Chapter XXVIII · (continued 3)

From Protestant Nuremberg it also was that Willibald Pirkheimer the patrician, as early as 1528, after his own return to the Church, wrote to a friend at Vienna, the architect Tschertte, “I confess that in the beginning I was a good Lutheran, just like our departed Albert [Dürer]. For we hoped that the Roman knavery and the roguery of the monks and priests would be amended. But now we see that matters have become so much worse, that, in comparison with the Evangelical scoundrels, those other scamps are quite pious.” The Evangelicals with their “shameful and criminal behaviour” wished nevertheless “not to be judged by their works,” and pointed to their faith. But “when a man acts wickedly and criminally he shows thereby that he is no honest man, however much he may boast of his faith; for without works faith is dead, just as works are dead without faith.... The works show plainly that there is neither faith nor truth there, no fear of God, or love of our neighbour, but a discarding of all honesty and clean living, art and learning.... Almsgiving has ceased, for these knaves have so abused it that no one will give any longer.”[1680]

A few years before this, Othmar Luscinius, an Alsacian theologian, then one of the most weighty scholars of Germany, who, save for having taken a passing fancy for Luther, remained true to the Church, described the “rude Christians,” “whom really we ought to pity, who of the articles necessary for Justification take those only that please them and are sweet, viz. faith and the Evangel, arguing: ‘I have only to believe and I shall be saved’; as for the other, which is bitter and far from easy, viz. the putting to death of the old Adam, that they take good care to leave alone.”[1681]

The above is sufficient to show that there was a consensus of opinion in tracing back the moral decadence to the Lutheran doctrine of works. As against this there is a certain strangeness in the explanation variously given by Protestants of this real retrogression: The complaints of Luther and his preachers, so they aver, only prove that they were dissatisfied, as it was their right and duty to be, with what had been achieved in the moral order.—At any rate, the distressing results of the doctrine of faith alone proved strikingly how ineffectual had been all Luther’s exhortations to good works.

Luther’s Utterances in Favour of Good Works.

Many and earnest are Luther’s exhortations to prove our faith by works of love towards God and our neighbour; to sinners he frequently speaks of the path of penance which they must tread; conversion he wishes to be accomplished with lively faith and the state of grace preserved by practical piety. It was assuredly not the lack of such counsels which occasioned the decline described above; this was rather due to the system itself, combined with the evil effects of the general overthrow of the old ecclesiastical law and practice which safeguarded morals, and with the contempt aroused for the sacraments, for public worship and the spiritual authorities. History must, however, allow Luther’s exhortations on behalf of good works and the keeping of the commandments to speak for themselves.

We may begin with his thesis: “We are bound to bring our will into entire conformity with the Divine Will.”[1682] In accordance with this, in his “Von der Freyheyt eynes Christen Menschen,” he does not fail to speak agreeably with the teaching of the olden Church of the assistance God gives for the zealous keeping of the commandments. “If you desire to keep all the commandments, to be rid of your evil lusts and of sin as the commandments enjoin and demand, then believe in Christ, for in Him I make bold to promise you all grace and righteousness, peace and freedom. If you believe, then you have it; if you do not believe, you have it not. For what is impossible to you with all the works of the Law, of which there must be many though all to no profit, will be short and easy to you by faith.... The promises of God give both the command and the fulfilment.”[1683] What he means to say is, that, by faith, we receive grace in order to wage a successful “conflict with sin.” Grace is, however, equivalent to faith. “Without grace,” he had already taught before, “man cannot keep God’s commandments.” “The old man ... is led by concupiscence.” “But to faith all things are possible through Christ.”[1684]

Elsewhere he clearly teaches that faith alone is not nearly enough; to rely exclusively on this must indeed be termed “folly”; with the assistance of grace man must also keep the Law.[1685]

In spite of all he has to say against Moses and his harsh and terrifying “Law”—the Ten Commandments inclusive—when he is busy exalting the Evangel, he nevertheless has occasionally high praise for the Decalogue on account of its agreement with the law of nature. His exposition of it contains much that is worth taking to heart.[1686] Faith, he points out, shows us whence the strength for keeping the Ten Commandments is to be drawn.[1687]

The Christian, according to a lengthy and beautiful passage in the Church Postils (in a sermon for the Feast of the Conception), must “struggle and fight” against his lusts and must seek to resist the darts of the wicked one.[1688] “If we have been baptised and believe, we have received grace, and this contends with the evil inclinations within us and expels and destroys original sin; then good and honest desires for humility, chastity, longanimity and all the virtues awaken in us, and at once good works begin to be performed with a cheerful heart. All this is done by the grace which we receive in baptism by faith in Christ; it is impossible for such grace to remain idle, but it must needs bring forth good works.”

Emphatic admonitions to preserve chastity and a reminder of the religious means to be employed are also frequent with him, for instance, in his “Von guten Wercken,” written in 1520 at Spalatin’s instigation, to repel the charge that his teaching was antagonistic to any striving after virtue, to morality or Christian works. He dedicated the writing to Duke Johann, the brother of the Saxon Elector. Chastity, he there says, is indeed a hard matter, but it must be acquired. “Even were no other work commanded besides chastity we should all of us have enough to do, so dangerous and furious is the [contrary] vice.... To get the better of all this requires labour and trouble, and in fact all the commandments of God teach us how important is the rightful performance of good works, nay that it is impossible of our own strength even to plan a good work, let alone commence and accomplish it.... This work of chastity, if it is to be preserved, impels us to many other good works, to fasting and temperance, in order to resist gluttony and drunkenness, to watching and early rising, in spite of our laziness and love for slumber, to strive and to labour in overcoming idleness. For gluttony and drinking, too much sleep, idleness and loitering are the weapons of unchastity.... These exercises, however, must not be carried further than is necessary to subdue unchastity, not to the extent of damaging our frame. The strongest weapons of all are prayer and the Word of God.... Thus you see that each one finds enough to do in himself and good works in plenty to perform. Yet now no one makes use of prayer, fasting, watching and labour for this purpose, but looks upon these works as an end in themselves, though the performance of these works of the Law ought to be regulated daily so as to be ever more and more purified [the sentence contains Luther’s usual perversion of Catholic doctrine and practice]. Other things also have been mentioned as to be avoided, such as soft beds and clothing, unnecessary adornments, the society, sight and conversation of men or women, and much else conducive to chastity. In all this no one can lay down a fixed rule and measure. Each one must decide for himself what things and how many are helpful to chastity, and for how long.” Here he even pays a tribute to the monasteries founded in bygone ages to teach the “young people discipline and cleanliness.” Finally he insists that “a good, strong faith” “helps greatly in this work,” since “faith ever liveth and doth all our works.”[1689]

The ravings of the fanatics repeatedly furnished him with an occasion to emphasise good works more strongly and even to speak of a faith working by love.

His dislike for their lawless behaviour and their praise of the Spirit, to some extent directed against ordinary works, called him into the arena. To call back the disturbers to a more moral life and to the considerations of charity, he appealed to them to “exercise themselves in the faith that worketh by charity” (Gal. v. 6). Even the Epistle of James now appeared to him good enough to quote, particularly the verse (i. 22): “Be ye doers of the the Word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves”; from this Epistle he also borrows the comparison of a dead faith, viz. of a faith not made living through charity, with the face as seen in a glass, which is merely the semblance of a countenance and not the reality.[1690]

It was the fanatics again who in 1530 drew from him some eloquent statements in favour of good works, because, so he said, they had misrepresented his doctrine that “Good works neither make a man pious nor blot out sin.” They said “they would give their good works for a groat,” and that all good works were not worth a peppercorn. Here he professes to see great danger in contempt for good works and the perversion of his teaching by the “devil’s lying tongue.” Good works, according to him, are rather to be esteemed very highly because they are God’s own. “If it is a good work, then God has wrought it in and by me”; “it was done for the honour and glory of God and for the profit and salvation of my neighbour.” He himself had been far from questioning this and had merely taught that works did not conduce to piety, i.e. “to justify the soul and to placate God”; this, on the contrary, was “entirely the work of the One true God and of His grace.”[1691]

Just as during his public career Luther looked upon such statements as all the more useful seeing they blunted the edge of the awkward inferences drawn from the new Evangel, and served to vindicate his action from the charge of loosening the bonds of morality, so, at the close of his days, he was obliged in a similar way to hark back to the defence of good works against Antinomianism, of which the principal spokesman was Johann Agricola. It is true that the Antinomians based their contempt for the Law, which they said was harmful, and for the excessive respect for commandments and good works which, according to them, still prevailed, on nothing less than Luther’s own teaching. In reality it was to his advantage that their exaggerations forced him to explain away much that he had said, or at least to exercise greater caution. The encounter with Agricola the Antinomian will be described later (vol. v., xxix., 3). In spite of his being thus compelled to take the Law and good works under his wing in this controversy, Luther never, then or later, put forward the true relation of the Law to the Gospel nor the real foundation of good works.[1692] He became involved in contradictions, and to the end of his days it became more and more apparent how forced had been the introduction into his theology of good works and the keeping of the Law.

