Chapter XL · AT THE GRAVE

1. Luther’s fame among the friends he left behind

The first panegyrics on Luther, the funeral orations and encomiums which were immediately printed and scattered broadcast through Germany constitute an historical phenomenon in themselves. They show orators and writers alike fascinated as it were by Luther’s overpowering personality, and they, in turn, fascinated many thousands who read them. Jonas was the first to deliver at Eisleben an address in his honour, viz. in the afternoon of Feb. 19; this was followed by another by Cœlius previous to the departure of the funeral procession on Feb. 20; whilst Bugenhagen, too, delivered one of his own on the 22nd, after the arrival of the body at the Schlosskirche. The rhetorical effusions of Jonas and Cœlius, who had been present with Luther at the end, likewise Bugenhagen’s address, and the account of Luther’s death which they published in conjunction with Aurifaber, are all crammed with incredible praises. Melanchthon, too, forgetful of all the pain he had suffered at Luther’s hand and shutting his eyes to all his weaknesses, paid his tribute of honour to Luther’s memory, first in a notice affixed at the University, then in a Latin funeral-oration which he delivered in the Schlosskirche as soon as Bugenhagen had had his say, and, again, in a short writing on his friend and master which he prefixed to the second volume of the Latin edition of Luther’s works (1546).

“Alas, gone is the chariot and horseman of Israel” (2 Kings ii. 12), so Melanchthon said in the notice of Luther’s death, which he addressed to the students,[1446] “who ruled the Church in this the old age of the world. For it was not human sagacity that discovered the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins and trust in the Son of God, but God revealed it through this man whom He raised up before our eyes.” In his funeral oration he extols the departed as one of the long line of Divine tools starting in Old Testament times, a man taught by God and exercised in severe spiritual combats, of a friendly nature, not at all passionate or quarrelsome and only inclining to be violent when such medicine was needed by the ailments of the age. “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever holy, lovely and of good fame” according to the Apostle (Philip. iv. 8) had been exemplified in him. Now, however, he had gone to join the company of the Prophets in heaven, etc.

According to the similar address delivered by Jonas[1447] only at the end of the world would people clearly see what “splendid revelations he had had when first he began to preach the Evangel.” Luther had the “Spirit of God in rich and exalted measure,” he was “a past master in spiritual combats.” “In the hour of death he had cast all his cares on Christ.” In the spirit of Luther, who was equal to Noe in his words and preaching, Jonas prophesied, that what he had once said would be fulfilled, viz. that, after his death, “all Papists and monks would be scattered and brought low”; Luther’s death, like that of all the prophets, would have in it “a special power and efficacy to overcome the godless, stiff-necked and blinded Papists,” nay, before two years were over, they would all be overtaken by a “gruesome chastisement.”—To such an extent had Luther’s pseudo-mysticism and fanatical expectations infected his pupils. Nevertheless Luther’s admissions concerning the imperfection of his work were also taken over by his pupils. “In spite of the great and bright light of the Evangel,” so Jonas confesses in his funeral oration, “the world has reached such a pass that now among many are found not only the common sins and shortcomings but, to boot, blasphemy, disorders, defiance, or deliberate persistence in the grossest vices; yet no one is ready to acknowledge that he is a sinner.” The sermon in question was again preached by Jonas at Halle later on.

Cœlius, in his funeral oration, declared that no one before Luther had known how to call upon God, how to look up to Him in trouble, or what a man ought to do, or how he was to serve God. But “by him God has unlocked Holy Writ which formerly was a book closed and sealed.” The dear man had been a “real Elias and Jeremias; he was a new John the Baptist, preaching the great day of the Lord, or else an Apostle.”

According to Bugenhagen’s sermon,[1448] the deceased was “undoubtedly the Angel of whom it is written in the Apocalypse (xiv.): ‘And I saw an angel flying through the midst of heaven having the eternal Gospel to preach.’” Through him, “the God-sent reformer of the Church,” God the Father has “revealed” the great mystery of His Beloved Son Jesus Christ.

These eulogies, which owe their fulsomeness partly to the bad taste of the humanistic period, were strong in their effects on men’s minds; the preachers, moreover, who had been trained or appointed by Luther, were anxious thereby to strengthen their own position and to show their scorn for Popery. Even in the above addresses Luther and what he stood for is contrasted with “the oppression and tyranny of the hateful Popedom” from which the world had been delivered. (Bugenhagen.)

In many of the churches Luther’s picture was hung up with the inscription: “The Holy Dr. Martin Luther (‘Divus et sanctus,’ etc.).” Writings were published bearing such titles as “Luther, the Prophet,” “Luther, the Wonder-Worker.” All sorts of medals were struck in his honour, one with the inscription: “Propheta Germaniæ, Sanctus Domini,” others with Luther’s motto: “Pestis eram vivus,” etc.[1449] Even in his lifetime pictures appeared in reprints of his works where he was represented with a halo and with the Dove, as the symbol of the Holy Ghost, descending on him from heaven.[1450]

The most popular biography of Luther was that of Johann Mathesius, who died as pastor of Joachimsthal in Bohemia. He met with a success such as can be accounted for only by the passion in favour of Wittenberg then prevalent in Protestant Germany. The appellations so common in later years, Luther the “Wonder-Worker,” “Chosen Instrument,” “True German Prophet,” “Man full of Grace and the Holy Spirit,” are to be met with already in the “Historien” of Mathesius, delivered originally as sermons and first published in 1566. In these “stories” he has interwoven in Luther’s laurel wreath much that is untrue or doubtful, for instance, the saying attributed to Erasmus and since frequently quoted on his authority, is spurious, viz. “that, when Dr. Luther explains Scripture, on one of his pages there is more reason and common sense than in all the tomes and scrolls of Scotists, Thomists, Albertists, Nominalists and Sophists.”[1451] Mathesius wishes people “not to be forgetful of so worthy a man’s life and testimony,” yet even he gives us a glimpse into the bitter controversies now already raging among the Lutherans; he points out how “God loves the peacemakers and calls them His own dear children while He sends adrift all who delight in war and strife.” He himself had some experience of the antagonism between the progressive party and the more old-fashioned Lutherans. Indeed one of the principal reasons why he wrote the “Historien” was because “many an ungrateful fellow actually forgets this great man and his faithful industry and toil.” He already sees the “Wittenberg cisterns” defiled by “all kinds of brackish, foul, baneful, muddy and uncleanly waters.”[1452]

Though historically the tales of “the pious panegyrist,” as Maurenbrecher a Protestant calls him,[1453] cannot be said to rank very high, yet the energy with which he claims a thoroughly German character for Luther and for his own biographical work was pleasing to many. He uses the term “Prophet of the Germans” ad nauseam, even in the Preface addressed to the Wittenberg authorities; God had bestowed Luther “as a gift on us, the descendants of Japhet, and the Holy German Empire in these last days”; he, Mathesius, had a living “under the Bohemian Crown,” but as a German by birth he had “preached officially in his mother tongue” and “of set purpose, had these German sermons, to the honour of Our God and the blessed German Theology, published in German in order that some at least in Germany might be reminded what this blessed German Church in the Kingdom of Bohemia thought of the doctrines of this great German Prophet.”

By his exertions for the preservation of the Table-Talk Mathesius also sought to glorify Luther’s memory.

An influential group of panegyrists, who, like Mathesius, noted down, collected, or published Luther’s utterances, comprises Cordatus, Dietrich, Rörer, Schlaginhaufen, Lauterbach and, to pass over others, Aurifaber, Stangwald and Selnecker. Cordatus, who went as Superintendent to Stendal in 1540, compared Luther’s sayings to the oracles of Apollo.[1454] Aurifaber, one of those present at Luther’s death at Eisleben, became in 1551 Court Chaplain at Weimar and in 1566 pastor at Erfurt. In the “Colloquia,” or Table-Talk, which he caused to be printed at Eisleben in 1566, he says, in the Preface addressed to the Imperial towns of Strasburg, Augsburg, Ulm, Nuremberg, etc., that Luther was the “Venerable and highly enlightened Moses of the Germans.”

Like Aurifaber and Stangwald (1571), Selnecker (1577) took for the motto of his edition of the Table-Talk the words of Christ, “Gather up the fragments that remain,” etc. (John vi. 12); he further embellished his collection with the words:

Of the Lutheran die-hards who were never weary of fighting for the true olden spirit of Luther in opposition to the Protestant critics who very soon sprang up, the most eminent were Flacius Illyricus, Justus Menius, Nicholas Amsdorf and Cyriacus Spangenberg.

Concerning the father of the latter, Johann Spangenberg, Luther, in the last days of his life, had advised and “faithfully exhorted, that he should be called as Superintendent [to Eisleben].”[1456] Full of boundless admiration for Luther his son Cyriacus wrote his “Theander Lutherus,” where he says that the latter was the “greatest prophet since the days of the Apostles” and a “real martyr,” particularly because the devil had persecuted him so greatly. In consideration of this he canonises him and speaks of him as “St. Luther.”[1457] In the preface he assures us that it was only Luther’s holy and persistent prayers that had hitherto spared Germany the perils of war which would otherwise have overtaken her. The significant and lengthy title of this remarkable work runs as follows: “Theander Lutherus; of the worthy man of God, Dr. M. Luther’s spiritual Household and Knighthood, of his office as Prophet, Apostle and Evangelist; How he was the third Elias, a new Paul, the true John, the best Theologian, the Angel of Apocalypse xiv., a faithful witness, wise pilgrim and true priest, also a good labourer in our Lord God’s vineyard, all summed up in one-and-twenty sermons.”

