 8)!”[339] “In order that worthless men may have no opportunity to blaspheme,” he refuses later, for instance, to accept anything at all as a present out of the Church property of the bishopric of Naumburg,[340] and he reprimands a drunken relative, sternly admonishing him: On your account I am evil spoken of; my foes seek out everything that concerns me; therefore it was his duty, Luther tells him, “to consider his family, the town he lived in, the Church and the Gospel of God.”[341] Mathesius also relates the following remark made by Luther when advanced in years: “Calumniators overlook the virtues of great men, but where they see a fault or stain in any, they busy themselves in raking it up and making it known.” “The devil keeps a sharp eye on me in order to render my teaching of bad repute or to attach some shameful stain to it.”[342]

In 1521 Luther thinks he is justified in giving himself this excellent testimonial: “During these three years so many lies have been invented about me, as you know, and yet they have all been disproved.” “I think that people ought to believe my own Wittenbergers, who are in daily intercourse with me and see my life, rather than the tales of liars who are not even on the spot.” His life was a public one, he said, and he was at the service of all; he worked so hard that “three of my years are really equal to six.”[343]

His energy in work was not to be gainsaid, but it was just his numerous writings produced in the greatest haste and under the influence of passion which led his mind further and further from the care of his spiritual life, and thus paved the way for certain other moral imperfections; here, also, we see one of the effects of the struggle on his character. At the same time he exposed himself to the danger of acquiring the customs and habits of thought of so many of his followers and companions, who had joined his party not from higher motives but for reasons of the basest sort.

In 1522 Johannes Fabri writes of the moral atmosphere surrounding Luther and his methods of work: “I am well aware, my Luther, that your only object was to gain the favour of many by this concession [the marriage of priests], and as a matter of fact, you have succeeded in doing so.” Why, he asks, did you not rather, “by your writings and exhortations, induce the priests who had fallen into sin to give up their concubines?” “I see you make it your business to tell the people what will please them in order to increase the number of your supporters.... You lay pillows under the heads of those who, from the moral standpoint, are snoring in a deep sleep and you know how difficult, nay dangerous, it is for me and those who think as I do, to oppose the doctrine which you teach.”[344]

That his work was leading him on the downward path and threatened to extinguish his interior religious life, Luther himself admitted at that time, though in some of his other statements he declares that his zeal in God’s service had been promoted by the struggle. He confesses in 1523, for instance, to the Zwickau Pastor Nicholas Hausmann, whom he esteemed very highly, that his interior life was “drying up,” and concludes: “Pray for me that I may not end in the flesh.” He is here alluding to the passage in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians where he warns the latter, lest having begun in the spirit they should end in the flesh.[345] This Pastor was a spiritual friend to whom, owing to his esteem for him, he confided much, though his confessions must not always be taken too literally.

The well-known incident of the flight of the nuns from the convent at Nimbschen, and their settling in Wittenberg, was looked upon by Luther and his followers as a matter of the greatest importance. The apostasy of the twelve nuns, among whom was Catherine von Bora, opened the door of all the other convents, as Luther expressed it, and demonstrated publicly what must be done “on behalf of the salvation of souls.”[346] Some of these nuns, as was frequently the case, had entered the Cistercian convent near Grimma, without a vocation, or had gradually become disgusted with their state owing to long-continued tepidity and want of fidelity to their profession. They had contrived to place themselves in communication with Luther, who, as he admits later in a public writing, himself arranged for them to be carried away by force, seeing that their relatives would do nothing. The plan was put into effect by one of the town councillors of Torgau, Leonard Koppe, aided by two other citizens of that town. Koppe had shortly before displayed heroic energy and skill in an attack upon a poor convent; with sixteen young comrades he had stormed the Franciscan friary at Torgau on the night of Ash Wednesday, 1523, thrown the monks who offered any resistance over the wall and smashed the windows, doors and furniture.[347] At the close of the Lenten season of the same year he signalised himself by this new exploit at Nimbschen.

On the Saturday in Holy Week, 1523, agreeably with an arrangement made beforehand with the apostate nuns, he made his appearance in the courtyard of the convent with an innocent-looking covered van, in which the nuns quietly took their places. As the van often came to the convent with provisions, no one noticed their flight. So runs the most authentic of the various accounts, some of them of a romantic nature, viz. that related by a chronicler of Torgau who lived about the year 1600.[348] Koppe brought the fugitives straight to Wittenberg, where they were safe. After a while they were received into different families in the town, or were fetched away by their relatives. Thus set free from their “bonds” on that memorable day of the Church’s year, they celebrated their so-called “resurrection.”

