Chapter XXXV · (Continued) LUTHER’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SOCIETY AND EDUCATION (continued 2)

At Strasburg a new system, dating from 1523, for regulating the distribution of the “common alms” was established in harmony with the great traditions of the 15th century, and above all with the spirit and labours of the famous Catholic preacher Geiler of Kaysersberg (†1510). Janssen has given us a fine series of witnesses, from Geiler’s sermons and writings, of the nature at once religious and practical of his exhortations to charity.[138] Charity, he insists, must show itself not merely in the bestowal of temporal goods; it is concerned above all with the “inward and spiritual goods, the milk of sound doctrine, and instruction of the unlearned, the milk of devotion, wisdom and consolation.” He repeatedly exhorts the authorities to stricter regulations on almsgiving.

After various improvements had been introduced in the poor law at Strasburg subsequent to 1500, the magistrates—the clergy and the monasteries not having shown themselves equal to their task—issued a new enactment, though even this relied to a great extent on the help of the clergy. The regulations of Augsburg and Nuremberg were the most effectual. It was only later, after the work of Capito, Bucer and Hedio at Strasburg, that, together with the new spirit, changes crept into the traditional poor-law system of the town.

All the enactments, dating from late mediæval times prior to the religious innovations, for the poor of the other great German towns, for instance, of Ratisbon (1523), Breslau (1525) and Würzburg (1533) are of a more or less similar character. Thus, thanks to the economic pressure, there was gradually evolved, in the centres of German prosperity and commercial industry, a sober but practical and far-sighted poor-law system.[139]

It was not, indeed, so easy to get rid of the existing disorders; to achieve this a lengthy struggle backed by the regulations just established would have been necessary. Above all, the tramps and vagabonds, who delighted in idleness and adventure and who often developed dangerous proclivities, continued to be the pest of the land. The cause of this economic disorder was a deep-seated one and entirely escapes those who declare that beggary sprang solely from the idea foisted on the Church, viz. that “poverty was meritorious and begging a respectable trade.”

Luther’s Efforts. The Primary Cause of their Failure

The spread of Lutheranism had its effect on the municipal movement for the relief of the poor, nor was its influence all for the good.

In 1528 and 1529 Luther twice published an edition of the booklet “On the Roguery of the False Beggars” (“Liber vagatorum”), a work dating from the beginning of the 16th century; in his preface to it he says, that the increase in fraudulent vagrancy shows “how strong in the world is the rule of the devil”; “Princes, lords, town-magistrates and, in fact, everybody” ought to see that alms were bestowed only on the beggars and the needy in their own neighbourhood, not on “rogues and vagabonds” by whom even he himself (Luther) had often been taken in. Everywhere in both towns and villages registers should be kept of the poor, and strange beggars not allowed without a “letter or testimonial.”[140]

He was, however, not always so circumspect in his demands and principles. In a passage of his work “An den Adel” he makes a wild appeal, which in its practicability falls short of what had already been done in various parts of Germany. The only really new point in it is, that, in order to make an end of begging and poverty, the mendicant Orders should be abolished, and the Roman See deprived of their collections and revenues. Of the ordinary beggars he says, without being sufficiently acquainted with the state of the case, that they “might easily be expelled,” and that it would be an “easy matter to deal with them were we only brave and in earnest enough.” To the objection that the result of violent measures would be a still more niggardly treatment of the poor he replied in 1520: “It suffices that the poor be fairly well provided for, so that they die not of hunger or cold.” With a touch of communism he exaggerates, at the expense of the well-to-do and those who did no work, an idea in itself undoubtedly true, viz. that work is man’s portion: “It is not just that, at the expense of another’s toil, a man should go idle, wallow in riches and lead a bad life, whilst his fellow lives in destitution, as is now the perverted custom.… It was never ordained by God that anyone should live on the goods of another.”[141]

In itself it could only have a salutary effect when Luther goes on to speak, as he frequently does, against begging among the class whose duty it was to work with their hands, and when he attempts both to check their idleness and to rouse a spirit of charity towards the deserving.[142] He even regards the Bible text, “Let there be no beggar or starving person amongst you,” as universally binding on Christians. Only that he is oblivious of the necessary limitations when he exclaims: “If God commanded this even in the Old Testament how much more is it incumbent on us Christians not to let anyone beg or starve!”[143]

The latter words refer to those who are really poor but quite willing to work (a class of people which will always exist in spite of every effort); as for those who “merely eat” he demands that they be driven out of the land. This he does in a writing of 1526 addressed to military men; here he divides “all man’s work into two kinds,” viz. “agricultural work and war work.” A third kind of work, viz. the teaching office, to which he often refers elsewhere, is here passed over in silence. “As for the useless people,” he cries, “who serve neither to defend us nor to feed us, but merely eat and pass away their time in idleness, [the Emperor or the local sovereign] should either expel them from the land or make them work, as the bees do, who sting to death the drones that do not work but devour the honey of the others.”[144] His unmethodical mind failed to see to what dire consequences these hastily penned words could lead.

With the object of alleviating poverty he himself, however, lent a hand to certain charitable institutions, which, though they did not endure, have yet their place in history. Such were the poor-boxes of Wittenberg, Leisnig, Altenburg and some other townships. This institution was closely bound up with his scheme of gathering together the “believing Christians” into communities apart. These communities were not only to have their own form of divine worship and to use the ecclesiastical penalties, but were also to assist the poor by means of the common funds in a new and truly Evangelical fashion.

The olden poor-law ordinances of mediæval times had been revised at Wittenberg and embodied in the so-called “Beutelordnung.”[145] Carlstadt and the town-council, under the influence of Luther’s earlier ideas, substituted for this on Jan. 24, 1522, a new “Order for the princely town of Wittenberg”; at the same time they reorganised the common funds.[146] These regulations Luther left in force, when, on his return from the Wartburg, he annulled the rest of Carlstadt’s doings; the truth is, that they were not at variance even with his newer ideals.

In 1523 he himself promoted a similar but more highly developed institution for the relief of the poor in the little Saxon town of Leisnig on the Freiberg Mulde; this was to be in the hands of the community of true believers into which the inhabitants had formed themselves at the instigation of the zealous Lutheran, Sebastian von Kötteritz. At Altenburg also, doubtless through Luther’s doing, his friend Wenceslaus Link, the preacher in that town, made a somewhat similar attempt to establish a communal poor-box. In many other places efforts of a like nature were made under Lutheran auspices.

How far such undertakings spread throughout the Protestant congregations cannot be accurately determined. We know, however, the details of the scheme owing to our still having the rules drawn up for Leisnig.[147]

According to this the whole congregation, town-councillors, aldermen, elders and all the inhabitants generally, were to bind themselves to make a good use of their Christian freedom by the faithful keeping of the Word of God and by submitting to good discipline and just penalties. Ten coffer-masters were to be appointed over the “common fund” and these were three times a year to give an account to the “whole assembly thereto convened.” Into this fund was to be put not merely the revenue of the earlier institutions which hitherto had been most active in the relief of the poor, viz. the brotherhoods and benevolent associations, as also that of most of the guilds, and, moreover, the whole income drawn by the parish from the glebes, pious foundations, tithes, voluntary offerings, fines, bridge dues and private industrial concerns. Thus it was not merely a relief fund but practically a trust comprising all the wealth of the congregation, which chiefly consisted in the extensive Church property it had annexed. In keeping with this is the manner in which the income was to be apportioned. Only a part was devoted to the relief of the poor, i.e. to the hospital, orphanage and guest-houses. Most of the money was to go to defray the stipend of the Lutheran pastor and his clerk, to maintain the schools and the church, and to allow of advances being made to artisans free of interest; the rest was to be put by for times of scarcity. The members of the congregation were also exhorted to make contributions out of charity to their neighbour.

The scheme pleased Luther so well that he advised the printing of the rules, and himself wrote a preface to the published text in which he said, he hoped that “the example thus set would prove a success, be generally followed, and lead to a great ruin of the earlier foundations, monasteries, chapels and all other such abominations which hitherto had absorbed all the world’s wealth under a show of worship.”

Hence here once more his chief motive is a polemical one, viz. his desire to injure Popery.

He invites the authorities on this occasion to “lay hands on” such property and to apply to the common fund all that remained over after the obligations attaching to the property had been complied with, and restitution made to such heirs of the donors as demanded it on account of their poverty. In giving this advice he was anxious, as he says, to disclaim any responsibility in the event of “such property as had fallen vacant being plundered owing to the estates changing hands and each one laying hold on whatever he could seize.” “Should avarice find an entry what then can be done? It must not indeed be given up in despair. It is better that avarice should take too much in a legal way than that there should be such plundering as occurred in Bohemia. Let each one [i.e. of the heirs of the donors] examine his own conscience and see what he ought to take for his own needs and what he should leave for the common fund!”[148]

The setting up of such a “common fund” was also suggested in other Lutheran towns as a means of introducing some sort of order into the confiscation of the Church’s property. The direct object of the funds was not the relief of the poor. This was merely included as a measure for palliating and justifying the bold stroke which the innovators were about to take in secularising the whole of the Church’s vast properties.