Nicholas Amsdorf, Luther’s intimate friend and most docile pupil, published in 1559 a tract entitled “That the proposition ‘Good works are harmful to salvation’ is a good and Christian one preached both by St. Paul and by Luther.” Their “harmfulness” resided in their being regarded as meritorious for salvation. We may wonder what Luther would have thought of this writing had he been alive? In any case the Lutheran Formula of Concord of 1577 contains a mild protest against it: “The assertion that good works are necessary is not to be reprehended, seeing that it may be understood in a favourable sense”;[1693] it also appeals to what had been laid down in the Augsburg Confession; it could “not be gainsaid that, in both the Confession and the ‘Apologia,’ the words: ‘Good works are necessary,’ are frequently used.”[1694]

As for the attitude of the Augsburg Confession, it declares concerning works—a declaration for which Melanchthon’s cautious pen was solely responsible—“We also teach that such faith [in Christ, whereby man is justified] must produce good fruit and good works, and that we must perform all manner of good works which God has commanded, for God’s sake.”[1695]

No one was so much concerned as Melanchthon in insisting that the performance of good works should be represented as indispensable to the people, particularly from the pulpit. It vexed him, the more prudent of the two, to hear Luther again and again, and that often in hyperbolical and paradoxical form, laying such stress on faith alone. How far Melanchthon’s name may justifiably be quoted against what was undesirable in the olden Protestant teaching on works, should be clear from what has already been said concerning this theological henchman of Luther’s (cp. vol. iii., p. 347 ff.).

Luther’s admirers are wont to quote the following utterance of his when praising his attitude towards works: “Good, pious works never made a good, pious man, but a good, pious man performs good, pious works. Wicked works never made a wicked man, but wicked men perform wicked works.”[1696] That “wicked deeds never made a wicked man” he probably found some difficulty in really convincing many. If Luther meant that an unjust man or sinner, who is not cleansed by faith in Christ, can never act but wickedly, then it is the same error as we find in other passages and which is repeated in connection with the words just quoted: “Unless a man believes beforehand and is a Christian [’consecrated by faith’] all his works are of no account, but are vain, foolish, criminal and damnably sinful.” This is surely as much beside the mark as the above statement of Luther’s concerning the relation between a “pious man” and “pious works.” Of supernatural works that are meritorious for heaven what Luther adds is indeed correct: “Hence, in every instance the person must first be good and pious previous to all works, and the good works follow and proceed from a good and pious person.” We must, however, decline to accept Luther’s other inferences, viz. that the sinner is not in a position to perform natural good works of his own, and that the just man does not become more righteous through good works.

Hence Luther’s statement, however apparently ingenious, cannot remove the unfavourable impression produced by his doctrine of works. That it was highly valued by its author is plain from the number of times he repeats it under different forms. “Works do not make a Christian, but a Christian performs works,” so he exclaimed in a sermon in 1523, summing up in these specious words the instruction he had just given, viz. that the faithful must struggle to remove whatever of evil there is in them, and that they must “work good to their neighbour,” but not on any account try “to blot out sin by works, for this would be to shame and blaspheme God and Christ and to disgrace their own heritage,” viz. Justification by faith alone.[1697]

Works of Charity. Luther and the Ages of the Past.

For the purpose of recommending the Lutheran doctrine of works it is sometimes urged that Luther, while slighting other works of less account, assigned a place of honour to active works of charity, done for the sake of our neighbour, that he placed them on a firmer moral basis than they had hitherto occupied and promoted them so far as the unfavourable circumstances of his age allowed. A few words on the conception and particularly on the practice of charity as advocated by him may serve as a fit conclusion to the present section.

First, we may mention that Luther is disposed to exaggerate the importance of works of charity done to our neighbour.

It was an unjustifiable and paralysing restriction on the pious impulse towards works pleasing to God that Luther embodied in the rule he repeatedly lays down regarding works, viz. that they must be directed exclusively towards the benefit of others. “On this earth,” so he teaches in his Church postils, “man does not live for the sake of works, nor that they may profit him, for he has no need of them, but all works must be done for the sake of our neighbour.” “Thus must all works be done, that we see to it that they tend to the service of other people, impart to them the right faith and bring them to Christ’s Kingdom.” They bring them the “right faith” when they serve to “quiet their conscience.” Thus even here the Kingdom of God, which consists in the forgiveness of sins, must also play its part.

Catholic doctrine recognises a wider field for good works. It regards as such even the works which the faithful perform directly for their own soul without any reference to their neighbour, such as self-conquest in contending against one’s own passions, or those works which are concerned primarily with honouring God whether in public worship or in the private life of the Christian. Luther himself, at least incidentally, also knows how to speak of the value of such works, though thereby he contradicts his other statements like the above.

If, however, we neglect the principle, we have to admit, that Luther’s frequent exhortations to neighbourly charity and kindness contain some fine and truly Evangelical thoughts. With deep feeling he expresses his sorrow that his admonitions are not heeded to the extent he would have wished.

In his statements already quoted concerning the corruption of morals consequent on the change of religion, we have heard him several times lamenting the notorious falling off in private benevolence and the quite remarkable decrease of public works of Christian charity. Everywhere avarice reigns supreme, so we have heard Luther repeatedly exclaim, and a reprehensible indolence in the doing of what is good has spread far and wide; everything is now different from what it had been “in the time of the monks and parsons,” when people “founded and built” right and left, and when even the poorest was anxious to contribute.[1698]

His defenders now declare, that he “unlocked the true source of charity” by denying any meritorious character to works, thus sending to limbo the imperfect, mediæval motive of charity and substituting a better one in its place, viz. a “grateful love springing from faith.” Luther’s own words have been used to decry earlier ages, as though charity then had “merely had itself in view,” people in those days having been intent solely on laying up merit “for them and theirs.”

It is perfectly true that the Catholic Church gladly emphasises the reward charity brings to the giver.

If in the times previous to Luther’s day, both in the Middle Ages and before, the Church frequently extolled the temporal and everlasting reward of charity, and if this proved to the faithful an incentive, she could at least in so doing appeal to those passages in the Gospel itself which promise to the charitable a heavenly recompense. Yet the thought of this reward did not exclude other high and worthy motives. So little were such motives slighted in the mediæval practice of charity, that, side by side with the heavenly reward, the original deeds of foundations, gifts and pious legacies still extant allege all kinds of other reasons, for instance, compassion for the helpless and concern for their bodily and spiritual welfare, or the furtherance of the common good by the establishment of institutions of public utility. One formula frequently used, which, taken literally, seems actually to ignore all merit and reward, runs variously: “For God’s sake only”; “for God”; or, “in order to please Him with temporal goods.” Thus the author of the “Wyhegertlin für alle frummen Christenmenschen,”[1699] a German work of edification, wrote in 1509: “Thanks to God’s grace there are still in our towns many hundreds of brothers and sisters who have united themselves out of Christian charity and compassion for the purpose of serving the poor sick people, the infirm, plague-stricken and lepers, purely for God’s sake.”

Duke George of Saxony, in his reply to Luther’s “Widder den Meuchler zu Dresen,” really expresses the motive for the active Catholic charity formerly so lavishly displayed, when he speaks of the great possessions given by past ages of which the religious revolt had robbed the Church; of the “gifts freely given by nobles, burghers and peasants out of ardent Christian love and gratitude for His sacred bitter Passion, bright blood and guiltless death, to cloisters, parish churches, altars, chapels, cells, hospitals, religious houses, crafts,” etc.[1700]

Neither did such motives or the motive of reward curtail the spirit of charity towards the close of the Middle Ages, as some Protestants have chosen to assert. On the contrary they served to animate it.

On the basis of the data furnished by German archives a modern historian remarks of those times: “The spirit of Christian charity showed itself most active in the foundation of benevolent institutions, in which respect hardly any age can compare with the 15th century.”[1701] “Towards the close of the Middle Ages the gifts to hospitals, pest-houses and hostels were simply innumerable”; such is the opinion of another researcher.[1702] Even G. Uhlhorn, in his “Geschichte der christlichen Liebestätigkeit,” had to admit: “No period did so much for the poor as the Middle Ages,” though, agreeably to the standard of his peculiar Lutheranism, this author would fain make out that good works then were done out of mere egotism.

Other Protestant authorities allow, that, even according to Luther’s own admission, the Catholic charity far exceeded that displayed by the new faith. “Here” (among the Catholics), says one historian, “Confraternities for the care of the poor and sick arose in the 16th and 17th centuries which far surpassed anything hitherto known in the purity of their aims and their extraordinary achievements.... Among the Catholics the reform in the nursing of the sick proceeded from Spain, which also produced the men who loomed largest in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, viz. the Jesuits and the Dominicans. From Spain came the model of the modern hospital with the nursing staff as we now know it.” “The Protestant communities during the two centuries which followed the Reformation showed a great lack of fruitfulness as regards works of charity.” “The hospitals in the Protestant districts, with few exceptions, were and remained bad, nor was anything done to improve them.”[1703]

Although Luther’s praiseworthy efforts to awaken charity were not altogether wasted, yet neither his success in some localities nor the supposed purer and higher spirit he introduced into deeds of love were so apparent as to bear comparison with the charity so sedulously cultivated on the Catholic side. On the contrary, his complaints confirm the suspicion that in Lutheran circles works of charity were as a rule lamed by the lack of that very spirit of piety which should have been so manifest. (More in vol. vi., xxxv., 4.)

