Chapter XXII · (continued 2)

Were Protestants to bestow more attention on the religious literature of the Later Middle Ages, such statements would be simply impossible. One of those best acquainted with this literature writes: “During the last few months the present writer has gone carefully, pen in hand, through more than one hundred printed and manuscript religious works, written in German and belonging to the end of the Middle Ages: catechetical handbooks, general works of piety, confession manuals, postils, prayer-books, booklets on preparation for death and German sermonaries. In this way he has learnt from the most reliable sources not only how in those days people were guided to devout intercourse with God, but also with what fervent piety the faithful were accustomed to converse with their Saviour.” Let Protestants, he adds, at least attempt to vindicate their pet assertions “scientifically, i.e. from trustworthy sources.”[386]

The relations between the individual and God were by no means suppressed because the priesthood stood as an intermediary between the faithful and God, or because ecclesiastical superiors watched over and directed public worship and the lines along which the life of faith was to move. If the union of the individual with God was endangered by such interference on the part of the clergy, then it was endangered just as much by Luther, who insists so strongly on the preachers being listened to, and on the ministers taking the lead in things pertaining to God.

He teaches, for instance: “It is an unsufferable blasphemy to reject the public ministry or to say that people can become holy without sermons and Church. This involves a destruction of the Church and rebellion against ecclesiastical order; such upheavals must be warded off and punished like all other revolts.”[387]

The fact is, the ecclesiastical order of things to which Luther attached himself more and more strongly amounted to this, as he declares in various passages of his Table-Talk. Through the ministers and preachers, as through His servants, God speaks to man; through them God baptises, instructs and absolves; what the ministers of the Gospel say and do, that God Himself does through and in us as His instruments. Whoever does not believe this, Luther looks on as damned. In a sermon of 1528, speaking of the spiritual authority which intervenes between God and man, he exclaims: “God requires for His Kingdom pious Bishops and pastors, through them he governs His subjects [the Emperor, on the other hand, so he had said, had not even to be a Christian since the secular power was all outward and merely served to restrain evil-doers].[388] If you will not hearken to these Bishops and pastors, then you will have to listen to Master Hans [the hangman] and get no thanks either.”[389]

He uses similar language in his sermons on Matthew: “God, by means of Prophets and Apostles, ministers and preachers, baptises, gives the sacraments, preaches and consoles; without preachers and holy persons, He does nothing, just as He does not govern land and people without the secular power.”[390]

Hence Luther shows himself very anxious to establish a kind of hierarchy. If then he charges the priesthood of the past with putting itself between God and man, it is hard to see how he is to avoid a similar charge being brought forward against himself. Moreover, at the bottom of his efforts, memories of his Catholic days were at work, and the feeling that an organised ministry was called for if the religious sentiment was not to die out completely among the people. His practical judgment of the conditions even appears here in a favourable light, for instance, in those passages where he insists on the authority of rightly appointed persons to act as intermediaries between God and man, and as vicars and representatives of Christ. The word Christ spoke on earth and the word of the preacher, are, he says, one and the same “re et effectu,” because Christ said: “He that heareth you heareth me” (Luke x. 16); “God deals with us through these instruments, through them He works everything and offers us all His treasures.”[391] Indeed, “it is our greatest privilege that we have such a ministry and that God is so near to us; for he that hears Christ hears God Himself; and he that hears St. Peter or a preacher, hears Christ and God Himself speaking to us.”[392]

“We must always esteem the spoken Word very highly, for those who despise it become heretics at once. The Pope despises this ministry”[393] [!]. God, however, “has ordained that no one should have faith, except thanks to the preacher’s office,” and, “without the Word, He does no work whatever in the Church.”[394]

Thus we find Luther, on the one hand insisting upon an authority, and, on the other, demanding freedom for the interpretation of Scripture. How he sought to harmonise the two is reserved for later examination. At any rate, it is to misapprehend both the Catholic Church and Luther’s own theological attitude, to say that “independent study of religious questions” had been forbidden in the Middle Ages and was “reintroduced” only by Luther, that he removed the “blinkers” which the Church had placed over people’s eyes and that henceforward “the representatives of the Church had no more call to assume the place of the Living God in man’s regard.”

Luther also laid claim to having revived respect for the secular authorities, who, during the Middle Ages, had been despised owing to the one-sided regard shown to the monks and clergy. He declares that he had again brought people to esteem the earthly calling, family life and all worldly employments as being a true serving of God. Boldly he asserts, that, before my time, “the authorities did not know they were serving God”; “before my time nobody knew ... what the secular power, what matrimony, parents, children, master, servant, wife or maid really signified.” On the strength of his assertions it has been stated, that he revived the “ideal of life” by discovering the “true meaning of vocation,” which then became the “common property of the civilised world”; on this account he was “the creator of those theories which form the foundation upon which the modern State and modern civilisation rest.”

The fact is, however, the Church of past ages fully recognised the value of the secular state and spheres of activity, saw in them a Divine institution, and respected and cherished them accordingly.

A very high esteem for all secular callings is plainly expressed in the sermons of Johann Herolt, the famous and influential Nuremberg Dominican, whose much-read “Sermones de tempore et de Sanctis” (Latin outlines of sermons for the use of German preachers) had, prior to 1500, appeared in at least forty different editions.

“It has been asked,” he says in one sermon, “whether the labour of parents for their children is meritorious. I reply: Yes, if only they have the intention of bringing up their children for the glory of God and in order that they may become good servants of Christ. If the parents are in a state of grace, then all their trouble with their children, in suckling them, bathing them, carrying them about, dressing them, feeding them, watching by them, teaching and reproving them, redounds to their eternal reward. All this becomes meritorious. And in the same way when the father labours hard in order to earn bread for his wife and children, all this is meritorious for the life beyond.”[395]—A high regard for work is likewise expressed in his sermon “To workmen,” which begins with the words: “Man is born to labour as the bird is to fly.”[396] Another sermon praises the calling of the merchant, which he calls a “good and necessary profession.”[397]

Another witness to the Church’s esteem for worldly callings and employments is Marcus von Weida, a Saxon Dominican. In the discourses he delivered on the “Our Father” at Leipzig, in 1501, he says: “All those pray who do some good work and live virtuously.” For everything that a man does to the praise and glory of God is really prayer. A man must always do what his state of life and his calling demands. “Hence it follows that many a poor peasant, husbandman, artisan or other man who does his work, or whatever he undertakes, in such a way as to redound to God’s glory, is more pleasing to God, by reason of the work he daily performs, and gains more merit before God than any Carthusian or Friar, be he Black, Grey or White, who stands daily in choir singing and praying.”[398]

It is evident that Catholic statements, such as that just quoted from Herolt, concerning the care of children being well-pleasing to God, have been overlooked by those who extol Luther as having been the first to discover and teach, that even to rock children’s cradles and wash their swaddling clothes is a noble, Christian work. What is, however, most curious is the assurance with which Luther himself claimed the merit of this discovery, in connection with his teaching on marriage.

The Carthusian, Erhard Gross, speaks very finely of the different secular callings and states of life, and assigns to them an eminently honourable place: “What are the little precious stones in Christ’s crown but the various classes of the Christian people, who adorn the head of Christ? For He is our Head and all the Christian people are His Body for ever and ever. Hence, amongst the ornaments of the house of God some must be virgins, others widows, some married and others chaste, such as monks, priests and nuns. Nor are these all, for we have also Princes, Kings and Prelates who rule the commonwealth, those who provide for the needs of the body, as, for instance, husbandmen and fishermen, tailors and merchants, bakers and shoemakers, and, generally, all tradesmen.” If the general welfare is not to suffer, he says, each one must faithfully follow his calling. “Therefore whoever wishes to please God, let him stick to the order [state] in which God has placed him and live virtuously; he will then receive his reward from God here, and, after this life, in the world to come.”[399]

Although Luther must have been well aware of the views really held on this subject, some excuse for his wild charges may perhaps be found in his small practical experience, prior to his apostasy, of Christian life in the world. His poverty had forced him, even in childhood, into irregular ways; he had been deprived of the blessings of a truly Christian family-life. His solitary studies had left him a stranger to the active life of good Catholics engaged in secular callings; the fact of his being a monk banished him alike from the society of the bad and impious and from that of the good and virtuous. Thus in many respects he was out of touch with the stimulating influence of the world; the versatility which results from experience was still lacking, when, in his early years at Wittenberg, he began to think out his new theories on God and sin, Grace and the Fall.

“Whoever wishes to please God let him stick to the order [state] in which God has placed him.” These words of Gross, the Carthusian, quoted above, remind us of a comparison instituted by Herolt the Dominican between religious Orders and the “Order” of matrimony. Commending the secular calling of matrimony, he says here, that it was instituted by God Himself, whereas the religious Orders had been founded by men: “We must know that God first honoured matrimony by Himself instituting it. In this wise the Order of matrimony excels all other Orders (‘ordo matrimonialis præcellit olios ordines’); for just as St. Benedict founded the Black Monks, St. Francis the Order of Friars Minor and St. Dominic the Order of Friars Preacher, so God founded matrimony.”[400]

True Christian perfection, according to the ancient teaching of the Church, is not bound up with any particular state, but may be attained by all, no matter their profession, even by the married.