Flacius Illyricus, the Wittenberg Professor famous for his connection with the “Magdeburg Centuries,” made Luther’s exemplary life play its part among the “Marks of the true Religion.” He proves in the book bearing this title the advantages of Protestantism over Popery by the mark of holiness, and by the pious life of some of the New Believers so different from that of the Catholics, and, in so doing, he appeals boldly to the founder of Protestantism. Whatever was alleged against Luther was false; “the Papists have never ceased from spreading these untruths, particularly in distant lands where the true state of the case is not so well known.”[1458]

Luther’s most ardent admirer after Flacius was perhaps Nicholas Amsdorf. In the Jena edition of Luther’s works for which he was responsible Amsdorf extols him in the Introduction as a man of God, “the like of whom has not been seen on earth since St. Paul’s day,” a man whom God “had raised up by His special Grace as a chosen instrument and bestowed on the German nation”; “by the Spirit and Word of God he had been led to attack the Pope, and his services in revealing him as Antichrist must be esteemed as highly as his vigorous advocacy of the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation and Justification through Christ.” Nay “he had been specially raised up” “in order to unmask the Roman Antichrist.” But, on account of all his other doctrines too, “pious Christians ought to acknowledge with grateful hearts this great miracle which God has shown to the world and used against the Pope in these last sad times through the precious man of God Martin Luther.” Amsdorf, however, as he hints in the same Preface, found to his dismay that Protestant “cavillers” were now even more numerous than in Luther’s lifetime, who “picked from Luther’s writings only antologies and contradictions.” Some had even dared to distort his writings. He complains that the Wittenberg complete edition of Luther’s works was so unreliable that he was now compelled to undertake the present new Jena edition: “Many things in those tomes were deleted, expurgated and altered for the sake of currying favour.”[1459] The real Luther, particularly as he is seen in his denial of the need of good works, is numbered by Amsdorf among the Saints; this is clear from the title of one of Amsdorf’s works, where he places Luther on a par with the Apostle of the Gentiles.[1460]

Particularly around Luther’s tomb did veneration centre. Thus the verses of August Buchner invite his readers to visit Luther’s tomb, and proclaim it a greater thing to have seen this little resting place than even the proud Temple of Capitoline Jove.[1461]

Immediately after his death a lengthy “poem” was published at Wittenberg entitled “Epitaphium,” celebrating both the deceased and his grave:

In it Luther tells how he had been sent by God that he might—

For ever and for ever it would remain true that

His grave was marked only by a stone let into the ground bearing on it a metal plate with his name, the date and place of his death, and his age.[1463]

On a bronze memorial tablet in the wall was described in Latin verse the dark night in which the world was plunged under the Papacy, until at last Luther “once more made known the Grace of Christ, and, moved by the Divine inspiration (‘Dei adflatu monitus’) and called by the Word of God, had caused the new light of the Evangel to illuminate the world.” Like Paul his tongue had sent forth lightnings, like John the Baptist he had shown to the world in its darkness the Saving Lamb of God, and also brought to light the Tables of Moses, the Prophet of God, in their counter-distinction from the Gospel. The altars had been purged of the Roman idols. In reward for all this he had been exalted by Christ to the stars in order that he might share in His eternal joy.[1464] Beside the monument there was placed in the following century a framed painting representing Luther in the pulpit, pointing with his finger to the Crucified, while a dragon with wide-open jaws was swallowing the Pope and his helpers. On this painting the verses given above were repeated.[1465]

The Elector Johann Frederick had another memorial tablet cast, but, owing to his defeat in the Schmalkalden War, this was taken by his sons to Weimar and later, in 1571, to Jena, where it was put up in the church of St. Michael. On it, above the life-size figure of the deceased, stands the verse: “Pestis eram vivus, moriens ero mors tua papa.” Other Latin verses at his feet state that, through him, the great fraud had been exposed whereby godless Rome had ensnared Christ’s flock. Would that Christ would help the orthodox school of Jena to vanquish the swarm of false doctrines (of the New Believers) that was springing up now, when the end of the world was so close.[1466]

2. Luther’s Memory among the Catholics. The Question of His Greatness

A faithful Catholic visiting the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg must necessarily have been assailed by thoughts much at variance with the eulogistic language of the epitaph and other expressions of Lutheran feeling. Let us suppose that one of those zealous and cultured Catholics who had been drawn by the attack on the olden religion into yet closer sympathy with it had crossed the threshold of the church—for instance a preacher such as Dr. Conrad Kling of Halle, who in the midst of trials and slanders was seeking to save the remnants of Catholicism,[1467] or a man like the historian Wolfgang Mayer,[1468] or the learned and sharp-witted Kilian Leib, Prior of Rebdorf,[1469] or one of the highly gifted women of that day, for instance, Charity Pirkheimer, the sister of the humanist and Superior of the struggling Poor Clares of Nuremberg[1470]—what would have been the impressions called forth by the building and the monument?

The building itself recalled the oneness of the divine edifice of the Church whose work it was to build up all the regenerate into one body, without dissensions or divisions, that oneness to which the Church in olden days, when barely out of the hands of the persecutor, had borne witness at the baptismal font of St. Peter’s in Rome in the impressive inscription: “One chair of Peter and one font of Baptism!”[1471] The pulpit of the Schlosskirche called to mind the commission given by the Divine Saviour to His Apostles and their successors to baptise all nations and preach that doctrine which He Himself was to preserve infallible by His Presence “all days even to the end of the world.” The altar reminded the Catholic visitor of the eucharistic Sacrament and of the unbloody sacrifice formerly offered there. The bare walls spoke of the iconoclastic storm against both the images of the Saints and any living union of the faithful on earth with the elect in heaven, while the elaborate monuments to the dead seemed to proclaim in these times of excitement the peace in which those departed men had passed away happy in the possession of the one olden faith.

This ecclesiastical unity—such would have been the thought of the Catholic—has been shattered in our unhappy age by the man whose remains are here honoured by his followers, and not in order to reform, or improve, but rather to replace the thousand-year-old heirloom of the Church by a new faith and worship.

Even Luther’s very monument re-echoed the menaces pronounced by Luther upon Catholicism when he desecrated what was most sacred for so many thousands, and laid rough hands on the one consolation of their sorrowful lives.

The fierce announcement to Popery: “My death will be your plague” fell from his lips not once but often. “Only after my death will they feel the real Luther.” “My life shall be their hangman, my death shall be their devil!”[1472] “When I die I shall become a spirit to plague the bishops, the priestlings and the godless monks so greatly that a dead Luther will spell to them more trouble than a thousand living ones.”[1473]

With the oft-repeated words: “Pestis eram vivus, moriens ero mors tua Papa,”[1474] which are also engraved on his death mask in the Luther-Halle at Wittenberg, he proclaimed that his death would do more harm to the Papacy than his life; as long as he lived the Papists would benefit to some extent from his labours, but, when he died, they would be deprived even of this. The threat, though grotesque, is quite in keeping with his belief in himself. He says that it is he alone who is still holding back the storm that is threatening to engulf all the Papists. He asks the Catholics of Germany: “How if Luther’s life were of so much value in God’s sight that, did he not live, not one of you would be sure of your life or existence here below, so that his death would be a misfortune to you all?”[1475] He even goes so far as to prophesy: “One day they will cry: Oh, that Luther were still living!”[1476] He parades before the Catholics the services he had rendered by resisting the fanatics and those who denied the Sacrament; the Catholics, so he says, would never have been able to do so much. “They are ungrateful, of this will I speak to them when I am dead. I have inveighed against them enough in the ‘Vermanũg,’ but it is all of no use.”[1477] “After my death the Papists will see all the good I have done them, and in me the saying will be fulfilled: ‘He died justified of his sin.’”[1478]

Thus in his half jesting, half serious fashion he proclaimed himself a sort of defender and pillar of the Papacy. The idea did not seem too strange to his friend Jonas to prevent him introducing it into his funeral oration on Luther: “The Papists,” he says, “Canons, priestlings, monks and nuns would in years to come wish that Dr. Luther still lived; they would gladly obey him, and, if they could, call him from the grave; but their chance is now gone.”[1479]

These great expectations and bold prophecies were as little realised as that of the impending fall of the Papacy.

On the contrary the Papacy gathered strength, renewed its youth from one decade to another and, though the apostasy also grew, yet a gradual revival of the ancient faith set in throughout the Catholic world. On the minds of the faithful Catholics there remained, however, indelibly stamped the gloomy recollection of the towering defiance with which the Wittenberg professor and his secular allies had sought to introduce an alien teaching and reform.

The inflexible will on which Luther so prided himself is the sign manual of his personality. Nothing is so characteristic of Luther as his obstinate determination which yielded to nothing, and the appalling pertinacity that ever drove him on and never allowed him to retreat.