In 1528 he told the inhabitants of Wittenberg: “This week your offerings will be solicited. I hear that people say they will give nothing to the collectors, but will turn them away. Well, thank God! You most ungrateful creatures, who are so grudging with your money, refuse to give anything, and, not satisfied with this, heap abuse on the ministers of the Church! I wish you a happy year. I am so horrified, that I do not know whether to continue preaching any longer to you, you rude brutes who cannot give even four half-pence ungrudgingly.” It was a disgrace, he says, that so far the fiscal authorities had been obliged to provide for the churches, the schools and the poor in the hospitals, whom it was the people’s duty as Christians to support. “Now that you are called upon to give four beggarly half-pence, you feel it a burden.” “Deceivers will come who will wax fat at your expense as happened formerly [in Catholic times]. I am sorry that you have arrived at such a glorious state of freedom, free from all tyrants and Papists, for, thankless brutes that you are, you don’t deserve this Evangelical treasure. Unless you mend your ways and act differently I shall cease to preach to you in order not to cast pearls before swine and to give what is holy to the dogs, and shall proclaim the Gospel to my real students who are the poor beggar-men. Formerly you gave so much to the wicked seducers [the Catholic clergy] and now ...!”[1704] Already, the year before, he had vigorously complained from the pulpit, though, as it would appear, all to no purpose: “Amongst those who hear the Word, faith is dull and charity has grown cold and hope is at an end, etc. There is no one who pities his brother’s distress. Once upon a time we gave a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, or even a thousand pieces of gold to the monks, canons or priests for the building of monasteries and churches. To-day no one can be found who will give a coin, let alone a piece of gold, for the poor. For this reason God sends His judgments on the world and curses the earth on account of the contempt for His Word and His Evangel; but we may look for yet worse things in the future.”[1705]

Amongst the reminiscences of his journey to Italy, Luther retained a kindly memory of the charity as practised by the Catholics, particularly at Florence. We read in Lauterbach’s Diary on Aug. 1, 1538: “Then Luther spoke of charity in Italy and how the hospitals there were cared for. They are located in princely buildings, are amply supplied with food and drink, the servants are most diligent and attentive, the physicians very skilled, the bedding and clothing are perfectly clean and the beds are even painted. When a patient is brought in, he has at once to strip, an inventory of his clothes is made in the presence of a notary and they are then kept carefully for him. Then he is dressed in a white shirt and put in a nice painted bed with clean sheets, and after a little while two physicians are at his bedside; servants come and bring him food and drink in perfectly clean glass goblets, which they do not touch even with a finger, carrying everything on a tray. Even the greatest ladies come there, muffled up completely so as to be unrecognisable, in order to serve the poor for some days, after which they return to their homes. At Florence I have seen what great care is bestowed on the hospitals. Also on the foundling homes where the children are admirably installed, fed and taught, are all dressed alike and in the same colour and treated in a right fatherly way.”[1706]

5. Other Innovations in Religious Doctrine

The absence of any logical system in Luther’s theological and moral views is so far from being denied by Protestants who know his theology that they even reproach Luther’s opponents for expecting to find logic in him. No system, but merely “the thought-world of a great religious man” is, so they say, all that we may look for in his works; it is true that he had a “general religious theory,” but it was “faulty, in its details not seldom contradictory, and devised for a practical and polemical object.” “Luther was no dogmatic theologian or man of system,” hence his individual sayings must not always be treated as though they were parts of a system.

There can be no doubt that this is a defect in a teacher who comes forward as the founder of a denomination and as the restorer of Christian doctrine, and who, in his quality of “Prophet of the Germans,” declares: “Before me people knew nothing.” After all, precision and coherence of doctrines form a test of their truth.

In reality the facts of the case are only indicated in a veiled way in the Protestant admissions just recorded. The truth is, as the reader has already had many an occasion to see, that, with Luther, one assertion frequently invalidates the other. Even in the field of moral teaching we find him at utter variance with himself, and his contradictions become particularly glaring as soon as he passes from theory to practice. Here it is easy to seize the “consummate contradictions of his theology,” of which a present-day Protestant theologian ventures boldly to speak; we may also subscribe to what this same writer says, viz. that Luther hardened his heart against certain consequences of his own religious principles.[1707] (Cp. p. 415, 447; vol. ii., p. 312, etc.)

The Regula Fidei.

Such a denial of the consequences of the principles of his doctrine lies first and foremost in the fact that Luther summed up in a Rule of Faith the various dogmas to which it was his intention to remain true. The “regula fidei,” such as he wished to bequeath to posterity, he saw expressed in the Confession of Augsburg, and in the oldest Œcumenical Creeds of the Church.

It has already been seen that the radicalism involved in his religious attitude should by rights have issued in a freedom, nay, licence, which would have rendered impossible any binding formularies of faith.

It is also the opinion of most modern Protestant theologians that the definition of doctrine which began with the Confession of Augsburg, or in fact with the Articles of Marburg, really constituted an unjustifiable encroachment on the freedom of religious thought inaugurated by Luther. Luther indeed invested these doctrinal formularies with all the weight of his authority, yet, according to these theologians, they represented a “narrowing” of the Evangelical ideas advocated by him; nor can it be gainsaid that the revolutionary ideas for which Luther stood from about 1520 to 1523 justify such strictures.[1708]

“This promising spring,” writes Adolf Harnack, a representative of theological freedom, “was followed by no real summer. In those years Luther was lifted above himself and seemed to have overcome the limitations of his peculiar temperament.”... But Luther unfortunately reverted to his limitations. Nor were they “merely a light vesture, or as some would fain have us believe, due simply to lack of comprehension on the part of Melanchthon and other henchmen, for Luther himself saw in them the very foundation of his strength and made the fullest use of them as such.”[1709]

In other words, his contradiction with his own original principles became to him, so to speak, a second nature. He was in deadly earnest with the dogmas which he retained, and which were comprised in the official Articles of faith. In so far, therefore, he may be said to have turned away from the consequences of his own action and to have striven to slam the door which he had opened to unbelief and private judgment.

Of the Confession of Augsburg, the most important of these declarations of faith, Harnack says: “That the Gospel of the Reformation found masterly expression in the ‘Augustana,’ that I cannot admit. The ‘Augustana’ founded a teaching Church; on it must be laid the blame for the narrowing of the movement of reform. Could such a thing have been written previous to 1526, or even previous to 1529?”

After admitting elsewhere the advantages of the Confession of Augsburg, Harnack proceeds: “It is possible by retracing our steps to arrive through it at the broader Evangelical ideas without which there would never have been a Reformation or an ‘Augustana.’ With regard to their author, however, it is no use blinking the fact, that here Melanchthon undertook, or rather was forced to undertake, a task to which his gifts and his character were not equal.”[1710] “In the theology of Melanchthon the moralist, who stands at the side of Luther the Evangelist, we discern attempts to amend Luther’s theology.... Melanchthon, however, felt himself cramped by having to act as the guardian of Lutheranism. We cannot take it ill if Lutherans prefer to err with Luther their hero, rather than submit to be put in Melanchthon’s leading-strings.”[1711]

Harnack and those who think like him are even more antagonistic to the later creeds of Lutheranism than to the Confession composed by Melanchthon. “The ‘symbolic age’ when the ‘Lutheran Church’ gave ‘definite expression’ to her will is nothing more than a fable convenue. ‘This Lutheran Church as an actual body,’ says Carl Müller, ‘never really existed and the spokesmen of the strictest Luther faction were just the worst enemies of such a union.... Thus to speak of creeds of the Lutheran Church involves an historic impossibility.’”[1712] According to these theologians Protestantism must hark back to Luther’s original principles of freedom. Moreover, argues Harnack, Protestantism has on the whole already reverted to this earlier standpoint. “We are not forsaking the clear testimony of history when we find in Luther’s Christianity and in the first beginnings of the Reformation all that present-day Protestantism has developed, though amidst weakness and constraint; nor when we state that Luther’s idea of faith is still to-day the moving spirit of Protestantism, however many or however few may have made it their own.”[1713] Luther’s “most effective propositions,” according to him, may well be allowed to stand as the “heirloom of the Evangelical Churches”; it is plain that they do not lead to a mere “dogmatic Christianity,” but to true Christianity consisting in the “disposition which the Father of Jesus Christ awakens in the heart through the Gospel.” Luther himself has only to be rightly appreciated and “allowed to remain Luther.”[1714]

Harnack repeatedly insists that Luther by setting aside all authority on dogma, whether of the Church, the hierarchy or tradition, also destroyed the binding character of any “doctrine.” By his attack on all authority he dealt a mortal blow at the vital principle of the ancient Church, traceable back to the second century. According to him “every doctrinal formulary of the past required objective proof”; this objective proof was to him the sole authority. “How then could there be authority when the objective proof failed or seemed to demonstrate the contrary?” To judge of the proof is within the province of each individual, and, according as he is constituted, the result will be different. “Luther—even at the most critical moment, when he seemed to stand in the greatest need of the formal authority of the letter—did not allow himself to be overawed or his mouth to be closed even by the Apostles’ Creed.” He indeed “involved himself later in limitations and restrictions,” “but there can be no doubt ... that by his previous historic behaviour towards them he had undermined all the formal authorities of Catholicism.”[1715]

On this fundamental question of the possibility of a “regula fidei” in Luther’s case, we may listen to the opinion of another esteemed Protestant historian of late years.

