Chapter XXIX · (continued 3)

In his “Kurtz Bekentnis vom heiligen Sacrament” (1545) Luther again gives vigorous expression to his aversion to the “Fanatics and foes of the Sacrament, Carlstadt, Zwingli, Œcolampadius and ‘Stinkfield’”; they were heretics “whom he had warned sufficiently” and who were to be avoided.[300] He had refused to listen to or to answer that “slanderer Schwenckfeld” because everything was wasted on him. “This you may well tell those among whom, no doubt, Stinkfield makes my name to stink. I like being abused by such slanderers.” If by their attacks upon the Sacrament they call the “Master of the house Beelzebub, how should they not abuse His household?”[301]

7. Self-Improvement and the Reformation of the Church

Self-betterment, by the leading of a Christian life and, particularly, by striving after Christian perfection, had in Catholic times been inculcated by many writers and even by first-rank theologians. In this field it was usual to take for granted, both in popular manuals and in learned treatises, as the general conviction, that religion teaches people to strive after what is highest, whether in each one’s ordinary duties of daily life, or in the ecclesiastical or religious state. The power of the moral teaching was to stand revealed in the struggle after the ideal thus set forth.

Did Luther Found a School of True Christian Life?

Luther, of set purpose, refused to make any attempt to found, in the strict sense of the term, a spiritual school of Christian life or perfection. He ever found it a difficult matter even to give any methodical instructions to this end.

Though he dealt fully and attractively with many details of life, not only in his sermons and commentaries, but also in special writings which still serve as inspirations to practical Christianity, yet he would never consent to draft anything in the shape of a system for reaching virtue, still less for attaining perfection. On one occasion he even deliberately refused his friend Bugenhagen’s request that he would sketch out a rule of Christian life, appealing to his well-known thesis that “the true Christian has no need of rules for his conduct, for the spirit of faith guides him to do all that God requires and that brotherly love demands of him.”[302]

It may indeed be urged that his failure to bequeath to posterity any regular guide to the spiritual life was due to lack of time, that his active and unremitting struggle with his opponents left him no leisure, and, in point of fact, it is quite true that his controversy did deprive him of the requisite freedom and peace of mind. It may also be allowed that no one man can do everything and that Luther had not the methodical mind needed for such a task, which, in his case, was rendered doubly hard by his revolution in doctrine. The main ground, however, is that there were too many divergent elements in his moral teaching which it was impossible to harmonize; so much in it was false and awry that no logical combination of the whole was possible. Hence his readiness to invoke the theory, which really sprung from the very depths of his ethics, viz. that the true Christian has no need of rules because everything he has to do is the natural outcome of faith.

In his “Sermon von den guten Wercken” (1520), he expressed this in a way that could not fail to find a following, though it could hardly be described as in the interests of moral effort. Each one must take as his first rule of conduct, not on any account to bind himself, but to keep himself free from all troublesome laws. The very title of the tract in question, so frequently reprinted during Luther’s lifetime, would have led people to expect to find in it his practical views on ethics. Characteristically enough, instead of attempting to define the exact nature and value of moral effort, Luther penned what, in reality, was merely an appendix to his new doctrine on faith. He himself, in his dedication of it to Duke Johann of Saxony, admits this of the first and principal part: “Here I have striven to show how we must exercise and make use of faith in all our good works and consider it as the chiefest of works. If God allows me I shall at some other time deal with faith itself, how we must each day pray and speak it.”[303]

As, however, no other of Luther’s writings contains so many elements of moral teaching drawn from his theology, some further remarks on it may here be in place, especially as he himself set such store on the sermon, that, while engaged on it, referring evidently to the first part, he wrote to Spalatin, that, in his opinion it “would be the best thing he had yet published.”[304] Köstlin felt justified in saying: “The whole sermon may be termed the Reformer’s first exposition and vindication of the Evangelical teaching on morals.”[305]

Starting from his doctrine that good works are only those which God has commanded, and that the highest is “faith, or trust in God’s mercy,”[306] he endeavours to show, agreeably to his usual idea, that from faith the works proceed, and for this reason he lingers over the first four commandments of the Decalogue. He explains the principle that faith knows no idleness. By this faith the believer is inwardly set free from the laws and ceremonies by which men were driven to perform good works. If faith reigned in all, then of such there would no longer be any need. The Christian must perform good works, but he is free to perform works of any kind, no man being bound to one or any work, though he finds no fault with those who bind themselves.[307] “Here we see, that, by faith, every work and thing is lawful to a Christian, though, because the others do not yet believe, he bears with them and performs even what he knows is not really binding.”[308] Faith issues in works and all works come back to faith, to strengthen the assurance of salvation.[309]

His explanation of the 3rd Commandment, where he speaks of the ghostly Sabbath of the soul and of the putting to death of the old man, seems like an attempt to lay down some sort of a system of moral injunction, and incidentally recalls the pseudo-mystic phase through which Luther had passed not so long before. Here we get just a glimpse of his theory of human unfreedom and of God’s sole action, so far as this was in place in a work intended for the “unschooled laity.”[310]

In man, because he is “depraved by sin, all works, all words, all thoughts, in a word his whole life, is wicked and ungodly. If God is to work and live in him all these vices and this wickedness must be stamped out.” This he calls “the keeping of the day of rest, when our works cease and God alone acts within us.” We must, indeed, “resist our flesh and our sins,” yet “our lusts are so many and so diverse, and also at times under the inspiration of the Wicked One so clever, so subtle and so plausible that no man can of his own keep himself in the right way; he must let his hands and feet go, commend himself to the Divine guidance, trusting nothing to his reason.... For there is nothing more dangerous in us than our reason and our will. And this is the highest and the first work of God in us, and the best thing we can do, for us to refrain from work, to keep the reason and the will idle, to rest and commend ourselves to God in all things, particularly when they are running smoothly and well.” “The spiritual Sabbath is to leave God alone to work in us and not to do anything ourselves with any of our powers.”[311] He harks back here to that idea of self-surrender to the sole action of God, under the spell of which he had formerly stood: “The works of our flesh must be put to rest and die, so that in all things we may keep the ghostly Sabbath, leaving our works alone and letting God work in us.... Then man no longer guides himself, his lust is stilled and his sadness too; God Himself is now his leader; nothing remains but godly desires, joy and peace together with all other works and virtues.”[312]

Though, according to the peculiar mysticism which speaks to the “unschooled laity” out of these pages, all works and virtues spring up of themselves during the Sabbath rest of the soul, still Luther finds it advisable to introduce a chapter on the mortification of the flesh by fasting.

Fasting is to be made use of for the salvation of our own soul, so far but no further, as or than each one judges it necessary for the repression of the “wantonness of the flesh” and for the “putting to death of our lust.”[313] We are not to “regard the work in itself.” Of corporal penance and mortification, and fasting in particular, he will have it, that they are to be used exclusively to “quench the evil” within us, but not on account of any law of Pope or Church. Luther dismisses in silence the other motives for penance recommended by the Church of yore, in the first place satisfaction for sins committed and the desire to obtain graces by reinforcing our prayers by self-imposed sacrifices.[314]

He fancies that a few words will suffice to guard against any abuse of the new ascetical doctrine: “People must beware lest this freedom degenerate into carelessness and indolence ... into which some indeed tumble and then say that there is no need or call that we should fast or practise mortification.”[315]

When, in the 3rd Commandment, he comes to speak of the practice of prayer one would naturally have expected him to give some advice and directions concerning its different forms, viz. the prayer of praise, thanksgiving, petition or penitence. All he seems to know is, however, the prayer of petition, in the case of temporal trials and needs, and amidst spiritual difficulties.[316]

Throughout the writing Luther is dominated by the idea that faith in Christ the Redeemer, and in personal salvation, must at all costs be increased. At the same time he is no less certain that the Papists neither prayed aright, nor were able to perform any good works because they had no faith.

His exhortations to a devout life (some of them fine enough in themselves, for instance, what he says on the trusting prayer of the sinner, on the prayers of the congregation which cry aloud to heaven and on patience under bitter sufferings), are, as a rule, intermingled to such an extent with polemical matter, that, instead of a school of the spiritual life, we seem rather to have before us the turmoil of the battlefield.[317] To understand this we must bear in mind that he wrote the book amidst the excitement into which he was thrown by the launching of the ban.

In the somewhat earlier writing on the Magnificat, which might equally well have served as a medium for the enforcing of virtue and which in some parts Luther did so use,[318] we also find the same unbridled spirit of hatred and abuse. Nor is it lacking even in his later works of edification. The most peaceable ethical excursus Luther contrives to disfigure by his bitterness, his calumnies and, not seldom, by his venom.

In the Sermon on Good Works as soon as he comes to speak of prayer he has a cut at the formalism of the prayer beloved of the Papists;[319] he then proceeds to abuse the churches and convents for their mode of life, their chanting and babbling, all performed in “obstinate unbelief,” etc. At least one-half of his instruction on fasting consists in mockery of the fasting as practised by the Papists. His anger, however, reaches its climax in the 4th Commandment, where he completely forgets his subject, and, losing all mastery over himself, wildly storms against the spiritual authorities and their disorders.[320] The only allusion to anything that by any stretch of imagination would be termed a work, is the following:[321] The rascally behaviour of the Church’s officers and episcopal or clerical functionaries “ought to be repressed by the secular sword because no other means is available.” “The best thing, and the only remaining remedy, would be, that the King, Princes, nobles, townships and congregations should take the law into their hands, so that the bishops and clergy might have good cause to fear and therefore to obey.” For everything must make room for the Word of God.