“No one, please God, shall awe me so long as I live!”[1480] To no other principle was he more faithful throughout his life. Thus we hear him declaring:

“Good, then let us bid defiance in God’s name; whoever feels compunction let him draw back; whoever is afraid let him flee!… I have brought Holy Scripture and the Word of God to light as no other has done for a thousand years. I have done my part. Your blood be upon your own heads and not on mine.”[1481]

“When we see and feel the world’s wantonness, anger and hate, let us learn to defy it,” “to the disgust and annoyance of the world.” “This is an exalted defiance and an excellent consolation.” “Defiantly we boast: The Gospel that we preach is not ours but our Lord Christ’s.”[1482]

Luther defied not only “the world,” i.e. his ecclesiastical opponents and Catholicism generally, but also what he calls the devil, i.e. the inner voice that reproached him; he defied life and death, Emperor and princes, and, to boot, his own followers. Yet it was to him not so easy a task to defy the olden Church: “Rather than anger the Christian Church, or say one word against her, I would prefer to lose ten heads and to die ten times over. And yet do it I must.” “They tell us ‘the Christian Church is where Popery is.’ But no, Christ says, ‘My word shall prevail and you shall obey me and listen to me alone, even should you go cracked, mad and crazy over it.’”[1483]

He was highly elated at the thought that the powerful protectors of the Church had “not been able to put him down.”[1484] All their success he regards as mere “devil’s dung”;[1485] the princes, “the tyrants and men of great learning” might be incensed at the blow he had dealt them, but, so he declares, for the defence of his teaching he would have to give them “thirty blows more to induce remorse and repentance.”[1486] For “in this may God give me no patience or meekness. Here I say No, No, No, so long as I can move a finger, let it vex King, Kaiser, princes, devils and whom it may.” “In the matter of doctrine no one is great in my sight, I look upon him as a mere soap-bubble, and even less; this there is no gainsaying.” The same was to hold good of his crass writing on the “Captive Will”: “I defy not only the King [of England] and Erasmus, but also their God and all the devils, fairly and rightly to dispose of that same booklet!”[1487]

“His enemies’ anger and fury,” so he declares when in this mood, is to him “real joy and fun.” He will force himself to be of “good and cheerful heart” about their “baneful books.”[1488]

With frightful earnestness he warns the Catholic princes: “It is the truth that you will go headlong to destruction; I know that on the word will follow the deed and that you will perish.… We have this consolation that we are not affrighted, even should emperors, kings, princes, Pope and bishops fall in a heap and kingdoms lie one on the top of the other.”[1489] “What is a prince or emperor, nay the whole world compared with the Word? They are but dung.” “Papacy, Empire and Grand Turk” mean nothing to us. “Such is our defiance.”[1490]

In his scorn for those who vex him and write against him he is determined to “put out his horns”,[1491] He will be a “huntsman and be after his quarry”; “I hunt the Pope, the cardinals, bishops, canons and monks.”[1492]

Of the defiance of the “hard Saxon”[1493] not only the Papists but the Court-lawyers and the theologians in his own camp had to taste when they annoyed him. Not only did he oppose the Papists, “cheerfully and confidently” condemning them to hell and to “eat the devil’s droppings,” and rejoicing with a “good conscience” at the impending destruction of these “slaves of Satan”;[1494] but he had similar, nay even stronger words of defiance ready for the “false teachers” amongst the New Believers, to wit for the Swiss and for such as Agricola. When the latter defended himself and said, “I too have a head,” Luther retorted: “And, please God, have I not one too.” But with such “stiff-necked” heretics “God was determined to torment him so as the better to defy the Papists.”[1495]

A defiance so utterly overwhelming as Luther’s the world had never before seen. The Catholics were quite dumbfounded. Can we take it ill if they failed to admire this form of Titanic greatness. A frightful greatness (perhaps it were more accurate to say a great frightfulness) indeed lurked behind Luther. Yet a Catholic would have had to throw over all religious and moral standards before he could extol a man as great simply on account of his strength of will, determination, power of resistance, inflexibility and defiance. Men felt that, after all, what was important was the aim and the means used in pursuing it. If all that mattered was merely the inflexibility of the will, this would have spelt an “upsetting of all values” and the strong man, he who towered above his fellows owing to his physical strength and his power of bidding defiance to the world would become the ideal of the human race.

Nor would a thoughtful Catholic contemporary have been much impressed by the modern eulogies of Luther’s defiance.

“Because he feared neither hell nor the devil, he stands out for all time as the embodiment of human greatness”; “in his brave spirit there does not seem to have existed the faintest shadow of the pallid fear of man.” “In word and writing he is the greatest demagogue of all the ages”; “the sledgehammer blows of his berserker fury and wild humour rained down on every side.”

“Since his road led to the goal, it must have been the right road, hence let critics hold their tongues.”

“Such a master knew best what tone to adopt in order to sway the nation.”

“His is the wrath and fury of a hero.… Heroes and hero-fury are inseparable.”

Those who speak in this way admit that there were darker sides to his picture; they, however, insist that, in Luther we see, with “the mighty will of the hero,” “traits of the dæmonic greatness of a leader of history” “casting both light and shadows.” Luther “shook the world to its foundations.” He was a man “of mighty powers and dimensions. In the case of almost all the really great men of history, not only their virtues, but also their defects bear an heroic stamp.” These defects are simply the “reverse side of such a man’s greatness.”

It is to cherish too low an idea of greatness, not merely according to the Christian but also according to the merely natural standard, if strength of will or eventual success are alone taken into account and the aim and whole moral character of the work completely disregarded. In one sense of the word Catholics have never been unwilling to grant Luther a certain greatness, particularly as regards his astounding mental gifts and his powers of work. Döllinger was quite ready in his Catholic days to include “the son of the peasant of Möhra amongst the great, nay, among the greatest of men,” though Döllinger qualifies the admission by the words which immediately follow: “His disciples and admirers were wont to console themselves with the ‘heroic spirit’ of the man, who was so intolerant of any limitations or restrictions and who, dispensed by a kind of inspiration from the observance of the moral law, could do things, which, done by others, would have been immoral and criminal.”[1496]

There was no neutral vantage-ground from which to judge of Luther’s labours and his influence. Every thinking man did so from the ethical standpoint, and the Catholic likewise from the standpoint of his Church. It is clear that Luther must not be tested by the standard of profane greatness, but by a religious one. It would be to do him rank injustice, and he would have been the first to protest were we to consider merely the force of his character and the extent of his success, rather than his objects and his influence from the moral and religious standpoint.

He represented himself to his Catholic contemporaries as a divinely commissioned preacher; in the name of the Lord he called on them to forsake the Church of all the ages, because he had come to proclaim afresh a forgotten Gospel. Hence they were bound to examine the actual state of the case and to probe for the moral signs which the words of Christ and the Apostles had taught them to look for, and, when they found the necessary religious qualities and moral greatness wanting, who can blame them for not having gone over to him? With them it was not a question whether they might admire in him a strong man, a Hercules or “superman,” but whether they were, at his bidding, to sever the tie that had hitherto bound them to the Church, follow him blindly, and commit their eternal salvation to his guidance. Luther had never tired of urging: “No man shall quench or thwart my teaching, it must have its way as it has hitherto for it is not mine” (but God’s).[1497] “I call myself Ecclesiastes [the preacher] by the Grace of God.… I am certain that Christ Himself calls and regards me as such, that He is my master, and that He will bear me witness on the Last Day that it is not mine but His own Gospel undefiled.”[1498] It was this rôle of Evangelist that the better class of opponents felt disposed to examine.

“Because you call yourself an evangelist and proclaimer of the Gospel,” so Duke George of Saxony wrote in his reply to Luther, “it would have better beseemed you to punish with mildness whatever abuses existed therein, and to instruct the people kindly.”[1499] On the contrary, so the Duke urges, his behaviour is anything but that of an “evangelist,” what with his passionate abuse and vituperation, and his criminal breach of the public peace and religious unity: “Where peace and unity are not, there there is neither the true faith, which indeed is not to be found in you.”

It is worth while to consider what response would have been awakened in the minds of serious Catholic visitors to Luther’s grave by his startling success.

Those who to-day claim unqualified “greatness” for Luther are usually thinking of the astonishing success of his undertaking, and of his influence and that of his labours on posterity. They boast: “He tore his age from its moorings,” “he reduced to ruins what for a thousand years had been held in honour”; “he gave a new trend to civilisation.”

A man of insight could, however, explain otherwise many of these effects.

The result of Luther’s preaching was undoubtedly very great. But, in the first place, this result was not solely due to the efforts of one man but was rather the outcome of the circumstances in which that man lived, the product of divers factors in the history of the times.

His contemporaries saw full well that Luther, with his fiery temperament, had merely assumed the direction of a spirit that had long began to pervade the clergy, regular and the secular, leading them to cast aside the duties of their calling and to seek merely honours and emoluments. They were also aware of the oppressive burden of abuses the Church had to carry and of the far-reaching disorders in public life. Society was now anxious to liberate itself from the Church’s tutelage which had grown irksome. Everyone was conscious of the trend of the day towards freedom, individuality and new outlooks. Both the Empire and the olden idea of the Christian nations united as in one family were in process of dissolution owing to political and social trends quite independent of Luther’s work. His contemporaries saw with deep misgiving how Luther’s new doctrine and his innovations generally were strengthening all these elements, and setting free others of a similar nature which could not fail to help on his work. Nevertheless the elements of unrest, without which he would have been unable to achieve anything, were not of his making.[1500]

We can still judge to-day, from the writings of those who lived at that time, of the feelings, in some cases enthusiastic in others full of fear, with which they listened to the Wittenberger as he proclaimed war on all that was obsolete, or demanded in fiery language the reform of the Church, for which all were anxious.[1501] The more alluring and seductive the very word “reformation,” the more effective was the help proffered for the overthrow of the Church under the cloak of this watchword. In the field of learning there were the humanists who had fallen foul of Catholic authority and the spirit of the past; in the lower strata of society there were the peasants who aimed at bettering their position; among the burghers and in official circles hopes were entertained of an increase of authority at the expense of the bishops, now regarded with ever-increasing jealousy; finally the nobles and knights were allured by the prospect of the success of a revolt under the banner of the Evangel which would redound to the advantage of their caste. What chiefly brought Luther’s star into the ascendant was, however, the protection he obtained from the princes. Without his Elector, without the Landgrave of Hesse, without the allies of Schmalkalden, in a word, without political authority on his side, all the force of his words would have availed nothing, or at least would never have sufficed to enable him to found a new Church. The Princes who helped to spread his teaching and reformation saw the lands and privileges of the Church falling into their lap, and what was even more, the extension of their sphere of influence to the spiritual domain where, so far, the Pope and the bishops had reigned supreme.

Thus in his success those well versed in the conditions of the times recognised for the most part only the working of natural causes.

Luther, as all were aware, shortly after having been put under the Ban was wont to say that the movement he had begun was something so great and wonderful that it could not but owe its success to the manifest intervention of God. “It cannot be,” he exclaimed in 1521, “that a man should of himself be able to start such a work and carry it through.”[1502] He was fond of saying he wished no earthly means to be used for arriving at the goal. Yet, in this very statement of 1521, for instance, he refers “to the sermons and writings” by which he had “begun” to disclose the Papists’ “knavery and trickery.” His burning words indeed acted as a spark flung on the inflammable material accumulating for so long. Anyone aware of the condition of Germany and of the artifices by which the author of the gigantic apostasy sought to consolidate his position at Wittenberg by means of the Court, and at the same time to excite the fanaticism of the masses, would feel but little impressed by Luther’s appeal to the apparent simplicity of his writings and sermons, as being out of all proportion to the unexampled success he attained.