Friedrich Paulsen, in his much-prized “Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts,” writes: “The Word of God does not suffice as a ‘regula fidei,’ but a personal authority is also needed to decide on questions of doctrine, this is what the Luther of 1535 says and thereby confutes the Luther of 1521, who refused to allow anyone on earth to point out to him the faith unless he himself could gather its truth from the Word of God. Had Luther abided by his rejection of all human authority he should have declared: On the interpretation of Scripture there is no final court of appeal, each one believes or errs at his own peril.... What Luther had relied on in 1521 against the Papists, viz. inability to refute him from Scripture, was used against him in his own struggle with the ‘fanatics.’... For the confuting of heretics a rule of faith is needed, and what is more, a living one to decide in each case. The principle of 1521, to allow no authority on earth to prescribe the faith, is anarchical. On these lines there can be no ‘Church’ with an ‘examen doctrinæ’ of its candidates and Visitations of the clergy. This the Reformers also saw and thus there was nothing left for them, if they were to retain a ‘Church,’ than to set up their own authority in the stead of the authority of Pope and Councils. On one vexatious point they were, however, at a loss: Against the later Luther it was always possible to appeal to the Luther of Worms. The starting-point and raison d’être of the whole Reformation was the repudiation on principle of all human authority in matters of faith; after this, to find Luther installed as Pope, was scarcely pleasing. If anyone stands in need of a Pope he would surely be better advised in sticking to the real one at Rome.... The hole in Luther’s teaching still remains a hole in the principle of the Protestant Church to-day: There can be no earthly authority in matters of faith, and: Such an authority there must be, this is an antinomy which lies at its very root. Nor is the antinomy accidental, but lies in the very nature of the matter and is expressed as often as we speak of the ‘Protestant Church.’ If there is to be a Church ... then the individual must submit himself and his ‘faith’ to the ‘faith’ of the community.” Paulsen, who had spoken of “Luther as Pope,” refers to Luther’s own remark when taking his seat with Bugenhagen in the carriage in which he went to meet Vergerio the Papal Nuncio: “Here go the German Pope and Cardinal Pomeranus, God’s chosen instruments”; Luther’s remark was of course spoken in jest, but the jest “was only possible against a background of bitter earnest”; Luther frequently dallied with this idea; “for the position Luther occupied, ages even after his death, there really was no other comparison to be found.... With the above jest Luther reduced himself ad absurdum.”[1716]—Such censures are in reality more in place than those eulogies of Luther’s exclamation at Worms in 1521 on the freedom of Bible conviction, into which orthodox Protestant biographers of Luther sometimes lapse.

Some Peculiarities of the New Doctrine on the Sacraments, Particularly on Baptism.

The theological pillars of the edifice of public worship are the seven sacraments, the visible signs ordained by Christ by which grace is given to our souls. Held in honour even by the Nestorians and Monophysites as witnesses to ecclesiastical antiquity, they enfold and hallow all the chief events of human life. Luther debased the effect of the sacraments by making it something wholly subjective, produced by the recipients themselves in virtue of the faith infused into them by God, whereas the Church has ever recognised the sacraments as sublime and mysterious signs, which of themselves work in the receiver (“ex opere operato”) according to the extent of his preparation, Christ having made the grace promised dependent on the outward signs instituted by Himself. Luther, on the other hand, by declaring the sacraments mere symbols whereby faith is strengthened, operative only by virtue of the recipient’s faith in the pardon and forgiveness of his sins, reduced them to the status of empty pledges for soothing and consoling consciences. Only later did he again come nearer to the Catholic doctrine of the “opus operatum.” With his view, however, that the sole object of the sacraments is to increase the “fides specialis,” we arrive again at the point which for Luther is the sum total of religion, viz.: “mere forgiveness.”

He was not at all conscious of the contradiction involved in his vigorous insistence on the absolute necessity of the sacraments for salvation. From his standpoint Carlstadt was far more logical when he said: “If Christ [alone] is peace and assurance [of salvation], then lifeless creatures [the sacramental, outward signs] can surely not satisfy or make secure.”[1717]

Luther raised no objection to infant baptism. He also wished it, and baptism in general, to be given in the usual way in the name of the Trinity. But how did he try to solve the difficulty arising from his theory of the sacraments: If the sacrament only works in virtue of the faith of the receiver and the effect is merely an increase of faith, of what advantage can it be to the infant who is incapable of belief? He endeavoured to remedy the defect with the help of the faith of the congregation.

Meeting difficulties on this line he did not shrink from claiming a perpetually recurring miracle, and proposed to assume that, during the act of baptism, the new-born infant was momentarily endowed by God with the use of reason and filled with faith.

In his “De captivitate babylonica” he had already attempted to cut the Gordian knot presented by infant baptism by this assumption, which, however arbitrary, is quite intelligible from his psychological standpoint. Thanks to the believing prayer of the congregation who present the children for baptism, so he said, faith is infused into them and they thus become regenerate. In 1523 he states that children have a hidden faith. “From that time onwards the tendency of his teaching was to require faith from candidates for baptism.... Even after the Concord he continued to speak exactly as before.”[1718] The Bible teaches nothing about infant baptism. Yet Luther declares in 1545 in a set of theses: “It is false and outrageous to say that little children do not believe, or are unworthy,” while at the head of the theses these words stand: “Everything that in the Church, which is God’s people, is taught without the Word of God, is assuredly false and unchristian.”[1719]

It is of interest to follow up his arguments for the faith of infants. In 1522 already he had attempted in a letter to prove to Melanchthon the possibility of such unconscious faith. He referred him to the circumstance, which, however, is irrelevant, “that we retain the faith while asleep or otherwise engaged.” Moreover, since to him who believes, everything is possible with God, so, too, to the congregation which prays for the children; the children are presented by the congregation to the Lord of all, and He, by His Omnipotence, kindles faith in them. In the same letter, aimed at the Anabaptists, who were then beginning to be heard of, we find an emphatic appeal to the authority and belief of the Church (“totius orbis constans confessio”), which, as a rule, Luther was so ruthless in opposing. “It would be quite impious to deny that infant baptism agrees with the belief of the Church; to do so would be tantamount to denying the Church”; it was a special miracle that infant baptism had never been attacked by heretics; there was therefore good reason to hope that Christ, now, would trample the new foemen “under our feet.” Luther forgets that the ancient Church was not hampered by such a heel of Achilles as was his own teaching, viz. that the sacraments owed all their efficacy to faith. We can, however, quite understand his admission to Melanchthon: “I have always expected that Satan would lay violent hands on this weak spot, but he has chosen to stir up this pernicious quarrel, not through the Papists, but with the help of our own people.”[1720] The rise of the Anabaptist heresy was indeed merely a natural reaction against Luther’s doctrine of baptism.

Seeing that the doctrine of baptism is of such importance to the Christian Church, we may be permitted to consider the inferences regarding the sacrament of baptism drawn in modern times from Luther’s conception of it, and from his whole attitude towards faith and Christianity. A domestic dispute among the Protestants at Bremen in 1905 on the validity of baptism not administered according to the usages of the Church, led to a remarkable discussion among theologians of broader views, some of whom went so far as to argue in Luther’s name and that of his Reformation, that baptism should be abolished.

Johannes Gottschick in “Die Lehre der Reformation von der Taufe” (1906) defended the opinion that, according to the real views of the Reformers, baptism was valid even when conferred without any mention of the Trinity.—O. Scheel, on his side, pointed out in his book “Die dogmatische Behandlung der Tauflehre in der modernen positiven Theologie” (1906), that a contradiction with the principle of the Reformation was apparent even in Luther’s own theology, inasmuch as, according to this principle, baptism should merely be the proclaiming of the Word of God; in the ceremony of baptism, according to the Reformation teaching, which should be taken seriously, “the Word is all”; baptism is the solemn declaration that the child has been received into the congregation and the bestowal on it of the promise of salvation, hence requires no repetition. “As to when the Word works faith [in them] we do not know, nor is it necessary that theology should know”; the power of God knows the day and the hour.[1721]—The question: “Can baptism be regarded rightly as the exclusive act of reception into the Church?” was answered negatively by Rietschel in an article under that title in the “Deutsche Zeitschrift für Kirchenrecht,”[1722] in which he too appeals to Luther. At any rate Rietschel’s conclusion is, that, since Luther makes the Christian state dependent on faith, the baptismal act as such cannot, according to him, be of any essential importance; he thinks it possible to complete Luther’s doctrine on baptism in the light of that of Zwingli and Calvin, who were of opinion that the children of Christian parents, by their very birth were received into the Church.

Luther’s attitude towards these questions was treated of more in detail by the editor of the Deutsch-Evangelische Blätter, Erich Haupt, Professor of theology at Halle.[1723]

Haupt agrees with Gottschick as to the possibility of discarding the Trinitarian formula in baptism, in that, like Rietschel, all he considers necessary is the liturgical retention of some definite form of words. He also subscribes in principle to Rietschel’s contention that it is possible to enter the Church without baptism. Going even further, however, he declares with regard to Luther, that it was not even necessary to borrow from Zwingli and Calvin as Rietschel had proposed. “I believe the admission that salvation may be secured even without baptism, is a necessary corollary of Luther’s theories taken in the lump. One thing that lies at the bottom of Luther’s doctrine of the sacraments is that the salvation bestowed by a sacrament is none other than that communicated by the word of the preacher.... Nay, the sacrament is merely a particular form in which the Evangel comes to men.” But wherever there is faith, there is communion with God, and faith may be wherever there is the Word of God. Just as it was said of the Supper: “crede et manducasti,” so also it might be said: “crede et baptizatus es.” “To deny this would not merely be to ascribe a magical and mechanical effect to the sacrament, but would also imply the denial of the first principle of all Evangelical Christianity, viz. that for man’s salvation nothing further is necessary than to accept in faith the offer of God’s grace given him in the Gospel. In this the Reformation was simply holding to the words of Scripture (Mk. xvi. 16),” where, in the second part (“He that believeth not shall be condemned”), baptism is not mentioned.[1724]—Haupt, like Rietschel, draws attention to the fact, that, according to Luther, the unbelieving Christian, in spite of baptism, is inwardly no better than a heathen.[1725] Nevertheless Haupt is unwilling to allow that all children of Christian parents should simply be declared members of the Christian Church on account of their birth and regardless of baptism; for canonical reasons, to be considered Christians, they must be inducted into the congregation by the act of baptism,[1726] although it is “a logical outcome of the Reformer’s opinions that instances may occur where the Gospel awakens faith, and thereby incorporates in the congregation people who have never been baptised; but this is the invisible congregation of the ‘vere credentes,’ not the outward, visible, organised Church.” In order to enter children into the latter, the parents must express their wish; this is the meaning of the ceremony of baptism; the fact remains, that, dismissing the magical effect formerly ascribed to baptism, the principal thing is, “not Christian parentage as such, but the will of the parents as expressed in some way or other.”[1727]

These vigorous attempts to shelter such ultra-modern views behind Luther’s authority, and to make him responsible for consequences of his doctrine, which he had been unwilling to face, have a common ground and starting-point.