“Neither Rome, nor heaven, nor earth” may decree anything contrary to the first three Commandments.

In dealing with these first three Commandments the booklet releases the reader at one stroke from all the Church’s laws hitherto observed. “Hence I allow each man to choose the day, the food and the amount of his fasting.”[322] “Where the spirit of Christ is, there all is free, for faith does not allow itself to be tied down to any work.”[323]

“The Christian who lives by faith has no need of any teacher’s good works.”[324] Here we can see the chief reason why Luther’s instructions on virtue and the spiritual life are so meagre.

A Lutheran Theologian on the Lack of any Teaching Concerning “Emancipation from the World”

Even from Protestant theologians we hear the admission that Luther’s Reformation failed to make sufficient allowance for the doctrine of piety; he neglected, so they urge, the question of man’s “emancipation from the world,” so that, even to the present day, Protestantism, and traditional Lutheran theology in particular, lacks any definite rule of piety. According to these critics, ever since Luther’s day practical and adequate instructions had been wanting with regard to what, subsequent to the reconciliation with the Father brought about by Justification, still remains “to be done in the Father’s house”; nor are we told how the life in Christ is to be led, of which nevertheless the Apostle Paul speaks so eloquently, though this is in reality the “main question in Christianity” and concerns the “vital interests of the Church.”

The remarks just quoted occur in an article by the theologian Julius Kaftan, Oberkonsistorialrat at Berlin, published in the “Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche” in 1908 under the title, “Why does the Evangelical Church know no doctrine of the Redemption in the narrower sense, and how may this want be remedied?” We all the more gladly append some further remarks by a theologian, who, as a rule, is by no means favourably disposed to Catholicism.

According to Kaftan, Luther indeed supplied “all the elements” for the upbuilding of a doctrine of “redemption from the world”; he gave “the stimulus” to the thought; it is “not as though we had no conception of it.”

But he, and the Reformation as a whole, failed to furnish any “actual, detailed doctrine” on this subject because their attack was directed, and had to be directed, against the ideal of piety as they found it in the Church’s monastic life; they destroyed it, so the author opines, because it was only under this distorted monkish shape that the “Christian idea of redemption from the world was then met.”[325] The Reformation omitted to replace it by a better system. It suffers from having fallen into the way of giving “too great prominence to the doctrine of Justification,” whereas the salvation “bestowed by Christ is not merely Justification and forgiveness of sins,” as the traditional Lutheran theology seems on the surface to assume even to-day, but rather the “everlasting possession” to be reached by a Christ-like life; Justification is but the road to this possession. Because people failed to keep this in view the doctrine of the real “work of salvation” has from the beginning been made far too little of.

A further reason which explains the neglect is, according to Kaftan, the following: In Catholicism it is the Church which acts as the guide to piety and supplies all the spiritual aids required; she acts as intermediary between God and the faithful. But “the Evangelical teaching rejected the Church (in this connection) as a supernatural agency for the dispensation of the means of salvation. In her place it set the action of the Spirit working by means of the Word of God.” Since this same teaching stops short at the Incarnation and Satisfaction of Christ, it has “no room for any doctrine of redemption (from the world) as a work of God.”[326] Pietism, with all its irregularities, was merely an outcome of this deficiency; but even the Pietists never succeeded in formulating such a doctrine of redemption.

It is to the credit of the author that he feels this want deeply and points out the way in which theology can remedy it.[327] He would fain see introduced a system of plain directions, though framed on lines different from those of the “ostensibly final doctrinal teaching” of the Formula of Concord,[328] i.e. instructions to the devout Christian how to manifest in his life in the world the death and resurrection of Christ which St. Paul experienced in himself. Much too much emphasis had been laid in Protestantism on Luther’s friendliness to the world and the joy of living, which he was the first to teach Christians in opposition to the doctrine of the Middle Ages; yet the other idea, of redemption from the world, must nevertheless retain a lasting significance in Christianity. Although, before Luther’s day, the Church had erroneously striven to attain to the latter solely in the monastic life, yet there is no doubt “that the most delicate blossoms of pre-Reformation piety sprang from this soil, and that the best forces in the Church owed their origin to this source.” Is it merely fortuitous, continues the author, “that the ‘Imitation of Christ,’ by Thomas à Kempis, should be so widely read throughout Christendom, even by Evangelicals? Are there not many Evangelical Christians who could witness that this book has been a great help to them in a crisis of their inner life? But whoever knows it knows what the idea of redemption from the world there signifies.” All this leads our author to the conclusion: “The history of Christianity and of the Church undoubtedly proves that here [in the case of the defect in the Lutheran theology he is instancing] it is really a question of a motive power and central thought of our religion.”[329] He points out to the world of our day, “that growing civilisation culminates in disgust with the world and with civilisation.” “Then,” he continues, “the soul again cries for God, for the God Who is above all the world and in Whom alone the heart finds rest. As it ever was, so is it still to-day.”[330]

It is a satisfaction to hear this call which must rejoice the heart of every believer. The same, however, had been heard throughout the ancient Church and had met with a happy response. Not in the “Imitation” only, but in a hundred other writings of Catholics, mystic and ascetic, could our author have found the ideals of Christian perfection and of the rest in God which comes from inward severance from the world, all expressed with the utmost clearness and the warmest feeling. Nor was Christian perfection imprisoned within the walls of the monasteries; it also flourished in the breezy atmosphere of the world. The Church taught the universality of this ideal of perfect love of God, of the imitation of Christ and of detachment from the world, and she recommended it indiscriminately to all classes, inviting people to practise it under all conditions of life and expending liberally in all directions her supernatural powers in order to attain her aim. Among the best of those whose writings inaugurated a school of piety may be classed St. Bernard and Gerson, in whom Luther had found light and edification when still a zealous monk. With him, however, the case was very different. Of the works he bequeathed to posterity the Protestant theologian referred to above, says regretfully: They contain neither a “doctrine” nor a definite “scheme of instruction” on “that side of life which faces God.” “No clear, conclusive thoughts on this all-important matter are to be found.”

On the other hand it must be added that there is no want of “clear, conclusive thoughts” to a quite opposite effect; not merely on enjoyment of the world, but on a kind of sovereignty over it which is scarcely consistent with the effort after self-betterment.

The Means of Self-Reform and their Reverse Side

Self-denial as the most effective means of self-education in the good, and self-conquest in outward and inward things, receive comparatively small attention from Luther; rather he is set on delivering people from the “anxiety-breeding,” traditional prejudice in favour of spiritual renunciation, obedience to the Church and retrenchment in view of the evil. This deliverance, thanks to its alluring and attractive character, was welcomed, in spite of Luther’s repeated warnings against any excess of the spirit of the world. His abandonment of the path of perfection so strongly recommended by Christ and his depreciation of “peculiar” works and “singular” practices were more readily understood and also more engaging than his words in favour of real works of faith. He set up his own inward experiences of the difficulty and, as he thought, utter futility of the conflict with self, together with his hostility to all spiritual efforts exceeding the common bounds, as the standard for others, and, in fact, even for the Church; in the Catholic past, on the other hand, the faithful had been taught to recognise the standard of the Church, their teacher and guide, as the rule by which to judge of their own experiences.

Here to prove what we have said, would necessitate the repetition of what has already been given elsewhere.

Luther’s writings, particularly his letters, also contain certain instructions, which, fortunately, have not become the common property of Protestants, but which everybody must feel to be absolutely opposed to anything like self-betterment. We need only call to mind his teaching, that temptations to despondency and despair are best withstood by committing some sin in defiance of the devil, or by diverting the mind to sensual and carnal distractions.[331] The words: “What matters it if we commit a fresh sin?”[332] since through faith we have forgiveness, and the other similar utterance, “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe more boldly still,” are characteristic of him, though he would have been unwilling to see them pressed or taken too literally. By these and other statements he did, however, seriously endanger the ethical character of sin; in reality he diminished the abhorrence for sin, though no doubt he did not fully perceive the consequences of his act.[333]

To the man who had become sensible of the ensnaring influence of the world and of its evil effects upon himself, or who on account of his mental build felt himself endangered by it, Catholic moralists advised retirement, recollection, self-examination and solitude. Luther was certainly not furthering the cause of perfection when he repeatedly insisted, with an emphasis that is barely credible, that solitude must be avoided as the deadly foe of the true life of the soul, and that what should be sought was rather company and distraction. Solitude was a temptation to sin. “I too find,” so he says, “that I never fall into sin more frequently than when I am alone.... Quietude calls forth the worst of thoughts. Whatever our trouble be, it then becomes much more dangerous,” etc.[334] Of course, in the case of persons of gloomy disposition Luther was quite right in recommending company, but it was just in doing so that he exceeded the bounds in his praise of sensual distractions;[335] of his own example, too, he makes far too much. On the other hand, all the great men in the Church had sought to find the guiding light of self-knowledge in solitude; this they regarded as a school for the subjugation of unruly emotions.

Not only were self-control and self-restraint something strange to Luther,[336] but he often went so far as to adduce curious theoretical reasonings of his own to prove that they could have no place in his public life and controversies, and why he and his helpers were compelled to give the reins to anger, hatred and abuse. Thus the work of self-improvement was renounced in yet another essential point.