This, however, makes some of Luther’s admonitions in his preface to the regulations for the Leisnig common fund sound somewhat strange, for instance, his injunction that everything be carried out according to the law of love. “Christian charity must here act and decide; laws and enactments cannot settle the difficulties. Indeed I write this counsel only out of Christian charity for the Christians.” Whoever refuses to accept his advice, he says at the conclusion, may go his own way; only a few would accept it, but one or two were quite enough for him. “The world must remain the world and Satan its Prince. I have done what I could and what it was my duty to do.” He was half conscious of the unpractical character of his proposals, yet any failure he was determined to attribute to the devil’s doing.

His premonition of failure was only too soon realised at Leisnig. The new scheme could not be made to work. The magistrates refused to resign the rights they claimed of disposing of the foundations and similar charitable sources of revenue or to hand over the incomings to the coffer-masters, for the latter, they argued, were representatives, not of the congregation but of the Church. Hence the fund had to go begging. Luther came to words with the town-council, but was unable to have his own way, even though he appealed to the Elector.[149] He lamented in 1524 that the example of Leisnig had been a very sad one, though, as the first of its kind,[150] it should have served as a model. Of Tileman Schnabel, an ex-Augustinian and college friend of Luther’s at Erfurt, who had been working at Leisnig as preacher and “deacon,” Luther wrote, that he would soon find himself obliged to leave if he did not wish to die of hunger. “Incidents such as these deprive the parsonages of their best managers. Maybe they want to drive them back to their old monasteries.”[151]

Thus the parochial fund of Leisnig, which some writers have extolled so highly, really never came into existence. It lives only in the directions given by Luther.

So ill were parson and schoolmaster cared for at Leisnig, in spite of all the Church property that had been sequestered, that, according to the Visitation of 1529, the preacher there had been obliged to ply a trade and gain a living by selling beer. In 1534, so the records of the Visitations of that date declare, the schoolmaster had for five years been paid no salary.

Link, the Altenburg preacher, was also unsuccessful in his efforts to carry out a similar scheme. He complained as early as 1523, in a writing entitled “Von Arbeyt und Betteln,” that this Christian undertaking had so far “not only not been furthered but had actually gone backward” in spite of all his efforts from the pulpit. He, too, addresses himself to the “rulers” and reminds them that it is their duty “to the best of their ability to provide for the poverty of the masses.”[152]

To Luther’s bitter grief and disappointment Wittenberg (see above, p. 49) also furnished anything but an encouraging example. Here the incentive to the introduction of the common fund by Carlstadt had been the resolve of the town council “to seize on the revenues of the Church, the brotherhoods and guilds and divert them into the common fund, to be employed for general purposes, and for paying the Church officials.… No less than twenty-one pious guilds were to be mulcted.”[153] Yet the Wittenberg measures were so little a success, in spite of all Luther’s efforts, that in his sermons he could not sufficiently deplore the absence of charity and prevalence of avarice and greed amongst both burghers and councillors.[154] The Beutelordnung continued indeed in existence, but merely as an administrative department of the town council.

It is not surprising therefore that Luther gave up for the while any attempt at putting into practice the Leisnig project elsewhere; his scheme for assembling the true Christians into a community had also perforce to betake itself unto the land of dreams. Only in his “Deudsche Messe” of 1526 does the old idea again force itself to the front: “Here a general collection for the poor might be made among the congregation; it should be given willingly and distributed amongst the needy after the example of St. Paul, 2 Cor. ix.… If only we had people earnestly desirous of being Christians, the manner and order would soon be settled.”[155]

Subsequent to 1526, however, Bugenhagen drafted better regulations and poor laws for Wittenberg and other Protestant towns, founded this time on a more practical basis. (See below, p. 57 f.)

Luther, nevertheless, continued to complain of the Wittenbergers. The indignation he expresses at the lack of all charitable endeavours throughout the domain of the new Evangel serves as a suitable background for these complaints.

Want of charity and of neighbourly love was the primary and most important cause of the failure of Luther’s efforts.

“Formerly, when people served the devil and outraged the Blood of Christ,” he says in 1530 in “Das man die Kinder zur Schulen halten solle” (see above, p. 6), “all purses were open and there was no end to the giving, for churches, schools and every kind of abomination; but now that it is a question of founding true schools and churches every purse is closed with iron chains and no one is able to give.” So pitiful a sight made him beg of God a happy death so that he might not live to see Germany’s punishment: “Did my conscience allow of it I would even give my help and advice so as to bring back the Pope with all his abominations to rule over us once more.”[156]

What leads him to such admissions as, that, the Christians, “under the plea of freedom are now seven times worse than they were under the Pope’s tyranny,” is, in the first place, his bitter experience of the drying up of charity, which now ceases to care even for the parsonages and churches. Under the Papacy people had been eager to build churches and to make offerings to be distributed in alms among the poor, but, now that the true religion is taught, it is a wonder how everyone has grown so cold.—Yet the people were told and admonished that it was well pleasing to God and all the angels, but even so they would not respond.—Now a pastor could not even get a hole in his roof mended to enable him to lie dry, whereas in former days people could erect churches and monasteries regardless of cost.—“Now there is not a single town ready to support a preacher and there is nothing but robbery and pilfering amongst the people and no one hinders them. Whence comes this shameful plague? ‘From the doctrine,’ say the bawlers, ‘which you teach, viz. that we must not reckon on works or place our trust in them.’ This is, however, the work of the tiresome devil who falsely attributes such things to the pure and wholesome teaching,” etc.[157]

He is so far from laying the blame on his teaching that he exclaims: What would our forefathers, who were noted for their charity, not have done “had they had the light of the Evangel which is now given to us”? Again and again he comes back to the contrast between his and older times: “Our parents and forefathers put us to shame for they gave so generously and charitably, nay even to excess, to the churches, parsonages and schools, foundations, hospitals,” etc.[158]—“Indeed had we not already the means, thanks to the charitable alms and foundations of our forefathers, the Gospel itself would long since have been wiped out by the burghers in the towns, and the nobles and peasants in the country, so that not one poor preacher would have enough to eat and drink; for we refuse to supply them, and, instead, rob and lay violent hands on what others have given and founded for the purpose.”[159]

To sum up briefly other characteristic complaints which belong here, he says: Now that in accordance with the true Evangel we are admonished “to give without seeking for honour or merit, no one can spare a farthing.”[160]—No one now will give, and, “unless we had the lands we stole from the Pope, the preachers would have but scant fare”; they even try “to snatch the morsels out of the parson’s mouth.” The way in which the “nobles and officials” now treat what was formerly Church property amounts to “a devouring of all beggars, strangers and poor widows; we may indeed bewail this, for they eat up the very marrow of the bones. Since they raise a hue and cry against the Papists let them also not forget us.… Woe to you peasants, burghers and nobles who grab everything, hoard and scrape, and pretend all the time to be good Evangelicals.”[161]

He is only too well acquainted with the evils of mendicancy and idleness, and knows that they have not diminished but rather increased. Even towards the end of his life he alludes to the “innumerable wicked rogues who pretend to be poor, needy beggars and deceive the people”; they deserve the gallows as much as the “idlers,” of whom there are “even many more” than before, who are well able to work, take service and support themselves, but prefer to ask for alms, and, “when these are not esteemed enough, to supplement them by pilfering or even by open, bare-faced stealing in the courtyards, the streets and in the very houses, so that I do not know whether there has ever been a time when robbery and thieving were so common.”[162]

Finally he recalls the enactments against begging by which the “authorities forbade foreign beggars and vagabonds and also idlers.” This brings us back to the attempts made, with the consent of the authorities in the Lutheran districts, to obviate the social evils by means similar to those adopted at Leisnig.

A Second Stumbling Block: Lack of Organisation

It was not merely lack of charity that rendered nugatory all attempts to put in force regulations such as those drafted for Leisnig, but also defects in the inner organisation of the schemes. First, to lump all sorts of monies intended for different purposes into a single fund could prove nothing but a source of confusion and diminish the amount to be devoted directly to charitable purposes; this, too, was the effect of keeping no separate account of the expenditure for the relief of the poor.

Then, again, the intermingling of secular and spiritual which the arrangement involved was very unsatisfactory. We can trace here more clearly than elsewhere the quasi-mystic idea of the congregation of true believers which retained so strong a hold on Luther’s imagination till about 1525. With singular ignorance of the ways of the world he wished to set up the common fund on a community based on faith and charity in which the universal priesthood was supposed to have abolished all distinction between the spiritual and secular authorities, nay, between the two very spheres themselves. He took for granted that Evangelical rulers would be altogether spiritual simply because they possessed the faith; faith, so he seemed to believe, would of itself do everything in the members of the congregation; under the guidance of the spirit everything would be “held in common, after the example of the Apostles,” as he says in the preface of the Leisnig regulations. But what was possible of accomplishment owing to abundance of grace in Apostolic times was an impossible dream in the 16th century. “The old ideal of an ecclesiastical commonwealth on which, according to the preface, Luther wished to construct a kind of insurance society for the relief of the poor, could not subsist for a moment in the keen atmosphere of a workaday world where men are what they are.”[163]

Hence the latest writer on social politics and the poor law, from whom the above words are taken, openly expresses his wonder at the “utopian, religio-communistic foundation on which the Wittenberg and Leisnig schemes, and those drawn up on similar lines, were based,” at the “utopian efforts” with their “absurd system of expenditure,” which, owing to their “fundamental defects and the mixing of the funds, were doomed sooner or later to fail.” This “travesty of early Christianity” tended neither to promote the moral and charitable sense of the people nor to further benevolent organisation. “Any rational policy of poor law” was, on the contrary, shut out by these early Lutheran institutions; the relief of the poor was thereby placed on an “eminently unstable basis”; the poor-boxes only served “to encourage idleness.” “Not in such a way could the modern poor-law system, based as it is on impersonal, legal principles, be called into being.”

