Note 278 — Chapter XV · (continued 3)

In the same way that he here abuses the Emperor, so he also knows how to bestow praise upon him; for instance, in the official writing referred to above (p. 89) to the Electoral Prince Joachim of Brandenburg and in his “Warnunge an seine lieben Deudschen,” where he declares, strangely enough, that “our beloved Emperor Carol” has shown himself hitherto, and last of all at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, such, that he has won the respect and love of the whole world and deserves that no trouble should befall him, and that our people should only speak in praise of his Imperial virtue (“Werke,” Weim. ed., 30, 3, p. 291; Erl. ed., 25², p. 23), and yet, even there, in consequence of his edict against the new faith at the Diet of Augsburg, he puts the Emperor with the Pope, as the originators of a resolution which “must prove an eternal blot upon all the Princes and the whole Empire, and make us Germans blush for shame before God and the whole world,” so that “even the Turk, the ‘Tattars’ and ‘Moscobites’ despise us.” “Who under the whole expanse of heaven will for the future fear us or think well of us when they hear that we allow ourselves to be hoaxed, mocked, treated as children, as fools, nay, even as clods and blocks by the cursed Pope and his tools [who hold the Emperor in leading strings]?... Every German may well regret that he was born a German and is called a German” (ibid., p. 285=15). On the strength of the words quoted above in praise of the Emperor we find Luther credited in Protestant works of history with “the old, loyal sentiments of a good, simple German for his Emperor,” nay, even with “the language of charity which according to Holy Scripture believes all things, hopes all things.” And yet Luther in his letters to his confidential friends spoke after this of Charles V. in the following terms: “The Emperor was, is, and shall ever remain a servant of the servants of the devil,” and the worst of it is, that he “lends the devil his services knowingly” (to Jonas, etc., March or April, 1540, “Briefe,” ed. De Wette, 5, p. 275). “God’s wrath has come upon him and his friends.... We have prayed enough for him, if he does not want a blessing, then let him take our curse.” He accuses him of hypocrisy (“purus hypocrita”) and of breach of faith with the Turks after his stay at Vienna; he had swallowed up the Bishopric of Liège and intended to do the same with all the bishoprics along the Rhine (to Melanchthon, June 17, 1541, “Briefe,” 5, p. 370). “I suspect the Emperor is a miscreant (‘quod sit nequam’) and his brother Ferdinand is an abominable bounder” (to Amsdorf, October 21, 1545, “Briefe,” 5, p. 764).