Luther, vol. 6 of 6

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Title: Luther, vol. 6 of 6
Author: Grisar, Hartmann
Language: English
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LUTHER

IMPRIMATUR
EDM. CAN. SURMONT,
_Vic. Gen._

_Westmonasterii, die 12 Martii, 1917._

LUTHER

HARTMANN GRISAR, S.J.

PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK

AUTHORISED TRANSLATION FROM THE GERMAN BY

E. M. LAMOND

EDITED BY

LUIGI CAPPADELTA

VOLUME VI

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.
BROADWAY HOUSE 68-74 CARTER LANE, E.C.
1917

A FEW PRESS OPINIONS OF VOLUMES I-V.

“His most elaborate and systematic biography … is not merely a book
to be reckoned with; it is one with which we cannot dispense, if only
for its minute examination of Luther’s theological writings.”—_The
Athenæum_ (Vol. I).

“The second volume of Dr. Grisar’s ‘Life of Luther’ is fully as
interesting as the first. There is the same minuteness of criticism
and the same width of survey.”—_The Athenæum_ (Vol. II).

“Its interest increases. As we see the great Reformer in the thick
of his work, and the heyday of his life, the absorbing attraction
of his personality takes hold of us more and more strongly. His
stupendous force, his amazing vitality, his superhuman interest in
life, impress themselves upon us with redoubled effect. We find him
the most multiform, the most paradoxical of men.… The present volume,
which is admirably translated, deals rather with the moral, social,
and personal side of Luther’s career than with his theology.”—_The
Athenæum_ (Vol. III).

“Father Grisar has gained a high reputation in this country through
the translation of his monumental work on the History of Rome and the
Popes in the Middle Ages, and this first instalment of his ‘Life of
Luther’ bears fresh witness to his unwearied industry, wide learning,
and scrupulous anxiety to be impartial in his judgments as well as
absolutely accurate in matters of fact.”—_Glasgow Herald._

“This ‘Life of Luther’ is bound to become standard … a model of every
literary, critical, and scholarly virtue.”—_The Month._

“Like its two predecessors, Volume III excels in the minute analysis
not merely of Luther’s actions, but also of his writings; indeed,
this feature is the outstanding merit of the author’s patient
labours.”—_The Irish Times._

“This third volume of Father Grisar’s monumental ‘Life’ is full of
interest for the theologian. And not less for the psychologist; for
here more than ever the author allows himself to probe into the
mind and motives and understanding of Luther, so as to get at the
significance of his development.”—_The Tablet_ (Vol. III).

“Historical research owes a debt of gratitude to Father Grisar for the
calm unbiased manner in which he marshals the facts and opinions on
Luther which his deep erudition has gathered.”—_The Tablet_ (Vol. IV).

“We have nothing but commendation for the translation.”—_The Tablet_
(Vol. V).

“Another volume of Father Grisar’s ‘Life of Martin Luther’ …
confirms the belief that it will remain the standard ‘Life,’ and
rank amongst the most valuable contributions to the history of the
Reformation.”—_Yorkshire Post._

CONTENTS

CHAPTER XXXV. LUTHER’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SOCIETY AND
EDUCATION (_continued from Vol. V._) _pages_ 3-98

3. ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS AND HIGHER EDUCATION.

Luther’s appeals on behalf of the schools; polemical
trend of his appeals; his ideal of elementary
education; study of the Bible and the classics. The
decline in matters educational after the introduction
of the innovations; higher education before Luther’s
day; results achieved by Luther _pages_ 3-41

4. BENEVOLENCE AND RELIEF OF THE POOR.

Organised charity in late mediæval times. Luther’s
attempts to arrange for the relief of the poor; the
“Poor-boxes”; Bugenhagen’s work; the sad effects of the
confiscation of Church-property; and of the doctrine
that good works are valueless _pages_ 42-65

5. LUTHER’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS WORLDLY CALLINGS.

Whether Luther’s claim can stand that he was the
first to preach the dignity of worldly callings? His
depreciation of the several classes of the nation due
to his estrangement from them. Attitude towards the
merchant-class. His Old-Testament ideas react on his
theories about usury and interest; his views on the
lawfulness of permanent investments, etc. _pages_ 65-98

CHAPTER XXXVI. THE DARKER SIDE OF LUTHER’S INNER LIFE.
HIS AILMENTS _pages_ 99-186

1. EARLY SUFFERINGS, BODILY AND MENTAL.

Fits of fear, palpitations, swoons, nervousness; his
temptations no mere morbid phenomena _pages_ 99-112

2. PSYCHIC PROBLEMS OF LUTHER’S RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT.

Temptations to despair. The shadow of pseudo-mysticism.
Temptations of the flesh _pages_ 112-122

3. GHOSTS, DELUSIONS, APPARITIONS OF THE DEVIL.

The statements regarding Luther’s intercourse with the
beyond and his visions of the devil. The misunderstood
reference to his disputation with the devil on the
Mass. His belief in possession and exorcism _pages_ 122-140

4. REVELATION AND ILLUSION. MORBID TRAINS OF THOUGHT.

His conviction that he was the recipient of a special
revelation; his apparent withdrawals of this claim. His
so-called “temptations” viewed by him as confirming his
mission; his persuasion that the Pope is Antichrist,
that his opponents are all egged on by the devil and
that no man on earth can compare with him. His tendency
to self-contradiction; his changeableness, his feverish
polemics _pages_ 141-171

5. LUTHER’S PSYCHOLOGY ACCORDING TO PHYSICIANS AND
HISTORIANS.

Whether Luther’s mind was abnormal, or whether all
his symptoms are to be explained by uric acid, or by
degeneracy _pages_ 172-186

CHAPTER XXXVII. LUTHER’S LATER EMBELLISHMENT
OF HIS EARLY LIFE _pages_ 187-236

1. LUTHER’S LATER PICTURE OF HIS CONVENT-LIFE AND
APOSTASY.

The legend about his first appearance on the field
of history. His supposed excessive holiness-by-works
during his monastic days _pages_ 187-205

2. THE REALITY. LUTHER’S FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY.

Inward peace and happiness in his monastic days; his
vows and their breach; some peculiarities of his
humility; his feverish addiction to his work; the facts
around which his later legend grew _pages_ 205-229

3. THE LEGEND RECEIVES ITS LAST TOUCH; HOW IT WAS USED.

Forged in the solitude of the Coburg. His
characteristic passage from the “I” to the “we.” His
monkish “experience” useful to him _pages_ 229-236

CHAPTER XXXVIII. END OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. THE
CHURCH-UNSEEN AND THE VISIBLE CHURCH-BY-LAW _pages_ 237-340

1. FROM RELIGIOUS LICENCE TO RELIGIOUS CONSTRAINT.

Freedom as Luther’s early watchword. Intolerance
towards Catholics, in theory, and in practice.
Sanguinary threats against all papists; the
death-penalty pronounced against “sectarians” at home;
his justification: blasphemy must be put down. The
people driven to the new preaching; no freedom of
conscience allowed: Luther’s intolerance imitated by
his friends _pages_ 237-279

2. LUTHER AS JUDGE.

The pigheadedness and arrogance of all the
“sectarians.” None of them are sure of their cause;
none of them can work miracles _pages_ 279-289

3. THE CHURCH-UNSEEN, ITS ORIGIN AND EARLY HISTORY.

Luther’s invisible Church; her marks; only the
predestined are members; his shifting theory _pages_ 290-308

4. THE CHURCH BECOMES VISIBLE. ITS ORGANISATION.

The Church materialises in Articles and a Ministry
set up by Wittenberg with the sovereign as
“emergency-bishop.” The results of State-interference _pages_ 309-325

5. LUTHER’S TACTICS IN QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE CHURCH.

The Erfurt preachers at variance with the Town-Council.
Luther shifts his ground in his controversies with
the Catholics. How the Church, in spite of Christ’s
promises, contrived to remain plunged in error for over
a thousand years. Luther’s interpretation of Christ’s
words “On this rock” _pages_ 325-340

CHAPTER XXXIX. END OF LUTHER’S LIFE _pages_ 341-386

1. THE FLIGHT FROM WITTENBERG.

His depression gets the better of him and he leaves the
town “for ever.” Change of air sweetens his temper and
he returns and resumes his work with new ardour _pages_ 341-351

2. LAST TROUBLES AND CARES.

Quarrels with the Swiss and with New Believers nearer
home; with the lawyers regarding clandestine marriages;
the State proves a cause of vexation on account of its
interference in matters which concern the preachers.
Luther’s fears for the future; encroachments of human
reason; the coming collapse of morals _pages_ 351-369

3. LUTHER’S DEATH AT EISLEBEN (1546).

Thoughts of death. His last visit to Mansfeld, to act
as arbitrator between the Counts. The versions of his
last moments _pages_ 370-381

4. IN THE WORLD OF LEGEND.

The tale of Luther’s suicide, of the disappearance of
his body, etc. Who was responsible for the habit of
concocting such stories _pages_ 381-386

CHAPTER XL. AT THE GRAVE _pages_ 387-462

1. LUTHER’S FAME AMONG THE FRIENDS HE LEFT BEHIND.

Extracts from the panegyrics and early biographies;
medals struck in his honour; his epitaphs _pages_ 387-394

2. LUTHER’S MEMORY AMONG THE CATHOLICS. THE QUESTION
OF HIS GREATNESS.

Luther’s defiance of the whole world, whilst evoking
their wonder, failed to secure the admiration of
Catholics. Whether Luther’s undoubted strength of will
makes of him a “great man.” The part played by other
factors in the movement he inaugurated _pages_ 394-407

3. LUTHER’S FATE IN THE FIRST STRUGGLES FOR HIS
SPIRITUAL HERITAGE.

Defeat of the Schmalkalden Leaguers. Osiandric,
Majorite, Adiaphoristic, Synergistic and
Cryptocalvinist controversies _pages_ 407-423

4. MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF THE TWO CAMPS. GROWING
STRENGTH OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

The Lutherans are induced to adopt the Formula of
Concord as a counterblast against the Council of Trent.
Catholic theology benefits by the new controversies;
the Church’s religious life is deepened; progress in
catechetical instruction, in matters educational,
Bible-study and Church-history _pages_ 423-439

5. LUTHER AS DESCRIBED BY THE OLDEN “ORTHODOX”
LUTHERANS.

Their “mediæval” attitude. Luther the “Prophet of the
Germans,” a New Elias and John the Baptist _pages_ 440-444

6. LUTHER AS SEEN BY THE PIETISTS AND RATIONALISTS.

Each in their own way make of Luther their forerunner
and breathe into him their own ideals _pages_ 444-448

7. THE MODERN PICTURE OF LUTHER.

The Romanticists; liberal theologians; independent
historians; the Janus-Luther, with one face looking
back on the Middle Ages and the other turned to the
coming world. Ritschl, E. M. Arndt. Luther the hero
of Kultur? Houston S. Chamberlain’s picture of the
“Political Luther.” Conclusion _pages_ 449-462

XLI. APPENDIX I. LUTHER’S WRITINGS AND THE
EVENTS OF THE DAY, ARRANGED IN CHRONOLOGICAL
ORDER _pages_ 465-495

XLII. APPENDIX II. ADDITIONS AND EMENDATIONS _pages_ 496-516

1-2. LUTHER’S VISIT TO ROME.

The Scala Santa; the General Confession; Oldecop’s
account of Luther’s petition to be secularised; the
outcome for the Order of Luther’s visit to Rome _pages_ 496-497

3. LUTHER’S CONCEPTION OF “OBSERVANCE” AND HIS
CONFLICT WITH HIS BROTHER FRIARS _pages_ 497-501

4. ATTACK UPON THE “SELF-RIGHTEOUS” _pages_ 501-503

5. THE COLLAPSE OF THE AUGUSTINIAN CONGREGATION _pages_ 503-504

6. THE TOWER INCIDENT _pages_ 504-510

7. THE INDULGENCE-THESES _page_ 510

8. THE TEMPTATIONS AT THE WARTBURG _page_ 511

9. PRAYER AT THE WARTBURG _pages_ 511-512

10. LUTHER’S STATE DURING HIS STAY AT THE COBURG _page_ 512

11. LUTHER’S MORAL CHARACTER _pages_ 512-513

12. LUTHER’S VIEWS ON LIES _pages_ 513-515

13. LUTHER’S LACK OF THE MISSIONARY SPIRIT _pages_ 515-516

14. Notes: Pope Alexander VI “the Maraña”; from Bishop
Maltitz’s letters to Bishop Fabri _page_ 516

General Index to the six volumes _pages_ 517-551

VOL. VI

SURVEY OF LUTHER’S WORK. HIS AILMENTS. HIS DEATH

LUTHER

CHAPTER XXXV (_Continued_)

LUTHER’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SOCIETY AND EDUCATION

3. Elementary Schools and Higher Education

_Luther’s Appeals on Behalf of the Schools_

In a pamphlet of 1524, on the need of establishing schools, Luther spoke
some emphatic and impressive words.[1]

There could be nothing worse, he declared, than to abuse and neglect the
precious souls of the little ones; even a hundred florins was not too
much to pay to make a good Christian of a boy; it was the duty of the
magistrates and authorities to whom the welfare of the town was confided
to see to this, the parents being so often either not pious or worthy
enough to perform this office, or else too unlearned or too much hampered
by their business or the cares of their household. The well-being of
a town was not to be gauged by its fine buildings, but rather by the
learning, good sense, and honourable behaviour of the burghers; given
this the other sort of prosperity would never be lacking. Luther dwells
on the urgent need of studying languages and sees an act of Providence
in the dispersion of the Greeks whose presence in the West had been the
means of giving a fresh stimulus to the study of Greek, and even to the
cultivation of other languages. Without schools and learning no men would
be found qualified to rule in the ecclesiastical or even in the secular
sphere; even the management of the home and the duties of women to their
families and households called for some sort of instruction.[2]

Owing to their innate leaning to savagery the German people, above all
others, could ill afford to dispense with the discipline of the school.
All the world calls us “German beasts”; too long have we been German
beasts, let us therefore now learn to use our reason.[3]

He speaks of the educational value not only of languages but of history,
mathematics and the other arts, but above all of religion, which, now
that the true Evangel is preached, must take root in the hearts of the
young, but which could not be maintained unless care was taken to ensure
a supply of future preachers.

He gives an excellent answer to the objection: “What is the good of going
to school unless we are thinking of becoming parsons?” The wholesale
secularisation of ecclesiastical benefices had resulted in a great
falling off in the number of scholars, the parents often thinking too
much of the worldly prospects of their children. Luther, however, points
out that even the secular offices deserve to be filled with men of
education. “How useful and called for it is, and how pleasing to God,
that the man destined to govern, whether as Prince, lord, councillor
or otherwise, should be learned and capable of performing his duty as
becomes a Christian.”[4]

* * * * *

This booklet, which is of great interest for the history of the schools,
was translated into Latin in the same year by Vincentius Obsopœus (Koch)
and published at Hagenau, with a preface by Melanchthon.[5] It also
became widely known throughout Germany, being frequently reprinted in the
original tongue. As the title shows, Luther addressed himself in the work
“To the Councillors of _all_ the townships,” viz. even to the Catholic
magistrates among whom he stood in disfavour. He declares that it was a
question of the “salvation and happiness of the whole German land. And
were I to hit upon something good, even were I myself a fool, it would be
no disgrace to anyone to listen to me.”[6]

In thus calling for the founding of schools Luther was but reiterating
the admonition contained in his writing “To the German Nobility.” Such
exhortations were always sure to win applause, and served to recommend
not only his own person but even, in the case of many, his undertaking
as a whole.[7] In his rules for the administration of the poor-box
at Leisnig Luther had been mindful of the claims of the schools, nor
did he forget them in the other regulations he drew up later. In his
sermons, too, he also dwelt repeatedly on the needs of the elementary
schools; when complaining of the decay of charity he is wont to instance
the straits, not only of the parsonages and the poor, but also of
the schools. “Only reckon up and count on your fingers what here [at
Wittenberg] and elsewhere those who bask in the Evangel give and do for
it, and see whether, were it not for us who are still living, there would
remain a single preacher or student.… Are there then no poor scholars who
ought to be studying and exercising themselves in the Word of God?” But
“hoarding and scraping” are now the rule, so that hardly a town can be
found “that collects enough to keep a schoolmaster or parson.”[8]

Many wealthy towns had, however, to Luther’s great joy, taken in hand the
cause of the schools. Their efforts were to prove very helpful to the new
religious system.

In the same year that the above writing appeared steps were taken at
Magdeburg for the promotion of education, and Cruciger, Luther’s own
pupil, was summoned from Wittenberg to assume the direction. Melanchthon
and Luther repaired to Eisleben in 1525, where Count Albert of Mansfeld
had founded a Grammar School. In some towns the Councillors carried
out Luther’s proposals, in others, where the town-council was opposed
to the innovators and their schools, the burghers “set at naught the
Council,” as Luther relates, and erected “schools and parsonages”; in
other words, they established schools as the best means to further
the new Evangel.[9] At Nuremberg Melanchthon, a zealous promoter of
education, exerted himself for the foundation of a “Gymnasium” which was
to serve as a model of the new humanistic schools of the Evangelicals,
and which was generously provided for by the town. May 6, 1526, saw the
opening of this new school. Learned masters were appointed, for instance,
Melanchthon’s friend Camerarius, the poet Eobanus Hessus and the humanist
Michael Roting. In 1530 Luther speaks of it in words meant to flatter the
Nurembergers as “a fine, noble school,” for which the “very best men”
had been selected and appointed. He even tells all Germany, that “no
University, not even that of Paris itself, was ever so well provided in
the way of lecturers”; it was in no small measure owing to this school
that “Nuremberg now shone throughout the whole of Germany like a sun,
compared with which others were but moon and stars.”[10]

Yet it was certain disagreeable happenings at Nuremberg itself which
led him to write in 1530 his second booklet in favour of the schools.
In the flourishing commercial city there were many wealthy burghers who
refused to send their children to the “Gymnasium,” thinking that, instead
of learning ancient languages, they would be more usefully occupied in
acquiring other elements of knowledge more essential to the mercantile
calling; by so doing they had raised a certain feeling against the new
school. Many were even disposed to scoff at all book-learning and roundly
declared, as Luther relates, “If my son knows how to read and reckon then
he knows quite enough; we now have plenty German books,” etc.[11]

In July of the above year, Luther, in the loneliness of the Coburg,
penned a sermon having for its title “That children must be kept at
school.” The sermon grew into a lengthy work; Luther himself was, later
on, to bewail its long-windedness.[12] This writing, taken with that of
1524, supplies the gist of Luther’s teaching with regard to the schools.