“No system of poor law has ever had less claim to be placed at the head of a new development than this one [of Leisnig].”[164]

The years 1525 and 1526 brought the turning point in Luther’s attitude towards the question of poor relief, particularly owing to the effect of the Peasant War on his views of society and the Church.

The result of the war was to bring the new religious system into much closer touch with the sovereigns and “thus practically to give rise to a theocracy.”[165] In spite of the changes this produced, Luther’s schemes for providing for the poor continued to display some notable defects.

For all “practical purposes Luther threw over the principle of the universal priesthood which the peasants had embraced as a socio-political maxim, and, by a determined effort, cut his cause adrift from the social efforts of the day.… He worked himself up into a real hatred of the mob, of ‘Master Omnes,’ the ‘many-headed monster,’ and indeed came within an ace of the socio-political ideas of Machiavelli, who advised the rulers to treat the people so harshly that they might look upon those lords as liberal who were not extortionate.” After the abrogation of episcopal authority and canon law, of hierarchy and monasteries “there came an urgent call for the establishment of new associations with practical aims and for the construction of the skeleton of the new Christian community; we now hear no more of that ideal community of true believers which, thanks to its heartfelt faith, was to carry on the social work of preventing and alleviating poverty.”

The whole of the outward life of the Church being now under the direction of the Protestant sovereign, the system of poor relief began to assume a purely secular character, having nothing but an outward semblance of religion. The new regulations were largely the work of Bugenhagen, who was a better organiser than Luther. The many enactments he was instrumental in drafting for the North German towns embody necessary provisions for the relief of the poor.

Officials appointed by the sovereign or town-council directed, or at least supervised, the management, while the “deacons,” i.e. the ecclesiastical guardians of the fund, were obliged to find the necessary money and, generally, to bear all the odium for the meagreness and backwardness of the distribution. The members of the congregation had practically no longer any say in the matter. The parish’s share in the relief of the poor was made an end of even before it had lost the other similar rights assigned to it by Luther, such as that of promulgating measures of discipline, appointing clergy, administering the Church’s lands, etc. Just as the organisation of the Church was solely in the hands of the authorities to the complete exclusion of the congregations, so poor relief and the ecclesiastical regulations on which it was based became merely a government concern.

What Bugenhagen achieved, thanks to the ecclesiastical regulations for poor relief, for which he was directly or indirectly responsible, gave “good hopes, at least at first, of bringing the difficult social problem of those days nearer to a solution.” At any rate they were a “successful attempt to bring some order into the whole system of relief, by means of the authorities and on a scale not hitherto attempted by the Church.”[166] It is true that he, like those who were working on the same lines, e.g. Hedio, Rhegius, Hyperius, Lasco and others, often merely transplanted into a new soil the rules already in vogue in the Catholic Netherlands and the prosperous South German towns. Hedio of Strasburg, for instance, translated into German the entire work of Vives, the opponent of Lutheranism, and exploited it practically and also sought to enter into epistolary communication with Vives. The prohibition of mendicancy, the establishment of an independent poor-box apart from the rest of the Church funds, and many other points were borrowed by Bugenhagen and others from the olden Catholic regulations.

Such efforts were in many localities supplemented by the kindliness of the population and, thanks to a spirit of Christianity, were not without fruit.

As, however, everybody, Princes, nobles, townships and peasants, were stretching out greedy hands towards the now defenceless possessions of the olden Church, a certain reaction came, and the State, in the interests of order, saw fit to grant a somewhat larger share to the ecclesiastical authorities in the administration of Church property and relief funds. The Lutheran clergy and the guardians of the poor were thus allowed a certain measure of free action, provided always that what they did was done in the name of the sovereign, i.e. the principal bishop. The new institutions created by such men as Bugenhagen soon lost their public, communal or State character, and sank back to the level of ecclesiastical enterprises. Institutions of this stamp had, however, “been more numerous and better endowed in the Middle Ages and were so later in the Catholic districts.”

Owing in part to a technical defect in the Protestant regulations, dishonesty and carelessness were not excluded from the management and distribution of the poor fund, the administration falling, as a matter of course, into the hands of the lowest class of officials. Catholics had good reason for branding it as a “usury and parson’s box.”[167] The reason why, in Germany, Protestant efforts for poor relief never issued in a satisfactory socio-political system capable of relieving the poor and thus improving the condition of both Church and State, lay, not merely in the economic difficulties of the time, but, “what is more important, in the social and moral working of the new religion and new piety which Luther had established.”[168]

Influence of Luther’s Ethics. Robbery of Church Property Proves a Curse

Not only had the Peasant Rising and the reprisals taken by the rulers and the towns brought misery on the land and hardened the hearts of the princes and magistrates, not only had the means available for the relief of the poor been diminished, first by the founding of new parishes in place of the old ones, which had in many cases been supported by the monasteries and foundations, secondly, by the demands of Protestants for the restitution of many ecclesiastical benefices given by their Catholic forefathers, thirdly, by the drying up of the spring of gifts and donations, but “the common fund, which had been swelled by the shekels of the Church, had now to bear many new burdens and only what remained—which often enough was not much—was employed for charitable purposes.” In the same way, and to an even greater extent, must the Lutheran ethics be taken into account. Luther’s views on justification by faith alone destroyed “that impulse of the Middle Ages towards open-handed charity.” This was “an ethical defect of the Lutheran doctrine”; it was only owing to his “utter ignorance of the world” that Luther persisted in believing that faith would, of itself and without any “law,” beget good works and charity.[169] “It was a cause of wonder and anxiety to him throughout his life that his assumption, that faith would be the best ‘taskmaster and the strongest incentive to good works and kindliness,’ never seemed to be realised.… The most notable result of Luther’s doctrine of grace and denial of all human merit was, at least among the masses, an increase of libertinism and of the spirit of irresponsibility.”[170]

The dire effects of the new principles were also evident in the large and wealthy towns, the exemplary poor-law regulations of which we have considered above. After the innovations had made their way among them we hear little more of provisions being made against mendicancy, for the promotion of work and for the relief of poverty. Hence, as regards these corporations … the change of religion meant, according to Feuchtwanger, “a decline in the quality of their social philanthropy.” (Cp. above, vol. iv., p. 477 ff.)

From some districts, however, we have better reports of the results achieved by the relief funds. In times of worst distress good Christians were always ready to help. Much depended on the spirit of those concerned in the work. In general, however, the complaints of the preachers of the new faith, including Melanchthon, wax louder and louder.[171] They tell us that the patrimony of the poor was being carried off by the rapacity of the great or disappearing under the hands of avaricious and careless administrators, whilst new voluntary contributions were no longer forthcoming. We find no lack of those, who, like Luther’s friend Paul Eber, are given to noting the visible, palpable consequences of the wrong done to the monasteries, brotherhoods and churches.[172]

A long list of statements from respected Protestant contemporaries is given by Janssen, who concludes: “The whole system of poor relief was grievously affected by the seizure and squandering of Church goods and of innumerable charitable bequests intended not only for parochial and Church use but also for the hospitals, schools and poor-houses.”[173] The testimonies in question, the frankness of which can only be explained by the honourable desire to make an end of the crying evil, come, for instance, from Thomas Rorarius, Andreas Musculus, Johann Winistede, Erasmus Sarcerius, Ambrose Pape and the General Superintendent, Cunemann Flinsbach.[174] They tend to show that the new doctrine of faith alone had dried up the well-spring of self-sacrifice, as indeed Andreas Hyperius, the Marburg theologian, Christopher Fischer, the General Superintendent, Daniel Greser, the Superintendent, Sixtus Vischer and others state in so many words.

The incredible squandering of Church property is proved by official papers, was pilloried by the professors of the University of Rostock, also is clear from the minutes of the Visitations of Wesenberg in 1568 and of the Palatinate in 1556 which bewail “the sin against the property set aside for God and His Church.”[175] And again, “The present owners have dealt with the Church property a thousand times worse than the Papists,” they make no conscience of “selling it, mortgaging it and giving it away.” Princes belonging to the new faith also raised their voice in protest, for instance, Duke Barnim XI in 1540, Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg in 1540 and Elector Johann George, 1573. But the sovereigns were unable to restrain their rapacious nobles. “The great Lords,” the preacher Erasmus Sarcerius wrote of the Mansfeld district in 1555, “seek to appropriate to themselves the feudal rights and dues of the clergy and allow their officials and justices to take forcible action.… The revenues of the Church are spent in making roads and bridges and giving banquets, and are lent from hand to hand without hypothecary security.”[176] The Calvinist, Anton Prætorius, and many others not to mention Catholic contemporaries, speak in similar terms.