Then again with regard to prayer. His exhortations thereto are numerous enough and he himself prayed frequently. But it is not necessary to be an ascetic to see that several things are wanting in his admonitions to prayer. The first is the salt of contrition and compunction. He was less alive to the wholesome underlying feeling of melancholy that characterises the soul which prays to God in the consciousness of having abused its free-will, than he was to the suggestions of self-confidence and assurance of salvation. The second thing wanting is the humility which should permeate prayer even when exalted to the highest limits of trusting confidence. If man, as Luther taught, is incapable of any work, then of course there can be no sense of shame at not having done more to please God and to merit greater grace from Him. Moreover, Luther indirectly encouraged people to pray in the bold consciousness of being justified and to look for the keeping of the law as a natural consequence of such “faith.” Lastly, and this sums up everything, we miss the spirit of love in his often so strongly worded and eloquent exhortations to prayer; the spirit which should have led him to resignation to God’s designs, and to commit his life’s work to the Will of God with a calm indifference as to its eventual success.[337] Hardly ever do we find any trace of that zeal for souls which embraces the whole of God’s broad kingdom even to the heathen, in short, the whole of the Church’s sphere.[338] On the other hand, however, he expressly exhorts his followers to increase the ardour of their prayers, after his own example, by interspersing them with curses on all whose views were different.[339]

In place of the pleasing variety of the old exercises of prayer—from the Office recited by the clergy with its daily commemoration of the Saints down to the multifarious devotions of the people, to say nothing of the great Sacrifice of the Altar, the very heart’s pulse of the Church—he recommends as a rule only the Our Father, the Creed and the Psalms—prayers indeed rich beyond all others and which will ever hold the first place among Christian devotions. But had they not been brought closer to the heart formerly in the inner and outer life of prayer dealt with in the writings of the Catholic masters of the spiritual life, and exemplified in the churches and monasteries, and even in private houses and the very streets? But behind all this rich display Luther saw lurking the demon of “singular works.” The monk absorbed in contemplation was, in Luther’s eyes, an unhappy wretch sitting “in filth” up to his neck. Thus he restricts himself to recommending the old short formulas of prayer. In accordance with his doctrine that faith alone avails, he desires that sin, and the intention of sinning, should be withstood by the use of the Our Father: “That you diligently learn to say the Our Father, the Creed and the Ten Commandments.”[340] “Grant, O God (thus must you pray), that Thy Name be hallowed by me, Thy Kingdom come to me, and Thy Will be done in me”; in this wise they would come to scorn “devil, death and hell.”[341] He indeed kept in touch with the people by means of the olden prayers, but, even into them, he knew how to introduce his own new views; the Kingdom of God, which to him is forgiveness of sins,[342] “must come to us by faith,” and the chief article of the whole Creed with which to defy “death, devil and hell” was the “remissio peccatorum.” These remarks must not, however, be understood as detracting from the value of his fine, practical, and often sympathetic expositions of the Our Father, whether in his special work on it in 1518 or in the Larger Catechism.[343]

Of the numerous “man-made laws” which he banished at one stroke by denying the Church’s authority there is no need to speak here. Without a doubt the overturning of all these barriers erected against human lusts and wilfulness was scarcely conducive to the progress of the individual.

Nor does the absence of any higher standard of life in his own case[344] serve to recommend his system of ethics. Seeing that, as has been already pointed out,[345] he himself is disposed to admit his failings, the apparent confidence with which, in order to exalt his reform of ethics, he appeals to the biblical verity, that the truth of a doctrine is proved by its moral fruits, is all the more surprising.

Of this confidence we have a remarkable example in a sermon devoted to the explanation of the 1st Epistle of St. John. At the same time the exceptional boldness of his language and the resolute testimony he bears in his own favour constitute striking proof of how the very firmness of his attitude impressed his followers and exercised over many a seductive spell. The weakness of the Reformer’s ethics seems all at once to vanish before his mighty eloquence.

The discourse in question, where at the same time he vindicates his own conduct, belongs to 1532. About that time he preached frequently at Wittenberg on St. John’s sublime words concerning the love of God and our neighbour (1 Jo. iv. 16-21). His object was to cleanse and better the morals of Wittenberg, the low standard of which he deplores, that the results of justification by faith might shine forth more brightly. At that very time he was treating with the Elector and the Saxon Estates in view of a new visitation of all the parishes to be held the next year, which might promote the good of morality. The sermons were duly reported by his pupil Cruciger, whose notes were published at Wittenberg in 1533 under the general title of “A Sermon on Love.”[346]

Dealing therein with ethical practice he starts by proclaiming that, according to the “pious Apostle” whose doctrines he was expounding, everything depends on Christians proving by their fruits whether they really “walk in love.” Of many, however, who not only declared themselves well acquainted with the principles of faith and ethics but even professed to be qualified to teach them, it was true that, “if we applied and manifested in our lives their ethics after their example, then we should be but poorly off.”[347] Such men must, nevertheless, be tested by their works. Nor does he exempt himself from this duty of putting ethics to a practical test.

Nowhere else does he insist more boldly than in these sermons on proof by actual deeds, even in his own case. According to the words of John, so he says, a life of love would give them “confidence in the Day of Judgment” (iv. 17). Confidence, nay, a spirit of holy defiance, even in the presence of death and judgment, must fill the hearts of all who acted aright, owing to the very testimony of their fellow-men to the blamelessness of their lives. “We must be able to boast [with Christ, ‘the reconciliation for our sins’] not before God alone but before God and all Christendom, and against the whole world, that no one can truthfully condemn or even accuse us.” “We must be able to assure ourselves that we have lived in such a way that no one can take scandal at us”; we must have this testimony, “that we have walked on earth in simplicity and godly piety, and that no one can charge us with having been given to ‘trickery.’” In this wise had Paul countered false doctrines by boasting, just as Moses and Samuel had already done under the Old Covenant.[348]

Coming to his own person the speaker thinks he can honestly say the same of himself, though, like the rest, he too must confess to being still in need of the article of the forgiveness of sins. There were false teachers who could not appeal so confidently to the morality of their lives, “proud, puffed-up spirits who lay claim to a great and wonderful holiness, who want to reform the whole world and to do something singular in order that all may say that they alone are true Christians. This sort of thing lasts indeed for a while, during which they parade and strut, but, when the hour of death comes, that is the end of all such idle nonsense.”[349] He himself, with the faithful teachers and good Christians, is in a very different case: “If I must boast of how I have acted in my position towards everyone then I will say: I witness before you and all the world, and know that God too witnesses on my behalf together with all His angels, that I have not falsified God’s Word, His Baptism or the Sacrament but have preached and acted faithfully as much as was in me, and suffered all ill solely for God’s and His Word’s sake. Thus must all the Saints boast.”[350]

He lays the greatest stress on the unanimous testimony which the preacher must receive from his fellow-men and from posterity. He must be able to say, “you shall be my witnesses,” he “must be able to call upon all men to bear him witness”; they must bear us witness on the Last Day that we have lived aright and shown by our deeds that we were Christians. If this is the case, if they can point to their practice of good works, then the preaching of good works can be insisted on with all the emphasis required.[351] It is natural, however, that towards the end Luther lays greater stress on his teaching than on his works.

On his preaching of the value of good works he solemnly assures us: “We can testify before the whole world that we have preached much more grandly and forcefully on good works than even those who calumniate us.”[352]

Self-Reform and Hatred of the Foe

In speaking of Luther, his staunch friends are wont to boast of his lifelong struggle against the fetters of the Papacy and of the overwhelming power of his assault on the olden Church; this, so they imply, redounded to his glory and showed his moral superiority.

In what follows we shall therefore consider some of the main ethical features of this struggle of Luther’s and of the attitude he adopted in his conflict with Popery. His very defence of himself and of the moral effects of his preaching, which we have just heard him pronounce subsequent to the Diet of Augsburg, invites us to consider in the light of ethics his public line of action, as traced in his writings of that period. These years represent a turning-point in his life, and here, if anywhere, we should be able to detect his higher moral standard and the power of his new principles to effect a change first of all in himself. In the sermon of 1532 (above, p. 96) he had said: The new Gospel which he had “preached rightly and faithfully” made those who accepted it “to walk in simplicity and godly piety” according to the law of love, and to stand forth “blameless before all the world.” Could he truthfully, he, the champion of this Gospel, really lay any claim to these qualities as here he seems to do, at least indirectly?

His controversial tracts dating from that time display anything but “simplicity and godly piety.” His hate was without bounds, and his fury blazed forth in thunderbolts which slew all who dared to attempt to bridge the chasm between him and the Catholic Church. Reproaching voices, about him and within him, seemed to him to come from so many devils. The Coburg, where he stayed, was assuredly “full of devils,” so he wrote.[353] There, in spite of his previous attempts to jest and be cheerful,[354] and notwithstanding the violent and distracting labours in which he was engaged, the devil had actually established an “embassy,” troubling him with many anxieties and temptations.[355]

The devil he withstood by paroxysms of that hate and rage which he had always in store for his enemies. “The Castle may be crammed with devils, yet Christ reigneth there in the midst of His foes!”[356] He includes in the same category the Papists, and the Turks who then were threatening Europe: Both are “monsters,” both have been “let loose by the fury of the devil,” both represent a common “woe doomed to overwhelm the world in these last days of Christendom.”[357] These “stout jackasses” (of the Diet of Augsburg), so he cried from the ramparts of his stronghold, “want to meddle in the business of the Church. Let them try!”[358] “The very frenzy and madness of our foes of itself alone proves that we are in the right.”[359] “Their blasphemy, their murders, their contempt of the Gospel, and other enormities against it, increase day by day and must bring the Turk into the field against us.”[360] “I am a preacher of Christ,” so he assures us, “and Christ is the truth.”—But is hatred a mark of a disciple of Christ, or of a higher mission for the reformation of doctrine and worship?