Luther declared, in a circular letter concerning this occurrence, that as Christ, the risen One, had, like a triumphant robber, snatched his prey from the Prince of this world, so also Leonard Koppe might be termed “a blessed robber.” All who were on God’s side would praise the rape of the nuns as a “great act of piety, so that you may rest assured that God has ordained it and that it is not your work or your conception.”[349]

The twelve nuns were, as Amsdorf writes to Spalatin on April 4, “pretty, and all of noble birth, and among them I have not found one who is fifty years old.... I am sorry for the girls; they have neither shoes nor dresses.” Amsdorf praises the patience and cheerfulness of the “honourable maidens,” and recommends them through Spalatin to the charity of the Court. One, namely the sister of Staupitz, who was no longer so youthful, he at once offers in marriage to Spalatin, though he admits he has others who are prettier. “If you wish for a younger one, you shall have your choice of the prettiest.”[350]

Soon after this three other nuns were carried off by their relatives from Nimbschen. Not long after, sixteen forsook the Mansfeld convent of Widerstett, five of whom were received by Count Albert of Mansfeld. Luther reported this latter event with great joy to the Court Chaplain, Spalatin, and at the same time informed him that the apostate Franciscan, François Lambert of Avignon, had become engaged to a servant girl at Wittenberg. His intention, and Amsdorf’s too, was to coax Spalatin into matrimony and the violation of his priestly obligation of celibacy. “It is a strange spectacle,” he writes; “what more can befall to astonish us, unless you yourself at length follow our example, and to our surprise appear in the guise of a bridegroom? God brings such wonders to pass, that I, who thought I knew something of His ways, must set to work again from the very beginning. But His Holy Will be done, Amen.”[351]

Luther at that time was not in a happy frame of mind. He knew what was likely to be his experience with the escaped monks and nuns. The trouble and waste of time, as well as the serious interruption to his work, which, as he complains, was occasioned by the religious who had left their convents, appeared to him relatively insignificant.[352] The large sums of money which, as he remarks, he had to “throw away on runaway monks and nuns,” he might also have overlooked, as he was not avaricious.[353] Yet the disorders introduced by the arrival of so many people bent on matrimony were distasteful to him. In a letter to Spalatin, July 11, 1523, this complaint escapes him: “I am growing to hate the sight of these renegade monks who collect here in such numbers; what annoys me most is that they wish to marry at once, though they are of no use for anything. I am seeking a means to put an end to it.”[354] The good name of his undertaking seemed to him to be at stake. On the occasion of the marriage of a Court preacher to a very old but wealthy woman, a match which was much talked about, he complains bitterly that the step was a disgrace to the Evangel; the miserly bridegroom was “betraying himself and us.”[355]

Above we have heard him speak of the monks who were desirous of marrying; he was more indulgent to the nuns who had come to Wittenberg. According to Melanchthon’s account he entered into too frequent and intimate relationship with them. (See below.)

Of the twelve who escaped from Nimbschen, nine, who were without resources, found a refuge in various houses at Wittenberg, while only three went to their relatives in the Saxon Electorate. To begin with, from necessity and only for a short time, the nine found quarters in the Augustinian monastery which had remained in Luther’s hands, in which he still dwelt and where there was plenty of room; later they found lodgings in the town. Luther had to provide in part for their maintenance. Catherine von Bora was lodged by him in the house of the Town-clerk, Reichenbach.

There was no longer any question of monastic seclusion for those quondam nuns, or for the others who had taken refuge at Wittenberg. Bora started a love affair in 1523 with Hieronymus Baumgärtner, a young Nuremberg patrician; he, however, married another girl in the commencement of 1525.[356] Christian, the exiled King of Denmark, made her acquaintance during his stay at Wittenberg in October, 1523; she showed, at a later date, a ring he had presented to her. In 1524 she was to have been married to Dr. Glatz, then Pastor of Orlamünde, in consequence of Luther’s stern and repeated urging. She let it, however, be understood that she looked higher, refused Glatz’s proposal, and announced quite frankly to Amsdorf that she would give her hand only to Luther himself, or to Amsdorf, his confidant. Amsdorf was not to be allured into matrimony, and remained single all his life. Luther, on the other hand, was also not then desirous of marrying and, besides, stood rather in awe of a certain haughtiness of bearing which was said to be noticeable in her, and which was attributed to her aristocratic descent.