Of the falling off in the Church funds and poor-boxes in the 16th century in Hesse, in the Saxon Electorate, in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, in Hamburg and elsewhere abundant proof is met with in the official records, and this is the case even with regard to Würtemberg in the enactments of the Dukes from 1552 to 1562, though that country constituted in some respects an exception;[177] at a later date Duke Johann Frederick hazarded the opinion that the regulations regarding the fund “had fallen into oblivion.”

The growth of the proletariate, to remedy the impoverishment of which no means had as yet been discovered, was in no small measure promoted by Luther’s facilitation of marriage.

Luther himself had written, that “a boy ought to have recourse to matrimony as soon as he is twenty and a maid when she is from fifteen to eighteen years of age, and leave it to God to provide for their maintenance and that of their children.”[178] Other adherents of the new faith went even further, Eberlin of Günsburg simply declared: “As soon as a girl is fifteen, a boy eighteen, they should be given to each other in marriage.” There were others like the author of a “Predigt über Hunger- und Sterbejahre, von einem Diener am Wort” (1571), who raised strong objections against such a course. Dealing with the causes of the evident increase of “deterioration and ruin” in “lands, towns and villages,” he says, that “a by no means slight cause is the countless number of lightly contracted marriages, when people come together and beget children without knowing where they will get food for them, and so come down themselves in body and soul, and bring up their children to begging from their earliest years.” “And I cannot here approve of this sort of thing that Luther has written: A lad should marry when he is twenty, etc. [see above]. No, people should not think of marrying and the magistrates should not allow them to do so before they are sure of being able at least to provide their families with the necessaries of life, for else, as experience shows, a miserable, degenerate race is produced.”[179]

What this old writer says is borne out by modern sociologists. One of them, dealing with the 16th and 17th centuries, says: “These demands [of Luther and Eberlin] are obviously not practicable from the economic point of view, but from the ethical standpoint also they seem to us extremely doubtful. To rush into marriage without prospect of sufficient maintenance is not trusting God but tempting Him. Such marriages are extremely immoral actions and they deserve legal punishment on account of their danger to the community.” “Greater evil to the world can scarcely be caused in any way than by such marriages. Even in the most favourable cases such early marriages must have a deteriorating influence on the physical and intellectual culture of posterity.”[180]

Owing to the neglect of any proper care for the poor the plague of vagabondage continued on the increase. Luther’s zealous contemporary, Cyriacus Spangenberg, sought to counteract it by reprinting the Master’s edition of the “Liber vagatorum.” He says: “False begging and trickery has so gained the upper hand that scarcely anybody is safe from imposture.” The Superintendent, Nicholas Selnecker, again republished the writing with Luther’s preface in 1580, together with some lamentations of his own. He complains that “there are too many tramps and itinerant scholars who give themselves up to nothing but knavery,” etc.[181]

Adolf Harnack is only re-echoing the complaints of 16th century Protestants when he writes: “We may say briefly that, alas, nothing of importance was achieved, nay, we must go further: the Catholics are quite right when they assert that they, not we, lived to see a revival of charitable work in the 16th century, and, that, where Lutheranism was on the ascendant, social care of the poor was soon reduced to a worse plight than ever before.”[182] The revival in Catholic countries to which Harnack refers showed itself particularly in the 17th century in the activity of the new Orders, whereas at this time the retrograde movement was still in progress in the opposite camp. “For a long time the Protestant relief system produced only insignificant results.” It was not till the rise of Pietism and Rationalism, i.e. until the inauguration of the admirable Home Missions, that things began to improve. But Pietism and Rationalism are both far removed from the original Lutheran orthodoxy.[183]

Some Recent Excuses

It has been remarked in excuse of Luther and his want of success, that, “with merit and the hope of any reward, there also vanished the stimulus to strive after the attainment of salvation by means of works,” and that this being so, it was “not surprising” that charity—the selfless fruit of faith—was wanting in many; “for new, albeit higher moral motives, cannot at once come into play with the same facility as the older ones which they displace; there comes a time when the old motives have gone and when the new ones are operative only in the case of a few; the leaven at first only works gradually.” The history of the spread of “the higher motives of morality” not only at the outset of Christianity but at all times, shows, however, as a rule these to be most active under the Inspiration of the Divine Spirit at the time when first accepted. Nor does the comparison with the leaven in the passage quoted apply to a state of decline and decay, where, for a change to be effected, outside and entirely different elements were needed. We are told that the new motives could not at once take effect, but, where the delay extends over quite a century and a half, the blame surely cannot be laid on the shortness of the time of probation.

Again, when we hear great stress laid on the fact that Luther at least paved the way for State relief of the poor and, thus, far outstrode the mediæval Church, one is justified in asking, whether in reality State relief of the poor, with compulsory taxation, non-intervention of Christian charity, or individual effort, or without any morally elevating influence, is something altogether ideal; whether, on the other hand, voluntary charity, as practised particularly by associations, Orders or ecclesiastics, does not deserve a much higher place and take precedence of, or at least stand side by side with, the forced “charity” of the State. Even to-day Protestantism is seeking to reserve a place for voluntary charitable effort. Considerations as to the value of mere State charity would, however, carry us too far. We must refer this matter to experts.[184]

That, before Luther’s day, the authorities took a reasonable and even larger share in the relief of the poor than he himself demanded, is evident from what has been said above (p. 43 ff.).

As a matter of fact, judging by what has gone before, the assertion that the system of State relief of the poor was originated by Luther or by Protestantism calls for considerable “revision.” “The reformation,” so the sociological authority we have so frequently quoted says, “created neither the communal nor the governmental system of poor relief.”[185] This he finds borne out by the different schemes for the relief of the poor contained in the old ecclesiastical constitutions. It is true, he says, that, “according to the idea in vogue, the origin of our present Poor Law can be traced back directly” to the Reformation. Nevertheless, the changes that took place in the social care of the poor subsequent to Luther’s day, though certainly “far-reaching enough,” were “exclusively negative”;[186] owing to his exertions the Church property and that set aside for the relief of the poor was secularised, and the previous free-handed method of distribution ceased; all further growth of legislation on the subject in the prosperous and independent townships was effectually hindered; out of the mass of property that passed into alien hands only a few scraps could be spared by the secular rulers and handed over to the ministers for the benefit of the poor.

This was no State-regulation of poor relief as we now understand it. Still, the way was paved for it in so far as the props of the olden ecclesiastical system of relief had been felled and had eventually to be replaced by something new. In this sense it may be said that Luther’s work “paved the way” for the new conditions.[187]

5. Luther’s Attitude towards Worldly Callings

An attempt has been made to prove the truth of the dictum so often met with on the lips of Protestants, viz. that “Luther was the creator of those views of the world and life on which both the State and our modern civilisation rest,” by arguing, that, at least, he made an end of contempt for worldly callings and exalted the humbler as well as the higher spheres of life at the expense of the ecclesiastical and monastic. What Luther himself frequently states concerning his discovery of the dignity of the secular callings has elsewhere been placed in its true light (and the unhistoric accounts of his admirers are all in last resort based on his). This was done in the most suitable place, viz. when dealing with “Luther and Lying,” and with his spiteful caricature of the mediæval Church.[188] Still, for the sake of completeness, the claims Luther makes in this respect, and some new proofs in refutation of them, must be briefly called to mind in the present chapter. It is not unusual for his admirers to speak with a species of awe of Luther’s achievements in this respect:

“One of the most Momentous Achievements of the Reformation”

The claims Luther makes in respect of his labours on behalf of the worldly callings are even greater than his admirers would lead one to suppose. His actual words reveal their hyperbolical character, or rather untruth, by their very extravagance.

Luther we have heard say: “Such honour and glory have I by the grace of God, that, since the time of the Apostles no doctor … has confirmed and instructed the consciences of the secular estates so well and lucidly as I.”[189]—It was quite different with the “monks and priestlings”! They “damned both the laity and their calling.” These “revolutionary blasphemers” condemned “all the states of life that God instituted and ordained”; on the other hand, they extol their self-chosen and accursed state as though outside of it no one could be saved.[190]

The phantom of a Popish, monkish holiness-by-works never left him. In his Commentary on Genesis, though he holds that he has already taught the Papists more than they deserve on the right appreciation of the lower callings and labours, yet he once more informs them of his discovery, “that the work of the household and of the burgher,” such as hospitality, the training of children, the supervision of servants, “despised though they be as common and worthless,” are also well-pleasing to God. “Such things must be judged according to the Word [of God], not according to reason!… Let us therefore thank God that we, enlightened by the Word, now perceive what are really good works, viz. obedience to those in authority, respect for parents, supervision of the servants and assistance of our brethren.” “These are callings instituted by God.” “When the mother of a family provides diligently for her family, looks after the children, feeds them, washes them and rocks them in the cradle,” this calling, followed for God’s sake, is “a happy and a holy one.”[191]

Luther is never tired of claiming as his peculiar teaching that even the most humble calling—that of the maid or day-labourer—may prove a high and exalted road to heaven and that every kind of work, however insignificant, performed in that position of life to which a man is called is of great value in God’s sight when done in faith. He is fond of repeating, that a humble ploughman can lay up for himself as great a treasure in heaven by tilling his field, as the preacher or the schoolmaster, by their seemingly more exalted labours.