Luther, and many after him, even down to the present day, have represented, that, according to the Catholic view, perfection was incapable of attainment save in the religious life, this alone being termed the “state of perfection.” In his work “On Monkish Vows” he declares: “The monks have divided Christian life into a state of perfection and one of imperfection. To the great majority they have assigned the state of imperfection, to themselves, that of perfection.”[401]

As a matter of fact the “state of perfection” only means, that, religious, by taking upon themselves, publicly and before the Church, the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, bind themselves to strive after perfection along this path as one leading most surely to the goal; it doesn’t imply that they are already in possession of perfection, still less that they alone possess it. By undertaking to follow all their life a Rule approved by the Church, under the guidance of Superiors appointed by the Church, they form a “state” or corporation of which perfection is the aim, and, in this sense alone, are said to belong to the “state of perfection.” In addition, it was always believed that equal, in fact the highest, perfection might be attained to in any state of life. Though the difficulties to be encountered in the worldly state were regarded as greater, yet the conquest they involved was looked upon as the fruit of an even greater love of God, the victory as more splendid, and the degree of perfection attained as so much the more exalted.

It is the love of God which, according to the constant teaching of the Church, constitutes the essence of perfection.

The most perfect Christian is he who fulfils the law of charity most perfectly, and this—notwithstanding whatever Luther may say—according to what has ever been the teaching of the Church, the ordinary Christian may quite well do in his everyday calling, and in the married as much as in the religious state. Even should the religious follow the severest of Rules, yet if he does not make use of the more abundant means of perfection at his command but lives in tepidity, then the ordinary Christian approaches more closely than he to the ideal standard of life if only he fulfils his duties in the home with greater love of God.

The Bavarian Franciscan, Caspar Schatzgeyer, Luther’s contemporary, is right when he says in his work “Scrutinium divinæ scripturæ”: “We do not set up a twofold standard of perfection, one for people in the world and another for the religious. For all Christians there is but one order, one mode of worshipping God, one evangelical perfection.... But we do say this, that in cloistral life the attainment of perfection is easier, though a Christian living in the world may excel all religious in perfection.”[402] For—such is the ground he gives in a German work—“it may well happen that in the ordinary Christian state a man runs so hotly and eagerly towards God as to outstrip all religious in all the essentials of Christian perfection, just as a sculptor may with a blunt chisel produce a masterpiece far superior to that carved by an unskilful apprentice even with the best and sharpest of tools.”[403]

This may suffice to elucidate the question of the Catholic ideal of life in respect of Luther’s statements, a question much debated in recent controversies but not always set in as clear a light as it deserved.

The preceding remarks on Luther’s misrepresentations of the Church’s teaching concerning worldly callings lead us to consider his utterances on the Church’s depreciation of the female sex and of matrimony.

5. Was Luther the Liberator of Womankind from “Mediæval Degradation”?

Luther maintained that he had raised the dignity of woman from the depths to which it had fallen in previous ages and had revived due respect for married life. What the Church had defined on this subject in the past he regarded as all rubbish. Indeed, “not one of the Fathers,” he says, “ever wrote anything notable or particularly good concerning the married state.”[404] But, as in the case of the secular authority and the preaching office, so God, before the coming of the Judgment Day, by His special Grace and through His Word, i.e. through the new Evangel, had restored married life to its rightful dignity, “as He had at first instituted and ordained it.” Marriage, so Luther asserts, had been regarded as “a usage and practice rather than as a thing ordained by God. In the same way the secular authorities did not know that they were serving God, but were all tied up in ceremonies. The preaching office, too, was nothing but a sham consisting of cowls, tonsures, oilings,” etc.[405]

In short, by his teaching on marriage he had ennobled woman, whereas the Catholics had represented matrimony as an “unchristian” state, only permitted out of necessity, even though they called it a Sacrament.[406]

Conspectus of Luther’s Distortion of the Catholic View of Marriage.

Luther based his charges chiefly on the canonical enforcement of clerical celibacy and on the favour shown by the Church to the vow of chastity and the monastic life. How this proved his contention it is not easy to see. Further, he will have it, that the Church taught that true service of God was to be found only in the monastic state, and that vows were a sure warrant of salvation—though, as a matter of fact, neither Church nor theologians had ever said anything of the sort.[407]

In his remarks on this subject in 1527 he openly accused the Papists of saying that “whoever is desirous of having to do with God and spiritual matters must, whether man or woman, remain unmarried,” and “thus,” so he says, “they have scared the young from matrimony, so that now they are sunk in fornication.”[408]

At first Luther only ventured on the charge, that matrimony had been “de facto” forbidden, though it had not actually been declared sinful, by the Pope;[409] by forbidding the monks to marry he had fulfilled the prophecy in 1 Timothy iv. 1 ff., concerning the latter times, when many would fall away from the faith and forbid people to marry. “The Pope forbids marriage under the semblance of spirituality.”[410] “Squire Pope has forbidden marriage, because one had to come who would prohibit marriage. The Pope has made man to be no longer man, and woman to be no longer woman.”[411]

As years passed Luther went further; forgetful of his admission that the Pope had not made matrimony sinful, he exclaimed: To him and to his followers marriage is a sin. The Church had hitherto treated marriage as something “non-Christian”;[412] the married state she had “handed over to the devil”;[413] her theologians look down on it as a “low, immoral sort of life,”[414] and her religious can only renounce it on the ground that it is a kind of legalised “incontinence.”[415]

In reality, however, religious, when taking their vow, merely acted on the Christian principle which St. Augustine expresses as follows: Although “all chastity, conjugal as well as virginal, has its merit in God’s sight,” yet, “the latter is higher, the former less exalted.”[416] They merely renounced a less perfect state for one more perfect; they could, moreover, appeal not only to 1 Cor. vii. 33, where the Apostle speaks in praise of the greater freedom for serving God which the celibate state affords, but even to Luther himself who, in 1523, had interpreted this very passage in the same sense, and that with no little warmth.[417]

His later and still more extravagant statements concerning the Catholic view of marriage can hardly be taken seriously; his perversion of the truth is altogether too great.

He says, that married people had not been aware that God “had ordained” that state, until at last God, by His special Grace, and before the Judgment Day, had restored the dignity of matrimony no less than that of the secular authority and the preaching office, “through His Word [i.e. through Luther’s preaching].” The blame for this state of things went back very far, for the Fathers, like Jerome, “had seen in matrimony mere sensuality,” and for this reason had disparaged it.[418]

The Prophet Daniel had foreseen the degradation of marriage under the Papacy: It is of the Papal Antichrist “that Daniel says [xi. 37], that he will wallow in the unnatural vice which is the recompense due to contemners of God (Rom. i.[27]), in what we call Italian weddings and silent sin. For matrimony and a right love and use of women he shall not know. Such are the horrible abominations prevailing under Pope and Turk.”[419] “The same prophet,” he writes elsewhere, “says that Antichrist shall stand on two pillars, viz.: idolatry and celibacy. The idol he calls Mausim, thus using the very letters which form the word Mass.” The Pope had deluded people, on the one hand by the Mass, and, on the other, “by celibacy, or the unmarried state, fooling the whole world with a semblance of sanctity. These are the two pillars on which the Papacy rests, like the house of the Philistines in Samson’s time. If God chose to make Luther play the part of Samson, lay hold on the pillars and shake them, so that the house fall on the whole multitude, who could take it ill? He is God and wonderful are His ways.”[420]

Luther appeals expressly to the Pope’s “books” in which marriage is spoken of as a “sinful state.”[421] The Papists, when they termed marriage a sacrament, were only speaking “out of a false heart,” and trying to conceal the fact that they really looked on it as “fornication.”[422] “They have turned all the words and acts of married people into mortal sins, and I myself, when I was a monk, shared the same opinion, viz. that the married state was a damnable state.”[423]

This alone was wanting to fill up the measure of his falsehoods. One wonders whether Luther, when putting forward statements so incredible, never foresaw that his own earlier writings might be examined and his later statements challenged in their light? Certainly the contradiction between the two is patent. We have only to glance at his explanation of the fourth and sixth Commandments in his work on the Ten Commandments, published in 1518, to learn from Luther himself what Catholics really thought of marriage, and to be convinced that it was anything but despised; there, as in other of his early writings, Luther indeed esteems virginity above marriage, but to term the latter sinful and damnable never occurred to him.

The olden Church had painted an ideal picture of the virgin. By this, though not alone by this, she voiced her respect for woman, from that Christian standpoint which differs so much from that of the world. From the earliest times she, like the Gospel and the Apostle of the Gentiles, set up voluntary virginity as a praiseworthy state of life. Hereby she awakened in the female sex a noble emulation for virtue, in particular for seclusion, purity and morality—woman’s finest ornaments—and amongst men a high respect for woman, upon whom, even in the wedded state, the ideal of chastity cast a radiance which subdued the impulse of passion. Virgin and mother alike were recommended by the Church to see their model and their guide in the Virgin Mother of our Saviour. Where true devotion to Mary flourished the female sex possessed a guarantee of its dignity, from both the religious and the human point of view, a pledge of enduring respect and honour.

How the Church of olden days continued to prize matrimony and to view it in the light of a true Sacrament is evident from the whole literature of the Middle Ages. Such being its teaching it is incomprehensible how a well-known Protestant encyclopædia, as late as 1898, could still venture to say: “As against the contempt for marriage displayed in both religious and secular circles, and to counteract the immorality to which this had given rise, Luther vindicated the honour of matrimony and placed it in an entirely new light.”

In those days Postils enjoyed a wider circulation than any other popular works. The Postils, however, do not teach “contempt of marriage,” but quite the contrary. “The Mirror of Human Conduct,” published at Augsburg in 1476, indeed gives the first place to virginity, but declares: “Marriage is good and holy,” and must not be either despised or rejected; those who “are mated in matrimony” must not imagine that the maids (virgins) alone are God’s elect; “Christ praises marriage, for it is a holy state of life in which many a man becomes holy, for marriage was instituted by our Lord in Paradise”; from Christ’s presence at the marriage at Cana we may infer that “the married life is a holy life.”