Elsewhere Luther himself describes hate as a “true image of the devil; in fact, it is neither human nor diabolical but the devil himself whose whole being is nothing but an everlasting burning,” etc. “The devil is always acting contrary to love.” “Such is his way; God works nothing but benefits and deeds of charity, while he on the contrary performs nothing but works of hate.”[361] On other occasions in his sermons he speaks in familiar and at the same time inspiring words of the beauty of Christian love. “Love is a great and rich treasure, worth many hundred thousand gulden, or a great kingdom. Who is there who would not esteem it highly and pursue it to the limit of his power, nay, pour out sweat and blood for it if he only hoped or knew how to obtain it!... What is sun, moon, heavens or all creation, all the angels, all the saints compared with it? Love is nothing but the one, unspeakable, eternal good and the highest treasure, which is God Himself.”[362]

But his “Vermanũg an die geistlichen versammelt auff dem Reichstag zu Augsburg” (which he wrote from the Coburg) was the fruit, not of love, but of the most glowing hate.[363] In a private letter he calls it quite rightly, not an “exhortation” (Vermanũg), but “an invective” against the clergy,[364] and, in another letter, admits the “violent spirit” in which he had written it; when composing it the abusive thoughts had rushed in on him like an “uninvited band of moss-troopers.”[365] But, that he drove them back as he declares he did, is not discernible from the work in question.

In the booklet under discussion he several times uses what would seem to be words of peace, and, in one passage, even sketches a scheme for reunion; but, as a Protestant critic of the latter says, not altogether incorrectly, the “idea was of its very nature impossible of execution.”[366] Indeed, we may say that Luther himself could see well enough that the idea was a mere deception; the best motto for the writing would be: Enmity and hatred until death!

The Catholic members of the Diet are there represented as “obstinate and stiff-necked,” and as “bloodhounds raging wantonly”; they had hitherto, but all to no purpose, “tried fraud and trickery, force and anger, murder and penalties.” To the bishops he cries: “May the devil who drives them dog their footsteps, and all our misfortunes fall on their head!” He puts them on a level with “procurers and whoremongers,” and trounces them as “the biggest robbers of benefices, bawds and procurers to be found in all the world.”[367]—There had been many cases of infringement of the law of celibacy among both lower and higher clergy previous to Luther’s advent, while the Wittenberg spirit of freedom set free in the German lands helped considerably to increase the evil amongst the ranks of the Catholic clergy; but to what unheard-of exaggerations, all steeped in hate, did not Luther have recourse the better to inflame the people and to defend the illicit marriages of those of the clergy who now were the preachers of the new religion? He was about “to sweep out of the house the harlots and abducted spouses” of the bishops, and not merely to show up the bishops as real “lechers and brothel-keepers” (a favourite expression of his), but to drag them still deeper in the mire. It was his unclean fancy, which delighted to collect the worst to be found in corrupt localities abroad, that led him to say: “And, moreover, we shall do clean away with your Roman Sodom, your Italian weddings, your Venetian and Turkish brides, and your Florentine bridegrooms!”[368]

The pious founders of the bishoprics and monasteries, he cries, “never intended to found bawdy-houses or Roman robber-churches,” nor yet to endow with their money “strumpets and rascals, or Roman thieves and robbers.” The bishops, however, are set on “hiding, concealing and burying in silence the whole pot-broth of their abominations and corrupt, unepiscopal abuses, shame, vice and noxious perversion of Christendom, and on seeing them lauded and praised,” whereas it is high time that they “spat upon their very selves”; their auxiliary bishops “smear the unschooled donkeys with chrism” (ordain priests) and these in turn seek “to rise to power”; yet revolt against them and against all authority is brewing in the distance; if the bloody deeds of Münzer’s time were repeated, then, he, Luther, would not be to blame; “men’s minds are prepared and greatly embittered and, that, not without due cause”; if you “go to bits” then “your blood be upon your own head!” Meanwhile it is too bad that the bishops “should go about in mitres and great pomp,” as though we were “old fools”; but still worse is it that they should make of all this pomp “articles of faith and a matter of conscience, so that people must commit sin if they refuse to worship such child’s play; surely this is the devil’s own work.” Of such hateful misrepresentations, put forward quite seriously, a dozen other instances might be cited from this writing. “But that we must look upon such child’s play as articles of faith, and befool ourselves with bishops’ mitres, from that we cannot get away, no matter how much we may storm or jeer.”[369]

The writing culminates in the following outburst: “In short we and you alike know that you are living without God’s Word, but that, on our side, we have God’s Word.”

“If I live I shall be your bane; if I die I shall be your death! For God Himself has driven me to attack you! I must, as Hosea says, be to you as a bear and a lion in the way of Assur. You shall have no peace from me until you amend or rush to your own destruction.”[370]

At a later date, of the saying “If I live,” etc., Luther made the Latin couplet: “Pestis eram vivus moriens ero mors tua papa.” In life, O Pope, I was thy plague, in dying I shall be thy death. He first produced this verse at Spalatin’s home at Altenburg on his return journey from the Coburg; afterwards he frequently repeated it, for instance, at Schmalkalden in 1537, when he declared, that he would bequeath his hatred of the Papacy as an heirloom to his disciples.[371]

As early as 1522 he had also made use of the Bible passage concerning the lion and the bear in his “Wyder den falsch genantten geystlichen Standt” with the like assurance of the Divine character of his undertaking, and in a form which shows how obsessed he was by the spirit of hate: He was sure of his doctrine and by it would judge even the angels; without it no one could be saved, for it was God’s and not his, for which reason his sentence too was God’s and not his: “Let this be my conclusion. If I live you shall have no peace from me, if you kill me, you shall have ten times less peace; and I shall be to you as Oseas says, xiii. 8, a bear in the path and a lion in the road. However you may treat me you shall not have your will, until your brazen front and iron neck are broken either unwillingly or by grace. Unless you amend, as I would gladly wish, then we may persist, you in your anger and hostility and I in paying no heed.”[372]

On another occasion he tells us how he would gladly have left Wittenberg with Melanchthon and the others who were going by way of Nuremberg to the Diet of Augsburg, but a friend had said to him: “Hold your tongue! Your tongue is an evil one!”[373]

After the publication of the “Vermanũg an die Geistlichen,” or possibly even before, Melanchthon seems to have written to him, re-echoing the observations of startled and anxious friends, and saying that the writing had been “variously” appreciated, in itself a significant remark; Luther himself at that time certainly dreaded the censure of his adherents. Still, he insists as defiantly as ever on his “invective”: “Let not your heart be troubled,” he admonishes Melanchthon, “My God is a God of fools, Who is wont to laugh at the wise. Whence I trouble myself about them not the least bit.”[374] On the contrary, he even came near regarding his writing as a special work of God.

As we have already pointed out, the defiant and violent steps he took, only too often became in his eyes special works of God. His notorious, boundless sense of his own greatness, to which this gave rise, is the first of the phenomena which accompanied his hate; these it will now be our duty briefly to examine in order better to appreciate the real strength of his ethical principles in his own case.

Companion-Phenomena of his Hate

As a matter of fact Luther’s sense of his superiority was so great that the opponents he attacked had to listen to language such as no mortal had ever before dreamed of making use of against the Church.

The Church is being reformed “in my age” in “a Divine way, not after human ways.” “Were we to fall, then Christ would fall with us.”[375]

Whenever he meets with contradiction, whenever he hears even the hint of a reproach or accusation, he at once ranges himself—as he does, for instance, in the “Vermanũg”—on the side of the persecuted “prophets and apostles,” nay, he even likens himself to Christ.[376] He stood alone, without miracles, and devoid of holiness, as he himself candidly informed Henry VIII. of England; nevertheless he pits himself against the heads of both Church and Empire assembled at the Diet.

All he could appeal to was his degree of Doctor of Theology: “Had I not been a Doctor, the devil would have given me much trouble, for it is no small matter to attack the whole Papacy and to charge it” (with error).[377] In the last instance, however, his self-confidence recalls him to the proud consciousness of his entire certainty. “Thus our cause stands firm, because we know how we believe and how we live.”[378]

With these words from his “Vermanũg” he defies the whole of the present and of the past, the Pope and all his Councils.

He knows—and that suffices—that what he has and proclaims is God’s Word; “and if you have God’s Word you may say: Now that I have the Word what need have I to ask what the Councils say?”[379] “Among all the Councils I have never found one where the Holy Spirit rules.... There will never be no Council [sic], according to the Holy Spirit, where the people have to agree. God allows this because He Himself wills to be the Judge and suffers not men to judge. Hence He commands every man to know what he believes.”[380] Luther only, and those who follow him, know what they believe; he takes the place of all the councils, Doctors of the Church, Popes and bishops, in short, of all the ecclesiastical sources of theology.