He was indeed heard to say that he attributed everything to the words and the divine power of Christ: “Look what it has done in the few years that we have taught and written such truths. How has the Papists’ cloak shrunk and become so short!… What will it be when these words of Christ have threshed with His Spirit for another two years?”[1503] These words were, however, spoken the year after the publication of those fearfully violent writings: “On the Popedom at Rome” (against Alveld), “To the German Nobility,” “On the Babylonish Captivity,” “On the Freedom of a Christian Man” and “Against the Bulls of End-Christ.” When uttered, his seductive writing “On the Monastic Vows” was already there to unbar the gates through which crowds of doubtful helpers would flock to join him.

Catholic polemics of that day, in order to demolish the objection arising from the marvellous spread of Lutheranism, set themselves to examine the relation between the new dogmas and their dissemination. Luther’s doctrine, as they frequently pointed out, was bound to secure him a large following.

In this particular it was easy enough to prove that it was not merely the “greatness” of the man which drew such crowds to him. The persistent vaunting of the universal priesthood, the right bestowed on all of judging of Scripture, the abandoning of the outward and inward Word to the feelings of the individual, the sweet preaching of a faith which “no sin could harm,” the denial of the merit of good works, the assertion that, not they, but only faith was required for salvation, and, not to speak of many other points, his contemptuous and unjust strictures on the Church and her doings, all this—human nature being what it is—could not fail for a time to help the cause of the New Evangel of freedom, and, under the conditions then prevailing, to assure it a real triumph.

This Evangel came upon Germany at a time when the Church’s life was in a state of decay, when the adequate religious instruction of the young was neglected by the Church, and when the dioceses were for the most part governed by younger sons of princely or noble houses, who were quite unfitted for their spiritual work. It is noteworthy that the defenders of the Church had very little good to say of the bishops.[1504]

Of the new preachers and promoters of Luther’s Reformation a large number was composed of apostate clergy and escaped monks and nuns whom Luther had won over. It was plain enough that it was no such “great and immortal” work as he claimed, to have attracted such people to his party thanks to theories which, while seeming to calm the conscience, really flattered the senses, for instance, by what he said on celibacy, vows and priestly ordination. “Do not seek to deny that you are a man, with flesh and blood; hence leave God to judge between the valiant angel-like heroes [those religious who were faithful to the Church] and the sickly, despised sinners [whom they upbraided as apostates].[1505]… Chastity is beyond healthy nature, let alone sinful nature.… There is no enticement so bad as these commands [of celibacy] and vows, forged by the devil himself.” Youthful religious were to be dragged out of their monasteries as quickly as possible, and priests were to learn that theirs was but a “Carnival ordination.” “Holy Orders are all jugglery and in God’s sight they have no value.”[1506]

Hence contemporaries, considering events from the standpoint just described, must needs have told themselves that Luther’s success, unexpected and astounding as it was, could not after all be laid down to the “greatness” of any one single man.[1507]

What, moreover, must have been the thoughts of the observer regarding the permanence of Luther’s work who lived to see the master’s own Lutheranism falling to pieces, according to the statements of his most zealous admirers,[1508] as soon as he was dead? Luther himself almost seemed ready to ring down the curtain on the premature termination of the great tragedy of which he could not but despair.[1509]

In the very year of Luther’s death Cochlæus passed in review the havoc wrought in the Church, embodying his observations in the work he had just finished and was to publish three years later, viz. his “De Actis et Scriptis Lutheri.”

These pages seem still to tremble with the excitement of the terrible period they describe. It is impressive to hear this voice of the Catholic spokesman coming as it were from Luther’s tomb and telling of the devastation of the storm raised by the Wittenberg professor. As Kawerau says, Cochlæus himself could point to a life “which, year after year, ever since 1521 had been devoted feverishly to the ecclesiastical debates of the day in which he was so keenly concerned and consumed in ceaseless controversy [with Lutheranism].”[1510] The grey-headed scholar, “illuminated and inspired as he was by the truest spirit of Christianity,”[1511] had once in 1533 declared: “Whatever I write now or at any time against Luther, I write for the glory of God, the service of the truth and the good of my neighbour. For I believe firmly that Luther is a malicious liar, heretic and rebel and I can find nothing but this in his books and in my own conscience.… I am not, however, bitter or hostile to Luther personally, but merely to his wickedness and vices. Were he to desist I would gladly go and fetch back so learned a man from Rome or Compostella and give him my love and my service.”[1512]

Cochlæus calls to mind first of all the course of public events in Germany. At Ratisbon, where he was staying, the Diet of 1546 was opened with great pomp by Charles V at the very time Cochlæus was penning the Preface to his work. He relates how the same Kaiser had declared at the Diet of Worms in 1521 in the edict against Luther that “his writings contain hardly anything but food for dissensions, schism, war, murder, robbery, conflagrations, and a great apostasy of the Christians.”[1513] “The times are grave and perilous,” so his warning had run: “Oh, that they may not mean the disgrace of our country!”[1514] Now, however, Cochlæus sees with grief that “Luther has brought nearly all Germany into shame and confusion.” “Our fatherland has lost all its former beauty,” he exclaims, “and its Imperial power is shattered.” He trembles at the sight of the dangers within and without.[1515]

“The mischief caused by Luther’s revolt is so great that it is out of comparison worse than the effects of even the most unhappy war. Never indeed in the whole of history have the miseries of war caused such injury to Christendom as the blows dealt us by this heresy.” In its consequences it was worse than the triumphal progress of Arianism in early Christian times. He instances the Peasant Rebellion and the frightful destruction that followed in its wake; also the machinations of political alliances, hostile alike to the Church and the State, the loosening of the common bonds that unite the Christian peoples, and the decline of the authority of the rulers, which was “attacked and dragged in the mire by Luther and thus rendered contemptible in the eyes of the masses.”[1516]

Even more loudly does he bewail the ruin of so many immortal souls; owing to Luther, countless numbers have been torn from the bosom of the Mother Church, founded by Christ, and set on the road to eternal damnation. No tears could suffice to bewail this the greatest of all misfortunes. Piety has declined everywhere and the new preaching of faith alone has lamed the practice of good works. “From every class and calling the former zeal for good works has fled.” He also ruthlessly describes the effect of Luther’s doctrines and example on Catholics. “The clergy no longer do their duty in celebrating the Sacrifice of the Mass and reciting the Church’s office and Hours; to the monks and nuns their Rule is no longer as sacred as it used to be. The charity of the rich, the rulers, and the great has dried up, the people no longer flock to divine worship, their respect for the priesthood, their benevolence and pity for the poor are coming to an end. Discipline and decorum are tottering everywhere and have fared worst of all in our family life. We see about us a dissolute younger generation, which, owing to Luther’s suggestions and his constant attacks on all authority ecclesiastical and secular, has cast off all shame and restraint. On anyone admonishing them they retort with a falsely interpreted Bible text, an invention of pure wantonness, such as ‘increase and multiply,’ etc. So far have things already gone that virginity and continence have become a matter of disgrace and suspicion.” In even darker colours does he paint the sad picture of the moral decline among the Protestants: Morals are trampled under foot, reverence and fear of God have been extinguished, obedience has become a byword, boldness in sinning gains the upper hand and “freedom” of the worst kind reigns supreme.[1517]

Full of grief he comes at last to speak of the man who was responsible for all this misery. Bugenhagen had boasted of Luther’s prophecy that, if in life he had been the Papacy’s plague, in death he would be its death. But the Papacy still lives and will continue to live because Christ’s promise stands. “Luther, however, was the plague of our Germany during his lifetime … and, alive or dead, he was his own plague and destruction.”[1518]

“Woe,” so he concludes, “to his godless panegyrists who call evil good and good evil, and confuse darkness with light, and light with darkness!”[1519]

3. Luther’s Fate in the First Struggles for his Spiritual Heritage

Luther’s reputation was to suffer a sudden and tragic blow owing to the success of the Imperial arms in the War of Schmalkalden.

Hardly had the grave closed over him than, in the following year, after the battle of Mühlheim on April 24, 1547, won with the assistance of Duke Maurice of Saxony, the Kaiser’s troops entered Wittenberg. A notable change took place in the public position of Lutheranism when the vanquished Elector, Johann Frederick, was forced to resign his electoral dignity in favour of Maurice and to follow the Emperor as a captive. His abdication and the surrender of his fortresses to the Emperor was signed by him on May 19 in Luther’s own city of Wittenberg. The Landgrave of Hesse too found himself forced at Halle to submit unconditionally to the overlords of the Empire and to see Duke Henry of Brunswick released from captivity and honoured by the Emperor in the same city.

The dreaded Schmalkalden League, Luther’s shield and protection for so many years, was, so to speak, annihilated over night.

Luther’s theological friends were also made to feel the consequences. Flacius, after the taking of Wittenberg, fled for a time to Brunswick. George Major, Luther’s intimate friend and associate, also escaped, but returned later. Amsdorf was obliged to give up the bishopric of Naumburg of which he had assumed possession, hand it over to the lawful Bishop Julius von Pflug, and hasten to Magdeburg, the new stronghold of the Lutheran spirit.

It is true that Luther’s cause soon recovered, at least politically speaking, from the defeat it had suffered in the War of Schmalkalden; the wounds inflicted on it in the theological quarrels among themselves of its own representatives were, however, more deep and lasting. Here Luther’s prediction was indeed fulfilled to the letter, viz. that his pupils would be the ruin of his doctrines.