Other works containing the same teaching are the “Evangelibuch,” e.g. in the Augsburg edition of 1487, the “Postils on the Four Gospels throughout the year,” by Geiler of Kaysersberg († 1510), issued by Heinrich Wessmer at Strasburg in 1522, and the important Basle “Plenarium” of 1514, in which the author, a monk, writes: “The conjugal state is to be held in high respect on account of the honour done to it by God”; he also appends some excellent instructions on the duties of married people, concluding with a reference to the story of Tobias “which you will find in the Bible” (which, accordingly, he assumed was open to his readers).

The “Marriage-booklets” of the close of the Middle Ages form a literary group apart. One of the best is “Ein nützlich Lehre und Predigt, wie sich zwei Menschen in dem Sacrament der Ehe halten sollen,” which was in existence in MS. as early as 1456. “God Himself instituted marriage,” it tells us, “when He said, ‘Be fruitful and multiply!’ The Orders, however, were founded by Bernard, Augustine, Benedict and Dominic; thus the command of God is greater than that of the teacher,” i.e. the Sacrament excels all Rules made by men, even by Saints. It also gives a touching account of how marriage is founded on love and sustained by it.[424]

Another matrimonial handbook, composed by Albert von Eyb, a Franconian cleric, and printed at Augsburg in 1472, lavishes praise on “holy, divine matrimony” without, however, neglecting to award still higher encomium to the state of virginity. Erhard Gross, the Nuremberg Carthusian, about the middle of the 15th century, wrote a “Novel” containing good advice for married people.[425] The hero, who was at first desirous of remaining unmarried, declares: “You must not think that I condemn matrimony, for it is holy and was established by God.”[426]

Among the unprinted matrimonial handbooks dating from the period before Luther’s time, and containing a like favourable teaching on marriage, are the “Booklet on the Rule of Holy Matrimony,”[427] “On the Sacrament of Matrimony,”[428] and the excellent “Mirror of the Matrimonial Order,” by the Dominican Marcus von Weida.[429] Fr. A. Ebert, the Protestant bibliographer, remarks of the latter’s writings: “They effectually traverse the charges with which self-complacent ignorance loves to overwhelm the ages previous to the Saxon Reformation,” and what he says applies particularly to the teaching on marriage.[430]

To come now to the preachers. We must first mention Johann Herolt, concerning whose influence a recent Protestant writer aptly remarks, that his “wisdom had been listened to by thousands.”[431] The passage already given, in which he describes marriage as an Order instituted by Christ (p. 129 f.), is but one instance of his many apt and beautiful sayings. In the very next sermon Herolt treats of the preparation which so great a Sacrament demands. In the same way that people prepare themselves for their Easter Communion, so they, bride and bridegroom, must prepare themselves for matrimony by contrition and confession; for “marriage is as much a Sacrament as the Eucharist.”

A similar view prevailed throughout Christendom.

One of the most popular of Italian preachers was Gabriel Barletta, who died shortly after 1480. Amongst his writings there is a Lenten sermon entitled: “De amore conjugali vel de laudibus mulierum.” In this he speaks of the “cordial love” which unites the married couple. He points out that marriage was instituted in Paradise and confirmed anew by Christ. Explaining the meaning of the ring, he finds that it signifies four things, all of which tend to render Christian marriage praiseworthy. He declares that a good wife may prove an inestimable treasure. If he dwells rather too much on woman’s physical and mental inferiority, this does not prevent him from extolling the strength of the woman who is upheld by Christian virtue, and who often succeeds in procuring the amendment of a godless husband.[432]

Barletta, in his sermons, frequently follows the example of his brother friar, the English Dominican preacher, Robert Holkot († 1349), whose works were much in request at the close of the Middle Ages.[433] Holkot had such respect for Christian matrimony, that he applies to it the words of the Bible: “O how beautiful is the chaste generation with glory; for the memory thereof is immortal.” Since the “actus matrimonialis” was willed by God, it must be assumed, he says, that it can be accomplished virtuously and with merit.[434] If the intention of the married couple is the begetting of children for the glory of God, they perform an act of the virtue of religion; they also exercise the virtue of justice if they have the intention of mutually fulfilling the conjugal duties to which they have pledged themselves. According to him, mutual love is the principal duty of the married couple.[435] Franz Falk has dwelt in detail on the testimony borne by the Late Middle Ages to the dignity of marriage.[436]

Commencing with the prayers of the marriage-service and the blessing of the ring, the prayers for those with child and in child-bed, and for the churching of women, he goes on to deal with the civil rights pertaining to the married state and with the Church’s opinion as witnessed to in the matrimonial handbooks and books of instruction and edification. With the respect for the Sacrament and the dignity of the married woman there found expressed, Falk compares the sentiments likewise found in the prose “novels” and so-called “Volksbücher,” and, still more practically expressed, in the numerous endowments and donations for the provision of bridal outfits. “It is quite incomprehensible,” such is the author’s conclusion, “how non-Catholic writers even to the present time can have ventured to reproach the Church with want of regard for the married state.”[437] Of the information concerning bridal outfits, he says, for instance: “The above collection of facts, a real ‘nubes testium,’ will sufficiently demonstrate what a task the Church of the Middle Ages here fulfilled towards her servants and children.... Many other such foundations may, moreover, have escaped our notice owing to absence of the deeds which have either not been printed or have perished. From the 16th century onwards records of such foundations become scarce.”[438]

In the “Internationale Wochenschrift” Heinrich Finke pointed out that he had examined hundreds of Late-mediæval sermons on the position of women, with the result, that “it is impossible to discover in them any contempt for woman.”[439] The fact is, that “there exist countless statements of the sanctity of marriage and its sacramental character ... statements drawn from theologians of the highest standing, Fathers, Saints and Doctors of the Church. Indeed, towards the close of the Middle Ages, they grow still more numerous. The most popular of the monks, whether Franciscans or Dominicans, have left us matrimonial handbooks which imply the existence of that simple, happy family life they depict and encourage.”[440] Finke recalls the 15th-century theologian, Raymond of Sabunde, who points out how union with God in love may be reproduced in marriage. Countless theologians are at one with him here, and follow Scripture in representing the union of Christ with the Church as an exalted figure of the marriage-bond between man and wife (Eph. v. 25, 32). Of the respect which the ancient Church exhibited towards women Finke declares: “Never has the praise of women been sung more loudly than in the sermons of the Fathers and in the theological tractates of the Schoolmen.” Here “one picture follows another, each more dazzling than the last.”[441] Certainly we must admit, as he does, that it is for the most part the ideal of virginity which inspires them, and that it is the good, chaste, virtuous wife and widow whom they extol, rather than woman qua woman, as a noble part of God’s creation. Their vocation as spiritual teachers naturally explains this; and if, for the same cause, they seem to be very severe in their strictures on feminine faults, or to strike harsh notes in their warnings on the spiritual dangers of too free intercourse with the female sex, this must not be looked upon as “hatred of women,” as has been done erroneously on the strength of some such passages in the case of St. Antoninus of Florence and Cardinal Dominici.[442]

“Just as Church and Councils energetically took the side of marriage” when it was decried in certain circles,[443] so the accusation of recent times that, in the Middle Ages, woman was universally looked upon with contempt, cannot stand; according to Finke this was not the case, even in “ascetical circles,” and “still less elsewhere.”[444] The author adduces facts which “utterly disprove any such general disdain for woman.”[445]

The splendid Scriptural eulogy with which the Church so frequently honours women in her liturgy, might, one would think, be in itself sufficient. To the married woman who fulfils her duties in the home out of true love for God, and with zeal and assiduity, the Church, in the Mass appointed for the Feasts of Holy Women, applies the words of Proverbs:[446] “The price of the valiant woman is as of things brought from afar and from the uttermost coasts. The heart of her husband trusteth in her ... she will render him good and not evil all the days of her life. She hath sought wool and flax and hath wrought by the counsel of her hands.... Her husband is honourable in the gates when he sitteth among the senators of the land.... Strength and beauty are her clothing, and she shall laugh in the latter day. She hath opened her mouth to wisdom.... Her children rose up and called her blessed, her husband, and he praised her.... The woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.”—Elsewhere the liturgy quotes the Psalmist:[447] “Grace is poured abroad from thy lips,” “With thy comeliness and thy beauty set out, proceed prosperously and reign.... Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.”

It cannot be objected that the ordinary woman, in the exercise of her household duties and of a humbler type of virtue, had no part in this praise. On the contrary, in honouring these Saints the Church was at the same time honouring all women who had not, by their misconduct, rendered themselves unworthy of the name. To all, whatever their rank or station, the high standard of the Saints was displayed, and all were invited to follow their example and promised their intercession. At the foot of the altar all were united, for their mother, the Church, showed to all the same consideration and helpful love. The honours bestowed upon the heroines of the married state had its influence on their living sisters, just as the Church’s “undying respect for virginity was calculated to exercise a wholesome effect on those bound by the marriage tie, or about to be so bound.”[448]

In Luther’s own case we have an instance in the devotion he showed in his youth to St. Anne, who was greatly venerated by both men and women in late mediæval times. The vow he had made to enter the cloister he placed in the hands of this Saint. The liturgical praise to which we have just listened, and which is bestowed on her in common with other holy spouses, he repeated frequently enough as a monk, when saying Mass, and the words of the Holy Ghost in praise of the true love of the faithful helpmate he ever treasured in his memory.[449]

How well Luther succeeded in establishing the fable of the scorn in which the married state was held in the Middle Ages is evident from several recent utterances of learned Protestants.