Wilhelm Herrmann, the Marburg theologian, in the “Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche,” thus expresses himself on the subject.[1728] “Christians are becoming more and more conscious,” he says, “that a religion which must base its origin on an assent to ‘dogmas revealed by God’ is at variance with elements of scholarship which they can no longer deny.” He speaks of the “distress of conscience into which the Church, by her demanding assent to revealed doctrine, plunges people as soon as, under the influence of education, they have come to see what alone can induce honest assent to any idea” (viz. the fact “that one evolves it for oneself”). Luther was himself scarcely acquainted with such trouble of conscience concerning faith, notwithstanding the many spiritual troubles he had to endure. On the contrary, he unhesitatingly sought and found a source of strength in supernatural faith. Herrmann continues: “We should be unable to escape from this difficulty had not the true Christian understanding of faith, i.e. of religion, been recovered at the Reformation.” From that standpoint “any demand for an assent to revealed doctrine may well be repudiated.” For it was the teaching of Luther’s Reformation that faith “must be experienced as the gift of God if it is to be the ‘nova et spiritualis vita’ essentially ‘supra naturam.’” This, however, could not be required of all. The demand is subversive of faith itself and “embodies the false Roman principle” that everything depends on the “decision to acquiesce in a doctrine,” and not on the “experienced power of a personal life.” “To lend a hand and clear a path for the chief discovery of the Reformation is the grandest task of theology within the Protestant Church.”[1729]

Luther by so incessantly emphasising personal religious experience and by his repudiation of all objective ecclesiastical authority capable of putting before mankind the contents of faith, certainly came very near that which is here represented as the “chief discovery” of the innovations undertaken by him (see above, pp. 403, vol. iii., 8 ff.). But what would the Wittenberg “lover of the Bible and Apostle of the Word” have said to the claim of modern scholars who wish simply to surrender revelation? The passages in which he so indignantly censures the unbelief of his day cannot but recur to one.[1730]

Luther arbitrarily reduced the sacraments to two; “there remain,” he says, “two sacraments; baptism and the Supper.”[1731] With regard to Penance his attitude was wavering and full of contradiction. In later years he again came nearer to the Catholic teaching, arguing that Penance must also be a sacrament because, as he said in 1545, “it contains the promise of and belief in the forgiveness of sins.”[1732] He had much at heart the retention of confession and absolution under some shape or form as a remedy against the moral disorders that were creeping in.[1733] Yet, according to him, Penance was only to be regarded as the “exercise and virtue of baptism,”[1734] so that the number of the sacraments underwent no actual increase.

Here, as everywhere else, the changeableness of Luther’s doctrinal opinions is deserving of notice. The numerous instances where he relinquishes a position previously held and virtually betakes himself to another, are scarcely to the credit either of his logic or of his foresight. Such wavering and groping hither and thither is the stamp of error. In the “Histoire des variations” which might be written on the fate of Luther’s views even during his lifetime, much would be found truly characteristic of them.

One sacramentarian doctrine, which to the end of his life he would never consent to relinquish, was, as we know, the Presence of Christ in the Supper. And relentless as he was in combating the Sacrifice of the Mass (see below, p. 506 ff.), yet he insisted steadfastly on the literal acceptance of Christ’s words of institution: “This is My Body.”

His Teaching on the Supper.

Luther’s retention of the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist may to some extent be explained by the influence which, side by side with the Bible, tradition and the authority of the Church still exercised over him, at least on such points as did not call for modification on account of his new doctrine of Justification. He had grown up in this faith, and was accustomed to give practical proof of it even when on other scores he had already broken with the Church. In this matter Scripture presented no difficulty. Had he shared Zwingli’s rationalistic leanings it is likely that, like him, he might have sought for some other interpretation of the words of institution than the obvious and literal one. It is also possible that the mysticism to which he was addicted in early years may have contributed to make him acknowledge the “mysterium tremendum” of the Sacrament, as he terms it in the language of olden days.

It is true there came a time—according to him the year 1519-1520—when he felt strongly tempted to throw the Sacrament overboard, because, as he says in the well-known words, “I could thus have given a great smack in the face to Popery.” At that time I “wrestled and struggled and would gladly have escaped.” But from the plain text of the Bible, he had, so he declares, been unable to free himself. This statement, which is on the whole worthy of belief, we find in “Eyn Brieff an die Christen zu Straspurg” which he published in 1525, and it is further corroborated by the fact, that he there refers to two men who had been anxious to move him to the denial of the Presence of Christ, but who had failed to convince him. The two, whose names he does not mention, were probably Cornelius Hendriks Hoen, a Dutchman, and Franz Kolb of Baden, whose letters to Luther, in 1522 and 1524, trying to induce him to accept the Zwinglian sense of the Sacrament, still exist.[1735]

When Carlstadt began his attack on the Real Presence, this, in view of the then situation, so Luther declares in his letter to the people of Strasburg, merely “confirmed his opinion.” “Even had I not believed it before, I should at once have known that his opinions were nought, because of his worthless, feeble stuff, devoid of any Scripture and based only on reason and conceit.” Offended vanity and annoyance with Carlstadt were here not without their effect on Luther; to deny this would argue a poor acquaintance with Luther’s psychology. It is true that the arguments of his opponent were very weak; it was not without reason that Luther speaks of his “stuff and nonsense” and “ridiculous tales.” He ranks the objections of the two letter-writers mentioned above higher than the proofs adduced by Carlstadt; at least they “wrote more skilfully and did not mangle the Word quite so badly.” Luther was, however, tactless enough to give the Strasburgers a glimpse of the secondary motives which led him to defend the Presence of Christ so strongly and defiantly from that time forward. He complains that Carlstadt was making such an ado as though he wanted “to darken the sun and light of the Evangel,” so “that the world might forget everything that had been taught them by us [by Luther] hitherto.” “I have up till now managed well and rightly in all the main points, and whoever says the contrary has no good spirit; I trust I shall not spoil it in the matter of the externals on which alone prophets such as these lay stress.”[1736]

It is unnecessary to show anew here how Luther’s later defence of the Real Presence in the Eucharist against the Zwinglians contains indubitable evidence in its virulence that Luther felt hurt. This personal element is, however, quite insufficient for one to base upon it any suspicion as to the genuineness of his convictions.

If, on the other hand, we consider the strange and arbitrary form he gave to the doctrine of the Supper, more particularly by insisting that the sole aim and effect of communion is to inspire faith in the personal forgiveness of sins, then his belief in the presence of Christ appears to a certain extent to harmonise with his peculiar theological views. Amidst the storm of his struggle after certainty of salvation the pledge of it which Christ bestows in the Sacrament seems to him like a blessed anchor. That this Body was “given” for us, and this blood shed for us, and that the celebration is in memory of the saving death of Christ, as the very words of institution declare, was frequently brought forward by him as a means to reassure anxious souls. The need of strengthening our faith should, according to him, impel us to receive the Sacrament.

He demands accordingly of others the same traditional faith in the Eucharist in which he found his own stay and support. While clinging to the literal interpretation of the words of the Bible, he, as we already know, is quite ready to appeal to the “dear Fathers” and to the whole of the Church’s past, at least when thereby he hopes to make an impression.[1737] To such lengths does he go in the interests of the confirmation of faith to which he strives to attain by means of this indispensable Sacrament.

He overlooks the fact, however, that his view of the Supper, according to which its only purpose is to be a sign for the stimulating of saving faith, in reality undermines the doctrine of the Real Presence. True to his theory of the Sacrament and of faith he reduces the Supper to an outward sign destined to confirm the forgiveness of sins. One might ask: If it is merely a sign, is so sublime a mystery as the Real Presence at all called for? And, if it is a question of assurance, how can we be rendered secure of our salvation by something which is so far removed above the senses as the belief in the Real Presence of Christ, or by an act which makes such great demands on human reason? Luther’s theory requires a sign which should appeal to the senses and vividly remind the mind of the Redemption and thus awaken faith. This is scarcely the case in the Eucharist where Christ is invisibly present and only to be apprehended by “the Word.” If bread and wine are merely to call forth a remembrance of Christ which inspires faith, then the Zwinglian doctrine of the Sacrament fulfils all that is required. Luther does not face this difficulty, but Protestants were not slow to urge it against him.[1738]

A peculiarity of Luther’s teaching on the Sacrament is to be found in his two theories of Impanation and Ubiquity. Impanation, viz. the opinion that the substance of the bread persists in the Sacrament and that Christ is present together with the bread, served him as a means to escape the Catholic doctrine of a change of substance (Transubstantiation). With the help of the theory of Ubiquity which affirmed the presence everywhere of the Body of Christ, he fancied he could extricate himself from certain difficulties raised by opponents of the Sacrament. The history of both opinions presents much that is instructive. Here, however, we shall consider only the second, viz. the ubiquity of Christ’s Body.