In the preface, printed before the body of the work, he dedicates the
writing to the Nuremberg “syndic” or town-clerk, Lazarus Spengler,
an ardent promoter of the new teaching. A town like Nuremberg, he
there says, “must surely contain more men than merchants, and also
others who can do more than merely reckon, or read German books.
German books are principally intended for the common people to read at
home; but for preaching, governing and administering justice in both
ecclesiastical and temporal sphere all the arts and languages in the
world are not sufficient.” Already in the preface he inveighs against
those who assert that arithmetic and a knowledge of German were quite
enough: These small-minded worshippers of Mammon failed to take into
consideration what was essential for “ruling”; both the civil and the
ecclesiastical office would suffer under such a system.[13]

In this writing his style follows his mood, being now powerful, now
popular and not seldom wearisome. He dwells longest on the spiritual
office, expressing his fear, that, should the lack of interest in
the schools become general, and the people continue so niggardly in
providing for their support, there would result such a spiritual
famine with regard to the Word of God, that ten villages would be left
in the charge of a single parson. Passing on to the secular office
he points out how the latter upholds the “temporal, fleeting peace,
life and law.… It is an excellent gift of God Who also instituted and
appointed it and Who demands its preservation.” Of this office “It is
the work and glory that it makes wild beasts into men and keeps them
in this state.… Do you not think that if the poor birds and beasts
could speak and were able to see the action of the secular rule among
men they would say: Dear fellows, you are no men but gods compared
with us; how secure you sit and live, enjoying all good things,
whereas we are not safe from each other for a single hour as regards
our life, our home or our food.”[14]

“Such rule cannot continue, but must go to rack and ruin unless the
law [the Roman law and the law of the land] is maintained. And what
is to maintain it? Fists and blustering cannot do so, but only brains
and books; we must learn to understand the wisdom and justice of our
secular rule.” Speaking of the lawyers’ office for which the young
must prepare themselves, he groups under it the “chancellors, clerks,
judges, advocates, notaries and all others who are concerned with
the law, not to speak of the great Johnnies who sport the title of
Hofrat.”[15] On the calling of the physician he only touches lightly,
showing that this “useful, consoling and health-giving” profession
demands the retention of the Latin schools, short of which it must
fall into decay.

The following hint was a practical one: Seeing that, in Saxony
alone, about 4000 men of learning were needed—what with chaplains,
schoolmasters and readers—those who wished to study had good prospects
of “great honours and emoluments since two Princes and three townships
were all ready to fight for the services of one learned man.” He urges
that assistance should be given to poor parents out of the Church
property so as to enable them to send their children to school, and
that the rich should make foundations for this purpose.

In this writing, as in that of 1524, he addresses himself to the
secular authorities and even demands that they should compel their
subjects to send their children to school in order that the supply
of capable men might not fail in the future. I consider, he says,
“that the authorities are bound to force those under them to see to
the schooling of their children, more particularly those just spoken
of [the more gifted]; for it is undoubtedly their duty to see to the
upkeep of the above-mentioned offices and callings.” If in time of war
they could compel their subjects to render assistance and resist the
enemy, much more had they the right to coerce them in respect of the
children, seeing that this was a war against the devil who wished to
despoil the land and the townships of able men, so as to be able “to
cheat and delude them as he pleased.”[16]

As regards the question whether _all_ children were to be forced to
go to school, in this writing Luther does not speak of any universal
compulsion; only “when the authorities see a capable lad”[17] does he
wish coercion to be applied to the parents. In his first writing on the
schools likewise, he had not advocated universal compulsion but had
merely pointed out that it was “becoming” that the authorities should
interfere where the parents neglected their duty;[18] he does not
say how they are to “interfere,” but merely suggests that one or two
“schoolmasters” should be provided whose salary should not be grudged.

“Hence it is incorrect,” rightly remarks Kawerau, “to represent Luther as
the harbinger of universal compulsory education.”[19]

Fr. Lambert of Avignon, in his ecclesiastical regulations dating from
1526, indeed sought to establish national schools throughout Hesse, but
his proposals were never enforced. It was only at the beginning of the
17th century that Wolfgang Ratke (Ratichius, †1635), a pedagogue educated
in the Calvinistic schools, established the principle of universal
education which then was incorporated in the educational regulations
of Weimar in 1619.[20] But the Thirty Years’ War put an end to these
attempts, and it was only in the 18th century that the principle of
compulsory State education secured general acceptance, and then, too,
owing chiefly to non-Lutheran influences.

Before entering further into the details of Luther’s educational plans
we must cast a glance at a factor which seems to permeate both the above
writings.

_Polemical Trend of Luther’s Pedagogics_

If we seek to characterise both the writings just spoken of we find
that they amount to an appeal called forth by the misery of those times
for some provision to be made to ensure a supply of educated men for
the future. Frederick Paulsen describes them, particularly the earlier
one, as nothing more than a “cry for help, wrung from Luther by the
sudden, general collapse of the educational system which followed on the
ecclesiastical upheaval.”[21] They were not dictated so much by a love
for humanistic studies as such or by the wish to further the interests
of learning in Germany, as by the desire to fill the secular-government
berths with able, “Christian” men, and, above all, to provide preachers
and pastors for the work Luther had commenced and for the struggle
against Popery. The schools themselves were unobtrusively to promote
the new Evangel amongst the young and in the home. Learning, according
to Luther, as a Protestant theologian expressed it, was to enter “into
the service of the Evangel and further its right understanding”; “the
religious standpoint alone was of any real interest to him.”[22]

Melanchthon’s attitude to the schools was more broadminded. To some
extent his efforts supplied what was wanting in Luther.[23] His
object was the education of the people, whereas, in Luther’s eyes,
the importance of the schools chiefly lay in their being “_seminaria
ecclesiarum_,” as he once calls them. With him their aim was too much
the mere promoting of his specific theological interests, to the
“preservation of the Church.”[24]

According to Luther the first and most important reason for
promoting the establishment of schools, was, as he points out to the
“Councillors of all the Townships,” to resist the devil, who, the
better to maintain his dominion over the German lands, was bent on
thwarting the schools; “if we want to prick him on a tender spot then
we may best do so by seeing that the young grow up in the knowledge of
God, spreading the Word of God and teaching it to others.”[25] “The
other [reason] is, as St. Paul says, that we receive not the grace of
God in vain, nor neglect the accepted time.” The “donkey-stables and
devil-schools” kept by monks and clergy had now seen their day; but,
now that the “darkness” has been dispelled by the “Word of God,” we
have the “best and most learned of the youths and men, who, equipped
with languages and all the arts, can prove of great assistance.” “My
dear, good Germans, make use of God’s grace and His Word now you have
it! For know this, the Word of God and His grace is indeed here.”[26]

In many localities preachers of the new faith were in request,
moreover, many of the older clergy, who had passed over to Luther’s
side, had departed this life or had been removed by the Visitors on
account of their incapacity or moral shortcomings. Those who had
replaced them were often men of no education whatever. The decline of
learning gave rise to many difficulties. Schoolmasters were welcomed
not only as simple ministers but, as we have heard Luther declare,
even as the candidates best fitted for the post of superintendent.[27]
How frequently people of but slight education were appointed pastors
is plain from the lists of those ordained at Wittenberg from 1537
onwards; amongst these we find men of every trade: clerks, printers,
weavers, cobblers, tailors, and even one peasant. Seven years later,
when the handicraftsmen had disappeared, we constantly find sextons
and schoolmasters being entrusted with the ministerial office.[28]

This sad state of things must be carefully kept in mind if we are to
understand the ideas which chiefly inspired the above writings, and as
these have not so far been sufficiently emphasised we may be permitted
to make some reference to them.

“We must have men,” says Luther in his first writing, viz. that
addressed to the councillors, “men to dispense to us God’s Word and
the sacraments and to watch over the souls of the people. But whence
are we to get them if the schools are allowed to fall to ruin and
other _more Christian_ ones are not set up?”[29] “Christendom has
always need of such prophets to study and interpret the Scriptures,
and, when the call comes, to conduct controversy.”[30] Similar appeals
occur even more frequently in the other writing, viz. that dedicated
by Luther to his friend at Nuremberg. Already in his first writing,
Luther, as the ghostly counsellor of Germany “appointed” in Christ’s
name, boldly faces all other teachers, telling the Catholics, that
what he was seeking was merely the “happiness and salvation” of
the Fatherland.[31] In the second he expressly states that it is
to all the German lands that he their “prophet” is speaking: “My
dear Germans, I have told you often enough that you have heard your
prophet. God grant that we may obey His Word.”[32] So entirely does
he identify the interests of his Church with those of the schools.
Well might those many Germans who did not hold with him—and at that
time Luther was an excommunicate outlaw—well might they have asked
themselves with astonishment whence he had the right to address them
as though he were the representative and mouthpiece of the whole of
Germany. Such exhortations have, however, their root in his usual
ideas of religion and in the anxiety caused by the urgent needs of the
time.

At the Coburg the indifference, coldness and avarice of his followers
appears to him in an even darker light than usual. He well sees that
if the schools continue to be neglected as they have been hitherto
the result will be a mere “pig sty,” a “hideous, savage horde of
‘Tatters’ and Turks.” Hence he fulminates against the ingratitude
displayed towards the Evangel and against the stinginess which, though
it had money for everything, had none to spare for the schools and the
parsons; the imagery to which he has recourse leaves far behind that
of the Old Testament Prophets.

Here we have the real Luther whom, as he himself admits, though in
a different sense, stands revealed in this writing penned at the
Coburg.[33] “Is this not enough to arouse God’s wrath?… Verily it
would be no wonder were God to open wide the doors and windows of hell
and rain and hail on us nothing but devils, or were He to send fire
and brimstone down from heaven and plunge us all into the abyss of
hell like Sodom and Gomorrha … for they were not one-tenth as wicked
as Germany is now.”[34] Has then Christ, the Son of God, deserved
this of us, he asks, that so many care nothing for the schools and
parsonages, and “even dissuade the children from becoming ministers,
that this office may speedily perish, and the blood and passion of
Christ be no longer of any avail.”[35] Here again his chief reason
for maintaining the schools is his anxiety: “What is otherwise to
become of the ghostly office and calling.”[36] Only after he has
considered this question from all sides and demonstrated that his
Church’s edifice stands in need not merely of “worked stones” but
also of “rubble,” i.e. both of clever men and of others less highly
gifted,[37] does he come in the second place to the importance of
having learned men even in the secular office.

He had begun this writing with an allusion to the devil, viz. to “the
wiles of tiresome Satan against the holy Evangel”; he also concludes
it in the same vein, speaking of the “tiresome devil,” who secretly
plots against the schools and thereby against the salvation of both
town and country.[38]

The author goes at some length into the question of languages and
declares that the main reason for learning them was a religious one.

Languages enable us “to understand Holy Scripture,” he says, “this was
well known to the monasteries and universities of the past, hence they
had always frowned on the study of languages”; the devil was afraid
that languages would make a hole “which afterwards it would not be
easy for him to plug.” But the providence of God has outreached him,
for, by “making over Greece to the Turks and sending the Greeks into
exile, their language was spread abroad and an impetus was given even
to the study of other tongues.” And now, thanks to the languages, the
Gospel has been restored to its “earlier purity.” Hence, for the sake
of the Bible and the Word of God, let us hark back to the languages.
His excellent observations on the importance of the study of languages
for those in secular authority, though perfectly honest, hold merely a
secondary place. The chief use of the languages is as a weapon against
the Papacy. “The dearer the Evangel is to us, the more let us hold
fast to the languages!”

So anxious is he to see the future schools thoroughly “Christian,”
i.e. Evangelical and all devoted to the service of his cause, that he
expressly states that otherwise he “would rather that not a single
boy learnt anything but remained quite dumb.” Hence the earlier
“universities and monasteries” must be made an end of. Their way of
teaching and living “is not the right one for the young.” “It is
my earnest opinion, prayer and wish that these donkey-stables and
devil-schools should either sink into the abyss or else be transformed
into Christian schools. But now that God has bestowed His grace upon
us so richly and provided us with so many well able to teach and bring
up the young, we are actually in danger of flinging the grace of God
to the winds.” “I am of opinion that Germany has never heard so much
of God’s Word as now.… God’s Word is a streaming downpour, the like of
which must not be expected again.”[39]

Hence the two writings differ but little from his usual polemical and
hortatory works. They do not make of Luther the “father of the national
schools,” as he has been erroneously termed, because, what he was after
was not the real education of the masses but something rather different;
still less do the booklets, with their every page reeking of the Word of
God which he preached, make him the father of the modern undenominational
schools.[40]

In fact, elementary schools as such have scarcely any place in these
writings. What concerns him is rather the Latin grammar schools, and only
as an afterthought does he passingly allude to the other schools in which
children receive their first grounding.[41]

Luther’s standpoint as to the Church’s need of Grammar Schools is always
the same, even when he speaks of them in the Table-Talk.

“When we are dead,” he says for instance, “where will others be
found to take our place unless there are schools? For the sake of the
Churches we must have Christian schools and maintain them.”[42]—“When
the schools multiply, things are going well and the Church stands
firm.”[43]—“By means of such cuttings and saplings is the Church sown and
propagated.”—“The schools are of great advantage in that they undoubtedly
preserve the Churches.”[44]

“Hence a reformation of the schools and universities is also called for,”
so he writes in a memorandum,[45] immediately after having declared, that
“it is necessary to have good and pious preachers; all will depend on men
who must be educated in the schools and universities.”[46]

For this reason, viz. on account of the preparation they furnished, he
even has a kind word for the schools of former days.

He recalls to mind, that, even in Popery “the schools supplied parsons
and preachers.” “In the schools the little boys learnt at least the Our
Father and the Creed and the Church was wonderfully preserved by means of
the tiny schools.”[47]—Of a certain hymn he remarks, that it was “very
likely written and kept by some good schoolmaster or parson. The schools
were indeed the all-important factor in the Church and the ‘_ecclesia_’
of the parson.”[48]

_Luther’s Educational Plans_

When, in his exhortations, Luther so warmly advocated the study of
Latin and of languages generally, he was merely keeping to the approved
traditional lines. Although he values ancient languages chiefly as a
means for the better understanding of Scripture, he is so prepossessed
in their favour in “worldly matters” that he even praises Latin at the
expense of German. He is particularly anxious that Latin works should
be read; among themselves the boys were to speak Latin. Recommending
the study of tongues, he says: “If we make such a mistake, which God
forbid, as to give up the study of languages, we shall not only lose the
Gospel but come to such straits as to be unable to read or write aright
either Latin or German.” The education of earlier days had not only led
men away from the Gospel owing to the neglect of languages, but “the
wretched people became mere brutes, unable to read or write either Latin
or German correctly, nay, had almost lost the use of their reason.”
It was statements such as these which drew from Friedrich Paulsen the
exclamation: “Hence Christianity and education, nay, even sound common
sense itself, all depend on the knowledge of languages!”[49]

Well founded as were Luther’s demands for a Latin education, yet we find
in him a notable absence of discrimination between schools and schools.

Even in the preparatory schools he was anxious to see the study of
languages introduced, and that for the girls too. Boys and girls, he
says, ought to be instructed “in tongues and other arts and subjects.”
He was of opinion, that, in this way, it would be possible from the very
first to pick out those best fitted to pursue the study of languages and
to become later “schoolmasters, schoolmistresses or preachers.”[50] He
even appeals to the example of olden Saints such as Agnes, Agatha and
Lucy when urging that the more talented girls should receive a grounding
in languages.[51] “It would undoubtedly have been quite enough had the
less ambitious children been taught merely to reckon, and to read and
write German.” “Luther’s action in having as many children of the people
as possible taught languages … and his warfare against the use of German
in the schools, whether in the towns, the villages, or the hamlets, was
all very unpractical.… He had come to the conclusion that German schools,
for one reason or another, were unsuited to be nurseries for the Church
(‘_seminaria ecclesiæ_’), hence his effort to transplant into the Latin
grammar schools every sapling on which he could lay hands.”[52]

The injunctions appended to Melanchthon’s Visitation rules (1538),
which were sanctioned and approved of by Luther, lay such stress on
the teaching of languages that the humbler schools were bound to
suffer. When dealing with “the schools” their only object seems to
be the “upbringing of persons fit to teach in the churches and to
govern.” And this aim, moreover, is pursued onesidedly enough, for
we read: “The schoolmasters are in the first place to be diligent
to teach the children only Latin, not German, or Greek, or Hebrew,
as some have hitherto done, thus overburdening the poor children’s
minds.” The regulations then proceed to prescribe in detail the
studies to be undertaken in the lowest form: “In order that the
children may get hold of many Latin words, they are to be made to
learn some words every evening, as was the way in the schools in
former days.” After the children have learnt to spell out the handbook
containing the “Alphabet, the Our Father, Creed and other prayers they
are to be set to Donatus and Cato … so that they may thus learn a
number of Latin words and gain a certain readiness of speech (‘_copia
dicendi_’).” Apart from this the lowest form is to be taught only
writing and “music.”