One Church historian goes so far, in his vindication of the Reformer’s statements concerning the mediæval “contempt felt for womankind,” as actually to lay the blame for Luther’s sanction of polygamy on the low, “mediæval view of the nature of matrimony.” Another theologian, a conservative, fancies that he can, even to-day, detect among “Romanists” the results of the mediæval undervaluing of marriage. According to Catholics “marriage is not indeed forbidden to everyone—for otherwise where would the Church find new children?—but nevertheless is looked at askance as a necessary evil.” Perfection in Catholic theory consists in absolute ignorance of all that concerns marriage. One scholar declares the Church before Luther’s day had taught, that “marriage had nothing to do with love”; “of the ethical task [of marriage] and of love not a trace is to be found” in the teaching of the Middle Ages. An eminent worker in the field of the history of dogma also declares, in a recent edition of his work, that, before Luther’s day, marriage had been “a sort of concession to the weak”; thanks only to Luther, was it “freed from all ecclesiastical tutelage to become the union of the sexes, as instituted by God [his italics], and the school of highest morality.” Such assertions, only too commonly met with, are merely the outcome of the false ideas disseminated by Luther himself concerning the Church of olden days. The author of the fable that woman and marriage were disdained in the Middle Ages scored a success, of which, could he have foreseen it, he would doubtless have been proud.

Two publications by Professors of the University of Wittenberg have been taken as clear proof of how low an opinion the Catholic Middle Ages had of woman and marriage. Of these publications one, however, a skit on the devil in Andr. Meinhardi’s Latin Dialogues of 1508—which, of the two, would, in this respect, be the most incriminating—has absolutely nothing to do with the mediæval Church’s views on marriage, but simply reproduces those of the Italian Humanists, though revealing that their influence extended even as far as Germany. It tells how even the devil himself was unable to put up with matrimony; since the difficulties of this state are so great, one of the speakers makes up his mind “never to marry, so as to be the better able to devote himself to study.” Despite this the author of the Dialogue entered the married state. The other publication is a discourse, in 1508, by Christopher Scheurl, containing a frivolous witticism at the expense of women, likewise due to Italian influence. This, however, did not prevent Scheurl, too, from marrying.[450] The truth is that the Italian Humanists’ “favourite subjects are the relations between the sexes, treated with the crudest realism, and, in connection with this, attacks on marriage and the family.”[451] At the same time it cannot be denied that individual writers, men influenced by anti-clerical Humanism, or ascetical theologians knowing nothing of the world, did sometimes speak of marriage in a manner scarcely fair to woman and did occasionally unduly exalt the state of celibacy.

Against such assertions some of Luther’s finest sayings on woman’s dignity deserve to be pitted.

Luther’s Discordant Utterances on the Value of Marriage in his Sermons and Writings.

Any objective examination of Luther’s attitude towards woman and marriage must reveal the fact, that he frequently seeks to invest Christian marriage, as he conceived it, with a religious character and a spiritual dignity. This he does in language witty and sympathetic, representing it as a close bond of love, though devoid of any sacramental character. Nor does he hesitate to use the noble imagery of the Church when describing his substitute for the Christian marriage of the past.

“It is no small honour for the married state,” he says in a sermon of 1536, “that God should represent it under the type and figure of the unspeakable grace and love which He manifests and bestows on us in Christ, and as the surest and most gracious sign of the intimate union between Himself and Christendom and all its members, a union than which nothing more intimate can be imagined.”[452]

In another sermon he praises the edification provided in the married state, when “man and wife are united in love and serve each other faithfully”; Luther invites them to thank God “that the married state is profitable alike to body, property, honour and salvation.” “What, however, is best of all in married life,” so he insists, “for the sake of which everything must be suffered and endured, is that God may give offspring and command us to train it in His service. This is earth’s noblest and most priceless work, because God loves nothing so well as to save souls.”[453]

Such exhortations of Luther’s, apart from peculiarities of expression, differ from those of earlier writers only in that those authors, relying on the traditional, sacramental conception of the matrimonial union, had an even greater right to eulogise marriage and the blessing of children.

Catholic preachers might quite profitably have made use of the greater part of a wedding discourse delivered by Luther in 1531,[454] though they might have failed to emulate the force and emphasis with which it was uttered. His theme there is “that marriage is to be held in honour”; he quotes Hebr. xiii. 4, “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled”; he continues: “It is true that our flesh is full of evil lusts which entice us to sin, but to these we must not consent; if, however, you hold fast to the Word of God and see to it, that this state is blessed and adorned, this will preserve and comfort you, and make of it a holy state for you.”[455] It was necessary, he continues, not merely to fight against any sensual lusts outside of the marriage bond, but also to cultivate virtue. Conjugal fidelity must be preserved all the more carefully since “Satan is your enemy and your flesh wanton.” “Fornication and adultery are the real stains which defile the marriage bed.” “Married persons are embraced in the Word of God.” This they must take as their guide, otherwise (here Luther’s language ceases to be a pattern) “the bed is soiled, and, practically, they might as well have passed their motions in it.”[456]

Such an emphasising of the religious side of matrimony almost gives the impression, that Luther was following an interior impulse which urged him to counteract the effects of certain other statements of his on marriage. Doubtless he felt the contrast between his worldly view of matrimony and the higher standard of antiquity, though he would certainly have refused to admit that he was behindhand in the struggle against sensuality. In view of the sad moral consequences which were bearing witness against him, he was disposed to welcome an opportunity to give expression to such sentiments as those just described, which tended to justify him both to his listeners and to himself. Nor were such sentiments mere hypocrisy; on the contrary, they have their psychological place as a true component part of his picture. On one occasion Luther bewails the want of attention paid to his excellent doctrines: “The teachers are there, but the doers are nowhere to be found; as with the other points of our doctrine, there are but few who obey or heed us.”[457]

Not infrequently, however, instead of praising the dignity of woman and the purity of married life, Luther speaks in a far from respectful, nay, offensive manner of woman, though without perhaps meaning all that his words would seem to convey. He thereby exposes woman, in her relations with man, to the danger of contempt, and thus forfeits the right of posing as the defender of feminine dignity and of the married state against alleged detractors among the Catholics. His false aspersions on former days thus stand out in a still more unpleasant light.

In a sermon of 1524, where it is true he has some fine words on the indulgent treatment to be meted out to the wife, he says: St. Peter calls woman the “weaker vessel” (1 Peter iii. 7); he “had given faint praise to woman,” for “woman’s body is not strong and her spirit, as a general rule, is even weaker; whether she is wild or mild depends on God’s choice of man’s helpmate. Woman is half a child; whoever takes a wife must look upon himself as the guardian of a child.... She is also a crazy beast. Recognise her weakness. If she does not always follow the straight path, bear with her frailty. A woman will ever remain a woman.... But the married state is nevertheless the best, because God is there with His Word and Work and Cross.”[458]

With those who complain of the sufferings of the mother in pregnancy and childbirth he is very angry, and, in one sermon, goes so far as to say: “Even though they grow weary and wear themselves out with child-bearing, that is of no consequence; let them go on bearing children till they die, that is what they are there for.”[459]

His description of marriage “as an outward, material thing, like any other worldly business,[460] was certainly not calculated to raise its repute;” and in the same passage he proceeds: “Just as I may eat and drink, sleep and walk, ride, talk and do business with a heathen or a Jew, a Turk or a heretic, so also I may contract marriage with him.”[461]

Matrimonial cases had formerly belonged to the ecclesiastical courts, but Luther now drives the parties concerned to the secular judge, telling them that he will give them “a good hog,” i.e. a sound trouncing, for having sought to “involve and entangle him in such matters” which “really concerned the secular authority.”[462] “Marriage questions,” he says, “do not touch the conscience, but come within the province of the secular judge.”[463] Previously, parties whose rights had been infringed were able to seek redress from the ecclesiastical tribunals, the sentences of which were enforced by Canon Law under spiritual penalties, to the advantage of the injured party. Luther, on the other hand, after having secularised marriage, finds himself unable to cope with the flood of people clamouring for justice: “I am tired of them [the matrimonial squabbles] and I have thrown them overboard; let them do as they like in the name of all the devils.”[464] He is also determined to rid the preachers of this business; the injured parties are, he says, to seek for justice and protection “in the latrines of the lawyers”; his own conduct, he hopes, will serve as a model to the preachers, who will now repel all who solicit their help.[465]

The increase in the number of matrimonial misunderstandings and quarrels, the haste with which marriage was entered upon and then dissolved, particularly in the Saxon Electorate and at Wittenberg, was not merely the result of the new Evangelical freedom, as Luther and his friends sadly admitted, but was due above all to the altered views on marriage. In the new preaching on marriage the gratification of the sensual impulse was, as will be shown below, placed too much in the foreground, owing partly to the fanatical reaction against clerical celibacy and religious vows. “To marry is a remedy for fornication”; these words of Luther’s were again and again repeated by himself and others in one form or another, as though they characterised the main object of marriage. Nature was persistently painted as excessively weak in the matter of chastity, and as quite captive under the yoke of passion. People were indeed admonished to curb their passions with the help of Grace, but such means of acquiring God’s Grace as mortification and self-conquest were only too frequently scoffed at as mere holiness-by-works, while as for the means of grace sought by Catholics in the Sacraments, they had simply been “abolished.”

By his patronage of polygamy, forced on him by his wrong interpretation of the Bible, Luther put the crowning touch on his contempt for Christian marriage.[466] This was to relinquish the position of privilege in which Christianity had established marriage, when, following the Creator’s intention, it insisted on monogamy.