There is no doubt, that, by means of this doctrine, which undoubtedly is not without foundation, he consoled many of the lower classes, and brought them to a sense of their dignity as Christians. It is true that it was his polemics against monasticism and the following of the counsels of perfection which led him to make so much of the ordinary states of life and to paint them in such glowing colours. Nevertheless, we must admit that he does so with real eloquence and by means of comparisons and figures taken from daily life which could not but lend attraction to the truth and which differ widely from the dry, scholastic tone of some of his Catholic predecessors in this field.

He does not, however, really add a single fresh element to the olden teaching, or one that cannot be traced back to earlier times.

Either Luther was not aware of this, or else he conceals it from his hearers and readers. It would have been possible to confront him with a whole string of writers, ancient and mediæval, and even from the years when he himself began his work, whose writings teach the same truths, often, too, in language which leaves nothing more to be wished for on the score of impressiveness and feeling.[192] So many proofs, from reason as well as from revelation, had always been forthcoming in support of these truths that it is hard for us now to understand how the idea gained ground that Christians had forgotten them. Those who, down to the present day, repeat Luther’s assertions make too little account of this psychological riddle.

Here we shall merely add to what has already been brought forward a few further proofs from Luther’s own day.

Andreas Proles (†1503), Vicar General of the Saxon Augustinian Congregation and founder of the reformed branch which Luther himself joined on entering the monastery, reminds the working classes in one of his sermons of the honour, the duty, and the worth of work. “Since man is born to labour as the bird to fly, he must work unceasingly and never be idle.” He warmly exhorts the secular authorities to prayer, but reminds them still more emphatically of the requirements and the dignity of their calling: “The life of the mighty does not consist in parade but in ruling and discharging their duties towards their people.” He praises voluntary chastity and clerical celibacy, but also points out powerfully that the married state “is for many reasons honourable and praiseworthy in the sight of God and all Christians.”[193]

Gottschalk Hollen, the preacher of Westphalia, was also an Augustinian. In his sermons published at Hagenau in 1517 he displays the highest esteem for the worldly callings. Those classes who worked with their hands did not seem to him in the least contemptible, on the contrary the Christian could give glory to God even by the humblest work; ordinary believers frequently allowed their calling to absorb them in worldly things, but these are not evil or blameworthy. In a special sermon on work he represents such cares as a means of attaining to everlasting salvation. He insists everywhere on a man’s performing the duties of his calling and will not allow of their being neglected for the sake of prayer or of out-of-the-way practices, such as pilgrimages.[194]

Just before Luther made his public appearance two German works of piety described the dignity and the honour of the working state and at the same time insisted on the obligation of labour. They speak of the secular callings as a source of moral and religious duty and the foundation of a happy life well pleasing to God.

The “Wyhegertlin,” printed at Mayence in 1509, says: “When work is done diligently and skilfully both God and man take pleasure in it, and it is a real good work when skilful artisans contribute to God’s glory by their handicraft, by beautiful buildings and images of every kind, and soften men’s hearts so that they take pleasure in the beautiful, and regard every art and handicraft as a gift of God for the profit, comfort and edification of man.”—“For seeing that the Saints also worked and laboured, so shall the Christian learn from their example that by honourable labour he can glorify God, do good and, through God’s mercy, save his own soul.”[195]

In an “Ermanung” of 1513, which also appeared at Mayence, we read: “To work is to serve God according to His command and therefore all must work, the one with his hands, in the field, the house or the workshop, others by art and learning, others again as rulers of the people or other authorities, others by fighting in defence of their country, others again as ghostly ministers of Christ in the churches and monasteries.… Whoever stands idle is a despiser of God’s commands.”[196]

These instances must suffice. Though many others could be quoted, Protestants will, nevertheless, still be found to repeat such statements as the following: “Any appreciation of secular work as something really moral was impossible in the Catholic Church.” “The Catholic view of the Church belittled the secular callings.” “The ethical appreciation of one’s calling is a significant achievement of the reformation on which rests the present division of society.” Luther it was who “discovered the true meaning of callings … which has since become the property of the civilised world.” “The modern ethical conception of one’s calling, which is common to all Protestant nations and which all others lack, was a creation of the reformation,” etc.

Others better acquainted with the Middle Ages have argued, that, though the olden theologians expressed themselves correctly on the importance of secular callings, yet theirs was not the view of the people.—But the above passages, like those previously quoted elsewhere, do not hail from theologians quite ignorant of the world, but from sermons and popular writings. What they reflect is simply the popular ideas and practice.

That errors were made is, of course, quite true. That, at a time when the Church stood over all, the excessive and ill-advised zeal of certain of the clergy and religious did occasionally lead them to belittle unduly the secular callings may readily be admitted; what they did furnished some excuse for the Lutheran reaction.

What above all moved Luther was, however, the fact that he himself had become a layman.

To assert that even the very words “calling” or “vocation” in their modern sense were first coined by him is not in agreement with the facts of the case.

On the contrary, Luther found the German equivalents already current, otherwise he would probably not have introduced them into his translation of the Bible, as he was so anxious to adapt himself to the language in common use amongst the people so as to be perfectly understood by them.[197] It is true that Ecclus. xi. 22, in the pre-Lutheran Bible, e.g. that of Augsburg dating from 1487, was rendered: “Trust God and stay in thy place,” whereas in Luther’s—and on this emphasis has been laid—we read: “Trust in God and abide by thy calling.” All that can be said is, however, that Luther’s translation here brings out the same meaning rather better. That the word was not coined by Luther, but was common with the people, is clear from what Luther himself says incidentally when speaking of 1 Cor. vii. 20, where the word vocatio (κλῆσις) is used of the call to faith. “And you must know,” he writes, “that the word ‘calling’ does not here mean the state to which a man is called, as when we say your calling is the married state, your calling is the clerical state, etc., each one having his calling from God. It is not of such a calling that the Apostle here speaks,” etc. The expression “as we say” shows plainly that Luther is speaking of a quite familiar term which there was no need for him to invent when translating Ecclus. xi. 22. Much less did he, either then or at any time, invent the “conception of a calling.”

Luther’s Pessimism Regarding Various Callings. The Peasants

When olden writers dealt with the relation between the Gospel and the worldly callings as a rule they pointed out with holy pride, that Christianity does not merely esteem every calling very highly but embraces them all with holy charity and cherishes and fosters the various states as sons of a common father. Nothing was so attractive in the great exponents of the Gospel teaching and renovators of the Christian people—for instance in St. Francis of Assisi—as their sympathy, respect and tenderness for every class without exception. The Church’s great men knew how to discover the good in every class, to further it with the means at their disposal and indulgently to set it on its guard against its dangers. They wished to place everything lovingly at the service of the Creator.

Had Luther in reality brought back to humanity the Gospel true and undefiled, as he was so fond of saying, then he should surely have striven, in the spirit of charity and good will, to make known its supernatural social forces to all classes of men, and to become, as the Apostle says, “All things to all men.”

Now, although Luther uses powerful words to describe the dignity of the different worldly callings, on the other hand, he tends at times to depreciate whole classes, this being especially the case when he allows his disappointment to get the better of him. Nor is the contempt openly expressed here counterbalanced by any sufficient recognition of the good, such as might have mollified his hearers and made them forget the ungracious abuse he thundered from his pulpit.

He speaks bitterly of the common people, the proletariate of to-day, to which, according to him, belonged all the lower classes in the towns. Although himself of low extraction he displays very little sympathy for the people. “We must not pipe too much to the mob, for they are fond of raging.… They have no idea of self-restraint or how to exercise it, and each one’s skin conceals five tyrants.”[198] “A donkey must taste the stick and the mob must be ruled by force; of this God was well aware, hence in the hands of the authorities He placed, not a fox’s brush, but a sword.”[199]

He only too frequently accuses the artisan and merchant class, as a whole, of cheating, avarice and laziness. At Wittenberg they may possibly have been exceptionally bad, yet he does not speak sufficiently of their less blameworthy side.

For the soldiers, it is true, he has friendly words of appreciation of their calling; it was for them that he wrote in 1526 a special work, where he replied in the affirmative to the question contained in the title: “Can even men-at-arms be in a state of grace?” Yet even here he does not shrink from bringing forward charges against their calling: “A great part of the men-at-arms are the devil’s own and some of them are actually crammed with devils.… They imagine themselves fire-eaters because they swear shamefully, perpetrate atrocities, and curse and defy the God of Heaven.”[200]

Of the nobles he says in 1523, wishing to promote more frequent marriages between them and those of lower birth:[201] “Must all princes and nobles who are born princes and nobles remain for ever such? What harm is there if a prince takes a burgher’s daughter to wife and contents himself with a burgher’s modest dowry? Or, why should not a noble maid give her hand to a burgher? In the long run it will not do for the nobles always to intermarry with nobles. Although we are not all equal in the sight of the world yet before God we all are equal, all of us children of Adam, creatures of God, and one man as good as another.” These words certainly do not express any lively conviction of the importance of the existing distinctions of rank for society.