The Osiandric, Majorite, Adiaphoristic and Synergistic Controversies

The theological warfare which followed on Luther’s decease opened with the Osiandric controversy which arose from the modifications of Luther’s idea of justification introduced subsequent to 1549 by Andreas Osiander, pastor and professor of theology at Königsberg. After Osiander’s death in 1552 the struggle was carried on by the Court preacher Johann Funk who held like views. Johann Brenz also defended Osiander’s opinion, whereas Melanchthon, Flacius Illyricus, Johann Æpinus, Joachim Westphal, Joachim Mörlin and others were opposed to it. Duke Albert of Prussia was for a long time a patron of Osiander’s doctrine, but was persuaded later to alter his views, and his Court preacher Funk did likewise. The old Lutherans, however, continued the struggle against Funk and, in 1566, owing to the charges brought against him by the Estates of abusing his position and of having violently championed “heretical doctrines,” he was beheaded.[1520] Osiander, however, the author of this new “heresy,” had himself been by no means wanting in Lutheran zeal where Catholics were concerned. Already in 1549 he wrote a tract against the Interim entitled: “On the new Idol and Antichrist at Babel,” in which he lashed those who “were sneaking back to Antichrist under cover of the Interim.”

The second, or Majorite controversy broke out at Wittenberg itself, and like the ones which followed was called forth by the opposition of the Lutheran zealots to any Melanchthonian modifications of Luther’s doctrines. George Major, professor at Wittenberg, and subsequently Superintendent at Eisleben, backed by Justus Menius, Superintendent at Gotha, had the courage to declare that works were necessary for salvation, and that, without works, no one could be saved. For this he and Menius were branded as “heretics” by Flacius Illyricus, Nicholas Amsdorf, Johann Wigand, Joachim Mörlin and Alexius Prætorius. It was in the midst of this passionate wrangle, which deeply agitated the ranks of the preachers and disturbed the congregations, that Amsdorf, with a determination and defiance equal to Luther’s own went to the extremes of publishing his tract entitled “That the proposition ‘good works are harmful to salvation,’ is a sound and Christian one.”[1521] Flacius brought a writing against Major to a close with the pious wish that Christ would speedily crush the head of the serpent. Major, the confidant of Luther whom he had once despatched to attend the religious Conference at Ratisbon, was now obliged to give in; he made a shameful recantation. Menius, however, was denounced to the preachers and people as a “Papist,” and, in spite of his weak compliance, was unable to maintain his position against the inquisition put into motion by the higher powers. Although he resigned his office as Visitor and submitted patiently to a reprimand from the Court, he was obliged to leave the land; he besought the sovereign in vain for protection against his theological adversaries and freedom to communicate with the “dear gentlemen” at Wittenberg. The Town Council of Gotha was forbidden to give him a testimonial to the purity of his doctrine, and he himself, in spite of his protest that he was as much heir to Luther’s doctrine as Flacius, was summoned to take his trial before a sort of religious Synod at Eisenach in 1556, which also ousted him from his Superintendency. “He died on Aug. 11, 1558, from the effects of what he had undergone.”[1522]

In the third great controversy, the Adiaphoristic, Flacius Illyricus behaved with great violence, indeed his extreme Lutheran views were the cause of the quarrel which in itself well illustrates the pettiness and acrimony of those concerned in it. The question under dispute was whether certain “indifferent matters” (ἀδιάφορα) sanctioned in the Augsburg Interim of 1547 might be allowed in Protestant circles even though Luther during his lifetime had frowned on them. Under the Elector Maurice the theologians and Estates of the Saxon Electorate had answered in the affirmative. This answer embodied in the so-called “Leipzig Interim,” was firmly contradicted by Flacius. It is true that what was in question was not only ceremonies, images, hymns and such-like external things but also the rites of Confirmation and Extreme Unction, and, in a certain sense, the use of Penance, the celebration of a kind of Mass and the veneration of Saints. Flacius was supported by Nicholas Gallus, Johann Wigand, Nicholas Amsdorf, Joachim Westphal, Caspar Aquila, Johann Aurifaber, Anton Otto and Matthæus Judex. These poured forth a stream of angry tracts against the opposite party, the Wittenbergers, who, however, defended themselves with a will, viz. against Melanchthon, Bugenhagen, George Major, and Paul Eber, and their friends elsewhere, such as the Provost of Magdeburg and Meissen, Prince George of Anhalt, Bernard Ziegler and Johann Pfeffinger of Leipsig, Justus Menius of Gotha, etc. Even the use of lights on the altar and of surplices were to these zealots “Popish abominations” and a sign of the abandoning of all that Luther had won; they even complained, though untruly, that the Wittenberg theologians no longer declared the Pope to be Antichrist.[1523] Bugenhagen, Luther’s right hand man at Wittenberg, had to hear himself charged by Flacius, Amsdorf and Gallus with having denied and falsified Luther’s doctrines and with teaching something not far short of Popery. These Adiaphorists, wrote Amsdorf, “in the name and under the semblance of the Word of God, seek to persuade us to worship the Antichrist at Rome, the Whore of Babylon and the Beast on which she is seated (Apoc. xvii.).” Such dangerous men he brands as “belly servers” “who seek to make terms with the world.” He himself on the other hand was ready to meet the contempt of the world for the falling off in the number of Luther’s true followers, hence on the title-page of the new edition of Luther’s works, which he commenced when the quarrel was at its height (1555), he printed the consoling verses: “Fear not, little flock, for it hath pleased the Father to give you a Kingdom” (Luke xii. 32), and “In the world you shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John xvi. 33).[1524] Towards the end of the Preface he consoles those who shared his way of looking at things, and, as Luther had done before, he alludes to the near end of the world, when everything would be righted.

At the time when the private judgment Luther had preached was thus bearing fruit we hear Melanchthon groaning: “You see how many teachers are fighting against us in our own Churches; every day new foes spring up, as it were, from the blood of the Titans; gladly would I leave these regions, nay, shake off my mortal coil, to escape the fury of such men.”[1525] Melanchthon too was accused of indirectly promoting Popery. An obstinate opponent of his was that very Johann Aurifaber who had been present at Luther’s death and who subsequently published the Table-Talk. Melanchthon included him in 1556 among the “unlearned fanatics, men filled with furious hate, lickspittles at the Court who seek to curry favour with the populace,” and with whom it was impossible to come to any understanding.[1526] Aurifaber, like many others of his party, was dismissed from his post as Court preacher at Weimar, and, subsequently, when pastor at Erfurt, was excommunicated on account of his teaching, particularly on original sin. His opponents he persisted in charging with Popery.

Against any relapse into Popery the Lutherans were well guarded since 1555, by the Religious Peace of Augsburg and its principle: “Cuius regio, illius et religio.” This, however, produced no inward unity, rather the opposite. The war among the theologians on account of the “adiaphora” still went on in the Protestant camp. The hopes entertained of the Protestant Convention at Coswig (1556) suffered shipwreck owing to Melanchthon’s disinclination to come to terms. Nor did the Conference at Altenburg (1568) settle things. It was not until 1577-1580 that the formulas of Concord established a “modus vivendi” by leaving to each individual Church the decision about the “adiaphora.” Flacius himself was compelled to leave Wittenberg early in the controversy. He went to Magdeburg, but fell into disgrace on account of his tendency to insist on the Church’s independence and had to go into exile to Ratisbon, Antwerp, Frankfurt, Strasburg, wandering about from place to place until, at last, he, Luther’s most ardent champion, died in want and poverty at Frankfurt-on-the-Main (1575).

With the Synergistic controversy the name of Flacius is likewise very closely linked.

Here, however, the question on which minds were divided was a vital one. Many refused to accept Luther’s rigid doctrine that, in Justification, the Holy Ghost worked on man as on a senseless block. Johann Pfeffinger of Leipsig agreed with Melanchthon in assuming some sort of co-operation (“synergia”) of the human will. In this he had the Leipsig Interim on his side; eventually Victorinus Strigel of Jena, George Major, Paul Eber, Christian Lasius and others also embraced this view. Against them stood the zealots like Flacius and Amsdorf, the latter of whom boldly attacked Pfeffinger’s “De libertate voluntatis” and insisted on the unfreedom of the will. Certain of the theologians of Jena also distinguished themselves by their opposition to the Synergists.

Flacius Illyricus went to great extremes in his antagonism to Synergism. He asserted that man was powerless by means of free will to effect anything in the matter of his salvation because “original sin was a ‘substance’ for otherwise holiness too would not be a ‘substance’”; the soul was by nature a mirror or image of Satan; it was itself original sin, and original sin was no mere ‘accident.’ It was impossible for Luther’s doctrine to be carried to its legitimate conclusion more ruthlessly than in this theory of Flacius. “It was utter demonism, was this doctrine of the substantial bedevilment of human nature.”[1527] At this point, however, Luther’s true friends drew back: Johann Wigand and Tilman Hesshus, professors at Jena, withstood Flacius, arguing that he was a traitor to Lutheranism and that his teaching was Manichæan. Like some others Cyriacus Spangenberg, then Dean of Mansfeld, was accused of favouring Flacius and of teaching that Satan had created man, that sin was baptised, and that pregnant women bore within them young devils. As was usual in such controversies, the people took an active share in the quarrel.

When the Elector August of Saxony assumed the government of the Duchy of Saxony, Hesshus and Wigand were deprived of their offices and driven from the land. Nine Superintendents and 102 preachers lost their posts at the same time. Hesshus had already tasted exile as pastor of Magdeburg, when in 1562 the Town Council expelled him from the town with his wife and child on account of his too emphatic enforcement of the strictest Lutheranism.

Spangenberg too had to flee when the administrator of Magdeburg called in the troops against the Flacian preachers. Cruel measures were used to force the burghers to accept the doctrine professed by the governor; the bodies of relatives of the Count of Mansfeld were even exhumed and reinterred in places untainted with “substantialist error.”

Spangenberg’s fate was that of many faithful Lutherans.