Birth of the New Views on Marriage during the Controversy on the Vow of Chastity.

How did Luther reach his opinion and succeed in endowing it with credibility and life? A glance at its birth and growth will give us an instructive insight into Luther’s manner of proceeding.

He had already long been engaged in his struggle with “Popish abuses” and had already set up all the essential points of his new theology, before becoming in the least conscious of the supposed contempt in which marriage was held by the Roman Church. In his exposition of the Ten Commandments, in 1518, he still speaks of it in the respectful language of his earlier years; in his sermon on the Married State, in 1519, he still terms it a Sacrament, without hinting in any way that it had hitherto been considered disreputable. Whether he uses the term Sacrament in its traditional meaning we do not, of course, know. At any rate, he says: “Matrimony is a Sacrament, an outward, holy sign of the greatest, most sacred, worthy and exalted thing that ever has been, or ever will be, viz. of the union of the Divine and human nature in Christ.”[467] Enumerating the spiritual advantages of marriage, which counteract the “sinful lusts therewith intermingled,” he expressly appeals to the “Doctors” of the Church, and the three benefits they perceived in matrimony; “first, marriage is a Sacrament,” “secondly, it is a bond of fidelity,” “thirdly, it brings offspring, which is the end and principal office of marriage”; a further benefit must be added, viz. the “training of the offspring in the service of God.”[468]

In his book “On the Babylonish Captivity” (1520) he has already arrived at the explicit denial to marriage of the name and character of a sacrament.

But it was only in the war he waged against his own vow of chastity that the idea arose in his mind, and even then only gradually, that the true value and excellence of marriage had never hitherto been recognised. The more he sought for theological grounds on which to prove the worthlessness of religious celibacy and the nullity of the vow of chastity, the more deeply he persuaded himself that proofs existed in abundance of the utter perversity of the prevailing opinions on matrimony. He began to impute to the Church extravagant views on virginity, of which neither he nor anyone else had ever thought. He now accused her of teaching the following: That virginity was the only state in which God could be served perfectly; that marriage was forbidden to the clergy because it was disreputable and a thing soiled with sin; finally, that family life with its petty tasks must be regarded as something degrading, while woman herself, to whom the chief share in these tasks belongs and who, moreover, so often tempts man to sins of incontinence, is a contemptible creature.

All these untruths concerning the ancient Church were purely the outcome of Luther’s personal polemics.

His system of attack exhibits no trace of any dispassionate examination of the testimonies of antiquity. But his false and revolting charges seemed some sort of justification for his attack on religious vows and clerical celibacy. From such theoretical charges there was but a step to charges of a more practical character and to his boundless exaggerations concerning the hideous vices supposed to have been engendered by the perversion of the divinely appointed order, and to have devastated the Church as a chastisement for her contempt for marriage.

In the second edition of the sermon of 1519 on the Married State he places virginity on at least an equal footing with matrimony. Towards the end of the sermon he (like the earlier writers) calls matrimony “a noble, exalted and blessed state” if rightly observed, but otherwise “a wretched, fearful and dangerous” one; he proceeds: Whoever bears this in mind “will know what to think of the sting of the flesh, and, possibly, will be as ready to accept the virginal state as the conjugal.”[469] Even during his Wartburg days, when under the influence of the burning spirit of revolt, and already straining at the vows which bound him, he still declared in the theses he sent Melanchthon, that “Marriage is good, but virginity better” (“Bonum coniugium, melior virginitas”),[470] a thesis, which, like St. Paul, he bases mainly on the immunity from worldly cares. This idea impressed Melanchthon so deeply, that he re-echoes it in his praise of virginity in the “Apology for the Confession of Augsburg”: “We do not make virginity and marriage equal. For, as one gift is better than another, prophecy better than eloquence, strategy better than agriculture, eloquence better than architecture, so virginity is a gift excelling marriage.”[471]

But this great gift, to Luther’s mind, was a moral impossibility, the rarest of God’s Graces, nay, a “miracle” of the Almighty. Hence he teaches that such a privilege must not be laid claim to, that the monastic vow of chastity was therefore utterly immoral, and clerical celibacy too, to say nothing of private vows of virginity; in all such there lurked a presumptuous demand for the rarest and most marvellous of Divine Graces; even to pray for this was not allowed.

At the conclusion of his theses for Melanchthon, Luther enforces what he had said by the vilest calumnies against all who, in the name of the Church, had pledged themselves to remain unmarried. Were it known what manner of persons those who profess such great chastity really are, their “greatly extolled chastity” would not be considered fit “for a prostitute to wipe her boots on.”

Then follow his further unhappy outbursts at the Wartburg on religious vows (vol. ii., p. 83 ff.) consummating his perversion of the Church’s teaching and practice regarding celibacy and marriage. In marriage he sees from that time forward nothing by the gratification of the natural impulse; to it every man must have recourse unless he enjoys the extraordinary grace of God; the ancient Church, with her hatred of marriage, her professed religious and celibate clergy, assumes in his imagination the most execrable shape. He fancies that, thanks to his new notions, he has risen far above the Christianity of the past, albeit the Church had ever striven to guard the sanctity of marriage as the very apple of her eye, by enacting many laws and establishing marriage-courts of her own under special judges. He becomes ever more reckless in casting marriage matters on the shoulders of the State. In the Preface to his “Trawbüchlin,” in 1529, he says, for instance, “Since wedlock and marriage are a worldly business, we clergy and ministers of the Church have nothing to order or decree about it, but must leave each town and country to follow its own usage and custom.”[472]

From that time forward, particularly when the Diet of Augsburg had embittered the controversy, Luther pours out all the vials of his terrible eloquence on the bondage in which marriage had been held formerly, and on the contempt displayed by Rome for it. He peremptorily demands its complete secularisation.

And yet he ostentatiously extols marriage as “holy and Divine,” and even says that wedlock is most pleasing to God, a mystery and Sacrament in the highest sense of the word. Of one of these passages Emil Friedberg, the Protestant canonist, remarks in his “Recht der Eheschliessung”: “Luther’s views as here expressed completely contradict other passages, and this same discrepancy is apparent throughout the later literature, and, even now, prevents [Protestants] from appreciating truly the nature of marriage.”[473]

Every impartial observer could have seen that the preference given to virginity by the Catholic Church, her defence of the manner of life of those whom God had called to the cloister, and her guardianship of the celibacy of the priesthood, handed down from the earliest ages, did not in the least imply any undervaluing of marriage on her part—unless indeed, as Joseph Mausbach remarks, he was prepared to admit that, “because one thing is better, its opposite must needs be bad.”

“Who thinks,” continues the same writer, that “preference for gold involves contempt for silver, or preference for the rose a depreciation of all other flowers? But these very comparisons are to be met with even amongst the ancient Fathers.... Why should the Church’s praise of virginity be always misconstrued as a reproach against matrimony? All this is mere thoughtlessness, when it is not blind prejudice, for the Church did everything to prevent any misunderstanding of her praise of virginity, and certainly taught and defended the sanctity of marriage with all her power.”[474]

Luther’s judgment was not due so much to mere thoughtlessness as to his burning hatred of the Papacy; this we see from the vulgar abuse which, whenever he comes to speak of marriage and celibacy, he showers on the Pope, the supreme champion of the Evangelical Counsels and of the priestly ideal of life; on the other hand, it was also to some extent due to his deeply rooted and instinctive aversion for everything whereby zealous Christians do violence to nature out of love for God, from the motive of penance and from a desire to obtain merit.

The Natural Impulse and the Honour of Marriage.

Ecclesiastical writers before Luther’s day speak frequently and plainly enough of the impulse of nature, but, as a rule, only in order to recommend its control, to point out the means of combating excesses, and to insist on the Sacrament which sanctifies conjugal intercourse and brings down the blessings we require if the earthly and eternal purpose of marriage is to be fulfilled.

Luther, however, if we may trust one of his most zealous defenders, rendered a great service with regard to sexual intercourse in that “he shook off the pseudo-ascetic spirit of the past.” He demonstrated, so we are told, particularly in what he wrote to Spalatin about the “actus matrimonialis”[475]—words which some have regarded as offensive—“that even that act, though represented by his opponents as obscene, to the faithful Christian who ‘receives it with thanksgiving’ (1 Tim. iv. 4), contained nothing to raise a blush or to forbid its mention.” According to the “Roman view” it is perfectly true that “the ‘actus matrimonialis’ is sinless only when performed with the object of begetting children, or in order to fulfil the conjugal due.”[476] This, he exclaims, “was forsooth to be the sole motive of conjugal intercourse! And, coupled with this motive, the act even becomes meritorious! Is there any need of confuting so repulsive a notion?... Luther’s view is very different. The natural sexual passion was, according to him, the will and the work of God.” “The effect of the Roman exaltation of celibacy was to make people believe, that the motive [of conjugal intercourse] implanted by God, viz. sexual attraction, must not be yielded to.” This attraction Luther declared to be the one motive on account of which we should “thankfully avail ourselves” of matrimony. “This Luther conveys most clearly in his letter to Spalatin, his intimate friend, shortly after both had wedded.... We know no higher conception of conjugal intercourse.”

This description does not do justice to the mediæval Catholic teaching on matrimony, its duties and privileges. This teaching never demanded the suppression of sensual attraction or love. It fully recognised that this had been implanted in human nature by God’s wise and beneficent hand as a stimulus to preserve and multiply the human race, according to His command: “Be fruitful and multiply.” But the Church urged all to see that this impulse was kept pure and worthy by attention to its higher purpose, viz. to the object appointed from above. Instead of becoming its slave the Christian was to ennoble it by allowing the motives of faith to play their part in conjugal intercourse. The Church’s teaching would indeed have been “repulsive” had it demanded the general repression of the sexual instinct and not merely the taming of that unruliness which is the result of original sin, and is really unworthy of man. Had she imposed the obligation to wage an impossible struggle against it as a thing essentially sinful, then her teaching might indeed have been described as “repulsive.”