The next class was to learn grammar (needless to say Latin grammar)
and to be exercised in Æsop’s Fables, the “_Pedologia_” of Mosellanus
and the “_Colloquia_” of Erasmus, such of the latter being selected
“as are useful for children and not improper.” “Once the children have
learnt Æsop they are to be given Terence, which they must learn by
heart.” There is no mention made here of any selection, this possibly
being left to the teacher; in the case of Plautus, who was to follow
Terence, this is expressly enjoined.—Of the religious instruction we
read: Seeing it is necessary to teach the children the beginnings of
a Godly, Christian life, “the schoolmaster is to catechise the whole
[2nd] class, making the children recite one after the other the Our
Father, the Creed and the Ten Commandments.” The schoolmaster was to
“explain” these and also to instil into the children such points as
were essential for living a good life, such as the “fear of God,
faith and good works.” The schoolmaster was not to get the children
into the habit of “abusing monks or others, as many incompetent
masters do.” Finally, it was also laid down that those Psalms which
exhort to the “fear of God, faith and good works” were to be learnt
by heart, especially Psalms cxii., xxxiv., cxxviii., cxxv., cxvii.,
cxxxiii. (cxi., xxxiii., cxxvii., cxxiv., cxxvi., cxxxii.), the Gospel
of St. Matthew was also to be explained and perhaps likewise the
Epistles of Paul to Timothy, the 1st Epistle of John and the Book of
Proverbs.

In the 3rd class, in addition to grammar, versification, dialectics
and rhetoric had to be studied, the boys being exercised in Virgil and
Cicero (the “_Officia_” and “_Epistolæ familiares_”). “The boys are
also to be made to speak Latin and the schoolmasters themselves are as
far as possible to speak nothing but Latin with them in order thus to
accustom and encourage them in this practice.”[53]

In his two appeals for the schools in 1524 and 1530 Luther is less
explicit in his requirements than the regulations for the Visitation.
According to him, apart from the languages, it is the text of Scripture
which must form the basis of all the instruction.

Holy Scripture, especially the Gospel, was to be everywhere “the chief
and main object of study.” “Would to God that every town had also a
school for girls where little maids might hear the Gospel for an hour a
day, either in German or in Latin.… Ought not every Christian at the age
of nine or ten to be acquainted with the whole of the Gospel? Young folk
throughout Christendom are pining away and being pitiably ruined for want
of the Gospel, in which they ought always to be instructed and exercised.”

“I would not advise anyone to send his child where Holy Scripture is not
the rule. Where the Word of God is not constantly studied everything must
needs be in a state of corruption.”[54]

In the event, the Bible, together with Luther’s Catechism which had to
be committed to memory, and the hymn-book, became the chief manuals in
the Lutheran schools. On these elements a large portion of the young
generation of Germany was brought up.

For the study of languages Luther, like Melanchthon, recommended
the “_Disticha_” ascribed to Cato and Æsop’s Fables. “It is by the
special mercy of God,” he says, “that Cato’s booklet and the Fables
of Æsop have been preserved in the schools.”[55] We shall describe
elsewhere the efforts he himself made to expurgate the editions of
Æsop which had become corrupted by additions offensive to good morals.
Various Latin classics which Humanists were wont to put in the hands
of the scholars he characterised in his Table-Talk as unsuitable for
school use. “It would be well that the books of Juvenal, Martial,
Catullus and also Virgil’s ‘_Priapeia_’ were weeded out of the land
and the schools, banished and expelled, for they contain coarse and
shameless things such as the young cannot study without grievous
harm.”[56] Of the Roman writers (with the Greeks he is much less at
home) he extols Cicero, Terence and Virgil as useful and improving.
As a whole, however, Luther always remained “at heart a stranger to
true Humanism.… Though not altogether inappreciative of elegance of
style, he is far from displaying the enthusiasm of the Humanists.”[57]
Although he shows himself fairly well acquainted with the writings of
the three authors just mentioned, and though he owed this education
to his early training, yet, in his efforts to belittle the olden
schools, he complains, that “no one had taught him to read the poets
and historians,” but, that, on the other hand, he had been obliged to
study the “devil’s ordure and the philosophers.”[58]

It must not be overlooked that he, like the Instructions for the
Visitors, recommends that Terence and other olden dramatists should
be given to the young to be read, and even acted, though, as he
admits, they “sometimes contain obscenities and love stories.” This
advice he further emphasised in 1537 by declaring that a Protestant
schoolmaster of Bautzen was in the right, when, regardless of the
scandal of many, he had Terence’s “_Andria_” performed. Luther agreed
with Melanchthon in thinking that the picture of morals given in this
piece was improving for the young; also that the disclosure of the
“cunning of women, particularly of light women,” was instructive;
the boys would thus learn how marriages were arranged, and, after
all, marriage was essential for the continuance of society: Even Holy
Scripture contained some love stories. “Thus our people ought not to
accuse these plays of immorality or declare that to read or act them
was prohibited to a Christian.”[59]

The regulations for the Protestant schools, in following Luther
in this matter, merely trod in the footsteps of the older German
Humanists, who had likewise placed Terence and Plautus in the hands
of their pupils. On the contrary Jakob Wimpfeling, the “Teacher of
Germany,” was opposed to them and wished to see Terence banished from
the schools in the interests of morality. At a later date in the
Catholic Grammar schools this author was on moral grounds forbidden to
the more youthful pupils, and only read in excerpts.[60]

In his suggestions on the instruction to be given in the Latin schools
(for in reality it was only of these that he was thinking) Luther
classes with languages and other arts and sciences “singing, music
and mathematics as a whole.”[61] Greek and Hebrew no less than Latin
would also be indispensable for future scholars. He further wished
the authorities to establish “libraries” to further the studies; not,
however, such libraries as the olden ones, containing “mad, useless,
harmful, monkish books”—“donkey’s dung introduced by the devil”—“but Holy
Scripture in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and German, and any other languages
in which it might have been published; besides these the best and
oldest commentaries in Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and furthermore such
books as served for the study of languages, for instance, the poets and
orators,” etc. “The most important of all were, however, the chronicles
and histories … for these are of wonderful utility in enabling us to
understand the course of events, for the art of governing, as also for
perceiving the wonderful works of God. Oh, how many fine stories we ought
to have about what has been done and enacted in the German lands, of
which we, sad to say, know nothing.” In his appreciation of the study
of history and of the proverbial philosophy of the people Luther was in
advance of his day.

Owing to his polemics the judgment he passed on the olden libraries was
very unjust; the remaining traces of them and the catalogues which have
been published of those that have been dispersed show that, particularly
from the early days of Humanism, the better mediæval collections of books
had reached and even passed the standard Luther sets up in the matter of
history and literature.

Very modest, not to say entirely inadequate, is the amount of time
Luther proposes that the children should daily spend in the schools. Of
the lower schools, in which Latin was already to be taught, he says, it
would be enough for “the boys to go to such a school every day for an
hour or two and work the rest of their time at learning a trade, or doing
whatever was required of them.… A little girl, too, could easily find
time to attend school for an hour daily and yet thoroughly perform her
duties in the house.” Only the “pick” of the children, those, namely,
who gave good promise, were to spend “more time and longer hours” in
study.[62]

From all the above it is plain that there is good reason for not
accepting the extravagant statement that Luther’s writings on education
constitute the “charter of our national schools.” Others have extolled
him as the founder of the “Gymnasium” on account of his reference in
these works to the Latin schools. But even this is scarcely true, for, in
them, the author either goes beyond the field covered by the Gymnasium or
else fails to reach it. The Protestant pastor, Julius Boehmer, says in
the popular edition of Luther’s works:[63] “It will not do to regard the
work (”An die Radherrn“) as the ‘Charter of the Gymnasium,’ as has often
been done, seeing that, as stated above, it is concerned with both the
Universities and the lower-grade schools.”[64]

As to attendance at the Universities, of which Luther also speaks, he
asks the authorities to forbid the matriculation of any but the “clever
ones,” though among the masses “every fellow wanted a doctorate.”[65]

What he says of the various Faculties at the Universities is also
noteworthy. With the object of reforming philosophy and the Arts
course he wishes that of all the writings of Aristotle, that blind
heathen master, who had hitherto led astray the Universities, only the
“_Logica_,” “_Rhetorica_” and “_Poetica_” should be retained; “the
books: ‘_Physicorum_,’ ‘_Metaphysicæ_,’ ‘_De anima_’ and ‘_Ethicorum_’
must be dropped”; curiously enough these are the very works on which
Melanchthon was later on to bestow so much attention. We know how hateful
Aristotle was to Luther, because, in his heathen way, he teaches nothing
of grace and faith, but, on the other hand, extols the natural virtues.
Luther’s impulsive and unmethodical mode of thought was also, it must be
said, quite at variance with the logical mind of the Stagirite.

According to Luther “artistic education must be wholly rooted out as a
work of the devil; the very most that can be tolerated is the use of
those works which deal with form, but even these must not be commented on
or explained.”[66]

“The physicians,” he says, “I leave to reform their own Faculty; I shall
see myself to the lawyers and theologians; and, first of all, I say
that it would be a good thing if the whole of Canon Law from the first
syllable to the last were expunged, more particularly the Decretals.
We are told sufficiently in the Bible how to conduct ourselves in all
matters.” Secular law, so he goes on, has also become a “wilderness,” and
accordingly he is in favour of drastic reforms. “Of sensible rulers in
addition to Holy Scripture there are plenty”; national law and national
usage ought certainly not to be subordinated to the Imperial common law,
or the land “governed according to the whim of the individual.… Justice
fetched from far afield was nothing but an oppression of the people.”
Theology, according to him, must above all be Biblical, though now
everything is made to consist in the study of the Book of Sentences of
the schoolman, Peter Lombard, and of his commentators, the Gospel in both
schools and courts of justice being left “forlorn” in the dust under the
bench.[67]

He rightly commends the Disputations, sometimes termed “_circulares_,”
held at the Universities by the students under the direction of their
professor; it pleased him well that the students should bring forward
their own arguments, even though they were sometimes not sound; for
“stairs can only be ascended step by step.” The Disputations, in his
view, also accustomed young men to “reflect more diligently on the
subjects discussed.”[68]

To conclude, we may say a few words concerning the incentives he uses
when urging parents to entrust their children to the schools.

Here Luther considerably oversteps the limits. In one passage, for
instance, he thinks it his right to threaten the parents with the worst
punishments of hell should they refuse to allow gifted children to study,
in order to place them later at the service of the pure Word of God, or
of the Christian rulers, as though forsooth parents and children had no
right in the sight of God to choose their own profession. “Tell me what
hell can be deep and hot enough for such shameful wickedness as yours?”
“If you have a child who studies well, you are not free to bring him up
as you please, nor to treat him as you will, but must bear in mind that
you owe it to God to promote His two rules.” Should the father refuse to
allow the boy to become a preacher, he says, then, so far as in him lies,
he was really consigning to hell all those whom the budding preacher
might have assisted; compared with such a crime against the common weal
the “outbreaks of the rebellious peasants were mere child’s play.” This
he says in a printed letter addressed in 1529 to the town commandant,
Hans Metzsch of Wittenberg, which served as a prelude to his pamphlet
“Das man Kinder zur Schulen halten solle.”[69] The writing is solely
dictated by Luther’s bitter annoyance at the dearth of pastors and the
indifference displayed within his fold.

In this letter, as in both his works on the schools, Luther, whilst
dealing with the excuses of the parents, at the same time throws some
interesting sidelights on the decline in learning and its causes.

_The Decline of the Schools Following in the Wake of the Innovations_

In the above letter to Metzsch Luther briefly gives as follows the
principal reason for the decay of learning: People were in the habit of
saying, “If my son has learnt enough to gain his living then he is quite
learned enough.”[70]

The contempt for learned studies was “largely due to the strongly
utilitarian temper of the age.” “Owing in the first place to the
flourishing state of the towns in the 13th and 14th century, and further
to the influence of the great political upheaval which resulted from
the discoveries and inventions of the day, a sober, practical spirit,
directed solely to material gain, had been aroused throughout a wide
section of the German nation. Preference was shown for the German schools
where writing and reckoning were taught and which prepared children for
the calling of the handicraftsman or the merchant.”[71] Against this
tendency of the day Luther enters the lists particularly in his second
work on the schools dedicated to the syndic of Nuremberg; at the same
time he deals, not in the best of tempers, with the objections advanced
by the merchant and industrial classes.[72] He speaks so harshly as
almost to place in the same category those who refused to bring up their
children “to art and learning” and those who turned them “into mere
gluttons and sucking pigs, intent on food alone” (to Metzsch). “The world
would thus become nothing but a pig-sty”; these “gruesome, noxious,
poisonous parents were bent on making simple belly servers of their
children,” etc.[73]

It is a question, however, whether the development of the material trend,
so surprisingly rapid, with its destructive influence on study was not
furthered by the religious revolution with which it coincided. Luther had
sapped the respect which had obtained for the clerical life and for those
callings which aimed at perfection, while at the same time, by belittling
good works he loosened the inclinations of the purely natural man; by his
repudiation of authority he had produced an intellectual self-sufficiency
or rather self-seeking, which, in the case of many, passed into mere
material egotism, though, of course, Luther’s work cannot be directly
charged with the utilitarianism of the day.

What, however, made his revolt to contribute so greatly to the decline
of learning was its destruction of the wealth of clergy and monks, and
its confiscation of so many livings and foundations established for
educational purposes. By far the greater number of students had always
consisted of such as wished to obtain positions in the Church among
her secular clergy, or to become priests in some monastery. The ranks
of these students had been thinned of late years now that the Catholic
posts no longer existed, that the foundations which formerly provided for
the upkeep of students had disappeared and that an avalanche of calumny
and abuse had descended on the monasteries, priests and monks.[74] In
addition to this there was the fear aroused in Catholic parents and
pastors by the unhappy controversies on religion, lest the young should
be infected in the higher schools these being so frequently hot-beds of
the modern spirit, of hypercriticism and apostasy. Then, again, there
was the distrust, springing from a similar motive, felt by the Catholic
authorities for the centres of learning, and their niggardliness in
making provision for them, an attitude which we meet with, for instance,
in Duke George of Saxony. This was encouraged in the case of the rulers
by the fear of social risings, such as they had experienced in the
Peasant War, and which they laid to the charge of the new ideas on
religion.

Among those favourable to Lutheranism the Wittenberg professor himself
awakened a distaste for the Universities by telling them they must
not allow their sons to study where Holy Scripture “did not rule” and
“where the Word of God was not unceasingly studied.”[75] No one ever
depreciated the Universities as much as Luther, who principally because
their character was still Catholic, was never tired of calling them the
“gates of hell,” and places worse than Sodom and Gomorrha.[76] Nor did
he stop short at the condemnation of their religious attitude. Luther’s
antagonism to the whole system of philosophy, which the Universities,
following the example of Aristotle and the schoolmen, had been so
criminal as to admit, to the liberty they allowed to crazy human reason
in spiritual matters, and to their championship of natural truth and
natural morality as the basis of the life of faith, all this, when
carried to its logical conclusion, necessarily brought Lutheranism into
fatal conflict with the learned institutions.

As Friedrich Paulsen points out: “Luther shared all the superstitions
of the peasant in their most pronounced form; the methods of natural
science were strange to him and any scattering of the prevalent
delusions he would have looked upon as an abomination.”[77] The latter
part of the quotation certainly holds good in those cases where Luther
fancied that Holy Scripture or his explanation of it was ever so
slightly impugned. When, on June 4, 1539, the conversation at table
turned on Copernicus and his new theory concerning the earth, of which
the latter had been convinced since 1507, Luther appealed (just as
later opponents of the theory were to do) to Holy Scripture, according
to which “Josue bade _the sun_ to stand still and _not the earth_.”
The new astronomer wants to prove that the earth moves. “But that is
the way nowadays: whoever wishes to seem clever, pays no attention to
what others do, but must needs advance something of his own; and what
he does must always be the best. The idiot is bent on upsetting the
whole art of astronomy.”[78]

Luther’s condemnation of philosophy found a strong echo among the
Pietists, who were an offshoot of Lutheranism, and even claimed to
be its truest representatives. The loud denunciations of Aristotle
were, for instance, taken up by the theologian Zierold.[79] But even
from the common people who looked up to him we hear such sayings as
the following: “What is the use of our learning the Latin, Greek
and Hebrew tongues and other fine arts seeing we might just as well
read in German the Bible and the Word of God which suffices for our
salvation?” Luther was not at a loss for an answer. He says first:
“Yes, I know, alas, that we Germans must always remain beasts and
senseless animals.” Then he falls back on his usual plea, viz. that
languages “are profitable and advantageous” for a right understanding
of Scripture; he forgets that he has here to do with the common
people, and that a critical or philosophical interpretation of the
Bible was of small use to them. Such a thing might be profitable to
those who were being trained for the ministry, though many even of
the preachers themselves declared that the illumination from above
sufficed, together with the reading of the Bible.[80]

Carlstadt was even opposed to the Wittenberg graduations because they
promoted pride of learning and the worldly spirit instead of humble
Bible faith. Melanchthon, at a time when he was still full of Luther’s
early ideas, i.e. in Feb., 1521, in a work written under the pseudonym
of Didymus Faventinus, attempted to vindicate against Hieronymus Emser
his condemnation of the whole philosophy of the universities; physics
as taught there consisted merely of monstrous terms and contradicted
the teaching of the Bible; metaphysics were but an impudent attempt
to storm the heavens under the leadership of the atheist Aristotle.
“My complaint is against that wisdom by which you have drawn away
Christians from Scripture to reason. Go on, he-goat,” he says to
Emser, “and deny that the philosophy of the schools is idolatry”; your
ethics is diametrically opposed to Christ; at the Universities human
reason had degraded the Church to Sodomitic vices. Nothing more wicked
and godless than the Universities had ever been invented; no pope, but
the devil himself was their author; this even Wiclif had declared, and
he could not have said anything wiser or more pious. The Jews offered
young men to Moloch, a prelude to our Universities where the young are
sacrificed to heathen idols.[81]

To such an extent had the darksome pseudo-mysticism which seethed in
Luther’s mind laid hold for a while upon his comrade—glaringly though
it contradicted the humanistic tendency found in him both earlier and
later.

If we look more closely into the decline of the schools, we shall find
that it came about with extraordinary rapidity, a fact which proves it to
have been the result of a movement both sudden and far-reaching.