It is perfectly true, that, occasionally, Luther has words of praise and recognition for the good qualities of the “fine, pious nobles,” if only on account of those who were inclined to accept his teaching. But far more often he trounces them unmercifully because they either failed to respond or were set on thwarting him. The language in which he writes of them sometimes becomes unspeakably coarse. “They are called nobles and ‘von so-and-so.’ But merd also comes ‘von’ the nobles and might just as well boast of coming from their noble belly, though it stinks and is of no earthly use. Hence this too has a claim to nobility.” Then follows his favourite saying: “We Germans are Germans and Germans we shall remain, i.e. swine and senseless brutes.”[202]

The rulers and the great ones of the Empire were the first to win his favour. The writing “An den Adel,” the first of his so-called “reformation writings,” he addresses to the nobles in the hope of thus attaining his aims by storm. When, however, he was disappointed, and they refused to meet him half-way, he abused the princes and all the secular authorities in Germany and wrote: “God Almighty has made our princes mad”; “such men were formerly rated as knaves, now we are obliged to call them obedient, Christian princes.” To him they were “fools,” simply because they were against him and thus belonged to the multitude who “blasphemed” the Divine Majesty.[203]

After the defeat of the peasants in 1525 he supported those princes favourable to his teaching at the expense of the peasants, so that the latter were loud in their complaints of him. In this connection, looking back at the overthrow of the Peasant Revolt, he wrote to those in power: “Who opposed the peasants more vigorously by word and writing than I? … and, if it comes to boasting, I do not know who else was the first to vanquish the peasants, or to do so most effectually. But now those who did the least claim all the honour and glory of it.”[204]

After the Peasant War he was so filled with hatred of the peasant class and so conscious of their dislike for himself personally, as to be hardly able to speak of them without blame and reproach. “The peasants do not deserve,” he says, “the harvests and fruits that the earth brings forth and provides.”

Of all classes the peasants around Wittenberg incurred his displeasure most severely. “They are all going to the devil,” he says when lamenting that, “out of so many villages, only one man taught his household from the Word of God”; with the young country folk “something” could be done, but the old peasants had been utterly corrupted by the Pope; this was also the complaint of the Evangelical deacons who came in touch with them.[205]—“I am very angry with the peasants,” he wrote in 1529, “who are anxious to govern themselves and who do not appreciate their good fortune in being able to sleep in peace owing to the help and protection of the rulers. You helpless, boorish yokels and donkeys,” he says to them, “will you never learn to understand? May the lightning blast you!—You have the best of it.… You have the Mark and yet are so ungrateful as to refuse to pray for the rulers or to give them anything.”[206]

As a matter of fact, however, the great ones did not wait for the peasants to “give” anything.

They oppressed the country people and plundered them. Melanchthon wrote, particularly after 1525, of the boundless despotism of the authorities over the people on the land. Since the overthrow of the social revolution very sad changes had taken place among the agriculturists. The violent “laying of the yokels” became a general evil, and, in place of the small holdings of the peasant class—the most virile and largest portion of the nation—arose the large estates of the nobles. Not merely where the horrors of war had raged, but even elsewhere, e.g. in the north-east of Germany, the peasant found himself deprived of his rights and left defenceless in the hands of the Junkers and knights.[207] “The reformation-age made his rights to his property and his standing more parlous than before.”[208]

What Luther says of serfdom, the oppression and abuse of which had led to the Peasant Rising, is worthy of record: “Serfdom,” he says, “is not contrary to Christianity, and whoever says it is tells a lie!”[209]—“Christ does not wish to abolish serfdom. What cares He how the lords or princes rule [in secular matters]?”[210]

He makes a strict application of this in his sermons on Genesis, where he even represents serfdom as a desirable state. Luther delivered these sermons in 1524 and they were printed from notes in 1527. In his preface he declares, that he was “quite willing” they should be published because they express his “sense and mind.” He relates in one passage how Abimelech had bestowed “sheep and oxen, men-servants and maid-servants” on Abraham (xx. 14), and then goes on to say of the people made over: “They too were all personal property like other cattle, so that their owners might sell them as they liked, and it would verily be almost best that this stage of things should be revived, for nobody can control or tame the populace in any other way.” Abraham did not set free the men-servants and maid-servants given him, and yet he was accounted amongst the “pious and holy” and was “a just ruler.” He proceeds: “They [the patriarchs] might easily have abolished it so far as they were concerned, but that would not have been a good thing, for the serfs would have become too proud had they been given so many rights, and would have thought themselves equal to the patriarchs or to their children. Each one must be kept in his place, as God has ordained, sons and daughters, servants, maids, husbands, wives, etc.… If compulsion and the law of the strong arm still ruled (in the case of servants and retainers) as in the past, so that if a man dared to grumble he got a box on the ear—things would fare better; otherwise it is all of no use. If they take wives, these are impertinent people, wild and dissolute, whom no one can use or have anything to do with.”[211]

The Psychological Background. Luther’s Estrangement from Whole Classes of Society

Both in Luther’s treatment of the peasants of his day and in his whole attitude to different classes of society, we find the traces of a profound and general depression which had seized upon him and which seems to accord ill with the sense of triumph one would have expected in him at the continued progress of his work, and at the apostasy from the Roman Church. Such expressions of dissatisfaction become more frequent as years go by and serve to some extent to explain and excuse his pessimism concerning the different classes.

This feeling had its origin, apart from other causes, in the fact that Luther little by little lost touch with whole classes of the people, while to many of the new conditions he remained a stranger. He, who had held in his hands the destiny of so many, was, in fact, becoming to a great extent isolated, particularly since the actual direction of the new Church had been taken out of his hands and vested in the princes or municipal authorities.

Not only did the rift which separated him from the peasants subsequent to 1525 become ever more pronounced, but he found hostility and dislike growing between himself and other classes of society.

Under the influence of the adverse wind blowing from Wittenberg many of the Humanists had given up their at one time enthusiastic friendship and turned against him. Catholic scholars who had once been disposed to favour the reform but had been disappointed in their hopes withdrew from him in increasing numbers. In other districts which had been recently Protestantised the country clergy remained faithful to the olden Church, as we see, for instance, from a letter of Luther’s dated Sep. 19, 1539, where he speaks of “over five hundred parsons, poisonous Papists,” who had “been left unexamined and now are raising their horns in defiance”—but who, he hopes, will soon be forcibly sent about their business.[212] In his own camp, again, there were Anabaptists and other sectarians; there were also theologians who refused to fall into line and either failed to preach on faith and works as harshly as he wished, or, running to the opposite extreme like the Antinomians, went much further than he himself. In the Saxon Electorate Luther felt grievously the decease of those Councillors, like Pfeffinger and Feilitzsch, who had been well disposed towards him, whose places were now taken by “greedy Junkers and skinflints, who looked upon the ecclesiastical revolution as a good opportunity for increasing their family estates and for running riot at others’ expense.”[213] Among the princes who had apostatised from the Church he also detected to his bitter vexation an ever-growing tendency to separate themselves from Wittenberg, partly owing to the influence of Zwinglianism, partly in consequence of their independent Church regulations. Such was, for instance, the action of Berlin, where the Protestant Elector, Joachim II of Brandenburg, declared in an address to his clergy: “As little as I mean to be bound to the Roman Church, so little do I mean to be bound to the Church of Wittenberg. I do not say: ‘credo sanctam Romanam’ or ‘Wittenbergensem,’ but ‘catholicam ecclesiam,’ and my Church here at Berlin or at Cöllen is just as much a true Christian Church as that of the Wittenbergers.”[214]

In the sermon Luther preached at Wittenberg on June 18, 1531, he pours forth the vials of his wrath on the nobles and peasants of the new faith. He was then doing duty for Bugenhagen, the absent pastor, and devoting himself to preaching, though he describes himself in a letter as “old, sickly and tired of life,” and elsewhere, alluding to his many employments, says: “I am not only Luther, but Pomeranus, Vicar-General, Moses, Jethro and I know not who else besides.”[215]

In this sermon the Gospel of Dives and Lazarus recalls to his mind the fact that, in the Saxon Electorate, he and his preachers were being treated very much as Lazarus, whom the rich man left lying at his gate and who had to get his fill of the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. “When we complain to the great, we get only kicks,” he exclaims indignantly; “our foes would gladly put a stop to the Evangel with the sword, whilst our own people would no less gladly cut off our head, like John the Baptist, only that the sword they use is want, misery and hunger.” If we preach against their wickedness they say we are trying to defy and contradict them! Let the devil defy them. They declare we want to set ourselves up against them, and to rule, and to bring them under our feet. For preaching against the rebellious peasants we are thanked by being called the Pope of Germany, as though we were playing the master. Not indeed that they mean this in earnest, but they are anxious to bring us to preach as they wish, otherwise they punish us with starvation. “The poor preachers they tread under foot, take the bread out of their mouths and abuse them most shamefully.” “This ingratitude is worse than any tyranny!” He tells them finally that their fate will be that of Dives, viz. hell-fire; then they will long in vain even for a drop of water.[216]

The world hates me, we read in another sermon, for it ever “hates the good.” “They refuse to have anything to do with the ministers [of religion], there is hardly a place where they suffer the preacher, much less support him. My opponents declare that: Did I preach the truth, the people would become pious.” This is the Anabaptists’ way of concealing their own errors. “But do not wonder,” so he consoles his hearers, for “the purer the Word, the worse almost all become; only a few become good. This is a sure sign that the doctrine is true; … for Satan, who is stung by the truth, tries to wreck it by corruption of morals.… He it is who sets himself up in defiance of it.” “But there are some few who are faithful and in earnest.” Nevertheless, the world must heap ingratitude and bitterness upon us otherwise it would not be the world. “By my preaching I have helped several, but what can I do? If you wait till the world honours you, then you wait a long time and only prepare a cross for yourself.”[217]

In a sermon on Jan. 22 of the same year he had quoted a saying current at that time about Rome, applying it to Wittenberg: “The nearer to Rome, the worse the Christians.” “For wherever the Evangel is, there it is despised.” “The Lord Himself says in to-day’s Gospel: ‘I have not found such faith as this in Israel.’ The chosen people do not believe, though some few do.… In other regions Christ may find adherents with a stronger faith than any in our principalities.” “At Court and elsewhere things go ill.… We tread the pearls under foot.” “So great is their shamelessness, ingratitude and hate that it is a sign that God is getting ready to show us something; the persecution of the Evangel in our principality is worse than ever. I am already sick of preaching (‘iam tædet me prædicatio’).” “Those who refuse the offered kingdom may go to the devil, etc.”[218] The faults of the government and the increase in the prices of necessaries drew from him bitter words in a sermon of April 23 of the same year: “There is no government, the biggest criminals (‘pessimi nebulones’) rule; this we have deserved by our sins.” “When things become cheaper then war and pestilence will come upon us.”[219]

Thus the ill will gathering within him was poured forth, as occasion offered, on the various classes indiscriminately.