Still it is sufficiently tragic, that, in spite of the gratification of the sensual impulse of nature playing the principal part in his new and supposedly more exalted view of conjugal intercourse, Luther should, on account of the concupiscence involved, characterise the “actus matrimonialis” as a mortal sin. In “De votis monasticis,” his work written at the Wartburg, he says: “According to Ps. 1. 7, it is a sin differing in nothing from adultery and fornication so far as the sensual passion and hateful lust are concerned; God, however, does not impute it to the married, though simply because of His compassion, since it is impossible for us to avoid it, although our duty would really be to do without it.”[477] We are already familiar with his curious and impossible theory of imputation, according to which God is able to close His eyes to a sin, which nevertheless is really there.

That there is actual sin in the act Luther also insists elsewhere, at the same time pleading, however, that the sin is not imputed by God, who, as it were, deliberately winks at it: “In spite of all the good I say of married life, I will not grant so much to nature as to admit that there is no sin in it; what I say is that we have here flesh and blood, depraved in Adam, conceived and born in sin (Ps. 1. 7), and that no conjugal due is ever rendered without sin.”[478]—The blessing which God bestowed on marriage, he says elsewhere, fallen human nature was “not able to accomplish without sin”; “without sin no married persons could do their duty.”[479]

Hence the following inference would seem justified: Matrimony is really a state of sin. Such was the opinion, not of the Church before Luther’s day, but of her assailant, whose opponents soon pointed out to him how unfounded was his supposition.[480] The ancient Church, by the voice of her theologians, declared the “actus matrimonialis,” when performed in the right way and to a right end, to be no sin; they admitted the inevitable satisfaction of concupiscence, but allowed it so long as its gratification was not all that was sought. According to Luther—whom the author above referred to has quite rightly understood—it is different: Sin is undoubtedly committed, but we may, nay, are bound, to commit it.

With the above, all Luther’s statements on the inevitable strength of the impulse of nature agree. Though the union of husband and wife is a rule of the natural law applying to the majority rather than to the individual, Luther practically makes it binding upon all. In this connection he seems to be unable to view the moral relation of the sexes in any other light than as existing for the gratification of mutual lust, since without marriage they must inevitably fall into every sort of carnal sin. “It is a necessary and natural thing, that every man should have a wife,” he says in the lengthy passage already quoted, where he concludes, “it is more necessary than eating and drinking, sleeping and waking, or passing the natural motions of the body.”[481] Elsewhere, in a characteristic comparison, he says: “Were a man compelled to close his bowels and bladder—surely an utter impossibility—what would become of him?”[482] According to him, “man must be fruitful, and multiply, and breed,” “like all other animals, since God has created him thereto, so that, of necessity, a man must seek a wife, and a woman a husband, unless God works a miracle.”[483]

Many were they who, during the controversies which accompanied the schism, listened to such teaching and believed it and were ready to forgo the miracle in order to follow the impulse of nature; were ready to indulge their weakness did their state of life prohibit marriage, or to dissolve the marriage already contracted when it did not turn out to their taste, or when they fancied they could advance one of the numerous reasons proclaimed by Luther for its annulment. The evil effects of such morality in the 16th century (see below, p. 164 ff. and xxiv. 1 and 2), witnessed to on all sides by Lutherans as well as Catholics, prove conclusively that the originator of the new matrimonial theories was the last man qualified to reproach the ancient Church with a want of appreciation for marriage or for woman.

Nor must we look merely at the results. The man’s very character, his mode of thought and his speech, suffice to banish him from the society of the olden, earnest moralists. Albeit unwillingly, we must add here some further statements to those already adduced.[484]

“If a man feels his manhood,” Luther says, “let him take a wife and not tempt God. ‘Puella propterea habet pudenda,’ to provide him a remedy that he may escape pollution and adultery.”[485]

“The sting of the flesh may easily be helped, so long as girls and women are to be found.”[486]

Our readers will not have forgotten the reason he gives why women have so little intellect;[487] or the reproof addressed to him by Staupitz.[488]

Luther urges early marriage in the words of an old proverb: “To rise early and to marry young will cause regret to no one.” “It will fare with you,” he says to the same addressee, “as with the nuns to whom they gave carved Jesuses. They cast about for others, who at least were living and pleased them better, and sought how best to escape from their convent.”[489]—“What greater service can one do a girl than to get her a baby? This rids her of many fancies.”[490] Here, and elsewhere too, he is anxious that people should marry, even though there should not be enough to live upon; God would not allow the couple to starve if they did their duty.[491]—“A young fellow should be simply given a wife, otherwise he has no peace. Then the troubles of matrimony will soon tame him.”[492]

On another occasion (1540) Luther expresses himself with greater caution about too early matches: “It is not good for young people to marry too soon. They are ruined in their prime, exhaust their strength and neglect their studies.” “But the young men are consumed with passion,” one of those present objected, “and the theologians work upon their conscience and tell them that ‘To marry young will cause regret to no one.’” Luther’s reply was: “The young men are unwilling to resist any temptations.... They should console themselves with the hope of future marriage. We used to be forbidden to marry in almost all the Faculties, hence the youths indulged in all kinds of excesses, knowing that, later on, they would no longer be able to do so. Thus they sunk into every kind of disorder. But now everybody is allowed to marry, even the theologian and the bishop. Hence, in their own interests, they ought to learn to wait.”[493]

At other times he was inclined to promote hasty marriages from motives of policy, and, without a thought of the dignity of the conjugal union and the respect due to woman, to use it as a means to increase the number of his followers.

This happened in the case of many of his converts from the ranks of the clergy and religious.[494]

In the case of the Bishop of Samland, George von Polenz, and his adviser, Johann Briesmann, the ex-Franciscan, who both were desirous of marrying, Luther judged that delay would be disastrous. He urged them to make haste and be publicly wedded, both having already contracted a so-called marriage in conscience; in their case there was “danger in delay,” and, as the saying goes, “If you wait a night, you wait a year”; even Paul had said we must not receive the grace of God in vain (2 Cor. vi. 1), and the bride in the Canticle complained that the bridegroom “was gone,” because she had been tardy in opening the door (v. 6). A German proverb said, “Wenn das Ferkel beut soll man den Sack herhalten.” Esau’s lost birthright, and the solemn words of Christ concerning separation from Him (John xii. 35 f.) were also made to serve his purpose. “Take it when, where and how you can, or you won’t get another chance.” A man could not be sure of his own mind on account of the snares of the devil; a marriage not yet publicly ratified remained somewhat uncertain.[495]

Before these exhortations reached them both the parties in question had, however, already taken the public step.

It was in those very days that Luther celebrated his own wedding and sent his pressing invitation to marry to the Cardinal and Elector of Mayence, telling him that, short of a miracle, or without some peculiar grace, it was a “terrible thing” for a man “to be found without a wife at the hour of death.”[496] It was then, too, that he sent to Albert of Prussia, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, who was contemplating marriage, his congratulations on the secularisation of the lands of the Order and the founding of the Duchy, which he had even previously strongly urged him to do. In this letter he tells the Grand Master that it was “God Almighty,” “Who had graciously and mercifully helped him to such a position [that of a secular Prince].”[497] The Grand Master’s marriage and consequent breach of his vow of chastity followed in 1526. He invited Luther to the wedding and wrote to him, that God had given him “the grace to enter the Order [of marriage] instituted by Himself” after he had “laid aside the cross [the sign of the Order] and entered the secular estate.”

It cannot be denied, that in all these marriages which Luther promoted, or at least favoured, what he had his eye on was the advantage of the new Church system. Of any raising of the moral position of women, of any deepening of the significance of marriage, there is here no trace; these marriages served quite another purpose. The circumstances attending them were, moreover, frequently far from dignified. “The Bishop of Samland,” so Philip von Creutz, a Knight of the Teutonic Order, relates, “gave up his bishopric to the Duke [Albert] in the presence of the whole assembly.... He caused his mitre to be broken up and, out of its precious stones and jewels, he had ornaments made for his wife.”[498]

Practical Consequences of the New View of Woman: Matrimonial Impediments, Divorce.

The readiness shown by Luther to annul valid marriages, and the wayward manner in which he disposed of the impediments fixed by the Church, were not calculated to enhance respect either for marriage or for woman.

As regards the impediments to marriage we shall here merely refer to the practical and not uncommon case where a person wished to marry a niece. Whereas Canon Law, at one with Roman Law, regarded this relationship as constituting an impediment, which might, however, be dispensed from by the Pope, Luther at first saw fit to declare it no impediment at all; he even issued memoranda to this effect, one of which was printed in 1526 and circulated widely.[499] “If the Pope was able to dispense,” he said later on concerning this, “why can’t I too?”[500] In favour of the lawfulness of such marriages he appealed to the example of Abraham, and in reply to objections declared: “If they blame the work and example of the holy Patriarch Abraham, then let them be scandalised.”[501] At a later date, nevertheless, he changed his mind and held such marriages to be unlawful. His previous statements he explained by saying that once he had indeed given a different decision, not in order to lead others into excesses but in order “to assist consciences at the hour of death against the Pope”; he had merely given advice in Confession to troubled consciences, and had not laid down any law; to make laws was not within his province, either in the State or in the Church. His former memoranda were not to be alleged now; a certain man of the name of Borner, who, on the strength of them, had married his niece, had acted very ill and done injustice to his (Luther’s) decision. The Pope alone, so Luther says, was to blame for his previous advice—because many, owing to his laws, were reduced to despair and had come to Luther for help. “It is true that in Confession and in order to pacify consciences I have advised differently, but I made a mistake in allowing such counsels to be made public. Now, however, it is done. This is a matter for Confession only.”[502]

When speaking in this way, in 1544, he probably had in mind his so-called advice in Confession to Philip of Hesse. He was still acting on the principle, that advice given in Confession might afterwards be publicly repudiated as quite wrong; he failed somehow to see that the case of marriage of uncle and niece was of its very nature something public.