The theory of the omnipresence of the Body of Christ which Luther reached together with his doctrine of the Supper, like his other theory of the faith of infants, shows plainly not only of how much his imagination was capable, but also what curious theses he could propound in all calmness and serenity. Thus we hear him asserting that the Redeemer, the Lord of Creation, is present, in His spiritualised Body, everywhere and penetrates all things! He is present bodily at the right hand of God according to the Scriptures; but the right hand of God is everywhere, hence also in the consecrated Bread and Wine lying on the altar; consequently the Body and Blood of Christ must be there too.[1739] To the question how this comes about, he replies: “It is not for us to know,” nor does reason even understand how God can be in every creature.

Much more important is it, so he says, that we should learn to seize, grasp and appropriate this ever-present Christ. “For though Christ is everywhere present, He does not everywhere allow Himself to be seized and laid hold of.... Why? Because it is one thing for God to be present and another for Him to be present to you. He is present to you then when He pledges His Word to it and binds Himself by it and says: Here you shall find Me. When you have His Word for it, then you can truly seize Him and say: Here I have Thee, as Thou hast said.”[1740] In this way Christ assures us of His presence in the Sacrament, and invites us, so Luther teaches, to partake of Him in the Bread of the Supper. This, however, is practically to explain away the presence of Christ in the Bread (to which Luther adheres so firmly) and to dissolve it into a purely subjective apprehension. Nevertheless, at least according to certain passages, he was anxious to see the Sacrament adored and did not hesitate to do so himself.[1741]

To the belief that Christ’s Body is truly received in Communion he held fast, as already stated, till the end of his life.

The report, that, in the days of extreme mental tension previous to his last journey to Eisleben, he abandoned the doctrine of the Real Presence, hitherto so passionately advocated, in order to conciliate the Zwinglians or Melanchthonians, is a fable, put into circulation by older Protestant writers.[1742] In view of the proofs, met with up to the very last, of his belief to the contrary, we may safely dismiss also the doubtful account to be mentioned directly which seems to speak in favour of his having abandoned it.

Luther’s “Kurtz Bekentnis” of September, 1544, certainly was true to his old standpoint and showed that he wished “the fanatics and enemies of the Sacrament, Carlstadt, ‘Zwingel,’ Œcolampadius, Stinkfield [Schwenkfeld] and their disciples at Zürich, or wherever else they be, to be sternly condemned and avoided.”[1743] In his last sermon at Wittenberg on Jan. 17, 1546, he warned his hearers against reason, that “fair prostitute and devil’s bride,” and, indirectly, also against the Sacramentarians and those who attacked his doctrine of the Supper. George Major relates that when he was sent, on Jan. 10, 1546, by Luther to the religious conference at Ratisbon he found scribbled on his door these words: “Our professors must be examined on the Supper of the Lord”; Luther also admonished him not to endeavour to conceal or pass over in silence belief in the Real Presence. On his journey Luther said much the same in the sermons he delivered at Halle and Eisleben; even in his last sermon at Eisleben we find the Sacramentarians described as seducers of mankind and foes of the Gospel.[1744]

That Luther changed his opinion is the purport of a communication, which, after his death, Melanchthon is said to have made to A. R. Hardenberg, a friend of his. Hardenberg speaks of it in a document in his own handwriting preserved in the Bremen municipal archives. There he certainly affirms that Melanchthon had told him how that Luther, before his last journey, had said to him: People have gone too far in the matter of the Supper; he himself had often thought of writing something so as to smooth things down and thus allow the Church again to be reunited; this, however, might have cast doubts on his doctrine as a whole; he preferred therefore to commend the case to God; Melanchthon and the others might find it possible to do something after his death.[1745]—Evidently it is our duty to endeavour to understand and explain this account, however grounded our suspicions may be. One recent Protestant writer has justly remarked: “There must be something behind Hardenberg’s testimony”[1746]; and another, that it “cannot be simply set aside.”[1747]

J. Hausleiter, in 1898, seems to have given the most likely explanation of it:[1748] After Luther’s death Amsdorf complained bitterly that the Wittenberg edition of Luther’s German works, then in the press, had not preserved the real Luther undefiled; he pointed out, that, in the second volume, Luther’s violent attack on the Sacramentarians had been omitted where (at the end of the work “Das diese Wort Christi ‘Das ist mein Leib, etce.,’ noch fest stehen,” 1527) he had said that the devil with the help of Bucer and his denial of the Sacrament had “smeared his filth” over Luther’s books; that Bucer was a “sly, slippery, slimy devil”; where Luther had spoken of Bucer’s “poisonous malice, murderous stabs and arch-scoundreldom,” thanks to which he had “defiled, poisoned and defamed” Luther’s teaching, and where a protest was registered against the assertion that “to begin with,” Philip too had taught the same as the Sacramentarians, viz. that there is “nothing but bread in the Lord’s Supper.”[1749] It was known that those pages had been suppressed in the new edition at Luther’s own hint. This was stated by George Rörer, Luther’s former assistant, who supervised the correction. He said, “he did this with the knowledge and by the request and command of Luther, because M. Bucer, who had there been so severely handled as a notable enemy of the Sacrament, had since been converted.” Of any real conversion of Bucer there can be no question, but as he was then doing good work at Ratisbon in the interests of the new Evangel it may be that Luther—perhaps moved thereto by his Electer at the instance of the Landgrave of Hesse—consented to display such indulgence. This may well have formed the subject of the communication Hardenberg received from Melanchthon, only that the one or the other, or possibly both, in the interests of the movement hostile to Luther’s Sacramental teaching, distorted and exaggerated the facts of the case, and thus gave rise to the legend of Luther’s change of views.

Support for it may also have been seen in the circumstance that Luther, in spite of Melanchthon’s defection on the doctrine of the Sacrament, never broke off his relations with him. In his severe “Kurtz Bekentnis” (1544) he forbore from attacking Melanchthon either openly or covertly. Even in 1545, in the Preface to his own Latin works, Luther bestowed his well-known eulogy on Melanchthon’s “Loci theologici.”[1750] It has been pointed out elsewhere that the services his friend rendered him had been and continued to be too important to allow of Luther’s breaking with him.[1751]

Though Luther was unflinching in his advocacy of the Presence of Christ together with his pet theories of Impanation and Ubiquity, yet he waged an implacable war on the Sacrifice of the Mass. As, however, we have reserved this for later consideration we shall here only point out, that both his doctrine and his practice with regard to the Sacrament of the Altar suffered by his unhappy opposition to the Mass in which it is celebrated and offered, even more so than by the modifications he had already introduced into the older doctrine.

Invocation of the Saints.

Among those doctrines of the Church from which Luther cut himself adrift only little by little and at the expense of a wrench, must be numbered those dealing with the invocation of the Saints and with Purgatory.

The grand and inspiring belief of the Church in the Communion of Saints, which weaves a close and common band between the living and those souls who have already passed into heaven and those, again, who are still undergoing purification, had at first taken deep root in Luther’s mind. Later on, however, the foundations of this doctrine became more and more undermined, partly owing to his theories on the Church and the Mediatorship of Christ, partly and even more so by his ardent wish to strike a deadly blow at the practical life of the Catholic Church and all that “Popish” worship had erected on this particular doctrine. Veneration of the Saints and intercession for the dead loomed very large among the religious practices dear to the Christian people, though, at that time, they were disfigured by abuses. Luther adroitly used the abuses as a lever for his work.

As late as 1519, in one of his sermons, he urged his hearers to call upon the angels and the Saints; just as on earth one Christian may pray for another and be asked for his prayers, so, as he justly remarks, is it also with the Saints in heaven.[1752] In his Church-postils, however, he raises his voice to condemn the “awful idolatry” by which (so he thought) the “trust” which we should repose on God alone was put in the Saints.[1753] From that time he never tires of declaring that there was “no text or warrant in Scripture for the worship of the Saints”; all he will sanction is the humble petition to the Saints: “Pray for me.”[1754] He required the Wittenberg Canons to erase from the liturgical prayers all reference to the intercession of the saints, as misleading and likely to give offence;[1755] this, in spite of the fact that the liturgical prayers of the Church’s earliest days loudly voice the opposite view. The “Sendbrieff von Dolmetzscheñ” of 1530 gives even stronger expression to his abhorrence for all invocation of the Saints. There he says that the light of the Gospel was now so bright that no one could find any excuse for remaining in darkness.[1756]

In his Schmalkalden Articles the invocation of Saints has become one of the “abuses of Endchrist”; for “though the angels in heaven pray for us,” so he explains, again reverting to the ancient teaching of the Church, “and also the Saints on earth, and, perhaps, even those in heaven, yet it does not follow that we are to invoke the angels and the Saints.”[1757]

Mary.

As long as he admitted the invocation of Saints, Luther assigned a prominent place to that of the Blessed Virgin. “She is to be invoked,” he writes in 1521, “that God may give and do according to her will what we ask.”[1758] After he had changed his mind concerning the saints, he was unwilling to allow this any longer.