“The immediate effect of the Wittenberg preaching,” wrote in 1908 the
Protestant theologian F. M. Schiele in the “Preussische Jahrbücher”
of Berlin, in a strongly worded but perfectly true account of the
situation, “was the collapse of the educational system which had
flourished throughout Germany; the new zeal for Church reform, the
growth of prosperity, the ambition in the burghers, the pride and
fatherly solicitude of the sovereigns who were ever gaining strength,
had resulted in the foundation on all sides of school after school,
university after university. Students flocked to them in multitudes,
for the prospects of future gain were good. Scholasticism provided a
capable teaching staff, Humanism a brilliant one. Humanism also set up
as the new ideal of education a return to the fountain-head and the
reproduction of ancient civilisation by means of original effort on
similar lines. Wide tracts of Germany lay like a freshly sown field,
and many a harvest seemed to be ripening. Then, suddenly, before it
was possible to determine whether the new crops consisted of wheat
or of tares, a storm burst and destroyed all prospects of a harvest.
The upheaval that followed in the wake of the Reformation, and other
external causes which coincided with it, above all the reaction among
the utilitarian-minded laity against the unpopular scholarship of
the Humanists emptied the class rooms and lecture halls.… Now all is
over with the priestlings; why then should we bind our future to a
lost and despised cause?… Nor was this merely the passing result of a
misapprehension of Luther’s preaching, for it endured for scores of
years.”[82]

As to the common opinion among Protestants, viz. that “Luther’s
reformation gave a general stimulus to the schools and to education
generally,” Schiele dismisses it in a sentence: “The alleged
‘stimulus’ is seen to melt away into nothing.”[83]

Eobanus Hessus, a Humanist friendly to Luther, who lectured at Erfurt
University, was so overcome with grief at sight of the decline that was
making itself felt there that, in 1523, he composed an Elegy on the decay
of learning entitled “_Captiva_” and sent it to Luther. The melancholy
poem of 428 verses was printed in the same year under the title “Circular
letter from the sorrowful Church to Luther.” Luther replied, praising the
poem and assuring the sender that he was favourably disposed towards the
humanistic studies and practices. He even speaks as though still full of
the expectation of a great revival; his depression is, however, apparent
from the very reasons he gives for his hopes: “I see that no important
revelation of the Word of God has ever taken place without a preliminary
revival and expansion of languages and erudition.” The present decline
might, however, he thought, be traced to the former state of things when
they did not as yet possess the “pure theology.”[84]

But Hessus had complained, and with good reason, of the evil doings
of the new believers, instances of which had come under his notice at
Erfurt, and which had caused many to declare sadly: “We Germans are
becoming even worse barbarians than before, seeing that, in consequence
of our theology, learning is now going to the wall.”[85] At Erfurt the
Lutheran theology had won its way to the front amidst tumults and revolts
since the day when Crotus had greeted Luther on his way to Worms with his
revolutionary discourse.[86] Since then there had been endless conflicts
of the preachers with the Church of Rome and amongst themselves. Some
were to be met with who inveighed openly against the profane studies at
the Universities, and could see no educative value in anything save in
their own theology and the Word of God. Attendance at the University had
declined with giant strides since the spread of Lutheranism. Whereas from
May 1520 to 1521 the names of 311 students had been entered, their number
fell in the following year to 120 and in 1522 to 72; five years later
there were only 14.

Hessus wrote quite openly in 1523: “On the plea of the Evangel the
runaway monks here in Erfurt have entirely suppressed the fine arts … our
University is despised and so are we.”

His colleague, Euricius Cordus, a learned partisan of Luther, expresses
himself with no less disgust concerning the state of learning and
decline of morals among the students.[87] “All those who have any
talent,” we read in the Academic Year-Book in 1529, “are now forsaking
barren scholarship in order to betake themselves to more remunerative
professions, or to trade.”[88]

As at Erfurt, so also at other Universities, a rapid diminution in the
number of students took place during those years. “It has been generally
remarked,” a writer who has made a special study of this subject says,
“that in the German Universities in the ’twenties of the 16th century
a sudden decrease in the number of matriculations becomes apparent.”
He proves from statistics that at the University of Leipzig from 1521
to 1530 the number of those studying dropped from 340 to 100, at the
University of Rostock from 123 to 33, at Frankfurt-on-the-Oder from 73
to 32 and, finally, at Wittenberg from 245 to 174.[89] The attendance
at Heidelberg reached its lowest figure between 1521 and 1565, “this
being due to the religious and social movements of the Reformation which
proved an obstacle to study.” Of the German Universities generally the
following holds good: “The religious and social disturbances of the
Reformation brought about a complete interruption in the studies. Some of
the Universities were closed down, at others the hearers dwindled down to
a few.”[90]

“The Universities, Erfurt, Leipzig and the others stand deserted,” Luther
himself says as early as 1530, gazing from the Coburg at the ruins, “and
likewise here and there even the boys’ schools, so that it is piteous to
see them, and poor Wittenberg is now doing better than any of them. The
foundations and the monasteries, in my opinion, are probably also feeling
the pinch.”[91] He speaks at the same time of the decline of the Grammar
schools and the lower-grade schools which also to some extent shared the
fate of the Universities.

In the Catholic parts of Germany the clergy schools and monastic schools
suffered severely under the general calamity, as Luther had shrewdly
guessed. Nor was the set-back confined to the Universities, but even the
elementary schools suffered.

It was practically the universal complaint of the monasteries, so
Wolfgang Mayer, the learned Cistercian Abbot of Alderspach in Bavaria,
wrote in 1529, that they were unable to continue for lack of postulants;
“in consequence of the Lutheran controversy the schools everywhere are
standing empty and no one is willing any longer to devote himself to
study. The clerical and likewise the religious state is despised by all
and no one is inclined to offer himself for this life.” “Oh, God who
could ever have anticipated the coming of such a time! Everything is
ruined, everything is in confusion, and there is nothing but sunderings,
splits and heresies everywhere!” Yet these words come from the same
author, who, in 1518, in the introduction to his Annals of Alderspach,
had been so enthusiastic about the state of learning in Germany and had
said: “Germany is richly blessed with the gifts of Minerva and disputes
the palm in the literary arena with the Italians and the Greeks.”
Whereas, between the years 1460-1514 no less than eighty brethren had
entered Alderspach, Mayer, in his thirty years of office as Abbot,
clothed only seventeen novices with the habit of St. Bernard, and, of
these, five broke their vows and left the monastery. He expresses his
fear that soon his religious house will be empty and ascribes the lack of
novices largely to the fate which had overtaken the schools owing to the
innovations.[92]

“Throughout the whole of the German lands,” as Luther himself admits: “No
one will any longer allow his children to learn or to study.”[93] At the
same time contemporaries bitterly bewailed the wildness of the students
who still remained at the Universities. With regard to Wittenberg
itself we have grievous complaints on this score from both Luther and
Melanchthon.[94]

The disorder in the teaching institutions naturally had a bad effect on
the education of the people, so that Luther’s efforts on behalf of the
schools may readily be understood. The ecclesiastical Visitors of the
Saxon Electorate had been forced to adopt stern measures in favour of the
country schools. The Elector called to mind Luther’s admonitions, that
he, as the “principal guardian of the young,” had authority to compel
such towns and villages as possessed the means, to maintain schools,
pulpits and parsonages, just as he might compel them to furnish bridges,
high roads and footpaths.… “If, moreover, they have not the means,”
so Luther had said, “there are the monastic lands which most of them
were bestowed for this very purpose.”[95] But in spite of the measures
taken by the Elector and the urgent demands of the theologians for State
aid, even in towns like Wittenberg the condition of the intermediate
educational institutions was anything but satisfactory. In the case of
his own sons Luther had grudgingly to acknowledge that he was “at a loss
to find a suitable school.”[96] He accordingly had recourse to young
theologians as tutors.

The disappointment of the Humanists was keen and their lot a bitter one.
They had cherished high hopes of the dawn of a new era for classical
studies in Germany. Many had rejoiced at the alliance which had at first
sprung up between the Humanist movement and the religious revolution,
believing it would clear the field for learning. They now felt it all
the more deeply seeing that the age, being altogether taken up with arid
theological controversies and the pressing practical questions of the
innovations, had no longer the slightest interest in the educational
ideals of antiquity. The violent changes in every department of life
which the religious upheaval brought with it could not but be prejudicial
to the calm intellectual labours of which the Humanists had dreamed; the
prospect of Mutian’s “_Beata tranquillitas_” had vanished.

Mutian, at one time esteemed as the leader of the Thuringian Humanists,
retired into solitude and died in the utmost poverty (1526) after the
Christian faith had, as it would appear, once more awakened in him.
Eminent lawyers among the Humanists, Ulrich Zasius of Freiburg and
Christopher Scheurl of Nuremberg, openly detached themselves from the
Wittenbergers. Scheurl, who had once waxed so enthusiastic about the
light which had dawned in Saxony, now declared confidentially to Catholic
friends that Wittenberg was a cesspool of errors and intellectual
darkness.[97] The reaction which the recognition of Luther’s real aims
produced in other Humanists, such as Willibald Pirkheimer, Crotus
Rubeanus, Ottmar Luscinius and Henricus Glareanus, has already been
referred to.[98] It is no less true of the Humanists favourable to the
Church than of those holding Lutheran views, that German Humanism was
nipped in the bud by the ecclesiastical innovations. As Paulsen says:
“Luther usurped the leadership [from the Humanists] and theology [that of
the Protestants] drove the fine arts from the high place they had just
secured; at the very moment of their triumph the Humanists saw the fruits
of victory snatched from their grasp.”[99]

The event of greatest importance for the Humanists was, however,
Erasmus’s open repudiation of Luther in 1523, and his attack on that
point so closely bound up with all intellectual progress, viz. Luther’s
denial of free-will.

Quite independent of this attack were the many and bitter complaints
which the sight of the decline of his beloved studies drew from Erasmus:
“The Lutheran faction is the ruin of our learning.”[100] “We see that the
study of tongues and the love of fine literature is everywhere growing
cold. Luther has heaped insufferable odium on it.”[101] He regrets the
downfall of the schools at Nuremberg: “All this laziness came in with
the new Evangel.”[102] He wished to have nothing more to do with these
Evangelicals, he declares, because, through their doing, scholarship was
everywhere being ruined. “These people [the preachers] are anxious for a
living and a wife, for the rest they do not care a hair.”[103]

In the above year, 1523, at the beginning of his public estrangement with
Erasmus, Luther had written: “Erasmus has done what he was destined to
do; he has introduced the study of languages and recalled us from godless
studies (‘_a sacrilegis studiis_’). He will in all likelihood die like
Moses, in the plains of Moab [i.e. never see the Promised Land]. He is
no leader to the higher studies, i.e. to piety”; in other words, unlike
Luther, he was not able to lead his followers into the land of promise,
where the enslaved will rules.[104]

Luther’s use of the term “_sacrilega studia_” invites us to cast a glance
on the state of education before his day.

_Higher Education before Luther’s Day_

The condition of the schools before Luther, as described in our available
sources, was very different from what Luther pictured to his readers in
his works.

According to Luther’s polemical writings, learning in earlier days
could not but be sacrilegious because Satan “was corrupting the young”
in “his own nests, the monasteries and clerical resorts”; “he, the
prince of this world, gave the young his good things and delights;
the devil spread out his nets, established monasteries, schools and
callings, in such a way that no boy could escape him.”[105] With this
fantastic view, met with only too frequently in Luther under all sorts
of shapes, goes hand in hand his wholesale reprobation and belittling
of the olden methods and system of education. The professors at the
close of the Middle Ages were only able, according to Luther, to
“train up profligates and greedy bellies, rude donkeys and blockheads;
all they could teach men was to be asses and to dishonour their wives,
daughters and maids.” “People studied twenty or forty years and yet
at the end of it all knew neither Latin nor German.” “Those ogres and
kidnappers” set up libraries, but they were filled “with the filth and
ordure of their obscene and poisonous books”; “the devil’s spawn, the
monks and the spectres of the Universities” when conferring doctorates
decked out “great fat loutish donkeys in red and brown hoods, like
a sow pranked out with gold chains and pearls.” “The pupils and
professors were as mad as the books on which they lectured. A jackdaw
does not hatch out doves nor can a fool beget wise offspring.”

It is in his “An die Radherrn,” the object of which was to raise the
standard of education, that we find such coarse language.

What is of more importance is that Luther seems here to be seeking to
conceal the decline in learning which he had brought about, and to lay
the blame solely on the olden schools. If the corruption had formerly
been so great then some excuse might be found for the ruin which had
followed his struggle with the Church.—Such an excuse, however, does
not tally with the facts.

That, on the contrary, education, not only at the Universities, but
also in the Latin schools, which Luther had more particularly in view,
was in a flourishing condition and full of promise before it was so
rudely checked by the religious disturbances which emptied all the
schools, has been fully confirmed to-day by learned research. “The
increased attendance at the Universities in the course of the 15th and
the commencement of the 16th century is a very rapid one,” writes Franz
Eulenburg. “Hence the decline in the ’twenties of the latter century is
all the more noticeable.”[106] “At the beginning of the 16th century,”
says Friedrich Paulsen, “everyone of any influence or standing, strength
or courage, devoted himself to the new learning: prelates, sovereigns,
the townships and, above all, the young”; but, shortly after the outbreak
of the ecclesiastical revolution, “everything became changed.”[107]

What had contributed principally to a salutary revival had been the
sterling work of the older Humanists. Eminent and thoroughly religious
men of the schools—men like Alexander Hegius and his pupils and
successors Rudolf von Langen, Ludwig Dringenberg, Johannes Murmellius
and, particularly, Jakob Wimpfeling, who, on account of his epoch-making
pedagogic work, was called the teacher of Germany—zealously made their
own the humanistic ideal of making of the classics the centre of the
education of the young, and of paving the way for a new intellectual
life, by means of the instruction given in the schools.[108] An attempt
was made to combine classical learning with devotion to the old religion
and respect for the Church. They also strove to carry out—though not
always successfully—the task which was assigned to the schools by the
Lateran Council held under Leo X; the aim of the teacher was to be not
merely to impart grammar, rhetoric and the other sciences, but at the
same time to instil into those committed to their charge the fear of God
and zeal for the faith.[109] The sovereigns and the towns placed their
abundant means at the disposal of the new movement and so did the Church,
which at that time was still a wealthy organisation.

The number of the schools and scholars in itself proves the interest
taken by the nation in the relative prosperity of its education.

To take some instances from districts with which Luther must have
been fairly well acquainted: Zwickau had a flourishing Latin school
which, in 1490, numbered 900 pupils divided into four classes. In
1518 instruction was given there in Greek and Hebrew, and bequests,
ecclesiastical and secular, for its maintenance continued to be made.
The town of Brunswick had two Latin schools and, besides, three
schools belonging to religious communities. At Nuremberg, towards
the close of the 15th century, there were several Latin schools
controlled by four rectors and twelve assistants; a new “School of
Poetry” was added in 1515 under Johann Cochlæus. Augsburg also had
five Church schools at the commencement of the 16th century, and
besides this private teachers with a humanistic training were engaged
in teaching Latin and the fine arts. At Frankfurt-on-the-Main there
were, in 1478, three foundation schools with 318 pupils; the college
at Schlettstadt in Alsace numbered 900 pupils in 1517 and Geiler of
Kaysersberg and Jakob Wimpfeling were both educated there. At Görlitz
in Silesia, at the close of the 15th century, the number of scholars
varied between 500 and 600. Emmerich on the lower Rhine had, in 1510,
approximately 450 pupils in its six classes, in 1521 about 1500.
Münster in Westphalia, owing to the labours of its provost, Rudolf
von Langen, became the focus and centre of humanistic effort, and,
subsequent to 1512, had also its pupils divided into six classes.[110]

The “Brothers of the Common Life” established their schools over the
whole of Northern Germany. Their institutions, with which Luther
himself had the opportunity of becoming acquainted at Magdeburg, sent
out some excellent schoolmasters. The schools of these religious at
Deventer, Zwolle, Liège and Louvain were famous. The school of the
brothers at Liège numbered in 1521 1600 pupils, assorted into eight
classes.

In the lands of the Catholic princes many important grammar-schools
withstood the storms of the religious revulsion, so that Luther’s
statements concerning the total downfall of education cannot be
accepted as generally correct, even subsequent to the first decades of
the century.

Nor were even the elementary schools neglected at the close of the
Middle Ages in most parts of the German Empire. Fresh accounts of such
schools, in both town and country, are constantly cropping up to-day
in the local histories. Constant efforts for their improvement and
multiplication were made at this time. About a hundred regulations
and charters of schools either in German, or in Dutch, dating from
1400-1521 have been traced. The popular religious handbooks were
zealous in advocating the education of the people.[111] Luther himself
tells us it was the custom to stir up the schoolmasters to perform
their duty by saying that “to neglect a scholar is as bad as to seduce
a maid.”[112]

_Luther’s Success_

Did Luther, by means of the efforts described above, succeed in bringing
about any real improvement in the schools, particularly the Latin
schools? The affirmative cannot be maintained. At least it was a long
time before the reform which he desiderated came, and what reform took
place seems to have been the result less of Luther’s exhortations than of
Melanchthon’s labours.

On the whole his hopes were disappointed. The famous saying of
Erasmus: “Wherever Lutheranism prevails, there we see the downfall of
learning,”[113] remained largely true throughout the 16th century, in
spite of all Luther’s efforts.