The multitude of divorces caused him great anxiety. Even the preachers of the new faith were setting a bad example by putting away their spouses and contracting fresh marriages. Melander, for instance, who blessed Philip’s second marriage, after deserting “two wives in succession without even seeking legal aid, married a third.”[503] At Gotha, as Luther himself relates, a woman deserted her husband and her three children, and sent him a message to tell him he might take another wife. When, however, he had done so the woman again asserted her claims. “Our lawyers,” Luther complains, “at once took her part, but the Elector decided she should quit the country. My own decision would have been to have her done to death by drowning.”[504]

In a still existing letter of 1525, Luther permitted Michael Kramer, preacher at Domitsch, near Torgau, to contract a third marriage, two previous ones having turned out unfortunate. Kramer, as a Catholic priest, had first married a servant maid and, for this, had been sent to jail by Duke George his sovereign. When the maid proved unfaithful and married another, Luther, to whom Kramer had attached himself, declared her to be really “deceased” and told the preacher he might use his “Christian freedom.” Kramer thereupon married a girl from Domitsch, where he had been in the meantime appointed Lutheran pastor. This new wife likewise ran away from him three weeks later. He now addressed himself to the local board of magistrates, who, conjointly with him, wrote to Luther, pointing out how the poor man “could not do without a wife.” Luther thereupon sent a memorandum, addressed to the “magistrates and the preacher of Domitsch,” in which he allowed a divorce from the second wife and gave permission for a third marriage, which, apparently, was more of a success. During the Visitations in 1528 this preacher, who had since been transferred to Lucka, got into trouble on account of his three marriages, but saved his skin by appealing to Luther’s letter.[505]

The reader already knows that, according to Luther, a woman who has no children by her husband, may, with the latter’s consent, quietly dissolve the marriage and cohabit with another, for instance, with her brother-in-law; this, however, was to be secret, because the children were to be regarded as her first husband’s. Should he refuse his consent, says Luther, “rather than suffer her to burn or have recourse to adultery, I would advise her to marry another and flee to some place where she is unknown. What other advice can be given to one who is in constant danger from carnal lusts?”[506] Duke George of Saxony, referring to a similar passage in Luther’s work “On Conjugal Life” (1522),[507] said in a letter to Luther which was immediately printed: “When was it ever heard of that wives should be taken from their husbands and given to other men, as we now find it stated in your Evangel? Has adultery ever been more common than since you wrote: If a woman has no children by her husband, then let her go to another and bear children whom her husband must provide for as though he were the father? This is the fruit of the precious Evangel which you dragged forth out of the gutter. You were quite right when you said you found it in the gutter; what we want to know is, why you didn’t leave it there.”[508]

What Luther had said concerning the refusal to render the conjugal due: “If the wife refuse, then let the maid come,” attracted more attention than he probably anticipated, both among his own adherents and among his foes. It is true, as already pointed out, that the context does not justify illicit relations outside marriage (see vol. iii., p. 252 f.), but the words as they stand, to say nothing of the unlikelihood of any real marriage with the maid, and, finally, the significance which may have clung to a coarse saying of the populace possibly alluded to by Luther, all favoured those who chose to make the tempting phrase a pretext for such extra-matrimonial relations.

When the sermon on marriage in which the passage occurs was published, Duke George’s representative at the Diet of Nuremberg in 1522 sent his master at Dresden a copy of the booklet, “which the devilish monk,” so he writes, “has unblushingly published, though it has cost him the loss of many followers about here; it would not go well with us poor husbands, should our naughty wives read it. I shall certainly not give my wife one.”[509] Duke George replied with a grim jest which doubtless went the rounds at Nuremberg among those whom the booklet had offended: “As to what you write,” George says, “viz. that you won’t let your wife read the little book on marriage, me thinks you are acting unwisely; in our opinion it contains something which might serve even a jealous husband like you very well; for it says, that if your wife refuses to do your will you have only to turn to the maid. Hence keep a look out for pretty maids. These and similar utterances you may very well hold over your wife.”[510]

In 1542 Wicel, in his Postils, speaking of the preachers, says: “The words of St. Paul, ‘Art thou loosed from a wife, seek not a wife,’ 1 Cor. vii. 27, have a very unevangelical sound on the lips of these Evangelists. How then must it be? Quick, take a wife or a husband; whether you be young or old, make haste; should one die, don’t delay to take another. Celebrate the wedding, if it turns out ill, then let the maid come! Divorce this one and take in marriage that one, whether the first be living or dead! For chambering and wantonness shall not be neglected,”—“Since the coming of Christ,” says the same writer elsewhere, “there have never been so many divorces as under Luther’s rule.”[511]

Of the unlooked-for effects produced among Luther’s preachers by the above saying, Sebastian Flasch, an ex-Lutheran preacher and native of Mansfeld, complained in 1576: “Although the preachers are married, yet they are so ill-content with their better halves, that, appealing to Luther’s advice, they frequently, in order to gratify their insatiable concupiscence, seduce their maids, and, what is even more shameful, do not blush to misconduct themselves with other men’s wives or to exchange wives among themselves.” He appeals to his long experience of Lutheranism and relates that such a “commutatio uxorum” had been proposed to him by a preacher of high standing.[512]—Much earlier than this, in 1532, Johann Mensing, the Dominican, wrote sadly, that the state of matrimony was dreadfully disgraced by the new preachers; “for they give a man two wives, a woman two husbands, allow the man to use the maid should the wife not prove compliant, and the wife to take another husband should her own prove impotent.” “When they feel disposed or moved to what is sin and shameful, they say the Holy Spirit urges them. Is not that a fine tale that all the world is telling about Melchior Myritsch of Magdeburg, of Jacob Probst of Bremen and of others in the Saxon land. What certain mothers have discovered concerning their daughters and maids, who listened to such preaching, it is useless to relate.”[513]—The name of the ex-Augustinian, Melchior Myritsch, or Meirisch, recalls the coarseness of the advice given by Luther, on Feb. 10, 1525, to the latter’s new spouse. (See vol. ii., p. 144.)

Respect for the Female Sex in Luther’s Conversations.

Had Luther, as the legend he set on foot would make us believe, really raised the dignity of woman and the married state to a higher level, we might naturally expect, that, when he has to speak of matters sexual or otherwise repugnant to modesty, he would at least be reticent and dignified in his language. We should expect to find him surrounded at Wittenberg by a certain nobility of thought, a higher, purer atmosphere, a nobler general tone, in some degree of harmony with his extraordinary claims. Instead we are confronted with something very different. Luther’s whole mode of speech, his conversations and ethical trend, are characterised by traits which even the most indulgent of later writers found it difficult to excuse, and which, particularly his want of delicacy towards women, must necessarily prove offensive to all.[514]

Luther was possibly not aware that the word “nun” comes from the Low Latin “nonna,” i.e. woman, and was originally the name given to those who dwelt in the numerous convents of Upper Egypt; he knew, however, well enough that the word “monk” was but a variant of “monachus.” He jestingly gives to both the former and the latter an odious derivation. “The word nun,” he says, “comes from the German, and cloistered women are thus called, because that is the term for unsexed sows; in the same way the word monk is derived from the horses [viz. the gelded horses]. But the operation was not altogether successful, for they are obliged to wear breeches just like other people.”[515] It may be that Catherine, the ex-nun, was present when this was said; at any rate she is frequently mentioned in the Table-Talk as assisting.[516]

He could not let slip the opportunity of having a dig at the ladies who were sometimes present at his post-prandial entertainments. In 1542 conversation turned on Solomon’s many wives and concubines. Luther pointed out,[517] that the figures given in the Bible must be taken as referring to all the women dwelling in the palace, even to such as had no personal intercourse with Solomon. “One might as well say,” he continues, “Dr. Martin has three wives; one is Katey, another Magdalene, the third the pastoress; also a concubine, viz. the virgin Els.[518] This made him laugh [writes the narrator, Caspar Heydenreich]; and besides these he has many girls. In the same way Solomon had three hundred queens; if he took only one every night, the year would be over, and he would not have had a day’s rest. That cannot be, for he had also to govern.”[519]

He advised that those who were troubled with doubts concerning their salvation should speak of improper subjects (“loquaris de venereis”), that was an infallible remedy.[520] In one such case he invited a pupil to jest freely with his own wife, Catherine. “Talk about other things,” Luther urges him, “which entirely distract your thoughts.”[521]

As we know, Luther himself made liberal use of such talk to cheer up himself and others. Thus, in the presence of his guests, in 1537, he joked about Ferdinand, the German King, his extreme thinness and his very stout wife who was suspected of misconduct: “Though he is of such an insignificant bodily frame,” he says, “others will be found to assist him in the nuptial bed. But it is a nuisance to have the world filled with alien heirs.”[522]—This leads him to speak of adulteresses in other districts.[523]