Owing, however, to the after effects of his Catholic education, here particularly noticeable in him, we meet with many beautiful sayings of his in support of the worship of Mary, although as time went on he grew ever more hostile to it.

“You know,” so he says in a sermon published in 1522, “that the honour paid to the Mother of God is so deeply implanted in the heart of man that we dislike to hear it spoken against, but would much rather it were fostered and encouraged.”[1759]

“O Blessed Mother,” he had already said, “O most worthy Virgin, be mindful of us and grant that the Lord may do great things in us also.” Such were his words in 1516 in a sermon on the Feast of the Assumption.[1760]

In the same year, on the Feast of our Lady’s Conception, he speaks of her name, which he says is derived from “stilla maris,” and extols her as the one pure drop in the ocean of the “massa perditionis.”[1761] To his admission here that her conception was immaculate he was still true in 1527, as has already been shown; after 1529, however, the passage containing this admission was expunged when the sermon in question was reprinted.[1762] In his home-postils he says of her conception: “Mary the Mother was surely born of sinful parents, and in sin, as we were”; any explanation of the universal belief to the contrary and of his own previous statements he does not attempt.[1763]

Owing to his belief in the Divinity of the Son, Luther continued to call Mary the “Mother of God.” Even later he shared the Catholic view that Mary by the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost and at the birth of the Saviour had been sanctified by God as the instrument of the great mystery of the Incarnation through her Divine Son.[1764] He was also firm in accepting the Virginity of the Mother of God as expressed in the Apostles’ Creed. Nevertheless, according to his own confession, this appealed to him less than her “wifehood,” and when praising her he prefers to dwell on the latter, i.e. on the Virgin’s motherhood.[1765] Mary was to him ever a Virgin, before, during and after childbirth, and, in the last sermon he delivered at Eisleben before his death, he insists on this perpetual Virginity, says she ever remained a “pure, chaste maid,” and praises her humility, because, though a “most pure and most holy Virgin,” yet after the birth of her Son, obediently to the Law, she came to the Temple to be purified.[1766]

Luther’s work on the Magnificat (1521), of which we have already spoken (p. 237, n. 1), marks a turning-point. Although much that it says of the greatness, dignity and virtues of Mary might well be quoted, yet it contains some curiously superfluous warnings, for instance, not to look on Mary as a “helpful goddess.”[1767] In spite of any abuse which may possibly have mingled with her worship, the Catholic people were well able to distinguish between the veneration and confidence given to her and those acts of worship which belong solely to God. Catholicism allowed full play to the deepest and warmest feelings towards the ideal of the purest of women, without in any way detracting from the exclusive rights of her Divine Son; on the contrary, devotion to the Mother tended only to increase the honour paid to the Son.

His “Exposition of the Magnificat” has frequently been taken as a proof of Luther’s great piety. It indeed contains many good thoughts, even apart from those relating to Mary, but in numerous passages the author uses his pen for a highly prejudiced vindication of his new teachings on the state of grace.

It should also be borne in mind that the printers started on the book just before the Diet of Worms, and that it was intended to attract and secure the support of the future rulers of the Saxon Electorate. Luther was also engaged at that time on his exceedingly violent screed against Catharinus, in which he attempts to reveal the Pope in his true character as Antichrist. When, after the Diet of Worms, he continued his work on the Magnificat he was certainly in no mood to compose a book of piety on Mary. The result was that the book became to all intents and purposes a controversial tract, which cannot be quoted as a proof of his piety or serenity of mind during those struggles. Luther’s Magnificat is as little a serious work of edification and piety as his exposition of certain of the Psalms, which appeared almost simultaneously and was also directed “against the Pope and the doctrine of men.”

In the “Prayer-book” which Luther prepared for the press he retained the “Hail Mary” together with the “Our Father” and the “I believe,” but he cut it down to the angel’s greeting, as contained in the Bible, and taught that thereby honour was merely to be given God for the grace announced to Mary.[1768] He frequently preached, e.g. in 1523, on the wrong use of this prayer.[1769]

In the Augsburg Confession, Melanchthon, when rejecting the invocation of the Saints, made no exception in favour of Mary. Yet in the “Apologia” of the Confession also composed by him, he says, that “Mary prays for the Church,” that she is “most worthy of the greatest honour” (“dignissima amplissimis honoribus”), but is not to be made equal to Christ, as the Catholics fancied.[1770]

Luther did not merely reproach the Catholics for making a goddess of Mary; he even ventured some remarks scarcely to the credit of the Mother of God; for a while, so he says, she had possessed only a small measure of faith and God had sometimes allowed her to waver; such statements were due to his idea that all Christians, in order to preserve a firm faith in their hearts, must ever be waging battle. On these statements, Eck, in his Homilies, was very severe.[1771]

An attitude hostile to all the Catholic veneration for Mary is expressed by Luther in a sermon in 1522 on the Feast of our Lady’s Nativity, included in his church-postils. It is true that we “owe honour to Mary,” he says, rather frigidly, at the very beginning, “but we must take care that we honour her aright.” He proceeds to explain that “we have gone too far in honouring her and esteem her more highly than we should.” For in the first place we have thereby “disparaged” Christ, the Redeemer, and “by the profound honour paid to the Mother of God derogated from the honour and knowledge of Christ”; secondly, the honour due to our fellow-men and the love of the poor has thereby been forgotten. If it is a question of honouring anyone on account of his holiness, “then we are just as holy as Mary and the other Saints, however great, provided we believe in Christ.” That she “has a greater grace,” viz. a higher dignity as the Mother of God, “is not due to any merit of hers, but simply because we cannot all be Mothers of God; otherwise she is on the same level with us.”[1772]

Of the anthem “Salve Regina,” which is “sung throughout the world to the ringing of great bells,” he says, that it was a “great blasphemy against God,” for it terms Mary, the mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. “The ‘Regina Caeli’ is not much better, since it calls her Queen of Heaven.” Why should her prayers have so much value, he asks, as though unaware of the explanations given by so many ecclesiastical writers, particularly by St. Bernard. “Your prayers, O Christian, are as dear to me as hers. And why? Because if you believe that Christ lives in you as much as in her then you can help me as much as she.”[1773]

In this discourse again he ventures on the calumny on the Catholic veneration of Mary, of which he was to make such frequent use later; it is equivalent to adoration; “To seek to make of Mary an idol, that we cannot and may not do. We will not have her as a mediator, but as an advocate [to this Luther always clung] we will gladly accept her, like the other Saints. But people have put her above all the choirs of angels.”[1774] Neither here nor elsewhere does he attempt to prove her alleged adoration or the idolatry of the Catholics; when, a little further on, he launches forth against the pilgrimages made by common folk to churches and chapels of our Lady, he is straying from the subject and dealing with a practice of the faithful, quite harmless and wholesome in itself, whatever abuses it may then have involved.

The veneration for the holy Mother of the Redeemer, that high ideal of humility and purity of heart, so devoid of the slightest trace of sensuality, springs from the soil of humility, chastity and pure, unselfish love. Luther’s whole mental outlook was not too favourable to such necessary dispositions. His moral character, as exhibited more particularly during the period after his stay at the Wartburg and previous to his marriage, scarcely harmonised with the delicate blossoms of this cultus, nor can we be surprised, looking at it psychologically, that the chief alteration in his views took place just at this time.

That hostile instinct, shared by so many heretics in their attitude towards the most holy of women, outweighed in his soul the vestiges of Catholic feeling he still retained. Malice impelled him to blacken the honour which the people loved to pay to Mary; this he strove to paint as mere idolatry, seeking unceasingly to affix this stigma on Catholicism. Controversy stifled in him the impulse to that pious veneration which he himself had admitted to be so well-founded and so natural.

Purgatory.

In the Schmalkalden Articles the olden doctrine of Purgatory was rejected by Luther as follows: Purgatory, “with all its pomp, worship and traffic, must be held to be nothing more than a mere phantom of the devil,” born of “that dragon’s tail” the Mass.[1775]

Although in this condemnation Luther’s customary polemical exaggeration of abuses clearly plays a part, yet from his Indulgence Theses and “Resolutions” down to the sentence in the Articles of Schmalkalden the working of his mind can clearly be traced, expressed as it is, now in rejection on principle, and on theological or biblical grounds, now in opportunist and cynical attacks on the Church’s ancient doctrine of Purgatory. The temporal penalties which, according to the teaching of the Church, must be paid by the suffering souls notwithstanding their state of grace, found no place in Luther’s new theory of a faith which covered over everything. According to the usual view venial sins also are forgiven in the next world, thanks to the purifying pains of Purgatory. But of venial sins as distinct from grievous sins Luther refused to hear. He had nothing but evasive replies to the objection which presented itself of its own accord, viz. that mortals when they die often seem ripe neither for heaven nor for hell.[1776]

At first Luther was content to modify merely the doctrine of Purgatory which is so deeply implanted in the consciousness of the Christian, by denying that it was capable of making satisfaction while nevertheless asserting his belief in the existence of a place of purgation (“mihi certissimum est, purgatorium esse”);[1777] then he devoted himself to countering the many legends and popular tales of the appearance of ghosts, a comparatively easy task.[1778] The Pope, he went on to say, had merely made Purgatory an article of faith in order to enrich himself and his followers by Masses for the Dead, though in fact “it may be that only very few souls go there.”

Later he preferred to think, that God had in reality told us practically nothing about the existence or non-existence of Purgatory, or of the condition of the Saints in heaven; the preachers would do well, he says, gradually to wean the people from their practices in this regard; they had merely to decline to discuss the question of the dead and of the Saints in heaven. He was indeed unwilling to sever the close ties, so dear to the Catholic, binding the faithful to the deceased members of his family and to the beloved patterns and heroes of former days, yet his writings do tend in that direction.