Schiele says: Where Melanchthon’s school-regulations for the Saxon
Electorate were enforced without alteration, Latin alone was taught,
“but neither German nor Greek nor Hebrew,” that the pupils might not be
overtaxed. Instruction in history and mathematics was not insisted on at
all. Bugenhagen added the rudiments of Greek and mathematics. Only about
twenty years after Luther’s “An die Radherrn” do we hear something of
attempts being made to improve matters in the Lutheran districts. As a
rule all that was done even in the large towns was to amalgamate several
moribund schools and give them a new charter. “Even towns like Nuremberg
and Frankfurt were unable, in spite of the greatest sacrifices, to
introduce a well-ordered system into the schools. The two most eminent,
practical pedagogues of the time, Camerarius and Micyllus, could not
check the decline of their council schools.”[114]

Nuremberg, the highly praised home of culture, may here be taken as a
case in point, because it was to the syndic of this city that Luther
addressed his second writing, praising the new Protestant gymnasium which
had been established there (above, p. 6). Yet, in 1530, after it had
been in existence some years, this same syndic, Lazarus Spengler, sadly
wrote: “Are there not any intelligent Christians who would not be highly
distressed that in a few short years, not Latin only, but all other
useful languages and studies have fallen into such contempt? Nobody,
alas, will recognise the great misfortune which, as I fear, we shall
soon suffer, and which even now looms in sight.”[115] In the Gymnasium,
which he had so much at heart, instruction was given free owing to the
rich foundations, nevertheless but very few pupils were found to attend
it. Eobanus Hessus, who was to have lent his assistance to promoting
the cause of Humanism, left the town again in 1533. When Hessus before
this complained to Erasmus that he had given offence to the town by his
complaints of the low standard to which the school had fallen (above, p.
32), the latter replied in 1531, that he had received his information
from the learned Pirkheimer and other friends of the professors there.
He had indeed written that learning seemed to be only half alive there,
in fact, at its last gasp, but he had done so in order by publishing the
truth to spur them on to renewed zeal. “This I know, that at Liège and
Paris learning is flourishing as much as ever. Whence then comes this
torpor? From the negligence of those who boast of being Evangelicals.
Besides, you Nurembergers have no reason to think yourselves particularly
offended by me, for such complaints are to be heard from the lips of
every honest man of every town where the Evangelicals rule.”[116]
Camerarius, whom Melanchthon wished to be the soul of the school, turned
his back on it in 1535 on account of the hopeless state of things. J.
Poliander said in 1540: In Nuremberg, that populous and well-built city,
there are rich livings and famous professors, but owing to the lack
of students the institution there has dwindled away. “The lecturers
left it, which caused much disgrace and evil talk to the people of
Nuremberg, as everybody knows.”[117] When Melanchthon stayed for a
while at Nuremberg in 1552 by order of the Elector, the Gymnasium
was a picture of desolation. In the school regulations issued by the
magistrates the pupils were reproached with contempt of divine service,
blasphemy, persistent defiance of school discipline, etc., and with being
“barbarous, rude, wild, wanton, bestial and sinful.” Camerarius even
wrote from Leipzig advising the town-council to break up the school.[118]

There is no doubt that in other districts where Lutheranism prevailed
Latin schools were to be found where good discipline reigned and where
masters and pupils alike worked with zeal; the records, however, have
far more to say of the decline.

Many statements of contemporaries well acquainted with the facts speak
most sadly of the then conditions. Melanchthon complained more and
more that shortsighted Lutheran theologians stood in the way of the
progress of the schools. Camerarius, in a letter to George Fabricius,
rector of Meissen, said in 1555 that it was plain everything was
conspiring for the destruction of Germany, that religion, learning,
discipline and honesty were doomed. As one of the principal causes
he instances “the neglect and disgust shown for that learning,
which, in reality, is the glory and ornament of man.” “It is looked
upon as tomfoolery and a thing fit only for children to play with.”
“Education, and life in general, too, has become quite other from what
we were accustomed to in our boyhood.” Of the Catholic times he speaks
with enthusiasm: “What zeal at one time inspired the students and in
what honour was learning held; what hardships men were ready to endure
in order to acquire but a modicum of scholarship is still to-day a
matter of tradition. Now, on the other hand, learned studies are so
little thought of owing to civil disturbances and inward dissensions
that it is only here and there that they have escaped complete
destruction.”[119]

What he says is abundantly confirmed by the accounts of the failure of
educational effort at Augsburg, Esslingen, Basle, Stuttgart, Tübingen,
Ansbach, Heilbronn and many other towns.

The efforts made were, however, not seldom ill-advised. If it be
really a fact that the Latin “_Colloquia_” of Erasmus, which Luther
himself had condemned for its frivolity, “played a principal part
in the education of the schoolboys,”[120] then, indeed, it is not
surprising that the results did not reach expectations. The crude
polemics against the olden Church and the theological controversies
associated with the names of Luther and Melanchthon, which penetrated
into the schools owing to the squabbles of the professors and
preachers, also had a bad effect. Again education was hampered by
being ever subordinated to the interests of a “pure faith” which was
regarded as its mainstay, but which was itself ever changing its shape
and doctrines.[121]

“The form of education required for future ministers,” says Schiele,
“became the chief thing, and education as such was consequently
obliged to take a back seat.” “At the Universities it was only
theology that flourished,” the olden Hellenists died out and the
young were, in many places, only permitted to attend the “orthodox”
Universities. Among the Lutherans the Latin schools were soon no
longer able to compete with the colleges of the Jesuits and the
Calvinists. Not a single Lutheran rector or master of note is recorded
in the annals of the history of education. It is true that the
so-called Küster-schools spread throughout the land simultaneously
with the spread of orthodoxy. But when we see how the orthodox clergy
despised their catechetical duties as of secondary importance,
and hastened to delegate them as far as possible to the Küster
[parish-clerk], it becomes impossible for us to regard such schools
as a proof of any interest in education on the part of the orthodox,
rather the contrary. How otherwise can we explain, even when we take
into account the unfavourable conditions of the age, that, a hundred
years after Luther’s day, far fewer people were able to read his
writings than at the time when he first came forward.[122]

In the elementary schools which gradually came into being the
parish-clerk gave instruction in reading and writing, and, in addition,
tried to teach the catechism by reciting it aloud and making the children
repeat it after him. The earliest definite regulations which imposed this
duty on the clerk in addition to the catechism were those issued by Duke
Christopher of Würtemberg in 1559, who also devoted his attention to the
founding of German schools. The latter, however, were not intended for
the smaller villages, nor did they receive any support from the “poor
box.” Nor did all the children attend the schools kept by the clerk. The
school regulations issued by the Protestant Duke were in themselves good,
but their effect was meagre.[123] In the Saxon Electorate it was only
in 1580 that the parish-clerks of the villages were directed to keep a
school.[124]

Finally, to come to the Protestant Universities; it was only in the
latter part of the 16th century that the attendance, which, as we saw
above, had fallen so low, began once more to make a better show.

In 1540 Melanchthon expressed himself as satisfied with the condition of
learning which prevailed in them.[125] But among others whose opinion
was less favourable we find Luther’s friend Justus Jonas, who, two
years before this, in 1538, wrote, that, since the Evangel had begun
to make its way through Germany, the Universities were silent as the
grave.[126] The testimony of Rudolf Walther, a Swiss, who had visited
many German Universities and been on terms of intimacy with eminent
Protestant theologians, must also receive special attention. In 1568
he wrote—though his words may perhaps be somewhat discounted by his
own theological isolation—“The German Universities are now in such
a state that, to say nothing of the conceit and carelessness of the
professors and the impudent immorality which prevails, they are in no way
remarkable. Heidelberg, however, is praised more than the others, for the
attacks which menace her on all sides do not allow this University to
slumber.”[127]

Heidelberg was the chief educational centre of those who held Calvinistic
views. Since 1580 the attendance at the University had notably increased
owing to the influx of students from abroad. Towards the close of the
century, with Wittenberg and Jena, it headed the list of the Universities
of the new faith in respect of the number of matriculations. Jena, like
its sister Universities of Marburg, Königsberg and Helmstädt, had been
founded as a seminary of Protestant theology and at the same time of
Roman law, which served to strengthen the absolutism of the princes.
Since the appointment of Flacius Illyricus in 1557 it had become a
stronghold of pure Lutheranism. The theological squabbles within the
bosom of Protestantism, here as in the other Universities, were,
however, disastrous to peace, and any healthy progress. Characteristic
of the treatment meted out to the professors by Protestant statesmen
of a different opinion, even when they were not summarily dismissed,
is the discourse of the Saxon Chancellor, Christian Brück, to the
professors of the theological Faculty at Jena in 1561: “You black, red
and yellow knaves and rascals! A plague upon you all you shameless
scamps and rebels! Would that you were knocked on the head, disgraced and
blinded!”[128]

The University of Wittenberg now registered the largest number of
students. Although on Luther’s first public appearance crowds of students
had been attracted by the fame of his name, yet these decreased to such
an extent that between 1523 and 1533 not a single theological degree
was conferred. About 1550, however, the Faculties again numbered about
2000 students, thanks chiefly to Melanchthon. In 1598 the number is even
given as exceeding 2000. Throughout the whole of the century, from the
beginning of the ecclesiastical schism, a considerable percentage of
students had poured in from abroad. Of the wantonness of the Wittenberg
students of the various Faculties, contemporaries as well as official
documents wax so eloquent that the University would seem to have enjoyed
an unenviable notoriety in this respect among the Protestant educational
establishments.[129] The fact that, as just mentioned, the students
were largely recruited from other countries must be taken into account.
Wittenberg suffered more than the other Universities from the quarrels
which, according to Luther, tore to pieces Protestant theology. What was
said in a sermon in 1571 on the words “Peace be with you” is peculiarly
applicable to Wittenberg: “Only see what quarrelling and envy, hatred,
and persecution, and expulsion there has been, and still is, among the
professors at Wittenberg, Jena, Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, Königsberg and
indeed all the Universities which really should be flourishing in the
light of our beloved Evangel; it would indeed be a great and heavenly
work of God if all the young men at these Universities did not fall into
such vices, and even become utterly corrupted.”[130]

4. Benevolence and Relief of the Poor

Luther’s attitude towards poor relief, which ever since the rise of
Protestantism has been the subject of extravagant eulogies, can only be
put in its true light by a closer examination of the state of things
before his day.[131]

_At the Close of the Middle Ages_

Indications of the provision made by the community for relief of the poor
are found in the Capitularies of Charles the Great, indeed even in the
6th century in the canons of a Council held at Tours in 567. Corporate
relief of the poor, later on carried out by means of the guilds, and
the care of the needy in each particular district undertaken by unions
of the parishes, were of a public and organised character. It has been
justly remarked concerning the working of the mediæval institutions: “The
results achieved by our insurance system were then attained by means of
family support, corporations, village clubs and unions of the lords of
the manors.… Such organised relief of the poor made any State relief
unnecessary. The State authorities concerned themselves only negatively,
viz. by prohibiting mendicancy and vagabondage.”[132] Private benevolence
occupied the first place, since the very nature of Christian charity
involves love of our neighbour. Its work was mainly done by means of the
ecclesiastical institutions and the monasteries. Special arrangements
also were made, under the direction of the Church, to meet the various
needs, and such were to be found in considerable numbers both in large
places and in small; all, moreover, was carried out on the lines of a
careful selection of deserving cases and a wise control of expenditure.

The share taken by the Church in the whole work of charity was, generally
speaking, a guarantee that the work was managed conscientiously.

Though among both monks and clergy scandalous instances of greed and
self-seeking were not wanting, yet there were many who lived up to their
profession and were zealous in assisting in the development of works
of charity. The mendicant Orders, by the very example of the poverty
prescribed by their rule, helped to combat all excessive avarice; their
voluntary privations taught people how to endure the trials of poverty
and they showed their gratitude for the alms bestowed on them by their
labours for souls in the pulpit and in the school, and by doing their
utmost to promote learning.

Every Order was exhorted by its Rule to fly idleness and to perform works
of neighbourly charity.

There are plentiful sermons and works of piety dating from the close of
the Middle Ages which prove how the faithful were not only urged to be
charitable to the needy, but also to obey God’s command and to labour,
this exhortation referring particularly to the poor themselves, who were
not unnecessarily to become a burden to others. Again and again are the
words of the Bible emphasised: “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat
thy bread,” and “Whoever will not work neither let him eat” (Gen. iii.
19; 2 Thes. iii. 10).

In spite of this, lack of industrial occupation, the difficulty and even
sometimes the entire absence of public supervision, and, in part also,
the ease with which alms were to be had, bred a large crop of beggars,
who moved about from place to place and who, in late mediæval times,
became a perfect plague throughout the whole of Germany. Hence all the
greater towns in the 15th century and early years of the 16th issued
special regulations to deal with the poor. In the matter of these laws
for the regulation of charity the city-fathers acted independently,
strong in the growing consciousness of their standing and duties. Lay
Guardians of the Poor were appointed by the magistrates and poor-boxes
were established, the management of which devolved on the municipal
authorities. The Catholic Netherlands set an excellent example in this
respect by utilising the old hospital regulations and, with their help,
drawing up new and independent organisations. Antwerp, Brussels, Louvain,
Mechlin, Ghent, Bruges, Namur and other towns already possessed a
well-developed system of poor relief.

“The admirable regulations for the relief of the poor at Ypres”
(1525), to which reference is so often made, “a work of social reform
of the first rank” (Feuchtwanger), sprang from such institutions,
and these, in turn, were by Charles V in 1531 made the basis of his
new Poor Law for the whole of the Netherlands. The Ypres regulations
declared, that, according to the divine command, everyone is obliged
to gain his living as far as he can. All begging was strictly
prohibited, charitable institutions and private almsgiving were not
allowed to have their way unchecked, admission of strangers was made
difficult and other salutary restrictions were enforced, yet, on the
other hand, Christian charity towards those unable to earn a living
was warmly welcomed and set in the right channels.[133]

In the Netherlands, Humanism, which had made great progress in
Erasmus’s native land, co-operated in the measures taken, and it was
here that the important “_De subventione pauperum_” of Juan Ludovico
de Vives, a friend of Erasmus, of Pope Hadrian IV and of Sir Thomas
More, and a zealous opponent of Lutheranism, was published in 1526.

In the Catholic towns of Germany, particularly in the south, it was
not merely the stimulus of Humanism but still more the economic and
political development which, towards the end of the Middle Ages and
during the transition to modern times, led to constant fresh efforts
in the domain of the public relief of the poor. The assistance of
the poor was, in fact, at that time “one of the principal social
questions, poor relief being identical with social politics. To
provide for the sick members of the guilds, for the serf incapable
of work, for the beggar in the street, for the guest in the hostel,
for the poor artisan to whom the city magistrates gave a loan free of
interest, for the burgher who received cheap grain from the council,
all this was, to give freely, to bestow alms and to perform works well
pleasing to God.”[134]

The gaping rift in the German lands and the chaotic conditions which
accompanied the transition from the agrarian to the commercial system
of economy were naturally not favourable to the peaceful work of
alleviating poverty. It was, however, eventually to the advantage of
the towns to form themselves into separate administrations, able to
safeguard their own charitable institutions by means of an efficient
police system. Thus the town councils took over what had been formerly
to a great extent the function of the Church, but this they did
without any animosity towards her. They felt themselves to be acting
as beseemed “Christian authorities.” They were encouraged in this by
that interference, in what had once been the domain of the Church, of
the territorial princes and the cities, which had become the rule in
the 15th century. The more or less extensive suzerainty in Church
matters which had prevailed even previous to the religious schism in
Saxony, Brandenburg and many of the Imperial cities may be called to
mind. In towns such as Augsburg, Nuremberg, Strasburg and Ratisbon
the overwhelming increase which had taken place in the class which
lived from hand to mouth, called for the prohibitive measures against
beggary and the other regulations spoken of above.

At Augsburg the town council issued orders concerning the poor-law
system in 1459, 1491 and 1498. Those of 1491 and 1498 sought to
regulate and prevent any overlapping in the distribution of the
municipal doles, the “holy alms which are compassionately given and
bestowed daily in many different parts and corners of the city”; to
these were subjoined measures for enforcing strict supervision of
those who received assistance and for excluding the undeserving;
whoever was able to work but refused to do so was shut out, in order
that the other poor people might not “be deprived of their bodily
sustenance.” A third and still better set of poor-law regulations
appeared in 1522. They provided for a stricter organisation of the
distribution of the monies, and made the supervision of those in
receipt of help easier by the keeping of registers of the poor and by
house to house visitations. Beggars at the church doors were placed
under special control. No breach with the ecclesiastical traditions of
the past is apparent in the rules of 1522, in spite of the influence
of the religious innovations in this town. From the civil standpoint,
however, they, like the poor laws generally drawn up at the close of
the Middle Ages, display a “thorough knowledge of the conditions and
are true to a well-tried tradition of communal policy.” The principal
author of this piece of legislation was Conrad Peutinger, the famous
lawyer and statesman who since 1497 had been town clerk. He died
greatly esteemed in 1547, after having done more to further than to
check the religious innovations in his native town by his uncertain
and vacillating behaviour.