It seemed to him as though little by little the whole world was becoming a hostel of which the devil was the landlord and where wickedness and lust reigned supreme—above all because it was so slow to receive his preaching.[220] Even the supreme Court of Justice of the Empire became in 1541 a “devil’s whore,”[221] because the judges and imperial authorities were against him and stood for the old order of things. It was also at this time that his pent-up anger broke out against the Jews.[222] Here it will be sufficient to give a few new quotations.

He put himself in the place of a ruler in whose lands the Jews blasphemed Christianity and exclaimed: “I would summon all the Jews and ask them,” whether they could prove their insulting assertions. “If they could, I would give them a thousand florins; if not I would have their tongues torn out by the root. In short, we ought not to suffer Jews to live amongst us, nor eat or drink with them.”[223]—“They are a shameful people,” he says on another occasion, “they swallow up everything with their usury; where they give a gentleman a thousand florins, they suck twenty thousand out of his poor underlings.”[224] The demands with which his anger against the Jews inspires him found only too strong an echo amongst his followers. “It would be well,” wrote the Lutheran preacher Jodokus Ehrhardt in 1558, after complaining of the usury of the Jews, “if in all places they were proceeded with as Father Luther advised and enjoined when, amongst other things, he wrote: ‘Let their synagogues and schools be set on fire … and let who can throw brimstone.… Refuse them safe conduct and all freedom to travel. Let all their ready money and treasures of gold and silver, etc., be taken from them,’ etc. Such faithful counsels and regulations were given by our divinely enlightened Luther.”[225]

After all that has been said it would be very rash to apply to Luther’s attitude towards the different callings and professions the words which St. Paul wrote of himself when considering humanity as a whole, i.e. of the power of God by which he had striven with endless patience and charity to bring home the Gospel to both Jew and Greek: “To the Greeks and to the barbarians, to the wise and to the foolish I am a debtor.” “I have become all things to all men in order to save all.”

The Merchant Class

The opening up of many previously unknown countries, the discovery of new trade routes, and the new industries called forth by new inventions brought about a sudden and quite unforeseen revival in trade and prosperity at the time of the religious schism. An alteration in the earlier ideas on political economy was bound to supervene. The upsetting of the mediæval notions which now could no longer hold and the uncertainty as to what to build on in future led to a deal of confusion in that period of transition.

What was chiefly needed in the case of one anxious to judge of things from their ethical and social side was experience and knowledge of the world joined with prudence and the spirit of charity. Annoyance was out of place; what was called for was a capacity to weigh matters dispassionately.

Among the Humanists there were some, who, because the new era of commerce turned men’s minds from learning, condemned it absolutely. Thus Eobanus Hessus of Nuremberg laments, that, there, people were bent on acquiring riches rather than learning; the world dreamt of nothing but saffron and pepper; he lived, as it were, among “empurpled monkeys” and would rather make his home with the peasants of his Hessian fatherland than in his present surroundings.[226]—What was Luther’s attitude towards the rising merchant class and its undertakings?

In his case it was not merely the injury done to the schools and to “Christian” posterity, and the ever growing luxury that prejudiced him against commerce, but, above all, the constant infringement of the principles of morality, which, according to him, was a necessary result of the new economic life and its traffic in wares and money. He exaggerated the moral danger and failed entirely to see the economic side of the case. We do not find in him, says Köstlin-Kawerau, “a sufficient insight into the existing conditions and problems,”[227] nevertheless he did not shrink from the harshest and most uncharitable censure.

It was his deliberate intention, so he says, “to give scandal to many more people on this point by setting up the true doctrine of Christ.” This we find in a letter he wrote after the Leipzig Disputation when putting the finishing touch to his first works on usury (1519).[228] Because no attention was paid to his “Evangelical” ideas on usury he came to the conclusion that, “now, in these days, clergy and seculars, prelates and subjects are alike bent on thwarting Christ’s life, doctrine and Gospel.”[229] Hence he must once again vindicate the Gospel. He, however, distorts the Christian idea by making into strict commands what Christ had proposed as counsels of perfection. There is reason to believe that the mistake he here makes under the plea of zeal for the principles of the Gospel is bound up not merely with his antipathy to the idea of Evangelical Counsels,[230] but also with his older, pseudo-mystic tendency and with his conception of the true Christian. We cannot help thinking of his fanciful plan of assembling apart the real Christians when we hear him in these very admonitions bewailing that “there are so few Christians”; if anyone refused to lend gratis it was “a sign of his deep unbelief,” since we are assured that by so doing “we become children of the Most High and that our reward is great. Of such a consoling promise he is not worthy who will not believe and act accordingly.”[231]

In any case it was a quite subjective and unfounded application of Holy Scripture, when, in his sermon on usury, he makes the following the chief point to be complied with:

“Christian dealings with temporal possessions,” he there says, “consist in three things, in giving for nothing, lending free of interest and lovingly allowing our belongings to be taken from us [Matt. v. 40, 42; Luke vi. 30]; for there is no merit in your buying something, inheriting it, or gaining possession of it in some other honest way, since, if this were piety, then the heathen and Turks would also be pious.”[232]

This extravagant notion of the Christian’s duties led to his rigid and untimely vindication of the mediæval prohibition of the charging of interest, of which we shall have to speak more fully later. It also led him to assail all commercial enterprise.

Greatly incensed at the action of the trading companies he set about writing his “Von Kauffshandlung und Wucher” (1524).

Here, speaking of the wholesale traders and merchants, he says: “The foreign trade that brings wares from Calicut, India and so forth, such as spices and costly fabrics of silk and cloth of gold, which serve only for display and are of no use, but merely suck the money out of our country and people, would not be allowed had we a government and real rulers.” The Old Testament patriarchs indeed bought and sold, he says, but “only cattle, wool, grain, butter, milk and such like; these are God’s gifts which He raises from the earth and distributes among men”; but the present trade means only the “throwing away of our gold and silver into foreign countries.”[233]

Traders were, according to him, in a bad case from the moral point of view: “Let no one come and ask how he may with a good conscience belong to one of these companies. There is no other counsel than this: ‘Drop it’; there is no other way. If the companies are to go on, then that will be the end of law and honesty; if law and honesty are to remain, then the companies must cease.” The companies, so he had already said, are through and through “unstable and without foundation, all rank avarice and injustice, so that they cannot even be touched with a good conscience.… They hold all the goods in their hands and do with them as they please.” They aim “at making sure of their profit in any case, which is contrary to the nature, not only of commercial wares but of all temporal goods which God wishes to be ever in danger and uncertainty. They, however, have discovered a means of securing a sure profit even on uncertain temporal goods.” A man can thus “in a short time become so rich as to be able to buy up kings and emperors”; such a thing cannot possibly be “right or godly.”[234]

As a further reason for condemning profit from trade and money transactions he points out, that such profit does not arise from the earth or from cattle.[235]

With both these arguments he is, however, on purely mediæval ground. He pays but little regard to the new economic situation, though he has a keen eye for the abuses and the injustice which undoubtedly accompanied the new commerce. Instead, however, of confining his censure to these and pointing out how things might be improved, he prefers to take his stand on an already obsolete theory—one, nevertheless, which many shared with him—and condemn unconditionally all such commercial undertakings with the violence and lack of consideration usual in him.[236]

In his remarks we often find interesting thoughts on the economic conditions; we see the remarkable range of his intellect and occasionally we may even wonder whence he had his vast store of information. It is also evident, however, that the other work with which he was overwhelmed did not leave him time to digest his matter. Often enough he is right when he stigmatises the excesses, but on the whole he goes much too far. As Frank G. Ward says: “Because he was incapable of passing a discriminating judgment on the abuses that existed he simply condemned all commerce off-hand.”[237] He was too fond of scenting evil usury everywhere. A contemporary of his, the merchant Bonaventura Furtenbach, of Nuremberg, having come across one of Luther’s writings on the subject, possibly his “Von Kauffshandlung,” remarked sarcastically: “Were I to try to write a commentary on the Gospel of Luke everyone would say, you are not qualified to do so. So it is with Luther when he treats of the interest on money; he has never studied such matters.”[238] A Hamburg merchant also made fun of Luther’s economics, and, as the Hamburg Superintendent Æpinus (Johann Hock) reported, quoted the instance of the Peripatetician Phormion, who gave Hannibal a scholastic lecture on the art of war, for which reason it is usual to dub him who tries to speak of things of which he knows nothing, a new Phormion.[239]