From 1522 onward he inclined strongly to the idea that those who passed away fell into a deep sleep, from which they would awaken only on the day of Judgment; those who had breathed their last in the faith of Christ would all, so he fancies, sleep as in Abraham’s bosom; but since this depended on the “good pleasure of God,” it was not forbidden “to pray for the dead”; the petition must, however, be cautiously worded, for instance, as follows: “I beseech Thee for this soul which may be sleeping or suffering; if it be suffering, I implore Thee, if it be Thy Divine Will, to deliver it.” After praying thus once or twice, then “let it be.”[1779] In 1528 we still meet, in his writings, with similar concessions to the olden teaching and practice.[1780]

In 1530, however, his writing “Widderruff vom Fegefeur,”[1781] made an end of all concessions; here he is compelled to combat the “shouting and boasting of the Papists,” for the “lies and abominations of the sophists with regard to Purgatory” had passed all endurance. He now wants the sleep of the soul to be understood as a state of happy peace, and when it becomes a question of answering the Bible passage alleged by the Catholics, viz. 2 Machabees xii. 45 f., where it is said of the offering made for the fallen, that it is “a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from sins,” Luther simply strikes out this book from the Canon of Scripture, as indeed he had done even previously; the Church, so his curious argument ran, could not bestow more authority and force on a book than it possessed of itself, because the sacred books must themselves bear witness to their inspiration.

It would be superfluous to enumerate in detail the other points of theology on which he set himself to oppose the Catholic teaching he had himself in earlier days advocated, sometimes on excellent grounds. We know his exclamation: Were I to teach to-day everything that I formerly taught, particularly in the beginning, then “I should be obliged to worship the Pope.” Moreover, not only were there contradictions due to his falling away from doctrines of the Church which he had formerly vindicated, but also many others resulting from his modification of his own views, or implied in his new opinions.

His views on indulgences, satisfaction, penance and contrition, original sin and predestination, on marriage, priestly ordination, spiritual jurisdiction and secular authority, on Councils and the Roman Primacy, have already been dealt with historically in what has gone before. Other points of doctrine will have to be discussed elsewhere in a different connection; for instance, the far-reaching question of the Church and her visibility and invisibility, and—what is of no less importance for a due appreciation of the man—the end of all and the devil.

One only point, on which indeed Luther opposed the doctrine and practice of the Church with all his heart and soul, must here be considered more closely.

6. Luther’s Attack on the Sacrifice of the Mass

All Luther’s new doctrines referred to above might be regarded in the light of attacks on the Church’s teaching and practice. None of his theological views were put forward by him merely to be discussed in the calm domain of thought. They are always quickened by his hatred of the Church and the antichristian Papacy. This holds good in particular of his antagonism to the sacrificial character of the Mass.

By his violent assault on the Mass he robbed the churches and public worship of the Holy Sacrifice,[1782] and removed the very focus of Divine service in the Church.

Whereas to the Catholic Church the celebration of the Sacrament of the Altar was always a true sacrifice of praise, thanksgiving and atonement, which Christ, as the High Priest, offers to the Eternal Father through the instrumentality of a priest, according to Luther it is merely a memorial on the part of the congregation, which stimulates faith and gives a public testimony to God’s glory.[1783] In 1538 he characterised the struggle against the Mass as one vital to the new faith;[1784] he was very well aware how closely allied it was with the worship to which he himself had once been devoted: “Had any man twenty years ago tried to rob me of the Mass, I should have come to blows with him.”[1785]

Sacrifice is the supreme and at the same time the most popular expression of the worship of God. “From the rising of the sun even to the going down,” the Prophet Malachias had prophesied (i. 11), “my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation,” viz. the Eucharist. The common oblation throughout Christendom formed a sublime bond uniting all the Christian nations of the earth in one holy family. The words of Christ concerning the “Body that is given for you,” and “Blood that is shed for you” were rightly regarded as proving both the institution of the common sacrifice and its atoning power.

Luther not only burst asunder the bond of unity, but also overthrew the altar of sacrifice. It is against the correct idea of Divine worship to deprive it of all sacrifice, and to make its principal object consist in the edification and instruction of the congregation, as Luther decreed. Here again we see Luther’s individualism and the stress he laid on the subjective side, even to the extent of robbing religion of the sacrifice of the Lamb, which had the misfortune to be independent of fortuitous piety. The very walls of his temples seemed to utter a chill protest against being given over to a worship so entirely at the mercy of the feelings of the visitor. Luther was against the abuses connected with the Mass, and so were all well-instructed Catholics. But the latter argued, that, in spite of the abuses, the Mass must be honoured as the sacrifice on which the spiritual life rests. To the many contradictions of which he was guilty Luther added a further one, viz. of advocating as a purer and higher worship, one that does not even come up to the true standard of worship. (See vol. v., xxix., 9).

Luther’s deep-seated and almost instinctive antipathy to the Sacrifice of the Mass affords us, in its various phases, a good insight into his plan of campaign. On no other point does his hate flame forth so luridly, nowhere else is he so defiant, so contemptuous and so noisy—save perhaps when attacking Popery—as when assailing the Sacrifice of the Mass, that main bulwark of the Papacy. One thing is certain; of all the religious practices sacred to Catholics none was branded by him with such hideous and common abuse as this, the sublimest mystery of faith and of Divine Love.

First Attacks. “On the Abomination of the Silent Mass.”

In spite of Luther’s assurance given above of his former high regard for the Mass, he must quite early have grown averse to it, probably at the time when his zeal in the religious life first began to flag.

Even in 1516 we learn from his correspondence that he rarely found time for its celebration or for the recitation of the Canonical Hours.[1786] At a much later date he lets fall the remark, that he had never liked saying Mass.[1787] In view of his disturbed state of soul we can readily credit what he says, viz. that, in the monastery Gabriel Biel’s book on the Mass, in which the dignity of the Holy Sacrifice is extolled with the voices of antiquity, had often made his heart bleed.[1788] It is rather curious, that, according to his own account, it was on the occasion of his first Mass after ordination that his morbid state of fear showed itself strongly for the first time.[1789] No less remarkable is it that his most extravagant self-reproaches for his past life had reference to his saying Mass. He tells us how, even long after his apostasy, he had often been brought to the verge of despair by the recollection of the terrible sin of saying Mass whereby he had at one time openly defied and offended God. He morbidly persuades himself that he had been guilty of the most frightful idolatry; that, as a priest and monk, he had performed the most criminal of actions, one subversive of all religion, in spite of his having done so in ignorance and in perfect good faith.[1790]

In his sermons on the Commandments, published in 1518, we still find a tribute to the Sacrifice of the Mass as Catholics understood it.[1791] But in his “Sermon von dem hochwirdigen Sacrament des heyligen waren Leychnams Christi” of 1519 he is curiously reticent concerning the nature of the Mass, whilst expressly recommending and praising the communion of the congregation—under both kinds—as the work of that faith “wherein strength lies.”[1792]

The first open attack on the Holy Sacrifice was made in his “Sermon von dem newen Testament das ist von der heyligen Messe” (1520). The latter appeared almost simultaneously with his “An den christlichen Adel” and prepared the way for his subversive treatment of the Mass in his “De captivitate babylonica.” In the Sermon he declared that it was “almost the worst abuse,” that in the older Church the Eucharistic celebration had been turned into a sacrifice to be offered to God.[1793] Statements such as these predominate in the virulent chapter devoted to the Mass in the “De captivitate babylonica”: Christ’s sacrifice on the cross had been made out to be insufficient and the Sacrifice of the Mass set up in its place; the Supper was the Lord’s work for us, but, by ascribing a sacrificial value to the Mass, it becomes a work of man for God, whereby man hopes to please God.

The close ties connecting the Sacrifice of the Mass with both the Church’s ancient traditions and the institution of Christ are here ruthlessly torn asunder. A lurid and grossly exaggerated account of the abuses which had arisen in connection with the money-offerings for Masses served to stimulate the struggle, essentials faring as badly as what was merely accidental.

At the Wartburg the “Spirit” of the place further excited Luther’s hatred of the Mass. He poked fun at the “Mass-priest” who served the stronghold and wrote to Melanchthon: “Never to all eternity shall I say another Low Mass.”[1794] This he says in the same letter which witnesses to his inner contest with the monastic vows, and in which we find the sentence: “Be a sinner and sin boldly but believe more boldly still.”[1795] At the time of his spiritual baptism in the Wartburg he also wrote both his “De abroganda missa” and his “De votis monasticis.” The former he published in 1522, also in a German version entitled “Vom Missbrauch der Messen.”

This was the bugle-call to the struggle he immediately commenced at Wittenberg against the continued celebration of Mass by the Catholic clergy in the Castle and Collegiate churches of the town. We have already treated of the phases of that campaign in which his impetuosity and intolerance manifested itself in all its nakedness.[1796] From the inglorious combat, thanks to the help of the mob, he was to come forth victorious. On Christmas Day, 1524, for the first time, there was no Mass, and in the following year Justus Jonas wrote of the completion of the work: “On the Saturday after the Feast of St. Matthew the Apostle and Evangelist, the whole Pope ... was flung out of All Saints’ church at Wittenberg, together with the stoles, albs, etc.; the olden ceremonies were replaced by pious ones such as accord with Scripture.”[1797]