From the Nuremberg mendicancy regulations Johannes Janssen quotes
certain highly practical enactments which belong to the latter half of
the 14th century. The so-called “meat and bread foundations,” which
had been enriched by the Papal Indulgences granted to benefactors,
were not available for any public beggars, but only for the genuine
poor. In 1478 the town council issued a more minute mendicant
ordinance. Here we read: “Almsgiving is a specially praiseworthy,
virtuous work, and those who receive alms unworthily and unnecessarily
lay a heavy burden of guilt on themselves.” Those allowed to beg were
also obliged at least “to spin or perform some other work according to
their capacity.” Beggars from foreign parts were only permitted to beg
on certain fixed days in the year. Conrad Celtes, the Humanist, in his
work on Nuremberg printed in 1501, boasts of the ample provision for
widows and orphans made by the town, the granaries for the purpose of
giving assistance and other arrangements whereby it was distinguished
above all other towns; families of the better class who had met with
misfortunes received yearly a secret dole to tide them over their
difficult time.[135]

New regulations concerning the poor, more comprehensive than the
former, appeared at Nuremberg in 1522. These deal with the actual
needs and are in close touch with the maxims of government and old
traditions of the Imperial cities. In them all the earlier charitable,
social and police measures are codified: the restriction of begging,
the management of the hospitals, the provision of work and tools,
advances to artisans in difficulties, granaries for future famines,
the distribution of alms, badges for privileged beggars, etc. The
whole is crowned by the Bible text, so highly esteemed in the Catholic
Middle Ages: “Blessed is he that hath pity on the poor and needy,
for the Lord will deliver him in the evil day.” “Our salvation,” so
we read when mention is made of the relief funds, “rests solely in
keeping and performing the commandments of God which oblige every
Christian to give such help and display such fraternal charity
towards his neighbour.”[136] At Nuremberg the new teaching had
already taken firm footing yet the olden Catholic conception of the
meritorious character of almsgiving is nevertheless recognisable in
the regulations of 1522.[137]

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

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

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

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

_Luther’s Efforts. The Primary Cause of their Failure_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_A Second Stumbling Block: Lack of Organisation_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Influence of Luther’s Ethics. Robbery of Church Property Proves a Curse_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Some Recent Excuses_

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

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

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

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

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

5. Luther’s Attitude towards Worldly Callings

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

“_One of the most Momentous Achievements of the Reformation_”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Luther’s Pessimism Regarding Various Callings. The Peasants_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_The Psychological Background. Luther’s Estrangement from Whole Classes
of Society_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_The Merchant Class_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Influence of Old-Testament Ideas_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Usury and Interest_

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

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

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

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

Luther was well aware that to lend at interest was already “usual”
and even “common in all classes.”[262] It was also, as a Protestant
contemporary complained in 1538, twice as prevalent in the Lutheran
communities than among the Catholics.[263] Still Luther insists
obstinately that, “it was a very idle objection, and one that any village
sexton could dispose of when people pleaded the custom of the world
contrary to the Word of God, or against what was right.… It is nothing
new or strange that the world should be hopeless, accursed, damned; this
it had always been and would ever remain. If you obey its behests, you
also will go with it into the abyss of hell.”[264]

Though in his instructions to the pastors he condemns
indiscriminately, as a “thief, robber and murderer,” everyone who
charges interest, still he wants his teaching to be applied above
all to the “great ogres in the world, who can never charge enough
per cent.” “The sacrament and absolution” were to be denied them,
and “when about to die they were to be left like the heathen and not
granted Christian burial” unless they had first done penance. To the
“small usurer it is true my sentence may sound terrible, I mean to
such as take but five or six on the hundred.”[265]

All, however, whether the percentage they charge be small or great, he
advises to bring their objections to him, or to some other minister,
“or to a good lawyer,”[266] so as to learn the further reasons
and particulars concerning the prohibition of receiving interest.
Every pastor was to preach strongly and fearlessly on its general
unlawfulness in order that he may not “go to the devil” with those of
his flock who charge interest.

Not that Luther was very hopeful about the results of such preaching.
“The whole world is full of usurers,” he said in 1542 in the
Table-Talk, and to a friend who had asked him: “Why do not the princes
punish such grievous usury and extortion?” Luther answers: “Surely,
the princes and kings have other things to do; they have to feast,
drink and hunt, and cannot attend to this.” “Things must soon come to
a head and a great and unforeseen change take place! I hope, however,
that the Last Day will soon make an end of it all.”[267]

As to his grounds for condemning interest, he declares in the same
conversation: “Money is an unfruitful commodity which I cannot sell
in such a way as to entitle me to a profit.” He is but re-echoing
the axiom “_Pecunia est sterilis_,” etc., maintained all too long in
learned Catholic circles. Hence, as he says in 1540, “Lending neither
can nor ought to be a true trade or means of livelihood; nor do I
believe the Emperor thinks so either.” Besides, “it is not enough in
the sight of heaven to obey the laws of the Emperor.”[268] According
to him God had positively forbidden in the Old Testament the charging
of any interest, as contrary to the natural law and as oppressive and
unlawful usury (Ex. xxii. 25; Lev. xxv. 36; Deut. xxiii. 19, etc.).
In the New Testament Christ, so Luther thinks, solemnly confirmed the
prohibition when He said in St. Matthew’s gospel: “Give to him that
asketh thee and from him that would borrow of thee turn not away” (v.
42), and in St. Luke (vi. 35) still more emphatically: “Lend, hoping
for nothing.”[269]

In the Old Law, however, the charging of interest was by no means
absolutely forbidden to the Jews (Deut. xxiii. 19 f.), so that it
could not be regarded as a thing repugnant to the natural law, though
the Mosaic Code interdicted it among the Jews themselves. As for the
New-Testament passages Luther had no right to infer any prohibition
from them. Our Saviour, after speaking of offering the other cheek
to the smiter, of giving also our cloak to him who would take away
our coat, and of other instances of the exercise of extraordinary
virtue, goes on to advise our lending without hope of return. But many
understood this as a counsel, not as a command. Luther indeed says
that thereby they were making nought of Christ’s doctrine. He insists
that all these counsels were real commands, viz. commands to be ever
ready to suffer injustice and to do good; the secular authorities
were there to see that human society thereby suffered no harm. The
Papists, however, and the scholastics looked upon these things in a
different light. “The sophists had no reason for altering our Lord’s
commands and for making out that they were ‘_consilia_’ as they term
them.”[270] “They teach that Christ did not enjoin these things on
all Christians, but only on the perfect, each one being free to keep
them if he desires.” In this way the Papists do away with the doctrine
of Christ; they thereby condemn, destroy and get rid of good works,
whilst all the time accusing us of forbidding them; “hence it is that
the world has got so full of monks, tonsures and Masses.”[271]—Yet,
even if we take the words of Christ, as quoted, let us say, by St.
Luke, and see in them a positive command, yet they would refer only
to the social and economic conditions prevailing among the Jews at
the time the words were spoken. According to certain commentators,
moreover, the words have no reference to the question of interest,
because, so they opine, “it was a question of relinquishing all claim
not merely on the interest but on the capital itself.”[272]

The Jesuit theologians of the 16th and 17th centuries as a rule were
careful to instance a number of cases in which the canonical prohibition
of charging even a moderate rate of interest does not apply. They thus
paved the way for the abrogation of the prohibition. Of this we have
an instance in Iago Lainez, who in principle was strongly averse to
the charging of interest. This theologian, who later became General
of the Jesuits, when a preacher at the busy commercial city of Genoa,
wrote (1553-1554) an essay on usury embodying the substance of his
addresses to the merchants.[273] Lainez there points out that any damage
accruing to the lender from the loan, and also the temporary absence of
profit on it, constitutes a sufficient ground for demanding a moderate
interest.[274] He also strongly insists that the lender, in compensation
for his willingness to lend, may accept from the borrower a “voluntary”
premium;[275] the lender, moreover, has a perfect right to safeguard
himself by stipulating for a fine (_pœna conventionalis_) from the
borrower should repayment be delayed. All this comes under the instances
of “apparent usury,” which he enumerates: “_Casus qui videntur usurarii
et non sunt_” (cap. 10).

Luther devotes no such prudent consideration to those exceptional cases.
He was more inclined by nature harshly to vindicate the principles he
had embraced than to seek how best to limit them in practice. “He did
not take into account loans asked for, not from necessity, but for the
purpose of making profit on the borrowed money”;[276] yet, after all,
this was the very point on which the question turned in the early days of
economic development. He discusses the lawfulness of a voluntary premium
and comes to the conclusion that it is wrong. He scoffs at the lender, as
a mere hypocrite, who argues: “The borrower is very thankful for such a
loan and freely and without compulsion offers me 5, 6 or even 10 florins
on the hundred.” “But even an adulteress and an adulterer,” says Luther
in his usual vein, “are thankful and pleased with each other; a robber,
too, does an assassin a great service when he helps him to commit highway
robbery.” The borrower does the lender a similar criminal service and
spiritual injury, for which no premium can make compensation.[277] As
regards the case where the loan is not repaid at the specified time,
Luther is, of course, of opinion that any real loss to the owner must be
made good by the borrower. But now, he says, “they accept reimbursement
for losses which they never suffered at all,” they simply calculate the
interest on a loss which they may possibly suffer from not having back
the money when the time comes for buying or paying. “In its efforts to
make a certainty of what is uncertain, will not usury soon be the ruin of
the world!”[278]

In the Table-Talk a friend, in 1542, raised an objection: If a man trades
with the money lent him and makes 15 florins yearly, he must surely pay
the lender something for this. Of this Luther, however, will not hear.
“No, this is merely an accidental profit, and on accidentals no rule can
be based.”[279] That the profit was “accidental” was, however, simply his
theory.

In spite of all this Luther did make exceptions, though, in view of
his rigid theory and reading of the Bible, it is difficult to see how
he could justify them.

Thus, he is willing to allow usury in those cases where the charging
of interest is “in reality a sort of work of mercy to the needy, who
would otherwise have nothing, and where no great injury is done to
another.” Thus, when “old people, poor widows or orphans, or other
necessitous folk, who have learned no other way of making a living,”
were only able to support themselves by lending out their money, in
such cases the “lawyers might well seek to mitigate somewhat the
severity of the law.” “Should an appeal be made to the ruler,” then
the proverb “Necessity knows no law” might be quoted. “It might
here serve to call to mind that the Emperor Justinian had permitted
such mitigated usury [he had sanctioned the taking of 4, 6 or 8 per
cent], and in such a case I am ready to agree and to answer for it
before God, particularly in the case of needy persons and where usury
is practised out of necessity or from charity. If, however, it was
wanton, avaricious, unnecessary usury, merely for the purpose of trade
and profit, then I would not agree”; even the Emperor himself could
not make this legitimate; for it is not the laws of the Emperor which
lead us to heaven, but the observance of the laws of God.[280]

It follows from this that even the so-called “_titulus legis_” found
no favour in his sight in the case of actual money loans, for it is of
this, not of “purchasable interest,” that he speaks in the writing to
the pastors. A real, honest purchase, so he there says quite truly, is
no usury.[281]

A remarkable deflection from his strict principles is to be found
not only in the words just quoted but also in his letter to the town
council of Erfurt sent in 1525 at the time of the rising in that
town and the neighbourhood. The mutineers refused among other things
to continue paying interest on the sums borrowed. For this refusal
Luther censures them as rebels, and also refuses to hear of their
“deducting the interest from the sum total” (i.e. the capital). He
here vindicates the lenders as follows: “Did I wish yearly to spend
some of the total amount I should naturally keep it by me. Why should
I hand it over to another as though I were a child, and allow another
to trade with it? Who can dispose of his money even at Erfurt in such
a way that it shall be paid out to him yearly and bit by bit? This
would really be asking too much.”[282]

Luther also relaxed his principles in favour of candidates for the
office of preacher. When, in 1532, the widow of Wolfgang Jörger, an
Austrian Governor, offered him 500 florins for stipends for “poor
youths prosecuting their studies in Holy Scripture” at Wittenberg, at
the same time asking him how to place it, he unhesitatingly replied
that it should be lent out at interest; “I, together with Master
Philip and other good friends and Masters, have thought this best
because it is to be expended on such a good, useful and necessary
work.” He suggested that the money “should be handed in at the
Rathaus” at Nuremberg to Lazarus Spengler, syndic of that town; if
this could not be, then he would have it “invested elsewhere.” Such
“good works in Christ” are, he says, unfortunately not common amongst
us “but rather the contrary, so that they leave the poor ministers to
starve; the nobles as well as the peasants and the burghers are all
of them more inclined to plunder than to help.”[283] Thus it was his
desire to help the preachers that determined his action here.

A writer, who, as a rule, is disposed to depict Luther’s social ethics
in a very favourable light, remarks: “When his attention was riveted
on the abuses arising from the lending of money [and the charging of
interest] he could see nothing but evil in the whole thing; on the
other hand, if some good purpose was to be served by the money, he
regarded this as morally quite justifiable.”[284] That Luther “was not
always true to his theories,” and that he is far from displaying any
“striking originality” in his economic views, cannot, according to
this author, be called into question.[285]

_Luther on Unearned Incomes and Annuities_

A great change took place in Luther’s views concerning the buying of the
right to receive a yearly interest, nor was the change an unfortunate
one. He was induced to abandon his earlier standpoint that such purchase
was wrong and to recognise, that, within certain limits, it could be
perfectly lawful.

The nature of this sort of purchase, then very common, he himself
explains in his clear and popular style: “If I have a hundred florins
with which I might gain five, six or more florins a year by means of
my labour, I can give them to another for investment _in some fertile
land_ in order that, not I, but he, may do business with them; hence I
receive from him the five florins I might have made, and thus he sells
me the interest, five florins per hundred, and I am the buyer and he
the seller.”[286] It was an essential point in the arrangement that the
money should be employed in an undertaking in some way really fruitful
or profitable to the receiver of the capital, i.e. in real estate,
which he could farm, or in some other industry; the debtor gave up the
usufruct to the creditor together with the interest agreed upon, but was
able to regain possession of it by repayment of the debt. The creditor,
according to the original arrangement, was also to take his share in the
fluctuations in profit, and not arbitrarily to demand back his capital.

At first Luther included such transactions among the “fig-leaves” behind
which usury was wont to shelter itself; they were merely, so he declared
in 1519 in his Larger Sermon on Usury, “a pretty sham and pretence by
which a man can oppress others without sin and become rich without labour
or trouble.”[287] In the writing “An den Adel” he even exclaimed: “The
greatest misfortune of the German nation is undoubtedly the traffic in
interest.… The devil invented it and the Pope, by sanctioning it, has
wrought havoc throughout the world.”[288] It is quite true that the
arrangement, being in no wise unjust, had received the conditional
sanction of the Church and was widely prevalent in Christendom. Many
abuses and acts of oppression had, indeed, crept into it, particularly
with the general spread of the practice of charging interest on money
loans, but they were not a necessary result of the transaction. Luther,
in those earlier days, demanded that such “transactions should be utterly
condemned and prevented for the future, regardless of the opposition of
the Pope and all his infamous laws [to the condemnation], and though
he might have erected his pious foundations on them.… In truth, the
traffic in interest is a sign and a token that the world is sold into the
devil’s slavery by grievous sins.”[289] Yet Luther himself allows the
practice under certain conditions in the Larger Sermon on Usury published
shortly before, from which it is evident that here he is merely voicing
his detestation of the abuses, and probably, too, of the “Pope and his
infamous laws.”

In fact his first pronouncements against the investing of money are
all largely dictated by his hostility to the existing ecclesiastical
government; “that churches, monasteries, altars, this and that,” should
be founded and kept going by means of interest, is what chiefly arouses
his ire. In 1519 he busies himself with the demolition of the objection
brought forward by Catholics, who argued: “The churches and the clergy
do this and have the right to do it because such money is devoted to the
service of God.”

In his Larger Sermon on Usury he gives an instance where he is ready to
allow transactions at interest, viz. “where both parties require their
money and therefore cannot afford to lend it for nothing but are obliged
to help themselves by means of bills of exchange. Provided the ghostly
law be not infringed, then a percentage of four, five or six florins may
be taken.”[290] Thus he here not only falls back on the “ghostly law,”
but also deviates from the line he had formerly laid down. In fact we
have throughout to deal more with stormy effusions than with a ripe,
systematic discussion of the subject.

Later on, his general condemnations of the buying of interest-rights
become less frequent.

He even wrote in 1524 to Duke Johann Frederick of Saxony: Since the
Jewish tithes cannot be re-introduced, “it would be well to regulate
everywhere the purchase of interest-rights, but to do away with them
altogether would not be right since they might be legalised.”[291] As
a condition for justifying the transaction he requires above all that
no interest should be charged without “a definitely named and stated
pledge,” for to charge on a mere money pledge would be usury. “What is
sterile cannot pay interest.”[292] Further the right of cancelling the
contract was to remain in the hands of the receiver of the capital. The
interest once agreed upon was to be paid willingly. He himself relied
on the practice and once asked: “If the interest applied to churches
and schools were cut off, how would the ministers and schools be
maintained?”[293]

With regard to the rate of interest allowable in his opinion, he says in
his sermons on Matt. xviii. (about 1537): “We would readily agree to the
paying of six or even of seven or eight on the hundred.”[294] As a reason
he assigns the fact that “the properties have now risen so greatly in
value,” a remark to which he again comes back in 1542 in his Table-Talk
in order to justify his not finding even seven per cent excessive.[295]
He thus arrives eventually at the conclusion of the canonists who, for
certain good and just reasons, allowed a return of from seven to eight
per cent.

In his “An die Pfarherrn” he took no account of such purchases but
merely declared that he would find some other occasion “of saying
something about this kind of usury”; at the same time a “fair, honest
purchase is no usury.”[296]

All the more strongly in this writing, the tone of which is only
surpassed by the attacks on the usury of the Jews contained in his
last polemics, does he storm against the evils of that usury which
was stifling Germany. The pastors and preachers were to “stick to the
text,” where the Gospel forbids the taking of anything in return for
loans.[297] That this will bring him into conflict with the existing
custom he takes for granted. In his then mood of pessimistic defiance
he was anxious that the preachers should boldly hurl at all the
powers that be the words of that Bible which cannot lie: where evil
is so rampant “God must intervene and make an end, as He did with
Sodom, with the world at the Deluge, with Babylon, with Rome and such
like cities, that were utterly destroyed. This is what we Germans are
asking for, nor shall we cease to rage until people shall say: Germany
_was_, just as we now say of Rome and of Babylon.”[298]

He nevertheless gives the preachers a valuable hint as to how they
were to proceed in order to retain their peace of mind and get over
difficulties. Here “it seems to me better … for the sake of your own
peace and tranquillity, that you should send them to the lawyers
whose duty and office it is to teach and to decide on such wretched,
temporal, transitory, worldly matters, particularly when they [your
questioners] are disposed to haggle about the Gospel text.”[299] “For
this reason, according to our preaching, usury with all its sins
should be left to the lawyers, for, unless they whose duty it is to
guard the dam help in defending it, the petty obstacles we can set up
will not keep back the flood.” But, after all, “the world cannot go on
without usury, without avarice, without pride … otherwise the world
would cease to be the world nor would the devil be the devil.”[300]

The difficulties which beset Luther’s attitude on the question of
interest were in part of his own creation.

“In the question of commerce and the charging of interest,” says
Julius Köstlin in his “Theologie Luthers,” “he displays, for all
his acumen, an unmistakable lack of insight into the true value for
social life of trade—particularly of that trade on a large scale with
which we are here specially concerned—in spite of all the sins and
vexations which it brings with it, or into the importance of loans
at interest—something very different from loans to the poor—for the
furthering of work and the development of the land.”[301]

With reference to what Köstlin here says it must, however, be again
pointed out that Luther’s lack of insight may be explained to some
extent “by the great change which was just then coming over the
economic life of Germany.” It must also be added, that, in Luther’s
case, the struggle against usury was in itself a courageous and
deserving work, and, that, hand in hand with it, went those warm
exhortations to charity which he knew so well how to combine with
Christ’s Evangelical Counsels.