“The end of the world may now come,” he said, in 1540, “for all that pertains to the knowledge of God has now been supplied” (by me).[381]

With this contempt for the olden Church he combines a most imperious exclusiveness in his treatment even of those who like him were opposed to the Pope, whether they were individuals or formed schools of thought. They must follow his lead, otherwise there awaits them the sentence he launched at the Zwinglians from the Coburg: “These Sacramentarians are not merely liars but the very embodiment of lying, deceit and hypocrisy; this both Carlstadt and Zwingli prove by word and deed.” Their books, he says, contain pestilential stuff; they refused to retract even when confuted by him, but simply because they stood in fear of their own following; he would continue to put them to shame by those words, which so angered them: “You have a spirit different from ours.” He could not look upon them as brothers; this was duly expressed in the article in which he went so far as to promise them that love which was due even to enemies. On his own authority he curtly dubs them “heretics,” and is resolved in this way to tread unharmed with Christ through Satan’s kingdom and all his lying artifices.[382] Luther’s aggravating exclusiveness went hand-in-hand with his overweening self-confidence.

In consequence of this treatment the Swiss, through the agency of Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor, complained to Bucer, “Beware of not believing Luther readily or of not yielding to him! He is a scorpion; no matter how carefully he is handled he will sting, even though to begin with he seems to caress your hand.”[383] To this Bucer, who had also ventured to differ from Luther, wrote in his reply: “He has flung another scathing book at us.... He speaks, and means to speak, much more harshly than heretofore.” “He will not now endure even the smallest contradiction, and I am sure that, were I to go any further, I should cause such a tragedy that all the churches would once more be convulsed.”[384] Another Protestant voice we hear exclaiming with a fine irony: “Luther rages, thunders and lightens as though he were a Jupiter and had all the bolts of heaven at his command to launch against us.... Has he then become an emperor of the Christian army on the model of the Pope, so as to be able to issue every pronouncement that his brain suggests?”[385] “He confuses the two Natures in Christ and brings forward foolish, nay godless, statements. If we may not condemn this, then what, pray, may be condemned?”[386]

His natural lack of charity, of which we shall have later on to add many fresh and appalling examples to those already enumerated, aggravated his hatred, his sense of his own greatness and his exclusiveness. What malicious hatred is there not apparent in his advice that Zwingli and Œcolampadius should be condemned, “even though this led to violence being offered them.”[387] It is with reluctance that one gazes on Luther’s abuse of the splendid gifts of mind and heart with which he had been endowed.

A recent Protestant biographer of Carlstadt’s laments the “frightful harshness of his (Luther’s) polemics.” “How deep the traces left by his mode of controversy were, ought not to be overlooked,” so he writes. “From that time forward this sort of thing took the place of any real discussion of differences of opinion between members of the Lutheran camp, nor did people even seem aware of how far they were thus drifting from the kindliness and dignity of Christian modes of thought.”[388] What is here said of the treatment of opponents within the camp applies even more strongly to Luther’s behaviour towards Catholics.

The following episode of his habitual persecution of Albert, Archbishop and Elector of Mayence, illustrates this very well.

On June 21, 1535, the Archbishop in accordance with the then law and with the sentence duly pronounced by the judge, had caused Hans von Schönitz, once his trusted steward, to be executed; the charge of which he had been proved guilty was embezzlement on a gigantic scale. The details of the case, which was dealt with rather hurriedly, have not yet been adequately cleared up, but even Protestant researchers agree that Schönitz deserved to be dealt with as a “public thief,”[389] seeing that “in the pecuniary transactions which he undertook for Albert he was not unmindful of his own advantage”;[390] “there is no doubt that he was rightly accused of all manner of peculation and cheating.”[391] Luther, however, furiously entered the lists on behalf of the executed man and against the detested Archbishop who, in spite of his private faults, remained faithful to the Church and was a hindrance to the spread of Lutheranism in Germany. Luther implicitly believed all that was told him, of Hans’s innocence and of Albert’s supposed abominable motives, by Schönitz’s brother and his friend Ludwig Rabe—who himself was implicated in the matter—and both of whom came to Wittenberg. “Both naturally related the case from their own point of view.”[392] Luther sent two letters to the Cardinal, one more violent than the other.[393] The second would seem to have been intended for publication and was sent to the press, though at present no copy of it can be discovered. In it in words of frightful violence he lays at the door of the Prince of the Church the blood of the man done to death. The Archbishop was a “thorough-paced Epicurean who does not believe that Abel lives in God and that his blood still cries more loudly than Cain, his brother’s murderer, fancies.” He, Luther, like another Elias, must call down woes “upon Achab and Isabel.” He had indeed heard of many evil deeds done by Cardinals, “but I had not taken your Cardinalitial Holiness for such an insolent, wicked dragon.... Your Electoral Highness may if he likes commit a nuisance in the Emperor’s Court of Justice, infringe the freedom of the city of Halle, usurp the sword of Justice belonging to Saxony, and, over and above this, look on the world and on all reason as rags fit only for the closet”—such is a fair sample of the language—and, moreover, treat everything in a Popish, Roman, Cardinalitial way, but, please God, our Lord God will by our prayers one day compel your Electoral Highness to sweep out all the filth yourself.

In the first letter he had threatened fiercely the hated Cardinal with publishing what he knew (or possibly only feigned to know) of his faults; he would not “advise him to stir up the filth any further”; here in the second letter he charges him in a general way with robbery, petty theft and fraud in the matter of Church property, also with having cheated a woman of the town whom he used to keep; he deserved to be “hanged on a gallows three times as high as the Giebichstein,” where Schönitz had been executed. Incidentally he promises him a new work that shall reveal all his doings. The threatened work was, however, never published, Albert’s family, the Brandenburgs, having raised objections at the Electoral Court of Saxony. Albert, however, offered quite frankly to submit the Schönitz case and the grievances raised by his relatives to the judgment of George of Anhalt, one of the princes who had gone over to Lutheranism, who was perfectly at liberty to take the advice of Jonas, nay, even of Luther himself. “In this we may surely see a proof that he was not conscious of being in the least blameworthy.”[394] At any rate he seems to have been quite willing to lay his case even before his most bitter foe.[395]

Such was Luther’s irritability and quickness of temper, even in private concerns, that, at times, even in his letters, he would pour forth the most incredible threats.

On one occasion, in 1542, when a messenger sent by Justus Jonas happened to offend him, he at once wrote an “angry letter” to Jonas and on the next day followed it up with another in which he says, that his anger has not yet been put to rest; never is Jonas to send such people into his house again or else he will order them to be gagged and put under restraint. “Remember this, for I have said it. This man may scold and do the grand elsewhere, but not in Luther’s house, unless indeed he wants to have his tongue torn out. Are we going to allow such caitiffs as these to play the emperor?”[396]—He had, as we already know, a sad experience with a certain girl named Rosina, whom he had engaged as a servant, but who turned out to be a person of loose morals and brought his house into disrepute. “She shall never again have the chance of deceiving anyone so long as there is water enough in the Elbe,” so he writes of her to a judge. In letters to other persons he accuses her of “villainy and fornication”; she had “shamed all the inmates of his house with the [assumed] name of Truchsess”; he could only think that she had been “foisted on him by the Papists as an arch-prostitute—the god-forsaken minx and lying bag of trouble, who has damaged my household from garret to cellar ... accursed harridan and perjured, thieving drab that she is!” Away with her “for the honour of the Evangel.”[397]

Even in younger days he had been too much accustomed to give the reins to his excitement, as his two indignant letters (his own description of them) to his brother monks at Erfurt show.[398] Even his upbringing of his own children, highly lauded as it has been, suffered from this same lack of self-control. “The mere disobedience of a boy would stir him to his very depths. For instance, he admits of a nephew he had living with him—a son of his brother James—that once ‘he angered me so greatly as almost to be the death of me, so that for a while I lost the use of my bodily powers.’”[399]—So exasperated was he with the lawyers who treacherously deceived the people that he went so far as to demand that their tongues should be torn out. At times he confesses his hot temper, owning and acknowledging that it was “sinful”; to such fits of passion he was still subject, but, as a rule, his anger was at least both right and called for, for he could not avoid being angry where it was “a question of the soul and of hell.” Anger, he also says, refreshed his inner man, sharpened his wits and chased away his temptations; he had to be angry in order to write, preach or pray well.[400]

Repeatedly he seemed on the point of quitting Wittenberg for ever in revenge for all the neglect he met with there; “I can no longer contain my anger and disappointment.”[401] It was to this depression of spirits that he was referring when he said, that, often, in his indignation, he had “flung down the keys on Our Lord God’s threshold.”[402] He sees his inability to change his surroundings and how Popery refuses to be overthrown; yet, as he told us, he is determined to “rain abuse and curses on the miscreants [the Papists] till he is carried to the grave,” and to provide the “thunder and lightning for the funeral” of the foe.[403]

A gloomy, uncanny passion often glows in his words and serves to fire the fanatism of the misguided masses.