In his “An den Adel” Luther had shown himself more reticent, though even here he inveighs against interest and trading companies, and says: “I am not conversant with figures, but I cannot understand how, with a hundred florins, it is possible to gain twenty annually.… I leave this to the worldly wise. I, as a theologian, have only to censure the appearance of evil concerning which St. Paul says [1 Thess. v. 22] ‘from all appearance of evil refrain!’ This I know very well,” he continues, speaking from the traditional standpoint, “that it would be much more godly to pay more attention to tilling the soil and less to trade.” Yet, even in this writing, he goes so far as to say: “It is indeed high time that a bit were put in the mouth of the Fuggers and such-like companies.”[240]

More and more plainly he was, however, forced to realise that it was not within his power to check the new development of commerce; he, nevertheless, stuck by his earlier views. He was also, and to some extent justifiably, shocked at the growing luxury which had made its way into the burgher class and into the towns generally in the train of foreign trade. Instead of “staying in his place and being content with a moderate living,” “everyone wants to be a merchant and to grow rich.”[241]

“We despise the arts and languages,” he says, “but refuse to do without the foreign wares which are neither necessary nor profitable to us, but [the expenses of] which lay our very bones bare. Do we not thereby show ourselves to be true Germans, i.e. fools and beasts?”[242] God “has given us, like other nations, sufficient wool, hair, flax and everything else necessary for suitable and becoming clothing, but now men squander fortunes on silk, satin, cloth of gold and all sorts of foreign stuffs.… We could also do with less spices.” People might say he was trying to “put down the wholesale trade and commerce. But I do my duty. If things are not improved in the community, at least let whoever can amend.”[243]

“I cannot see that much in the way of good has ever come to a country through commerce.”[244]

He refused to follow the more luxurious mode of living which had become the rule in the towns as a result of trade, but insisted on leading the more simple life to which he had throughout been accustomed. For the good of the people, poverty or simplicity was on the whole more profitable than riches. “People say, and with truth, ‘It takes a strong man to bear prosperity,’ and ‘A man can endure many things but not good fortune.’ … If we have food and clothing let us esteem it enough. For the cities of the plain which God destroyed it would have been better, if, instead of abounding in wealth, everything had been of the dearest, and there had been less superfluity.”[245]—“What worse and more wanton can be conceived of than the mad mob and the yokels when they are gorged with food and have the reins in their hands.”[246]

Hence he took a “tolerable maintenance” as he expresses it, i.e. the mode of living suitable to a man’s state, as the basis of a fair wage. The question of wages must in the last instance, he thinks, depend on the question of maintenance. Luther, like Calvin, did not go any further in this matter. “Their conservative ideas saw in high wages only the demoralisation of the working classes.”[247]

Luther’s remarks on this subject “recall the words of Calvin, viz. that the people must always be kept in poverty in order that they may remain obedient.”[248]

According to his view “the price of goods was synonymous with their barter value expressed in money; money was the fixed, unchangeable standard of things; it never occurred to anyone that an alteration in the value of money might come, a mistake which led to much confusion. Again, the barter value of a commodity was its worth calculated on the cost of the material it contained and of the trouble and labour expended on its manufacture. This calculation excluded the subjective element, just as it ignored competition as a factor in the determining of prices.”[249] Thus, according to Luther, the merchant had merely to calculate “how many days he had spent in fetching and acquiring the goods, and how great had been the work and danger involved, for much labour and time ought to represent a higher and better wage”; he should in this “compare himself to the common day-labourer or working-man, see what he earns in a day, and calculate accordingly.” More than a “tolerable maintenance” was, however, to be avoided in commerce, and likewise all such profit “as might involve loss to another.”[250] It would have pleased him best had the authorities fixed the price of everything, but, owing to their untrustworthiness, this appeared to him scarcely to be hoped for. The principle: “I shall sell my goods as dear as I can,” he opposed with praiseworthy firmness; this was “to open door and window to hell.”[251] He also inveighed rightly and strongly against the artificial creation of scarcity. Here, too, we see that his ideas were simply those in vogue in the ranks from which he came.

“His economic views in many particulars display a retrograde tendency.”[252]—“In the history of economics he cannot be considered as either an original or a systematic thinker. We frequently find him adopting views which were current without seriously testing their truth or their grounds.… His exaggerations and inconsequence must be explained by the fact that he took but little interest in worldly business. His interpretation of things depended on his own point of view rather than on the actual nature of the case.”[253]

The worst of it is that his own “point of view” intruded itself far too often into his criticisms of social conditions.

Influence of Old-Testament Ideas

Excessive regard for the Old-Testament enactments helped Luther to adopt a peculiar outlook on things social and ethical.

He says in praise of the Patriarchs: “They were devout and holy men who ruled well even among the heathen; now there is nothing like it.”[254] He often harks back to the social advantages of certain portions of the Jewish law, and expressly regrets that there were no princes who had the courage to take steps to reintroduce them for the benefit of mankind.

In 1524, under the influence of his Biblical studies, he wrote to Duke Johann Frederick of Saxony, praising the institution of tithes and even of fifths: “It would be a grand thing if, according to ancient usage, a tenth of all property were annually handed over to the authorities; this would be the most Godly interest possible.… Indeed it would be desirable to do away with all other taxes and impose on the people a payment of a fifth or sixth, as Joseph did in Egypt.”[255] At the same time he is quite aware that such wishes are impracticable, seeing that, “not the Mosaic, but the Imperial law is now accepted by the world and in use.”

Partly owing to the impossibility of a return to the Old Covenant, partly out of a spirit of contradiction to the new party, he opposed the fanatics’ demand that the Mosaic law should be introduced as near as possible entire, and the Imperial, Roman law abrogated as heathenish and the Papal, Canon law as anti-Christian. Duke Johann, the Elector’s brother, was soon half won over to these fantastic ideas by the Court preacher, Wolfgang Stein, but Luther and Melanchthon succeeded in making him change his mind.[256] The necessity Luther was under of opposing the Anabaptists here produced its fruits; his struggle with the fanatics preserved him from the consequences of his own personal preference for the social regulations of the Old Covenant.

In what difficulties his Old-Testament ideas on polygamy involved him the history of the bigamy of Philip of Hesse has already shown.[257] Had such ideas concerning marriage been realised in society the revolution in the social order would indeed have been great.

Luther’s esteem for the social laws of the Old Testament finds its best expression in his sermons on Genesis, which first saw the light in 1527.

He says, for instance, of the Jewish law of restitution and general settlement of affairs, in the Jubilee Year: “It is laid down in Moses that no one can sell a field in perpetuity but only until the Jubilee Year, and when this came each one recovered possession of his field or the property he had sold, and thus the lands remained in the family. There are also some other fine laws in the Books of Moses which well might be adopted, made use of and put in force.” He even wishes that the Imperial Government would take the lead in re-enacting them “for as long as is desired, but without compulsion.”[258]

His views on interest and usury were likewise influenced by his one-sided reading of certain Old- and New-Testament statements.

Usury and Interest

On the question of the lawfulness of charging interest Luther not only laid down no “new principles” which might have been of help for the future, but, on the contrary, he paved the way for serious difficulties. He was not to be moved from the traditional, mediæval standpoint which viewed the charging of any interest whatever on loans as something prohibited. His foe, Johann Eck, on the other hand, in a Disputation at Bologna, had defended the lawfulness of moderate interest.[259]

After having repeatedly attacked by word and pen usury and the charging of any interest[260]—led thereto, as he says, by the grievous abuses in the commercial and financial system, he published in 1539 his “An die Pfarherrn wider den Wucher zu predigen,” whence most of what follows has been taken. As it was written towards the end of his life, we may assume it to represent the result of his experience and the final statement of his convictions.

In this writing, after a sad outburst on the increase of usury in Germany, he begins his “warnings” by urging that “the people should be told firmly and plainly concerning lending and borrowing, and that when money is lent and a charge made or more taken back than was originally made over, this is usury, and as such is condemned by every law. Hence those are usurers who charge 5, or 6, or more on the hundred on the money they lend, and should be called idolatrous ministers of avarice or Mammon, nor can they be saved unless they do penance.… To lend is to give a man my money, property or belongings so that he may use them.… Just as one neighbour lends another a dish, a can, a bed, or clothes, and in the same way money, or money’s worth, in return for which I may not take anything.”[261]

The writer of these words, like so many others who, in his day and later, still adhered to the old canonical standpoint, failed to see, that, as things then were, to lend money was to surrender to the borrower a commodity which was already bringing in some return, and that, in consequence of this, the lender had a right to demand some indemnification. As this had not generally speaking been the case in the Middle Ages, the prohibition of charging interest was then a just one. Nevertheless, within certain limits, it was slowly becoming obsolete and, as the economic situation changed for that of modern times and money became more liquid, the more general did lending at interest become.