Having made his escape to Thuringia disguised as a midwife he there accepted a position as pastor, but was again driven out in 1590 owing to the rigid views on original sin he had imbibed from Luther. From that time he lived by his pen until his death at Strasburg in 1604. He declared that he was suffering on behalf of the articles on sin and righteousness, but that he was determined to remain “a staunch old disciple of Luther’s.” The behaviour of the Wittenberg theologians was a source of great grief to Spangenberg: They have not only fallen away from Luther’s doctrine in ten or twelve articles, but also speak of him in the most unseemly manner: “They call Luther a ‘philauticus,’ i.e. a man who thinks highly of no one but himself, and whom nothing pleases but what he has himself said or done; item, a ‘philonisticus’ and ‘eristicus,’ a quarrelsome fellow who always insisted he was in the right, believing no good of anyone, yielding to no one, only seeking his own honour and unable to endure that anyone else should be highly thought of.” “His books [so they say] contain things that are very Manichæan, and others that resemble the old heresies.”[1528]

Nor was Spangenberg doing an injustice to the Wittenberg professors when he charged them with having thrown Luther over.

Cryptocalvinism

At the time when Flacianism was being suppressed by force, a trend of opinion known as Cryptocalvinism had the upper hand in the Saxon Electorate where it was causing grave troubles. Such was the name given to the gradual leavening of the pure Lutheran doctrine with elements derived from Calvinism. In other Protestant districts on German soil Calvinism took root openly, and either supplanted Luther’s teaching, or prevented its springing up. This was the case in the Palatinate, where the Elector Frederick III exerted his influence in favour of Calvinism with the help of the Calvinistic professors of Heidelberg Caspar Olevian and Zacharias Ursinus. The Elector himself told his son-in-law Johann Frederick of Saxony, that though for more than forty years the “pure doctrine” of the Evangel and the holy Word of God had been proclaimed, “little amendment of life had followed,” and, in “excessive eating and drinking, gambling, avarice, immorality, envy and hatred we almost outdo the Papists.”[1529] He also said that it was not merely the lack of morality in Lutheranism that prejudiced him against it, but that he had decided to introduce Calvinism into his land because he had discovered in Luther’s writings many errors and contradictions which he must remove, particularly in his views on the “bodily presence of Christ” in the Sacrament of the Altar.[1530]

The spirit of criticism which Luther had let loose in the Saxon Electorate grew among some of the Cryptocalvinists into scepticism, though they boasted of being great admirers of Luther. This scepticism was first directed against the mystery of mysteries. Luther’s own uncertainty regarding the Sacrament of the Altar, his halt mid-way, and his strange theory of the ubiquity of Christ, were in themselves a challenge. Around Melanchthon there grouped themselves at Wittenberg and Leipsig men, who, by a prudent introduction of the Calvinistic view of the Supper according to which Christ is only received spiritually, sought to question at the same time two of Luther’s pet dogmas, viz. the indwelling of Christ in the Bread at the moment of reception (Impanation) and the ubiquitous albeit spiritualised bodily presence of Christ. Hardly six years had elapsed since Luther’s death when the Hamburg preacher, Joachim Westphal, strove to set up a barrier against the threatening inroad of Cryptocalvinism in his “Farrago Opinionum de Cœna Domini”(1552). The Elector August, who assumed the reigns of government in the Saxon Electorate (1553-1586), for quite twenty years of his reign was entirely committed to Cryptocalvinism. Among the theologians and Court officials who were responsible for his attitude were, particularly, Melanchthon’s son-in-law, Caspar Peucer, Court physician to the Elector, the Court preacher Christian Schütz, Johann Stössel, Superintendent of Pirna and Privy Councillor Georg Craco, the most influential person in the government of the Saxon Electorate. A “Corpus doctrinæ Philippicum” was drawn up in 1560 from Melanchthon’s writings by these so-called “Philippists.” In 1571 a Catechism appeared, which, like the “Corpus” had the Elector’s approval. The doctrine it contained was endorsed by an assembly of theologians at Dresden in the same year, and it was intended to enforce it as the true faith throughout the land.

As might have been expected, the opposition of the “Gnesiolutherans” against these doings in the Saxon Electorate, the original home of Lutheranism, was very strong.

Protests were registered by Martin Chemnitz, the “aristarch of Brunswick” as the opposite party called him, and by the Jena theologians, as, for instance, Wigand, Hesshus, Johann Frederick Cœlestinus and Timotheus Kirchner. At Jena the new system was branded as a “fresh incursion of devilish spirit” and, in a “Warning” against the Wittenbergers, it was stated: “They want to make an end of Luther, that is to say, of his doctrine, and at the same time to appear innocent of so doing.”[1531] Similarly in the following year, 1572, a writing entitled “Von den Fallstricken” declared: “They trample Luther’s doctrine under foot, laugh at it, ridicule it and anathematise it in the most scandalous manner,” etc.[1532] The Jena divines, so they asserted, were alone in having the true unalloyed doctrine which they were anxious to keep free from all the extravagances and errors of the Pope, the Turks, blasphemers of the Sacrament, Schwenckfeldians, Servetians, Arians, Antinomians, Interimists, Adiaphorists, Synergists, Majorites, Enthusiasts, Anabaptists, Manichæans and other sects.[1533]

The divergencies were so considerable and far-reaching, and the falling away from Luther’s doctrine so great, that Aurifaber, who boasted of having closed the eyes of his immortal master and of being soaked in his spirit, prefaced as follows the collection of the Table-Talk, which he gave to the world in 1566: “His doctrine is now so despised, and, in the German lands men have become so tired, weary and sick of it, that they no longer care to hear his name mentioned, nor do they much esteem the testimony of his books. It has come about that, if one wishes to find Dr. Martin Luther’s doctrine pure and unfalsified anywhere in the German lands, one has to put on strong spectacles and look very closely; this is a dreadful thing to learn.” Aurifaber has this sole consolation, viz. that Luther, because he had foreseen this state of things, had proved himself a “true prophet.”[1534]

Another writer speaks in the following terms of the decay of Luther’s doctrines and the utter contempt for his person: The endless benefits Luther brought to Germany—of these the author enumerates eighteen—those who now profess the Evangel treat with the “most shocking and gruesome unthank,” doing so not merely by their “evil life” but by “scorning, decrying and condemning” both his benefits and his faith. People refuse any longer to follow the great teacher in his chief doctrines “about the Law and the true knowledge of sin,” “true justice,” “the distinction between Law and Gospel,” and about the holy sacraments. “This worthy sendsman of God” meets with “shameful contempt,” nay, with something worse than contempt, seeing that, “to boot, he is abused, reviled and defamed by most people,” which “is all the more hard in that not only his person but also the wholesome doctrine and divine truth revealed to us by Luther the man of God, is too often contemptuously rejected by the greater number.” The author, in his concern, also fears that as people were also bent on introducing changes in the language “in a few years not much will be left of Luther’s pure German speech.”[1535]

At the Court at Dresden, however, the opposition to the Cryptocalvinism described above gradually gathered strength. Finally the Elector August, too, was won over, partly on political, partly on theological grounds. As early as 1573 August declared: “It would not take much to make him send all the rogues to the devil,”[1536] and, on another occasion that, “for the sake of three persons he would not expose his lands to the harm wrought by the Sacramentarians.”[1537] When at last an unmistakably Calvinistic writing by Joachim Curæus on the Supper was published by a Leipzig printer, known to be well disposed to the Wittenberger party, the fury of the Elector broke loose and he declared at a meeting at Torgau “The venomous plant must now be torn up by the roots.”[1538] In his name the so-called Articles of Torgau denoting more or less a return to Luther’s doctrines were drawn up by an ecclesiastical court. All the theologians who refused to subscribe to them were to be “arrested.” On this the Leipzig theologians all signed the Articles, that they agreed in their hearts to all the things contained in Luther’s writings including his controversial writings against the Heavenly Prophets and his “Kurtz Bekentnis” on the Supper.[1539] Among the many Cryptocalvinists who submitted without any protest was Nicholas Selnecker, the editor of Luther’s Table-Talk. In matters of faith he followed the bidding of the secular authorities, and on one occasion, wrote to the Elector that “he would gladly crawl on hands and knees to Dresden only to escape the suspicion which had been cast on him.”[1540]

Among the Wittenbergers, on the other hand, four theologians refused their assent: “Luther’s books,” they said, “were not positive; sometimes he wrote one way, sometimes another; besides which there were dirty spots and objectionable things in his controversial writings.”[1541] Such was the opinion of Widebram, Pezel, Moller and, particularly, Caspar Cruciger. The latter, a personal friend of Luther’s, called the Articles of Torgau “a medley of all sorts of things which Luther himself, had he been alive, would not have signed.” His fate like that of the three others was removal from his office and banishment from the country.

Of the four former favourites at Court Stössel the Superintendent though he craved pardon was kept a prisoner until his death; the Court-preacher Schütz, in spite of his promise to hold his tongue, was shut up in prison for twelve years; the Privy Councillor Craco was flung into the filthiest dungeon of the Pleissenburg at Leipzig, tortured on the rack for four hours and died with mangled limbs on a miserable layer of straw (March 16, 1575).[1542] Finally Peucer, professor of medicine and history, who, owing to his influence, had once controlled the University, because he declared he would not “abjure the doctrine of the Sacrament that had been rooted in his heart for thirty-three years and adopt Luther’s instead,” was left pining in a damp, dirty dungeon in the Pleissenburg and was constantly harried with injunctions “to desist from his devilish errors” and “not to fancy himself wiser and more learned than His Highness the Elector and his distinguished theologians, who had also searched into and pondered over this Article [of the Sacrament].”[1543] He continued to languish in prison, after the death of his wife, Magdalene, Melanchthon’s daughter, sorrowing over his motherless children, until after wellnigh twelve years of captivity he was released at the instance of a prince. “The behaviour of the Elector and Electress and their advisers towards him gives us a glimpse into an abyss of injustice, brutality and malice made all the more revolting by the hypocritical religious cant and pretended zeal for the Church under which they were disguised. In spite of all the attempts made of old as well as later to excuse the course of the so-called cryptocalvinistic controversies, it remains—especially the case of Peucer—one of the darkest pages in the annals of the Lutheran Church and of civilisation in the 16th Century.”[1544]

But the intolerance displayed by orthodoxy in that struggle had been taught it by Luther. As has been shown already, he had urged that, whoever advocated blasphemous articles, even if not guilty of sedition, should be put to death by the authorities; the sovereign must take care that “there is but one religion in each place”; above all, such was the opinion of his friends,—the sovereign should “put a Christian bit in the mouth of all the clergy.”[1545]

The so-called formula of concord (1580)

Owing partly to the wish of the secular authorities for some clearer rule, partly to the sight of the confusion in doctrine and the bad effects of the quarrels on faith, there arose a widespread desire for greater unity based on some new and thoroughly Lutheran formulary.