“Lo and behold how my blood boils and how I long to see the Papacy punished!” And what was the punishment he looked for? Just before he had said that the Pope, his Cardinals and all his court should have “the skins of their bodies drawn off over their heads; the hides might then be flung into the healing bath [the sea] at Ostia, or into the fire,” unless indeed they found means to pay back all the alien property that the Pope, the “Robber of the Churches, had stolen only to waste, lose and squander it, and to spend it on whores and their ilk.” Yet even this punishment fell short of the crime, for “my spirit knows well that no temporal penalty can avail to make amends even for one Bull or Decree.”[404]

Side by side with language so astonishing we must put other sayings which paint his habitual frame of mind in a light anything but favourable: “It is God’s Word! Let what cannot stand fall ... no matter what!”[405] “The Word is true, or everything crumbles into ruin!”[406] “Even if you will not follow”—such were his words to Staupitz as early as 1521, “at least suffer me to go on and be carried away [’ire et rapi’].” “I have put on my horns against the Roman Antichrists”;[407] in these words Luther compares himself to a raving bull.

This frame of mind tended to promote his natural tendency to violence, hitherto repressed. His proposal to flay all the members of the Roman Curia was not by any means his first hint at deeds of blood; such allusions occur in other shapes in earlier discourses, particularly in his predictions of the judgments to come. The Princes, nobility and towns, so he declared, must put their foot down and prevent the shameful abuses of Rome: “If we mean to fight against the Turks let us begin at home where they are worst; if we do right in hanging thieves and beheading robbers, why then do we let Roman avarice go scot free, when all the time it is the biggest thief and robber there ever has been or will ever be upon the earth.” Whoever comes from Rome bringing in his pocket a collation to a benefice ought to be warned either “to desist, or else to jump into the Rhine or the nearest pond, and give the Roman Brief—letter, seals and all, a cold bath.”[408] Not without a shudder can one read the description in his “Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” written in his last days, of the kinds of death best suited to the Pope and his Curia, of which the flaying and the “bath” at Ostia is only one example. (Cp. below, xxx., 2.) True enough he is careful to point out that such a death will be theirs only should they refuse to amend their ways and accept the Lutheran Evangel!

Ten years previously, in 1535, he had written to Melanchthon, who shrank from acts of violence with what appeared to Luther too great timidity: “Oh, that our most venerable Cardinals, Popes and Roman Legates had more Kings of England to put them to death!”[409] These words he penned soon after Henry VIII of England had sacrificed the lives of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and his Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, to his sensual passions and his thirst for blood. Luther adds, of the Pope and the Curia, with the object of vindicating the sentence of death he had passed on them, “They are traitors, thieves, robbers and regular devils.... They are out and out miscreants to the very bottom of their hearts. May God only grant you too to see this.”[410]

Fury had stood by the cradle of Luther’s undertaking and under its gloomy auspices his cause continued to progress. Without repeating what has already been said, it may suffice to point out how his excitement frequently led him to take even momentous steps which he would otherwise have boggled at. Only too frankly he admitted to his friend Lang in 1519 and soon after to Spalatin, that Eck had so exasperated him that he would now shake himself loose and write and do things from which he would otherwise have refrained. His early “jest” at Rome’s expense would now become a real warfare against her[411]—as though Rome was to be made to suffer for Eck and his violence. In 1521, from apprehension of his violence and out of consideration for the Court, Spalatin had kept back two of Luther’s writings which the latter wished to be printed. “I shall get into a towering rage,” so the author wrote to him, “and bring out much worse things on this subject afterwards if my manuscripts are lost, or you refuse to surrender them. You cannot destroy the spirit even though you destroy the lifeless paper.”[412]—This incident at so early a date shows how deeply seated in him was his tendency to violence; even at the outset it was to some extent personal animus which led him to shape his action as he did. Self-esteem and the plaudits of the mob had even then begun to dim his mental vision.

The part played by the first person is great indeed in Luther’s writings.

“We should all have fallen back into the state of the brute!” “Not for a thousand years has God bestowed such great graces on any bishop as on me.” “I, wonderful monk that I am,” have, by God’s grace, overthrown the devil of Rome; “I have stamped off the heads of more than twenty factions, as though they had been worms.” Countless other such utterances are to be found in what has gone before.[413] “He,” so he declares, “was surely far too learned to allow himself to be taught by the Swiss theologians”; this was one of the sayings that led the friends of the latter to speak of his “tyrannical pride.”[414]

Here come the fractious Sacramentarians, he says, and want a share in my fame; they want to celebrate a “glorious victory” as though it was not from me that they got everything. This is how things turn out, “one labours and some other man takes the fruit.”[415] Carlstadt comes forward and seeks to become a new doctor; “he is anxious to detract from my importance and to introduce among the people his own regulations.”[416]

A character where the first person asserted itself so imperiously could not but be a disputatious one. Down to his very last years Luther’s whole life was filled with strife: quarrels with the jurists; with his own theologians; with the Jews; with the Princes and rapacious nobility; with the Popish foemen and with his own colleagues and followers, even with the preachers and writers dearest to him.

Luther sought to safeguard his cause on every side, even at the cost of concessions at variance with his duty, or by grovelling subserviency to the Princes, whether he actually granted their desire,[417] or, as in the case of the bigamy of Henry VIII of England, merely threw out a suggestion.[418]

His new ethical principles should surely have been attested in his own person, above all by truthfulness. In this connection we must, however, recall to mind the observations made elsewhere. (Above, vol. iv., p. 80 ff.)

Who is the lover of truth who does not regret the advice Luther gave from the Coburg to his followers at the Diet of Augsburg, viz. to make use of cunning when the cause seemed endangered? Where does self-betterment come in if “tricks and lapses” are to form a part of his life’s task, even though “with God’s help” they were afterwards to be amended;[419] if, when treating of the most important church matters, “reservation and subterfuge (‘insidiæ’)” are not only to be used but even to be represented as the work of Christ? Wherever the principle holds: Against the malice of our opponents everything is lawful,[420] there, undoubtedly, the least honest will always have the upper hand. As to how far Luther thought himself justified in going in order to conceal his real intentions we may see from his letters to the Pope, particularly from the last letter he addressed to him, where the public assertion of his devotion to the Roman Church coincides with his private admission to friends that the Pope was Antichrist and that he had sworn to attack him.[421]

In his relentless polemics against the Church—where he does not hesitate to bring the most baseless of charges against both her dignitaries and her institutions—we might dismiss as not uncommon his tendency to see only what was evil, eagerly setting this in the foreground while passing over all that was good; his eyes also served to magnify and distort the dark spots into all manner of grotesque shapes. But what tells more heavily against him is his having evolved out of his own mind a mountain of false doctrines which he foists on the Church as hers, though in reality not one of them but the very opposite was taught in and by the Church.

The Pope, he writes, for instance, in his “Vermanũg” from the Coburg, wants to “forbid marriage” and teaches that the “love of woman” is to be despised; this is one of the abominations and plagues of Antichrist, for God created woman for the honour and help of man.[422] The state of celibacy, willingly embraced by many under the Papacy, Luther decried in the same violent writing as a “state befitting whores and knaves,”[423] and he even connects with it unmentionable abominations.

He had declared “contempt of God” to be the mark of the Papal Antichrist, but, in the booklet in question, and elsewhere, we find him tirelessly charging with utter forgetfulness of God, hatred of religion, nay, complete absence of Christian faith not only the Pope and his advisers—who, none of them rose above an Epicurean faith—but all his opponents, particularly those who by their pen had damaged his doctrine. “Willingly enough would I obey the Pope and all the bishops, but they require me to deny Christ and His Gospel and to take of God a liar, therefore I prefer to attack them.”[424] When, in addition to this, he tries in all seriousness to make the people believe that at Rome the Gospel and all it contained was scoffed at; that the Papists were all sceptics; that their Doctors did not even know the Ten Commandments; that their priests were quite unable to quiet any man’s conscience; that the popish doctrine spelt nothing but murder, and that indeed every Papist must be a murderer, etc.,[425] one is tempted to seek for a pathological explanation of so strange a phenomenon. Such explanations will, it is true, be forthcoming in due course and will furnish grounds for a more lenient judgment. Here it may suffice to instance the terrific strength of will which dominated Luther’s fiery warfare, and which at times made him see things that others, even his own followers, were absolutely unable to see. Fortunately his mad statements concerning the Papists’ love of murder found little credence, any more than his repeated assurance that the Papists were at heart on his side, at any rate their leaders, writers and educated men.

He seems, however, also to believe many other monstrous things: it was his discovery, that, “in the Papacy, men sought to find salvation in Aristotle”; this belief he attempted to instil into the people in a sermon of 1528.[426] In 1542 he assured his friends in tones no less confident that the Papists had succeeded in teaching nothing but idolatry, “for every work [as taught by them] is idolatry. What they learnt was nothing but holiness-by-works.... Man was to perform this or that; to put on a cowl or get his head shaved; whoever did not do or believe this was damned. Yet, on the other hand, even if a man did all this they were unable to say with certainty whether thereby he would be saved. Fie, devil, what sort of doctrine was this!”[427]

The cowl and tonsure of the monks were particularly obnoxious to him. He cherished the view that he had for ever extirpated monkery; he declared that even the heads of Catholicism would not in future endure these hateful guests. To have been instrumental in preparing such a fate for the sons of the most noble-minded men, of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic, and for all the monks generally, who had been the trustiest supports of the faith, of the missions and of civilisation, this appears to him a triumph, which he proceeds to magnify out of all proportion the better to gloat over it.