A coarser tale is the one he related about the same time. A minister came to him complaining of giddiness and asking for a remedy. His answer was: “Lass das Loch daheime,” which, so the narrators explain, meant, “that he should not go to such excess in chambering.”[524]—A similar piece of advice is given by Luther in the doggerel verses which occur in his Table-Talk: “Keep your neck warm and cosy,—Do not overload your belly.—Don’t be too sweet on Gertie;—Then your locks will whiten slowly.”[525]—On one occasion he showed his friends a turquoise (“turchesia”), which had been given him, and said, following the superstition of the day, that when immersed in water it would make movements “sicut isti qui eveniunt juveni cum a virgine in chorea circumfertur,” but, that, in doing so, it broke.[526] On account of the many children he had caused to be begotten from priests and religious, he, as we already know, compared himself to Abraham, the father of a great race: He, like Abraham, was the grandfather of all the descendants of the monks, priests and nuns and the father of a mighty people.[527]

We may not pass over here Luther’s frequent use of filthy expressions, which, though they agree well with his natural coarseness, harmonise but ill with the high ideals we should expect in one whose vocation it was to rescue marriage and feminine dignity from the slough of the Papacy. He is fond of using such words in his abuse of the Popish teaching on marriage: At one time, he writes, the Papists make out marriage to be a Sacrament, “at another to be impure, i.e. a sort of merdiferous Sacrament.”[528] The Pope, who waywardly teaches this and other doctrines, “has overthrown the Word of God”; “if the Pope’s reputation had not been destroyed by the Word of God, the devil himself would have ejected him” (‘a posteriori’).[529] Elsewhere he voices his conviction as to the most fitting epithet to apply to the Pope’s “human ordinances.” One thing in man, he explains, viz. “the ‘anus,’ cannot be bound; it is determined to be master and to have the upper hand. Hence this is the only thing in man’s body or soul upon which the Pope has not laid his commands.”[530]

“The greatest blessing of marriage,” he tells his friends, “lies in the children; this D.G. [Duke George] was not fated to see in his sons, ‘quos spectatissima principissa cacatos in lucem ederat.’”[531]

The Pope and his people, he says in a sermon, had “condemned and rejected matrimony as a dirty, stinking state.” “Had the creation of human beings been in the Pope’s power he would never have created woman, or allowed any such to exist in the world.”[532] “The Pope, the devil and his Church,” he says in 1539, “are hostile to the married state.... Matrimony [in their opinion] is mere fornication.”[533]

The Pope, he says, had forbidden the married state; he and his followers, “the monks and Papists,” “burn with evil lust and love of fornication, though they refuse to take upon themselves the trouble and labour of matrimony.”[534] “With the help of the Papacy Satan has horribly soiled matrimony, God’s own ordinance”; the fact was, the clergy had been too much afraid of woman; “and so it goes on: If a man fears fornication he falls into secret sin, as seems to have been the case with St. Jerome.”[535]

He saw sexual excesses increasing to an alarming extent among the youth of his own party. At table a friend of the “young fellows” sought to excuse their “wild, immoral life and fornication” on the ground of their youth; Luther sighed, at the state of things revealed, and said: “Alas, that is how they learn contempt for the female sex.” Contempt will simply lead to abuse; the true remedy for immorality was prayerfully to hold conjugal love in honour.[536]

Luther, however, preferred to dwell upon the deep-seated vice of an anti-matrimonial Papacy rather than on the results of his teaching upon the young.

“Every false religion,” he once exclaimed in 1542 in his Table-Talk,[537] “has been defiled by sensuality! Just look at the |!”—[He must here have used, says Kroker, “a term for phallus, or something similar,” which Caspar Heydenreich the reporter has suppressed.][538] “What else were the pilgrimages,” Luther goes on, “but opportunities for coming together? What does the Pope do but wallow unceasingly in his lusts?... The heathen held marriage in far higher honour than do the Pope and the Turk. The Pope hates marriage, and the Turk despises it. But it is the devil’s nature to hate God’s Word. What God loves, e.g. the Church, marriage, civic order, that he hates. He desires fornication and impurity; for if he has these, he knows well that people will no longer trouble themselves about God.”

The New Matrimonial Conditions and the Slandered Opponents.

It is a fact witnessed to by contemporaries, particularly by Catholics, that Luther’s unrestraint when writing on sexual subjects, his open allusions to organs and functions, not usually referred to, and, especially, the stress he laid on the irresistibility of the natural impulse, were not without notable effect on the minds of the people, already excited as they were.

In 1522, after having explained his new views on divorce, he puts himself the question, whether this “would not make it easy for wicked men and women to desert each other, and betake themselves to foreign parts”? His reply is: “How can I help it? It is the fault of the authorities. Why do they not strangle adulterers?”[539]

Certain preachers of Lutheranism made matters worse by the fanaticism with which they preached the freedom of the Evangel. So compromising was their support, that other of Luther’s followers found fault with it, for instance, the preacher Urbanus Rhegius[540] It was, however, impossible for these more cautious preachers to prevent Luther’s principles being carried to their consequences, in spite of all the care they took to emphasise his reserves and his stricter admonitions.

The Protestant Rector, J. Rivius, complained in 1547: “If you are an adulterer or lewdster, preachers say ... only believe and you will be saved. There is no need for you to fear the law, for Christ has fulfilled it and made satisfaction for all men.” “Such words seduce people into a godless life.”[541]

E. Sarcerius, the Superintendent of the county of Mansfeld, also bewailed, in a writing of 1555, the growing desecration of the married state: Men took more than one wife; this they did by “fleeing to foreign parts and seeking other wives. Some women do the same. Thus there is no end to the desertions on the part of both husbands and wives.” “In many places horrible adultery and fornication prevail, and these vices have become so common, that people no longer regard them as sinful.” “Thus there is everywhere confusion and scandal both in match-making and in celebrating the marriages, so that holy matrimony is completely dishonoured and trodden under foot.” “Of adultery, lewdness and incest there is no end.”[542]—These complaints were called forth by the state of things in the very county where Luther was born and died.

The convert George Wicel, who resided for a considerable time at Mansfeld, had an opportunity of observing the effects of Luther’s matrimonial teaching and of his preaching generally on a population almost entirely Protestant. He writes, in 1536: “It is enough to break a Christian’s heart to see so many false prophets and heretics flourishing in Germany, whose comforting and frivolous teaching fills the land not merely with adulterers but with regular heathen.”[543] In an earlier work he had said: “Oh, you people, what a fine manner of life according to the Gospel have you introduced by your preaching on Grace! Yes, they cry, you would make of Christ a Moses and a taskmaster; they, however, make of Him a procurer and an Epicurean by their sensual life and knavish example.”[544]

Luther, it is true, had an excuse ready. He pleaded that the freedom of the Gospel was not yet rightly understood. “The masses,” he wrote to Margrave George of Brandenburg, on Sep. 14, 1531, “have now fallen under the freedom of the flesh, and there we must leave them for a while until they have satisfied their lust. Things will be different when the Visitation is in working order [the first Visitation in the Margrave’s lands had taken place as early as 1528]. It is quick work pulling down an old house, but building a new one takes longer.... Jerusalem, too, was built very slowly and with difficulty.... Under the Pope we could not endure the constraint, and the lack of the Word; now we cannot endure the freedom and the superabundant treasure of the Gospel.”[545]

Amidst all these disorders Luther found great consolation in contemplating the anti-Christian character of the Popish Church and Daniel’s supposed prophecy of Antichrist’s enmity for woman.[546] His preachers only too eagerly followed in his footsteps.

George Wicel speaks of the preachers, who, while themselves leading loose lives, used Daniel’s prophecy against the Catholic view of marriage.[547] “They mock at those who wish to remain single or who content themselves with one wife, and quote the words of Daniel: ‘He shall not follow the lust of women nor regard any gods,’ so that anyone belonging to this sect who is not addicted to the pursuit of women, is hardly safe from being taken for Antichrist. The words of St. Paul in Cor. vii., of Our Lord in Mat. xix., concerning the third sex of the eunuchs, and of St. John in Apoc. xiv., on those who have not defiled themselves with women, and, again, of St. Paul when speaking of the ‘vidua digama’ in 1 Tim. v., don’t count a farthing in this Jovinian school[548].... It is an Epicurean school and an Epicurean life and nothing else.” With biting satire, in part the result of the controversy thrust upon him, in part the outcome of his temper, he had declared shortly before, that Lutheranism was all “love of women,” was “full of senseless lust for women”; he uses “gynecophiles” as an adjective to qualify it, and speaks of its “gynecomania”; by this means men were to become better Christians, and be more secure of salvation than all the Saints of God ever were in the ancient apostolic Church. “See there what Satan is seeking by means of this exalted respect for the love of women, and by his glib, feminist preachers in Saxony. Hence his and his followers’ concern for women, to whom they cling so closely that they can hardly get into their pulpits without them, and, rather than live a celibate life, the Evangelist would prefer to be the husband, not of one wife, but of three or four.”[549]

An intimate friend of Luther’s, Johann Brenz, wrote, in 1532, in a book to which Luther supplied the Preface: “The youngsters are barely out of the cradle before they want wives, and girls, not yet marriageable, already dream of husbands.”[550]—After the immoral atmosphere has brought about their fall, writes Fr. Staphylus, “they grow so impudent as to assert that a chaste and continent life is impossible and the gratification of the sexual appetite as essential as eating and drinking.”[551]—The same author, who returned to the Catholic Church, also wrote, in 1562: “So long as matrimony was looked upon as a Sacrament, modesty and an honourable married life was loved and prized, but since the people have read in Luther’s books that matrimony is a human invention ... his advice has been put in practice in such a way, that marriage is observed more chastely and honourably in Turkey than amongst our German Evangelicals.”[552]