In his attack on the abuses connected with usury his indignation at
the mischief, and his ardent longing to help the oppressed, frequently
called forth impressive and heart-stirring words. Though, in what
Luther said about usury and on the economic conditions of his day, we
meet much that is vague, incorrect and passionate, yet, on the other
hand, we also find some excellent hints and suggestions.[302]

It is notorious that the controversy regarding the lawfulness of
interest, even of 5 per cent, on money loans, went on for a long time
among theologians both Catholic and Protestant. The subject was also
keenly debated among the 16th-century Jesuits. No theologian, however,
succeeded in proving the sinfulness of the charging of a five per cent
interest under the circumstances which then obtained in Germany. Attempts
to have this generally prohibited under severe penalties were rejected
by eminent Catholic theologians, for instance, in a memorandum of the
Law and Divinity Faculties at Ingolstadt, dated August 2, 1580, which
bore the signatures of all the professors.[303] On the Protestant side
the contest led to disagreeable proceedings at Ratisbon, where, in 1588,
five preachers, true to Luther’s injunctions, insisted firmly on the
prohibition on theological grounds. They were expelled from the town by
the magistrates, though this did not end the controversy.[304]

There was naturally no question at any time of enforcing the severe
measures which Luther had advocated against those who charged interest;
on the contrary the social disorders of the day promoted not merely
the lending at moderate interest, but even actual usury of the worst
character. When even Martin Bucer showed himself disposed to admit the
lawfulness of taking twelve per cent interest George Lauterbecken, the
Mansfeld councillor, wrote of him in his “Regentenbuch”: “What has become
of the book Dr. Luther of blessed memory addressed to the ministers on
the subject of usury, exhorting them most earnestly,” etc., etc.? Nobody
now dreamt, so he complains, of putting in force the penalties decreed
by Luther. “Where do we see in any of our countries which claim to be
Evangelical anyone refused the Sacrament of the altar or Holy Baptism on
account of usury? Where, agreeably to the Canons, are they forbidden to
make a will? Where do we see one of them buried on the dungheap?”[305]

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE DARKER SIDE OF LUTHER’S INNER LIFE. HIS AILMENTS

The struggles of conscience which we already had occasion to consider
(vol. v., p. 319 ff.) were not the only gloomy elements in Luther’s
interior life. Other things, too, must be taken into our purview if we
wish to appreciate justly the more sombre side of his existence, viz.
his bodily ailments and the mental sufferings to which they gave rise
(e.g. paroxysms of terror and apprehension), his temptations, likewise
his delusions concerning his intercourse with the other world (ghosts,
diabolical apparitions, etc.), and, lastly, the revelations of which he
fancied himself the recipient.

1. Early Sufferings, Bodily and Mental

It is no easy task to understand the nature of the morbid phenomena which
we notice in Luther. His own statements on the subject are not only very
scanty but also prove that he was himself unable to determine exactly
their cause. Nevertheless, it is our duty to endeavour, with the help of
what he says, to glean some notion of what was going on within him. His
gloomy mental experiences are so inextricably bound up with his state of
health, that, even more than his “agonies of conscience” already dealt
with, they deserve to take their place on the darker background of his
psychic life. Here again, duly to appreciate the state of the case, we
shall have to review anew the whole of Luther’s personal history.

_Fits of Fear; Palpitations; Swoons_

What first claims our attention, even in the early days of Luther’s
life as a monk, are the attacks of what he himself calls fears and
trepidations (“_terrores_, _pavores_”). It seems fairly clear that these
were largely neurotic,—physical breakdowns due to nervous worry.

According to Melanchthon, the friend in whom he chiefly confided, Luther
gave these sufferings a place in the forefront of his soul’s history.
The reader may remember the significant passage where Melanchthon says,
that, when oppressed with gloomy thoughts of the Divine Judgments,
Luther “was often suddenly overwhelmed by such fits of terror (‘_subito
tanti terrores_’)” as made him an object of pity. These terrors he had
experienced for the first time when he decided to enter the monastic
life, led to this resolution by the sudden death of a dearly loved
friend.[306]

We hear from Luther himself of the strange paroxysms of fear from
which he suffered as a monk. On two occasions when he speaks of them
his words do not seem to come under suspicion of forming part of
the legend which he afterwards wove about his earlier history (see
below, xxxvii.). These statements, already alluded to once, may be
given more in detail here. In March, 1537, he told his friends: “When
I was saying Mass [his first Mass] and had reached the Canon, such
terror seized on me (_ita horrui_) that I should have fled had not the
Prior held me back; for when I came to the words, ‘Thee, therefore,
most merciful Father, we suppliantly pray and entreat,’ etc., I
felt that I was speaking to God without any mediator. I longed to
flee from the earth. For who can endure the Majesty of God without
Christ the Mediator? In short, as a monk I experienced those terrors
(_horrores_); I was made to experience them before I began to assail
them.”[307] Incidentally it may be noted that “Christ the Mediator,”
whom Luther declares he could not find in the Catholic ritual, is, as
a matter of fact, invoked in the very words which follow those quoted
by Luther: “Thee, therefore, most merciful Father, we suppliantly pray
and entreat through Jesus Christ Thy Son our Lord to accept and bless
these gifts,” etc. Evidently when Luther recorded his impressions he
had forgotten these words and only remembered the groundless fear and
inward commotion with which he had said his first Mass.

Something similar occurred during a procession at Erfurt, when he had
to walk by the side of Staupitz, his superior, who was carrying the
Blessed Sacrament. Fear and terror so mastered Luther that he was
hardly able to remain. Telling Staupitz of this later in Confession,
the latter encouraged him with the words: “Christ does not affright,
He comforts.” The incident must have taken place after 1515, the
Eisleben priory having been founded only in that year.[308]

If we go back to the very beginning of his life in the monastery we
shall find that the religious scruples which assailed him at least
for a while, possibly also deserve to be reckoned as morbid. We shall
return below to the voice “from heaven” which drove him into the
cloister.

Unspeakable fear issuing in bodily prostration was also at work in
him on the occasion of the already related incident in the choir of
the Erfurt convent, when he fell to the ground crying out that he was
not the man possessed. Not only does Dungersheim relate it, on the
strength of what he had heard from inmates of the monastery,[309] but
Cochlæus also speaks of the incident, in his “Acta,” and, again, in
coarse and unseemly language in the book he wrote in 1533, entitled
“Von der Apostasey,” doubtless also drawing his information from the
Augustinian monks: “It is notorious how Luther came to be a monk;
how he collapsed in choir, bellowing like a bull when the Gospel
of the man possessed was being read; how he behaved himself in the
monastery,” etc.[310] We may recall, how, according to Cochlæus, his
brother monks suspected Luther, owing to this attack and on account of
a “certain singularity of manner,” of being either under diabolical
influence or an epileptic.[311] The convulsions which accompanied the
fit may have given rise to the suspicion of epilepsy, but, in reality,
they cannot be regarded as sufficient proof. Epilepsy is well-nigh
incurable, yet, in Luther’s case, we hear of no similar fits in later
life. In later years he manifested no fear of epileptic fits, though
he lived in dread of an apoplectic seizure, such as, in due course,
was responsible for his death. A medical diagnosis would not fail to
consider this seeming instance of epileptic convulsions in conjunction
with Luther’s state of fear. For the purpose of the present work it
will be sufficient to bring together for the benefit of the expert the
necessary data for forming an opinion on the whole question, so far as
this is possible.

From the beginning Luther seems to have regarded these “states of
terror” as partaking to some extent of a mystic character.

To what a height they could sometimes attain appears from the
description he embodied in his “_Resolutiones_” in 1518, and of which
Köstlin opines that, in it Luther portrayed the culminating point to
which his own fears had occasionally risen. It is indeed very probable
that Luther is referring to no other than himself when he says in the
opening words of this remarkable passage: “I know a man who assures me
that he has frequently felt these pains.”[312] G. Kawerau also agrees
with Köstlin in assuming that Luther is here speaking of himself,[313]
a view which is, in fact, forced upon us by other similar passages.
Walter Köhler declares: “Whether Luther intended these words to refer
to himself or not, in any case they certainly depict his normal
state.”[314]

Luther, after saying that, “many, even to the present day,” suffer
the pangs of hell so often described in the Psalms of David, and [so
Luther thinks], by Tauler, goes on to describe these pangs in words
which we shall now quote in full, as hitherto only extracts have been
given.[315]

“He often had to endure such pains, though in every instance they were
but momentary; they were, however, so great and so hellish that no
tongue can tell, no pen describe, no one who has not felt them believe
what they were. When at their worst, or when they lasted for half
an hour, nay, for the tenth part of an hour, he was utterly undone,
and all his bones turned to ashes. At such times God and the whole
of creation appears to him dreadfully wroth. There is, however, no
escape, no consolation either within or without, and man is ringed
by a circle of accusers. He then tearfully exclaims in the words of
Holy Scripture: ‘I am cast away, O Lord, from before Thy eyes’ [Ps.
xxx. 23], and does not even dare to say: ‘Lord, chastise me not in
Thy wrath’ [Ps. vi. 1]. At such a time the soul, strange to tell, is
unable to believe that it ever will be saved; it only feels that the
punishment is not yet at an end. And yet the punishment is everlasting
and may not be regarded as temporal; there remains only a naked
longing for help and a dreadful groaning; where to look for help the
soul does not know. It is as it were stretched out [on the cross] with
Christ, so that ‘all its bones are numbered.’ There is not a nook in
it that is not filled with the bitterest anguish, with terror, dread
and sadness, and above all with the feeling that it is to last for
ever and ever. To make use of a weaker comparison: when a ball travels
along a straight line, every point of the line bears the whole weight
of the ball, though it does not contain it. In the same way, when the
floods of eternity pass over the soul, it feels nothing else, drinks
in nothing else but everlasting pain; this, however, does not last
but passes. It is the very pain of hell, is this unbearable terror,
that excludes all consolation!… As to what it means, those who have
experienced it must be believed.”[316]

A physical accompaniment of these fears was, in Luther’s case, the
fainting fits referred to now and again subsequent to the beginning of
his struggle against the Church.

On the occasion of the attack of which we are told by Ratzeberger the
physician, when he was found by friends lying unconscious on the floor,
he had been “overpowered by melancholy and sadness.” It is also very
remarkable that when his friends had brought him to, partly by the help
of music, he begged them to return frequently, that they might play to
him “because he found that as soon as he heard the sound of music his
‘_tentationes_’ and melancholy left him.”[317] According to Kawerau
the circumstances point to this incident having taken place in 1523 or
1524.[318]

On the occasion of a serious attack of illness in 1527 his swoons again
caused great anxiety to those about him. This illness was preceded by a
fit in Jan., 1527. Luther informs a friend that he had “suddenly been
affrighted and almost killed by a rush or thickening of the blood in the
region of the heart,” but had as quickly recovered. His cure was, he
thinks, due to a decoction of milk-thistle,[319] then considered a very
efficacious remedy. The rush of blood to the heart, of which he here
had to complain, occurred at a time when Luther had nothing to say of
“temptations,” but only of the many troubles and anxieties due to his
labours.

The more severe bout of illness began on July 6, 1527, at the very
time of, or just after, some unusually severe “temptation.”[320] Jonas
prefaces his account of it by saying that Luther, “after having that
morning, as he admitted, suffered from a burdensome spiritual temptation,
came back partially to himself (‘_utcunque ad se rediit_’).” The words
seem to presuppose that he had either fainted or been on the verge of
fainting.[321] Having, as the same friend relates, recovered somewhat,
Luther made his confession and spoke of his readiness for death. In the
afternoon, however, he complained of an unendurable buzzing in his left
ear which soon grew into a frightful din in his head. Bugenhagen, in his
narrative, is of opinion that the cause of the mischief here emerges
plainly, viz. that it was the work of the devil. A fainting fit ensued
which overtook Luther at the door of his bedchamber. When laid on his bed
he complained of being utterly exhausted. His body was rubbed with cloths
wrung out of cold water and then warmth was applied. The patient now felt
a little better, but his strength came and went. Amongst other remarks
he then passed was one, that Christ is stronger than Satan. When saying
this he burst into tears and sobs. Finally, after application of the
remedies common at that time, he broke out into a sweat and the danger
was considered to be over.

There followed, however, the days and months of dreadful spiritual
“temptations” already described (vol. v., p. 333 ff.). At first the
bodily weakness also persisted. Bugenhagen was obliged to take up his
abode in Luther’s house for a while because the latter was in such dread
of the temptations and wished to have help and comfort at hand. For a
whole week Luther was unable either to read or to write.

At the end of August and again in September the fainting fits recurred.

His friends, however, were more concerned about Luther’s mental anguish
than about his bodily sufferings. The latter gradually passed away,
whereas the struggles of conscience continued to be very severe. On Oct.
17, Jonas wrote to Johann Lang: “He is battling amidst the waves of
temptation and is hardly able to find any passage of Scripture wherewith
to console himself.”[322]

In 1530 again we hear of Luther’s life being endangered by a fainting
fit, though it seems to have been distinct from the above attack of
illness. This also occurred after an alarming incident during which he
believed he had actually seen the devil. It was followed the next day by
a loud buzzing in the head. Renewed trouble in the region of the heart,
accompanied by paroxysms of fear, is reported to have been experienced
in 1536.[323] After this we hear no more of any such symptoms till just
before Luther’s death. In the sudden attack of illness which brought his
life to a close he complained chiefly of feeling a great oppression on
the chest, though his heart was sound.[324]

_Nervousness and other Ailments_

Quite a number of Luther’s minor ills seem to have been the result of
overwrought nerves due partly to his work and the excitement of his life.
Here again it is difficult to judge of the symptoms; unquestionably some
sort of connection exists between his nervous state and his depression
and bodily fears;[325] the fainting fits are even reckoned by some as
simply due to neurasthenia.

There can be no doubt that his nervousness was, to some extent inherited,
to some extent due to his upbringing. His lively temper which enabled him
to be so easily carried away by his fancy, to take pleasure in the most
glaring of exaggerations, and bitterly to resent the faintest opposition,
proves that, for all the vigour of his constitution, nerves played an
important part.

Already in his monastic days his state was aggravated by mental
overstrain and the haste and turmoil of his work which led him to neglect
the needs of the body. His uninterrupted literary labours, his anxiety
for his cause, his carelessness about his health and his irregular mode
of life reduced him in those days to a mere skeleton. At Worms the
wretchedness of his appearance aroused pity in many. It is true that when
he returned from the Wartburg he was looking much stronger, but the years
1522-25, during which he led a lonely bachelor’s life in the Wittenberg
monastery, without anyone to wait on him, and sleeping night after night
on an unmade bed, brought his nervous state to such a pitch that he was
never afterwards able completely to master it. On the contrary, his
nervousness grew ever more pronounced, tormenting him in various ways.

So little, however, did he understand it that it was to the devil that he
attributed the effects, now dubiously, now with entire conviction.

Among these effects must be included the buzzing in the head and singing
in the ears, to which Luther’s letters allude for many a year. When, at
the end of Jan., 1529, the violent “agonies and temptations” recurred,
the buzzing in the ears again made itself felt. He writes: “For more
than a week I have been ailing from dizziness and humming in the head
(‘_vertigo et bombus_’), whether this be due to fatigue or to the malice
of the devil I do not know. Pray for me that I may be strong in the
faith.”[326] He also complains of this trouble in the head in the next
letter, dating from early in Feb.[327] He was then unable to preach or to
give lectures for nearly three weeks.[328]

He goes on to say of himself: “In addition to the buffets of the angel
of Satan [the temptations] I have also suffered from giddiness and
headache.”[329] It was, however, as he himself points out, no real
illness: “Almost constantly is it my fate to feel ill though my body is
well.”[330]

In the new kind of life he had to lead in the Castle of Coburg in 1530,
when, to want of exercise, was added overwork and anxiety of mind, these
neurasthenic phenomena again reappeared. He compares the noises in his
head to thunder, or to a whirlwind. There was also present a tendency
to fainting. At times he was unable even to look at any writing, or to
bear the light owing to the weakness of his head.[331] Simultaneously
the struggle with his thoughts gave him endless trouble; thus he writes:
“It is the angel of Satan who buffets me so, but since I have endured
death so often for Christ, I am quite ready for His sake to suffer this
illness, or this Sabbath-peace of the head.”[332] “You declare,” he
says laughingly in a letter to Melanchthon, “that I am pig-headed, but
my pig-headedness is nothing compared with that of my head (‘_caput
eigensinnigissimum_’); so powerfully does Satan compel me to make holiday
and to waste my time.”[333] Towards the middle of August his head
improved, but the tiresome buzzing frequently recurred. Luther complained
later that, during this summer, he had been forced to waste half his
time.[334]

When, from this time onwards, “we hear him ever saying that he feels
worn-out (‘_decrepitus_’), weary of life and desirous of death … all
this is undoubtedly closely bound up with these nerve troubles.”[335]
The morning hours became for him the worst, because during them he often
suffered from dizziness. After his “_prandium_,” between nine and ten
o’clock, he was wont to feel better. As a rule he slept well.

The attacks which occurred early in 1532 must also be noted.

In Jan., so his anxious pupil Veit Dietrich writes, Luther had a
foreboding of some illness impending and fancied it would come in March;
in reality it came on on Jan. 22. “Very early, about four o’clock, he
felt a violent buzzing in his ears followed by great weakness of the
heart.” His friends were summoned at his request as he did not wish to
be alone. “When, however, he had recovered and had his wits about him
(‘_confirmato animo_’), he proceeded to storm against the Papists, who
were not yet to make gay over his death.” “Were Satan able,” he says, “he
would gladly kill me; at every hour he is at my heels.” “The physician
declared,” so the account goes on, “after having examined the urine, that
Luther stood in danger of an attack of apoplexy, which indeed he would
hardly escape.” The prediction was, however, not immediately verified
and the patient was once more able to leave his bed. On Feb. 9, however
(if the date given in the Notes be correct),[336] after assisting at a
funeral in the church of Torgau, he was again seized with such a fit
of giddiness as hardly to be able to return to his lodgings. When he
recovered he said: “Do not be grieved even should I die, but continue to
further the Word of God after my death.… It may be we are still sinners
and do not perform our duty sufficiently; if so we shall cloak it over
with the forgiveness of sins.” This time again he was not able to work
for a whole month.