“No greater service has ever been rendered to the bishops and pastors,” so he writes in his “Vermanũg,” “than that they should thus be rid of the monks; and I venture to surmise that there is hardly anyone now at Augsburg who would take the part of the monks and beg for their reinstatement. Indeed the bishops will not permit such bugs and lice again to fasten on their fur [their cappas], but are right glad that I have washed the fur so clean for them.”[428]—The untruth of this is self-evident. If some few short-sighted or tepid bishops among them were willing to dispense with the monks, still this was not the general feeling towards those auxiliaries of the Church, whom Luther himself on the same page dubs the “Pope’s right-hand men.” But the lie was calculated to impress those who possessed influence.

Further untruths are found in this booklet: Hitherto, the monks, not the bishops, had “governed the churches”; it was merely his peaceable teaching and the power of the Word that had “destroyed” the monks; this the bishops, “backed by the might of all the kings and with all the learning of the universities at their command had not been able to do.”[429] Let no one accuse him of “preaching sedition,” so he goes on; he had merely “taught the people to keep the peace”;[430] he would much rather have preferred to end his days in retirement; “for me there will be no better tidings than to hear that I had been removed from the office of preacher”; better and more pious heretics than the Lutherans had never before been met with; he cannot deny that there is nothing lacking in his doctrine and in that of his “followers ... whatever their life may be.”[431]

We have here a row of instances of the honesty of his polemics and of the way in which he treated with the State authorities concerning the deepest matters of the Church’s life. Often enough his polemics consist solely of unwarrantable statements concerning his own pacific intentions and salutary achievements, supported by revolting untruths, misrepresentations and exaggerations tending to damage his opponents’ case.

Beyond this we frequently find him having recourse to low and unworthy language, and to filthy and unmannerly abuse. (Vol. iv., p. 318 ff.)

“When they are most angry I say to the Papists,” he cries in his “Warnunge an seine lieben Deudschen,” “My dear sirs, leave the wall, relieve yourselves into your drawers and sling it round your neck.... If they do not care to accept my services, then the devil may well be thankful to them!” etc.[432] “Oh, the shameful Diet, such as has never before been held or heard of ... an everlasting blot on the whole Empire! What will the Turk say ... to our allowing the accursed Pope with his minions to fool and mock at us, to treat us as children, nay, as clouts and blocks, to our behaving contrary to justice and truth, nay, with such utter shamelessness in open Diet as regards their blasphemies, their shameful and Sodomitic life and doctrines?”[433] These were the words in which he described the Diet of Augsburg in 1530.

We may here recall the saying of Valentine Ickelsamer the Anabaptist. At one time he had thought of espousing Luther’s cause, but “owing to the diabolical abuse” which he piled on “erring men” it was possible to regard him only “as a non-Christian.” Luther wanted to overthrow his opponents simply by words “of abuse”; these “Saxon rogues of Wittenberg,” “when unable to get what they want by means of a few kind words, invoke on you all the curses of the devil.”

Heinrich Bullinger complains repeatedly, and quite as bitterly, of the frightful storm into which Luther’s eloquence was apt to break out. It is noteworthy that he applies what he says to Luther’s polemics, not merely against the Swiss, but against other opponents. “Here all men have in their hands Luther’s King Harry of England, and another Harry as well, in his unsavoury Hans Worst; item, they have Luther’s book on the Jews with its hideous letters of the Bible dropped from the posterior of the pig, which the Jews may swallow, indeed, but never read; then, again, there is Luther’s filthy, swinish Schemhamphorasch, for which some small excuse might have been found had it been written by a swine-herd and not by a famous pastor of souls.”[434]

“And yet most people,” so Bullinger says, “even go so far as to worship the houndish, filthy eloquence of the man. Thus it comes that he goes his way and seeks to outdo himself in vituperation.... Many pious and learned people take scandal at his insolence, which really is beyond measure.” He should have someone at his side to keep a check on him, so Bullinger tells Bucer, for instance, his friend Melanchthon, “so that Luther may not ruin a good cause with his wonted invective, his bitterness, his torrent of bad words and his ridicule.”[435]

And yet Luther at this very time, in his “Warnunge,” calls himself “the German Prophet” and “a faithful teacher.”[436]

The following words of Erasmus contain a general censure: “You wish to be taken for a teacher of the Gospel. In that case, however, would it not better beseem you not to repel all the prudent and well-meaning by your vituperation nor to incite men to strife and revolt in these already troubled times?”[437]—“You snarl at me as an Epicurean. Had I been an Epicurean and lived in the time of the Apostles and heard them proclaim the Gospel with such invective, then I fear I should have remained an Epicurean.... Whoever is conscious of teaching a holy doctrine should not behave with insolence and delight in malicious misrepresentation.”[438]—“To what class of spirits,” he had already asked him, “does yours belong, if indeed it be a spirit at all? And what unevangelical way is this of inculcating the holy Gospel? Has perchance the risen Gospel done away with all the laws of public order so that now one may say and write anything against anyone? Does the freedom you are bringing back to us spell no more than this?”[439]

Kindlier Traits and Episodes

The unprejudiced reader will gladly turn his gaze from pictures such as the above to the more favourable traits in Luther’s character, which, as already shown elsewhere,[440] are by no means lacking.

Whoever has the least acquaintance with his Kirchenpostille and Hauspostille will not scruple to acknowledge the good and morally elevating undercurrent which runs below his polemics and peculiar theories. For instance, his exhortations, so warm and eloquent, to give alms to the needy; his glowing praise of Holy Scripture and of the consolation its divine words bring to troubled hearts; again, his efforts to promote education and juvenile instruction; his admonitions to assist at the sermon and at Divine worship, to avoid envy, strife, avarice and gluttony, and private no less than public vice of every kind.

The many who are familiar only with this beautiful and inspiring side of his writings, and possibly of his labours, must not take it amiss if, in a work like the present, the historian is no less concerned with the opposite side of Luther’s writings and whole conduct.

As a matter of fact, gentler tones often mingle with the harsher notes, while the unpleasant traits just described alter at times and tend to assume a more favourable aspect. This is occasionally true of his severity, his defiant and imperious behaviour. He not seldom, thanks to this art of his, achieved good and eminently creditable results, particularly in the protection of the poor or oppressed. Many who were in dire straits were wont to apply to him in order to secure his powerful intervention with the authorities on their behalf.

During the famine of 1539, when the nobles avariciously cornered the grain, Luther made strong representations to the Elector and begged him to come to the assistance of the town. Nor, in the same year, did he hesitate to address a severe “warning” to the Electoral steward, the Knight Franz Schott of Coburg, when the town-council at his instigation was moved to take too precipitate action.[441]

Best known of all, however, was his powerful intervention in the case of a certain man whose misdeeds were the plague of the Saxon Electorate from 1534 to 1540; this was Hans Kohlhase, a Berlin merchant. He had been overreached in a matter of two horses by a certain Saxon squire of Zaschwitz, and had afterwards lost his case in the courts. In order to obtain satisfaction Kohlhase formally gave out, that he would “rob, burn, capture and hold to ransom” the Saxons until he obtained redress. Incendiary fires broke out shortly after in Wittenberg and the neighbourhood which were laid to the charge of Kohlhase’s men. The Elector could think of no better plan than to suggest a settlement between the merchant, now turned robber-knight, and the heirs of the above-mentioned squire; it was then that Kohlhase appealed to Luther for advice.

Luther replied with authority and dignity, not hesitating to rebuke him for his unprincipled action. He would not escape the wrath of God if he continued to pursue his unheard-of course of private revenge, since it stands written that “Vengeance is mine”; the shameful acts of violence which had been perpetrated by his men would be put down to his account. He ought not to take the devil as his sponsor. If in spite of all peaceful efforts he failed to succeed in obtaining his due, then nothing was left but for him to submit to the Divine decree, which was always for our best, and to suffer in patience. He consoled him at the same time in a friendly way for such injury and outrage as he might have endured; nor was it wrong to seek redress, but this must be done within the right bounds.[442]

The well-meaning letter, which does Luther credit, had unfortunately no effect.

The attempted arbitration, owing to the leniency of the Electoral agent, Hans Metzsch, ended so much to the advantage of Kohlhase that the Elector, partly owing to his strained relations with Brandenburg, refused to ratify it. Kohlhase’s bands came from Brandenburg and fell upon the undefended castles and villages in the Saxon Electorate. Their raids were also to some extent connived at by the Elector of Brandenburg. They excited great terror even at Wittenberg itself owing to sudden attacks made in the vicinity of the town. New attempts to reach a settlement brought them to a standstill for a while, but soon the strange civil war—an echo of the Peasant Rising and Revolt of the Knights—broke out anew and lasted until 1539.

Luther told his friends that such things could never have taken place under the Landgrave of Hesse; that, as the principal actor had shed blood, he would himself die a violent death. In 1539 he invited the Elector of Saxony by letter to act as the father of his country; he should come to the assistance of his people who were at the mercy of a criminal, nor should he leave the Elector of Brandenburg a free hand if it were true that he was implicated in the business.[443]

Finally Kohlhase, after committing excesses even in Brandenburg itself, was executed at Berlin on March 22, 1540, being broken on the wheel.