The Confession of Augsburg and the Apologia were found insufficient; they contained no decisions on the countless controversies which had since sprung up. Thus it came about that “one German province and town after another attempted to satisfy its desire for unity of doctrine by means of a confession of faith of its own.… This in itself, in view of the dismemberment of Germany and the attitude of the Emperor towards the reformation, would necessarily have resulted in a splitting up of the Lutheran Church into countless sects unless some means was found of counteracting individualism and of uniting the Lutherans in one body.”[1546]

It was, however, the politicians, who, in their own interests, were the chief promoters of union.

Elector August of Saxony wishful of achieving the desired end “by means of a princely dictum” led the way in 1576 with the so-called Book of Torgau.

This work was drawn up by the theologians Jakob Andreæ, Martin Chemnitz, David Chytræus, Andreas Musculus and Wolfgang Körner. The Book of Torgau was subsequently revised by Caspar Selnecker and reissued under the title of the Book of Bergen (1577). It was hoped that it would become the theological statute-book for all the Protestant Churches; the Protestant Estates of the Empire were to accept it and it was proposed by the theologians that all the Lutheran preachers and school-teachers should be required to give their assent to it.[1547]

Selnecker supported this attempt by referring to the Council of Trent which had been successfully concluded in 1563. They ought, so he said, at last to draw up a “common body of doctrine” as an “evangelical counterblast to the damnable conciliabulum of Trent”; he adds frankly that this was essential, “in order to check the corruption of morals amongst the Evangelical people which was growing worse and worse”; at the same time he wished to see “a united front against the idolatrous Popedom and its devilish satellites the Jesuits, with all their verminous following.”[1548]

Hopes of preserving Luther’s work by means of the new Formula had risen high since Frederick, the zealous Calvinistic Elector of the Palatinate, had been called away by death in Oct., 1576; his successor, the Elector Louis held Lutheran views and was determined to make a stand for Lutheranism.

In spite, however, of the latter’s patronage, and notwithstanding the efforts of the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, the Formula, as Louis of the Palatinate sorrowfully admitted, was not approved by even one-half of the Protestant Princes and townships. One of the strongest objectors was Landgrave William of Hesse. He did not hesitate to abuse Luther’s memory in the rudest language, and asserted that the latter had written “contradictory things.”[1549]

The Unionists, not satisfied with their partial success, published on June 25, 1580, the “Formula Concordiæ,” consisting of an “Epitome” and a “Solida declaratio.” This document occupies an important place in the history of Lutheranism.

The doctrines of original sin, unfreedom, justification, the Supper, the ubiquity of Christ and of the “communicatio idiomatum” were taken as they had been by Luther, though they are often stated with deliberate ambiguity. Thrusts at Melanchthon, not to speak of Calvin, are found more particularly in the “Declaratio.”

The permanent rift with Calvinism was as strongly emphasised, as that with the Papacy. One of the propositions taken from the Articles of Schmalkalden ran: “All Christians ought to shun the Pope and his members and followers as the kingdom of Antichrist, and execrate it as Christ has commanded.”[1550]

The cement, however, which was to bind together the antagonistic Lutheran views and schools was not very durable. The fact that “Melanchthon’s memory had been completely blotted out,”[1551] or that the Pope had been condemned afresh, did not suffice to bring people together, nor did much good come of the smoothing over, toning down and evasions to which it had been necessary to have recourse in the work in order to arrive at a written basis of outward unity. Over and above all this it became known that the Protestant Estates were at liberty to add printed prefaces of their own to the Concord, in which they might, if they chose, set forth their own theological position, and thus interpret as they liked the text of the Concord, so long as they did not interfere with the text itself.[1552] It was also known that the father of the whole scheme, Jakob Andreæ, Inspector General of the churches of Saxony, had quite openly made of the acceptance of the Formula a pure formality and had told the Nurembergers who showed signs of antipathy that all that was required was their signature, and that this would not prevent their being and remaining of the same opinion as before.[1553]

The authors of the Concord, however, displayed such mutual distrust, nay hatred of each other, as greatly to obscure even the origin of the Concord and to raise but scant hopes of its future success. Andreæ bewailed Selnecker’s “diabolical tricks”; he was very well aware that the latter would be delighted were he (Andreæ) strung up on the gallows. Selnecker, on the other hand, complained loudly of Andreæ as a dishonest, egotistical man; he accused Andreæ of calling him: “a damned rascal, a good-for-nothing scoundrel, an arch-villain and a hellish thief.”[1554] Andreæ was equally severe in his censure of the church-councillors and theologians for the part they took in the matrimonial questions: “After a theologian had dealt with marriage cases two years in the Consistory,” he said, “he would by that time be well fitted to be appointed keeper of a brothel.”[1555] We hear an echo of Luther in the coarse language his followers were in the habit of using against each other.

In spite of all this the Concord constitutes the greatest and most important step ever taken by Lutheranism to define its position. The year 1580 gave to the Lutheran Churches a certain definite status, though, among the theologians, the controversies continued to rage as before.

The Concord itself, the supposed new palladium, became a theological bone of contention. The following years were taken up with wild quarrels about the Formula of Concord. At Strasburg alone in three years the different parties hurled against each other approximately forty screeds, full of vulgar abuse, and the literary feuds had their aftermath in the streets in the shape of hand-to-hand scuffles between the students and the burghers. Even at Wittenberg the quarrels went on.

The Calvinistic Count Palatine, Johann Casimir, notorious for his bloody deeds on behalf of the French Huguenots, instructed one of his theologians, Zacharias Ursinus, to draw up the so-called “Neustadt Admonition” in which the adherents of the Concord were accused of “making an idol of Luther”; it was a mere farce when the Concord professed to subordinate his books to Holy Scripture, because in reality they were exalted into a rule of faith and treated as the standard of doctrine; all subscribers to the Augsburg Confession were wont without exception to appeal to these writings whatever their opinions were; as a matter of fact, owing to the errors, exaggerations and contradictions they contained it was possible to quote passages from Luther’s writings in support of almost anything. His controversial works, above all, had no claim to any authority, though it was to these that the followers of the Concord preferred to appeal. “Here, as his own followers must admit,” so the “Admonition” declares, “he had been carried away into excitement and passion which exceeded all bounds and had been guilty of assertions which contradicted his own earlier declarations, and which he himself had often been under pressure obliged to withdraw or modify.”[1556]

There was, however, a large party which did not make an “idol” of Luther, but openly rejected his teaching. It was in this that Aurifaber saw a fulfilment of Luther’s prophecy of the coming extinction of his doctrine among his followers. As early as 1566 he said that the master had not been wrong in his idea, that “the Word of God had seldom persisted for more than forty years in one place.” “The holy man,” he goes on, “had frequently told the theologians and his table companions that, though his teaching had thus far grown and thriven, yet it would begin to dwindle and collapse when its course was finished. And he had declared that his doctrine had stood highest and been at its best at the Diet of Augsburg, anno 1530. But that now it would go downhill.” That, as stated above, the Word of God seldom persisted in one place for more than forty years he had proved “by many examples” taken from the times of the Judges, Kings and Prophets; even the teaching of Christ had not remained pure and free from error for longer “in the land of the Jews, in Greece, Asia and elsewhere.”[1557]

4. Mutual Influence of the Two Camps. Growing Strength of the Catholic Church

One cannot but recognise in the history of the 16th century the religious influence indirectly exerted on one another by Lutheranism and Catholicism, an influence which indeed proved advantageous to both.

Luther’s Churches

To begin with the phenomena grouped around the Formula of Concord we may say, that the movement towards greater religious unity, among the Lutherans was largely stimulated by the brilliant and to Luther’s adherents quite unexpected example of Catholic unity resulting from the religious struggle and particularly from the Council of Trent. Selnecker had insisted that Protestants must endeavour to produce an “evangelical counterblast” to Catholic theology and the Council.[1558] In the case of many others too, it was the harmony and united front of the Catholics at the Council of Trent that served as an incentive to create a similar positive bond between their own Churches. Many once more mooted the question of a Protestant General Council, but others, as for instance Andreæ, pointed out how impossible this would be and what a danger it would involve of even greater dissensions. It was also of advantage to the Protestant writers on theology to have a clearly formulated statement of the Catholic doctrine set before them in the definitions of a General Council and explained in the “Roman Catechism.” Though Luther had distorted beyond recognition the Catholic doctrines he attacked, it was less possible than formerly to doubt—after so solemn a declaration—what the teaching of the despised Church was, or, with a good conscience, to deny how alien to her was the anti-Christian doctrine of which she had been accused. Catholic polemics, too, who were growing both in numbers and in strength, must necessarily have opened the eyes of many to the interior continuity, the firm foundation and the logical sequence of the Catholic propositions and, at least in the case of the learned and unprejudiced, led them to regret keenly the absence of clearness and logic on their own side. The latter holds good in particular of the untenability of the conciliatory Lutheran theology which sought to gloss over all the contradictions and which had given rise to the phantom of the Concordia.