On Luther’s admonition to the robber, Protestant legend soon laid hold, and, even in the second half of the 16th century, we find it further embellished. There is hardly a popular history of Luther to-day which does not give the scene where Kohlhase, in disguise, knocks at Luther’s door one dark night and on his reply to the question, “Art thou Kohlhase?” is admitted by the latter, explains his quarrel in the presence of Melanchthon, Cruciger and others and is reconciled with God and his fellow-men; he then promises to abstain from violence in future as Luther and his people are willing to help him to his rights, and the romantic visit closes by the repentant sinner making his confession and receiving the Supper.

The only chronicler of the March who relates this at the date mentioned above fails to give any authority for his narrative, nor can it, as Köstlin-Kawerau points out, be assigned its place “anywhere in Kohlhase’s life-story as otherwise known to us.”[444] Luther’s own statements concerning the affair, particularly his last ones, do not agree with such an ending; throughout he appears as the champion of outraged justice against a public offender. The not unkindly words in which Luther had answered Kohlhase’s request were probably responsible for the legend, which sprang up all the easier seeing that numerous instances were known where Luther’s powerful intervention had succeeded in restraining violence and in securing victory for the cause of justice against the oppressor.[445]

The Reformation of the Church and Luther’s Ethics

The defenders of the ancient faith urged very strongly that the first step towards a real moral reformation of the Church was to depict the Church as she was to be in accordance with Christ’s institution and the best traditions, and then, with the help of this standard, to see how far the Church of the times fell short of this ideal; in order to reform any institution, so they argued, we must be acquainted with its primitive shape so as to be able to revert to it.

This they declared they had in vain asked of Luther, who, on the contrary, seemed bent on subverting the whole Church. They even failed to see that he had suggested any means wherewith to withstand the moral shortcomings of the age. In their eyes the radical and destructive changes on which he so vehemently insisted spelt no real improvement; the discontent with prevailing conditions which he preached to the people could not but create a wrong atmosphere; nor could the abolishing of the Church’s spiritual remedies, the slighting of her commands and the revolting treatment of the hierarchy serve the cause of prudent Church reform.

Luther himself, in his so-called “Bull and Reformation,” put forth his demands for the reform of ecclesiastical conditions as they presented themselves to his mind during the days of his fiercest struggle.[446] The “Bull” does not, however, afford any positive scheme of reformation, as the title might lead one to suppose. It is made up wholly of denials and polemics, and the same is true of his later works.

According to this writing the bishops are “not merely phantoms and idols, but folk accursed in God’s sight”; they corrupt souls, and, against them, “every Christian should strive with body and substance.” One should “cheerfully do to them everything that they disliked, just as though they were the devil himself.” All those who now are pastors must repudiate the obedience which they gave “with the promise of chastity,” seeing that this obedience was promised, not to God, but to the devil, “just as a man must repudiate a compact he has made with the devil.” “This is my Bull, yea, Dr. Luther’s own,” etc.

In this Luther was striking out a new road. Christ and his Apostles had begun the moral reform of the world by preaching the doing of “penance, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” True enough such a preaching can never have been so popular with the masses as Luther’s invitation to overthrow the Church.

Luther’s “Reformation” did not, however, consist merely in the overthrow of the olden ecclesiasticism; it also strove to counteract much that was really amiss.

His action had this to recommend it, that it threw into the full light of day the shady side of ecclesiastical life; after all, knowledge of the evil is already a step towards its betterment. For centuries few had had the courage to point a finger at the Church’s wounds so insistently as Luther; at the ills rampant in the clergy, Church government and in the faith and morals of the people. His piercing glance saw into every corner, and, assisted by expert helpers, some of them formerly officials of the Curia, he laid bare every regrettable disorder, needless to say not without exaggerating everything to his heart’s content. Practically, however, Luther’s revelations represent what was best in the movement which professed to aim at a reform of morals. Had he not embittered with such unspeakable hate the long list of shortcomings with which he persistently confronted the olden Church, had he used it as a means of amendment and not rather as a goad whereby to excite the masses, then one might have been even more thankful to him.

It cannot be gainsaid that, particularly at the outset, ethical motives were at work in him; that he like others felt the burden of the evil, was certainly no lie.

Yet it must not be forgotten that he attacked the Pope and the Church so violently, not on account of any refusal to amend, but in order to clear a path for his subversive views of theology and for the “Evangel” which had been condemned by ecclesiastical authority. The very magnitude of the attack he led on the whole conception of the Church, in itself proves that it was no mere question of defending the rights of Christian ethics; the removal of moral disorders from Christendom was to him but a secondary concern, and, moreover, he certainly did everything he could to render impossible any ordered abolishment of abuses and any real improvement.

One may even ask whether he had any programme at all for the betterment of the Church. The question is made almost superfluous by the history of the struggle. He himself never set up before his mind any regular programme for his work, whether ecclesiastical, social or even ethical, when once he had come to see that the idealist scheme in his “An den christlichen Adel” was impossible of realisation. Hence, when he had succeeded in destroying the old order in a small portion of the Church’s territory, he had perforce to begin an uncertain search after something new whereby to replace it; nothing could be more hopeless than his efforts to build up from the ruins a new Church and a new society, a new liturgy and a new canon law, and to improve the morals of the adherents of his cause. In spite of Luther’s aversion to the scheme, it came about that the whole work of reformation was, by the force of circumstances, left to the secular authorities; from the Consistories down to the school-teachers, from the Marriage Courts down to the guardians of the poor, everything came into the hands of the State. Luther had been wont to complain that the Church in olden days had drawn all secular affairs to herself. Since his day, on the other hand, everything that pertained to the Church was secularised. The actual result was a gradual alienation of secular and ecclesiastical, quite at variance with the theories embodied in the faith. In this it is impossible to see a true reformation in any moral meaning of the word, and Luther’s ethics, which made all secular callings independent of the Church, failed in the event to celebrate any triumph.

The better to appreciate certain striking contrasts between the olden Church and her ratification of morality on the one hand and Luther’s thought on the other, we may glance at his attitude towards canonisation and excommunication.

Canonisation and excommunication are two opposite poles of the Church’s life; by the one the Church stamps her heroes with the seal of perfection and sets them up for the veneration of the faithful; by the other she excludes the unworthy from her communion, using thereto the greatest punishment at her command. Both are, to the eye of faith, powerful levers in the moral life.

Luther, however, laughed both to scorn. The ban he attacked on principle, particularly after he himself had fallen under it; in this his action differed from that of Catholic writers, many of whom had written against the ban though only to lament its abuse and its too frequent employment for the defence of the material position of the clergy.

The Pope, according to Luther, had made such a huge “mess in the Church by means of the Greater Excommunication that the swine could not get to the end with devouring it.”[447] Christians, according to him, ought to be taught rather to love the ban of the Church than to fear it. We ourselves, he cries, put the Pope under the ban and declare that “the Pope and his followers are no believers.”

Later on, however, he came to see better the use of ghostly penalties for unseemly conduct and made no odds in emphasising the right of the community as such to make use of exclusion as a punishment; in view of the increase of disorders he essayed repeatedly to reintroduce on his own authority a sort of ban in his Churches.[448]

As early as 1519 Luther had expressed his disapproval of the canonising of Saints by the Church, a practice which stimulated the moral efforts of the faithful by setting up an ideal and by encouraging daily worship; he added, however, that “each one was free to canonise as much as he pleased.”[449] In 1524, however, he poured forth his wrath on the never-ending canonisations; as a rule they were “nothing but Popish Saints and no Christian Saints”;[450] the foundations made in their honour served “merely to fatten lazy gluttons and indolent swine in the Churches”; before the Judgment Day no one could “pronounce any man holy”; Elisabeth, Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Bernard and Francis, even he regarded as holy, though he would not stake his life on it, seeing there was nothing about them in Holy Scripture; “but the Pope, nay, all the angels, had not the power of setting up a new article of faith not contained in Scripture.”[451]

On May 31, 1523, was canonised the venerable bishop Benno of Meissen, a contemporary of Gregory VII. Luther was incensed to the last degree at the thought of the special celebration to be held in 1524 in the town—the Duchy being still Catholic—in honour of the new Saint. He accordingly published his “Against the new idol and olden devil about to be set up at Meyssen.”[452] His use of the term “devil” in the title he vindicates as follows on the very first page: Now, that, “by the grace of God, the Gospel has again arisen and shines brightly,” “Satan incarnate” is avenging himself “by means of such foolery” and is causing himself to be worshipped with great pomp under the name of Benno. It was not in his power to prevent Duke George setting up the relics at Meissen and erecting an artistic and costly altar in their honour. The only result of Luther’s attack was to increase the devotion of clergy and people, who confidently invoked the saintly bishop’s protection against the inroads of apostasy. The attack also led Catholic writers in the Duchy to publish some bitter rejoinders. The rudeness of their titles bears witness to their indignation. “Against the Wittenberg idol Martin Luther” was the title of the pamphlet of Augustine Alveld, a Franciscan Guardian; the work of Paul Bachmann, Abbot of Alte Zelle, was entitled “Against the fiercely snorting wild-boar Luther,” and that of Hieronymus Emser, “Reply to Luther’s slanderous book.” The last writer was to some extent involved in the matter of the canonisation through having published the Legend of the famous Bishop. This he had done rather uncritically and without testing his authorities, and for this reason had been read a severe lesson by Luther.