“In the work of unifying Protestant theology,” Janssen justly writes, “no slight service was rendered by the Catholic controversialists and apologists and also and especially by the Tridentine Council and the Roman Catechism. Those who opposed to the hurly-burly and confusion of the new teaching the settled, uniform system of a theology, harmonious and consistent in all its parts, thereby made manifest to the dissentient theologians the defects and the glaring discords which Protestantism presented both in its formal and material principles. The sharply defined terminology and the wealth of speculative matter which they offered stood here also in very good stead.”[1559]

This thought also reminds us of the great store of spiritual treasure that Luther’s Churches carried away with them when they severed their connection with Mother Church. Who can question that Luther bequeathed to his Churches much of the heritage of mysteries which Christianity brought to mankind? Faith in the Holy Trinity; in the Father as Source of all being; in the Eternal Son as the Redeemer and Mediator; in the Holy Spirit as the organ of sanctity; again, in the Incarnation, in Christ and His works, miracles and Resurrection; finally a firm belief in an eternal reward, in the again-rising of every man and the everlasting life of the just; in short all the consoling articles of the Apostles’ Creed must be included amongst the treasures which Luther not only took over from the olden Church but, in his own fashion, even defended with warmth and energy against those who differed from him.[1560]

On Catholic principles we may broadmindedly admit that countless well-meaning men since Luther’s day have found in the doctrine he preached the satisfaction of their religious cravings. Very many erred and still err “in good faith” and “with no stubbornness.”[1561] But wherever there is good faith and an honest conviction of having the best, there a religious life is possible. “This the Catholic Church does not deny when she claims to be the one ark of salvation. One would think that this had been repeated often enough to make any misapprehension impossible on the part of Protestants. As to how far this result is due to the Protestant Churches and how far to the Grace of God which instils into every willing heart peace and blessing, is no open question seeing that the Grace of God alone is the foundation of a truly religious life.”[1562]

But if, on the one hand, Lutheranism owes much to the ancient Church, on the other, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the revival in the Catholic Church during the 16th century was indirectly furthered by Luther and his work.

Progress and Gains of Catholicism

There were Catholic contemporaries who pointed out that the going over to Luther of many who were members of the Church merely in name, and whose lives did not correspond with her demands, had a wholesome effect on the Church’s body. This held good of the monasteries in particular. In many places relief was felt and a revival of discipline became possible when those, who had entered the religious life from worldly motives, took their departure in order, as Luther himself lamented, to seek greater comfort in the bosom of the new Church. “God has purged His floor and separated the chaff from the wheat,” wrote the Cistercian Abbot, Wolfgang Mayer.[1563] Augustine Alveld, the Franciscan, portrayed with indignant words the evil lives of many apostate monks and declared with relief that: “Those who were of the same pack and lived among us have now, thanks be to God, all of them run away from their convents and institutions.”[1564] In lesser degree the same was true of the laity.

“Indirectly, though very much against his will, Luther helped to promote the regeneration of the Catholic Church by means of the Council of Trent.”[1565] It was his apostasy which made possible that gathering of the Bishops which hitherto external obstacles, shortsightedness, indolence and worldly aims had prevented.

Theological studies profited by the struggle with Protestantism. More attention was bestowed on the question of man’s natural and supernatural equipment; the dangers with which the excessive spread of Nominalism had threatened the doctrine of Grace were effectually circumvented, and the indispensable need of Grace for any work meritorious for heaven was more strongly emphasised. Thus, on the whole, there was a gain which we must not underrate, a new development of theological lore and a clearer formulation of dogma on threatened points similar to that which had resulted from the great controversies in Patristic times.

Under the Divine guidance the Church also more than made up for the numbers torn from her, by the rapid growth of her missions in distant parts of the world, where the voyages of discovery and the conquest of the Western Continent at the dawn of the new century gave rise to unlooked-for new opportunities; this, too, at a time when Lutheranism and the other Protestant sects were still inclined to discountenance any universality and preferred to remain strictly local and national.

Above all it is indisputable that the Catholic Church, in order to emphasise her opposition to the so-called Evangelical freedom, devoted herself ever more assiduously to promoting a true inward life of religion among the people, the lower clergy and the bishops.

Whereas—at the close of the Middle Ages and dawn of the new era—the Papacy had been too eager in the pursuit of humanistic aims, had cultivated too exclusively merely human ideals of art and learning, and at the same time had become entangled in secular business and politics and was altogether too worldly, after Luther’s terrible attack on the formalism of the Church the Popes devoted themselves more and more to the real problems of the Kingdom of God, summoned to their side better advisers in the shape of Cardinals of strict morals, and introduced disciplinary new regulations in the spirit of a St. Charles Borromeo. The charge of shallowness brought against Catholic life was not—so far as it was justified—made in vain. From the new seminaries, from the sublime and saintly figures, who, in greater numbers than ever before, set an example of heroic virtue, and from the newly founded religious Orders such as the Theatines (1524), Capuchins (1528), Somaschans (1528), Barnabites (1530) and last but not least the Jesuits (1534), a new spirit breathed through the Church’s life and revived once more the practice of prayer, self-denial and neighbourly charity.

In this connection we need have no scruple in characterising the “Spiritual Exercises” of St. Ignatius Loyola as a phenomenon typical of the increasing religiousness of the age. Many, particularly amongst the influential representatives of the Church in Germany, under the guidance of such men as Pierre Favre, Peter Canisius and Claude Jaius, found in them a new wellspring of love for the Church and her aims.[1566]

“To the Exercises, through which many of the great German nobles went,” so Pierre Favre wrote from Ratisbon, “almost all the good was due that was afterwards done in Germany.”[1567]

The struggle with the apostasy called forth everywhere an increase of intellectual activity on the part of the threatened Church. Not only was theology deepened, but all the cognate branches of learning were more sedulously cultivated. “I scarcely think,” wrote the Jesuit, Peter Canisius, to the General of his Order, speaking of religious writings, that “Our Order could undertake or carry out any work that would be more useful and more conducive to the general welfare of the Church. Fresh writings on religious questions make a great impression and are a source of immeasurable comfort to the hard-pressed Catholics at a time when the writings of the false teachers are disseminated far and wide and cannot be exterminated.”[1568] Canisius was, however, of opinion that a simple exposition of the Catholic faith was more in place than polemics; he did not wish to see too much heat and human passion in the writings: “We do not heal the sick by such medicine but only make their case worse”;[1569] as he says in a memorandum: “In Germany there are countless numbers who err in religion, but they do not err from stubbornness or bitterness; they err after the manner of Germans who by nature are generally honest, very ready to accept everything that they, born and bred in the Lutheran heresies, have learnt, partly in schools, partly in churches, partly by the writings of false teachers.”[1570]

There is a true saying of Erasmus’s often quoted by Catholics: “Just as it would be wrong to approve all that Luther writes, so, too, it would be unjust, if, out of hatred for his person, we condemned what is true or distorted what is right.”[1571] “What writer is so bad,” he asks elsewhere, “that we do not find some good in his writings?”[1572]—What there was of good in his own and Luther’s writings was not without its effect on Catholicism. Some of their censures of things Catholic were seen to be deserved, and, in the course of time, were acted upon, at least in order to give opponents less cause for fault-finding.

The following remarks of Erasmus also found an echo amongst Catholic contemporaries and bear witness to the good which came of the sad religious struggles: “Often have I pondered in my own mind, whether, perchance, it had not pleased God to send a strong physician to deal with the profound corruption of morals in our day, who should heal by cutting and searing what was incapable of remedy by means of medicines and bandages.”[1573]—“May God, Who is wont to turn evil to good, so dispose matters, that, from this strong and bitter medicine (‘ex hoc violento amaroque pharmaco’) with which Luther has purged the world, as a body sick unto death, there may come some good for the morals of Christians.”[1574]—In 1524 he even went so far as to term Luther a “necessary evil” which they must not even desire to see removed.[1575] Yet Erasmus writes severely of him and ranks him with the greatest foes of the people of God: God had chosen to use Luther as a tool just as He had used the Pharaohs, the Philistines, Nabuchodonosor and the Romans.[1576]

That Luther wielded a wholesome rod was admitted even by the Papal Legate Zacharias Ferreri in an admonition he addressed to him in 1520; with such a scourge as this God from time to time tried Christians in order to bring them to repentance. “If you are a scourge, praised be the name of the Lord, if by this wicked instrument He is leading us to a better mind, purifying and purging us!… Is it astonishing if, even through you, we are purified and cleansed? Oh, that the Almighty would pour on us ‘clean water,’ ‘sprinkle us with hyssop’ and wash us!”[1577]

Thomas Murner, the Strasburg Franciscan, a man who was wont to scourge the failings and abuses in the Church of his day in very outspoken language, frankly admitted in a reply to Luther’s book “An den Adel” that much of the Wittenberg monk’s censure might be useful to those who wanted to put a stop to immorality, and to abuses and obsolete ecclesiastical customs and statutes. He even goes so far as to say to Luther: “Where you speak the truth, there undoubtedly the Holy Spirit speaks through you, for all truth is of God.” He adds, however, “Where you do not speak the truth, there assuredly the devil speaks through you, he who is the father of lies.” Speaking of the pictures of Luther with the symbol of the dove, which even then were common, in his satirical fashion, he suggests an improvement: “They paint the Holy Spirit over your head as though He were speaking through you. Now I learn for the first time that the Holy Spirit can say silly things.… I should suggest that they paint over your head, the Holy Ghost on one side and the devil on the other, and, in the middle, the city of Prague,” (to symbolise the heresy of Hus of which he accused Luther).[1578] Anxious as Murner was to see an end of the real abuses which Luther censured, yet, in the true Catholic spirit, he left to the ecclesiastical authorities the right and duty of taking the initiative, and it was to them that he addressed his urgent exhortations.