What he at times endured from the trouble in his head we learn from a
statement in the Notes of the Table-Talk made by Cordatus: “When I awake
and am unable to sleep again on account of the noise in my ears, I often
fancy I can hear the bells of Halle, Leipzig, Erfurt and Wittenberg, and
then I think: Surely you are going to have a fit. But God frequently
intervenes and gives me a short sleep afterwards.”[337]

No notable improvement took place until the middle of 1533.

The noises in the head began again in 1541. He fancied then that he could
hear “the rustling of all the trees and the breaking of the waves of
every sea” in his head.[338] When he wrote this he was also suffering
from a discharge from the ear, which, for the time, deprived him of his
hearing; so great was the pain as to force tears from him. Alluding to
this he says that his friends did not often see him in tears, but that
now he would gladly weep even more copiously; to God he had said: “Let
there be an end either of these pains or of me myself,” but, now that
the discharge had ceased, he was beginning to read and write again quite
confidently.[339]

From the commencement of his struggle, however, until the end of his
life his extreme nervous irritability found expression in the violence
of what he said and wrote. There can be no question that, had he not
been in a morbidly nervous state, he would never have given way to such
outbursts of anger and brutal invective. “There was a demoniacal trait,”
says a Protestant Luther biographer, “that awakened in him as soon as
he met an adversary, at which even his fellow-monks had shuddered,
and which carried him much further than he had at first intended.”
He became the “rudest writer of his age.” In his controversy with
the Swiss Sacramentarians he “was domineering and high-handed.” “His
disputatiousness and tendency to pick a quarrel grew ever stronger in
him after his many triumphs.”[340]—But, even among his friends and in
his home, he was careless about controlling his irritation. We find him
exclaiming: “I am bursting with anger and annoyance”; as we know, he
excited himself almost “to death” about a nephew and threatened to have a
servant-maid “drowned in the Elbe.”[341] (Cp. the passages from A. Cramer
quoted below, towards the end of section 5.)

Other maladies and indispositions, of which the effects were sometimes
lasting, also deserve to be alluded to. Of these the principal and worst
was calculus of which we first hear in 1526 and then again in 1535, 1536
and 1545. In Feb., 1537, Luther was overtaken by so severe an attack
at Schmalkalden that his end seemed near.—In 1525 he had to complain
of painful hæmorrhoids, and at the beginning of 1528 similar troubles
recurred. The “_malum Franciæ_,” on the other hand, cursorily mentioned
in 1523,[342] is not heard of any more. The severe constipation from
which he suffered in the Wartburg also passed away. Luther was also
much subject to catarrh, which, when it lasted, caused acute mental
depression. The “discharge in his left leg” which continued for a
considerable while[343] during 1533 had no important after-effects.

The maladies just mentioned, to which must be added an attack of the
“English Sweat,” in 1529, do not afford sufficient grounds for any
diagnosis of his physical and mental state in general.[344] On the
other hand, the oppression in the præcordial region and his nervous
excitability are of great importance to whoever would investigate his
general state of health.

_The so-called Temptations no Mere Morbid Phenomena_

Anyone who passes in review the startling admissions Luther makes
concerning his struggles of conscience (above, vol. v., pp. 319-75),
or considers the dreadful self-reproaches to which his apostasy and
destruction of the olden ecclesiastical system gave rise, reproaches
which lead to “death and hell,” and which he succeeded in mastering only
by dint of huge effort, cannot fail to see that these mental struggles
were something very different from any physical malady. Since, however,
some Protestants have represented mere morbid “fearfulness” as the
root-cause of the “temptations,” we must—in order not to be accused of
evading any difficulties—look into the actual connection between natural
timidity and the never-ending struggles of soul which Luther had to wage
with himself on account of his apostasy.

Luther’s temptations, according to his own accurate and circumstantial
statements, consisted chiefly of remorse of conscience and doubts about
his undertaking; they made their appearance only at the commencement
of his apostasy, whereas the morbid sense of fear was present in him
long before. Of such a character were the “_terrores_” which led him to
embrace monasticism, the unrest he experienced during his first zealous
years of religious life, and the dread of which he was the victim while
saying his first Mass and accompanying Staupitz in the procession;
this morbid fear is also apparent in the monk’s awful thoughts on
predestination and in his subsequent temptations to despair. Moreover,
such crises, characterised by temptations and disquieting palpitations
ending in fainting fits, were in every case preceded by “spiritual
temptations,” and only afterwards did the physical symptoms follow.
Likewise the bodily ailments occasionally disappeared, leaving behind
them the temptations, though Luther seemed outwardly quite sound and able
to carry on his work.[345]

Hence the “spiritual temptations” or struggles of conscience were of a
character in many respects independent of this morbid state of fear.

They occur, however, on the one hand, in connection with other physical
disorders, as in the case of the attack of the “English Sweat” or
influenza which Luther had in 1529, and which was accompanied by severe
mental struggles; on the other hand, they appear at times to excite the
bodily emotion of fear and in very extreme cases undoubtedly tended
to produce entire loss of sleep and appetite, cardiac disturbance and
fainting fits. Luther himself once said, in 1533, that his “gloomy
thoughts and temptations” were the cause of the trouble in his head and
stomach;[346] in his ordinary language the temptations were, however,
“buffets given him by Satan.”[347] He is fond of clothing the temptations
in this Pauline figure and of depicting them as his worst trials, and
only quite exceptionally does he call his purely physical sufferings
“_colaphi Satanæ_,” they, too, coming from Satan. Now we cannot of
course entirely trust Luther’s own diagnosis—otherwise we should have to
reduce all his maladies to a work of evil spirits—yet his feeling that
the “temptations” were on the one hand a malady in themselves and on the
other a source of many other ills, should carry some weight with us.

It is also clear that, in the case of an undertaking like Luther’s, and
given his antecedents, remorse of conscience was perfectly natural even
had there been no ailment present. It was impossible that a once zealous
monk should become faithless to his most solemn vows and, on his own
authority and on alleged discoveries in the Bible, dare to overthrow
the whole ecclesiastical structure of the past without in so doing
experiencing grave misgivings. Add to this his violence, his “wild-beast
fury” (J. von Walther), his practical contradictions and the theological
mistakes which he was unable to hide. Hence we need have no scruple about
admitting what is otherwise fairly evident, viz. that his ghostly combats
stand apart and cannot be attributed directly to any bodily ailment.

It remains, however, true that such struggles and temptations throve
exceedingly on the morbid fear which lay hidden in the depths of his
soul. It must also be granted that neurasthenia sometimes gives rise to
symptoms of fear similar to those experienced by Luther, as we shall hear
later on from an expert in nervous diseases, whom we shall have occasion
to quote (see section 5 below). Consideration for such facts oblige the
layman to leave the question open as to how much of Luther’s fear is to
be attributed to nervousness or to other physical drawbacks.

We do not think it desirable here to enter further into the views of
the older Catholic polemics, already referred to, who looked upon
Luther as possessed (as labouring under an “_obsessio_” or at least a
“_circumsessio_”). The fits of terror he endured both before and after
his apostasy seemed to them to prove that he was really a demoniac. As
already pointed out above (vol. iv., p. 359), this field is too obscure
and too beset with the danger of error to allow of our venturing upon
it.[348] Quite another matter is it, however, with regard to temptations,
with which, according to Holy Scripture and the constant teaching of
the Church, the devil is allowed to assail men, and to discuss which in
Luther’s case we will now proceed, using his own testimonies.

2. Psychic Problems of Luther’s Religious Development

From the beginning of his apostasy and public struggle we find in Luther
no peace of soul and clearness of outlook; rather, he is the plaything of
violent emotions. He himself complains of having to wrestle with gloomy
temptations of the spirit. It is these that we now propose to investigate
more narrowly. In so doing we must also examine how his nervous state
reacted on these temptations, whereby we shall, maybe, discern more
clearly than before the connection of Luther’s doctrine with his distress
of soul.

_Temptations to Despair_

As to the temptations admitted by Luther to be such, we must first of
all recall the involuntary thoughts of despair which occurred to him in
the convent and the inclination he felt, against his will, to abandon
all hope of his salvation and even to blaspheme God. Everybody in the
least acquainted with the spiritual life knows that such darkening of the
soul may be caused by the Spirit of Evil and often accompanies certain
morbid conditions of the body. When the two, as is often the case, are
united, the effects are all the more far-reaching. Now, on his own
showing, this was precisely the case with the unhappy inmate of the
Erfurt monastery. Luther felt himself compelled, as he says, to lay bare
his temptations (the “_horrendæ et terrificæ cogitationes_”) to Staupitz
in confession.[349] The latter comforted him by pointing out the value of
such temptations as a mental discipline. Staupitz, and others too, had,
however, also told him that his case was to some extent new to them and
beyond their comprehension.[350] Hence, understood by none, he passed his
days sunk in sadness. All to whom he applied for consolation had answered
him: “I do not know.”[351] His fancy must, indeed, have strayed into
strange bypaths for both Pollich, the Wittenberg professor, and Cardinal
Cajetan expressed amazement at the oddness of his thoughts.

His theological system finally became the pivot around which his
thoughts revolved; to it he looked for help. He had created it under
the influence of other factors to which it is not here needful to refer
again; particularly it had grown out of his own relaxation in the virtues
of his Order and religious life.[352] His system, however, had for its
aim to combat despair, overmastering concupiscence and the consciousness
of sin by means of a self-imposed tranquillity. He was determined to
arrive by main force at peace and certainty. Only little by little, so
he wrote in 1525, had he discovered, “God leads down to hell those whom
He predestines to heaven, and makes alive by slaying”; whoever had read
his writings “would understand this now very well”; a man must learn to
despair utterly of himself, and allow himself to be helplessly saved by
the action of God, i.e. by virtue of the forgiveness won by fiducial
faith.[353] How he himself was led by God down to hell he sets forth in
his “_Resolutiones_,” in the account of his mental sufferings given above
(p. 101 f.), a passage which transports the reader into the midst of the
pains which Luther endured in his anxiety.

The man most deeply initiated into the darker side of Luther’s
temptations and struggles was the friend of his youth, the
Augustinian, Johann Lang. He, too, apparently suffered severely
beneath the burden of temptations regarding predestination and the
forgiveness of sins. It was in a letter to him, that, not long after
the nailing up of the Wittenberg Theses, Luther penned those curious
words: They would pray earnestly for one another, “that our Lord Jesus
may help us to bear our temptations which no one save us two has ever
been through.”[354] Shortly before this Luther had commended to the
care of his friend, then prior at Erfurt, a young man, Ulrich Pinder
of Nuremberg, who had opened his heart to him at Wittenberg; on this
occasion he wrote that Pinder was “troubled with secret temptations
of soul which hardly anyone in the monastery with the exception
of yourself understands.”[355] He also alludes to the temptations
peculiar to himself in that letter to Lang, in 1516, in which he
describes his overwhelming labours, which “seldom leave him due time
for reciting the hours or saying Mass.” On the top of his labours, he
says, there were “his own temptations from the world, the flesh and
the devil.”[356] To this same recipient of his confidences Luther was
wont regularly to give an account of the success attending his attacks
on the ancient Church and doctrine; he kindled in him a burning
hatred of those Augustinians at Erfurt who were well disposed towards
scholasticism and Aristotle, and forwarded him the controversial
Theses for the Disputations at the Wittenberg University embodying
his new doctrine of the necessity of despairing of ourselves and of
mystically dying, viz. the new “Theology of the Cross.”

Some mysterious words addressed to Staupitz, in which Luther hints
at his inward sufferings, find their explanation when taken in
conjunction with the above. He assured Staupitz (Sep. 1, 1518) in a
letter addressed to him at Salzburg, that the summons to Rome and
the other threats made not the slightest impression on him: “I am
enduring incomparably worse things, as you know, which make me look
upon such fleeting, shortlived thunders as very insignificant.”[357]
His temptations against God and His Mercy were of a vastly different
character. By the words just quoted he undoubtedly meant, says
Köstlin, “those personal, inward sufferings and temptations, probably
bound up with physical emotions, to which Staupitz already knew him
to be subject and which frequently came upon him later with renewed
violence. They were temptations in which, as at an earlier date, he
was plunged into anxiety concerning his personal salvation as soon as
he started pondering on the hidden depths of the Divine Will.”[358]

_The Shadow of Pseudo-Mysticism_

In this connection it will be necessary to return to Luther’s earlier
predilection for a certain kind of mysticism.[359]

As we know, at an early date he felt drawn to the writings of the
mystics, for one reason, because he seemed to himself to find there
his pet ideas about spiritual death and wholesome despair. Their
description of the desolation of the soul and of its apparent
abandonment by God appeared to him a startling echo of his own
experiences. He did not, however, understand or appreciate aright the
great mystics, particularly Tauler, when he read into them his own
peculiar doctrine of passivity.

To a certain extent throughout his whole life he stood under the
shadow of this dim, sad mysticism.

He will have it that he, like the mystics, had frequently been plunged
in the abyss of the spirit, had been acquainted with death and with
states weird and unearthly. He refuses to relate all he has been
through and actually gives as his ground for silence the very words
used by St. Paul when speaking of his own revelations: “But I forbear,
lest any man should think of me above that which he seeth in me, or
anything he heareth from me” (2 Cor. xii. 6). When speaking thus of
the mystic death he fails to distinguish between such thoughts and
feelings as may have been the result solely of a morbid state of fear,
or of remorse of conscience, and the severe trials through which the
souls of certain great and holy men had really to pass.

It is indeed curious to note how he was led astray by a combination of
fear, mysticism and temptation.

He was deluded into seeing in his own states just what he desired,
viz. the proof of the truth of his own doctrine and exalted mission
to proclaim it; he will not hear of this being a mere figment of
his own brain. On the contrary, he is convinced that he, like the
inspired Psalmist, has passed through every kind of the terrors which
the latter so movingly describes. Like the Psalmist, he too must
pray, “O Lord, chastise me not in thy wrath,” and like him, again, he
is justified in complaining that his bones are broken and his soul
troubled exceedingly (Ps. vi.). He even opines that those who have
endured such things rank far above the martyrs; David, according to
him, would much rather have perished by the sword than have “endured
this murmuring of his soul against God which called forth God’s
indignation.”[360]

There is no doubt that Johann Lang might have been able to tell us
much about these gloomy aberrations of Luther’s, for he had a large
share in Luther’s development.

It is worthy of note that it was to this bosom friend that Luther
sent his edition of “Eyn Deutsch Theologia.”[361] “_Taulerus tuus_”
(“Your Tauler”[362]) so he calls the German mystic when writing to
his friend, and in a similar way, in a letter to Lang, he speaks of
the new theology built entirely on grace and passive reliance as “our
theology.” “Our theology and St. Augustine,” he says, “are progressing
bravely at our University and gaining the upper hand, thanks to the
working of God, whereas Aristotle is now taking a back seat.”[363] We
must not be of those who, “like Erasmus, fail to give the first place
to Christ and grace,” so he writes to Lang, knowing that here he would
meet with a favourable response. The man who “knows and acknowledges
nothing but grace alone” judges very differently from one “who
attributes something to man’s free-will.”[364]

It was not long before Luther’s pseudo-mysticism translated itself
into deeds. He persuades himself that he is guided in all his actions
and resolutions by a sort of Divine inspiration. A singular sort of
super-naturalism and self-sufficiency gleams in the words he once wrote
to Lang. After reminding him of the unquestioned truth, that “man must
act under God’s power and counsel and not by his own,” he goes on to
explain defiantly, that, for this reason, he scorns once and for all any
objections the Erfurt Augustinians might urge against the “paradoxical
theses” he had sent them a little earlier, also their charge that he
had shown himself hasty and precipitate: God was enough for him; of
their counsel and instruction he stood in no need.[365] As though
real wisdom and true mysticism did not teach us to welcome humbly the
opinion of well-meaning critics, and not to trust too implicitly our own
ideas, particularly in fields where one is so liable to trip. But the
“Theology of the Cross,” sealed by his fears, now seemed to him above all
controversy. During his temptations he had come to see its truth, and
it also fell in marvellously with his changed views on the duties of a
religious and with his renunciation of humility and self-denial.

At a time when mysticism and the study of Tauler still exercised a
powerful influence over him he was wont in his fits of terror to
revert to Tauler’s misapprehended considerations on the inward trials
of the soul.

In pursuance of this idea and hinting at his own mental state he
declares in his “_Operationes in psalmos_” (1519-21), that, according
to St. Paul (Rom. v. 3 f.), tribulations work in us patience
and trial and hope, and thus the love of God and justification;
tribulation, however, consisted chiefly of inward anxiety, and trial
called for patience and calm endurance of this anxiety; the greater
the tribulation, the higher would hope rise in the soul. “Thus it is
plain that the Apostle is speaking of the assurance of the heart in
hope,[366] because, after anxiety cometh hope, and then a man feels
that he hopes, believes and loves.” “Hence Tauler, the man of God,
and also others who have experienced it, say that God is never more
pleasing, more lovable, sweeter and more intimate with His sons than
after they have been tried by temptation.”[367] It is quite true that
Tauler said this; he also teaches that the greater the desolation
by which God tries the souls of the elect, the higher the degree of
mystical union to which He wishes to call them; for death is the road
to life. It is quite another thing, however, whether Tauler would have
approved of Luther’s application of what he wrote.

Luther also refers both to Tauler and to himself elsewhere in the
“Operationes,” where he speaks of the fears of conscience regarding
the judgment of God which no one can understand who had not himself
experienced them; Job, David, King Ezechias and a few others had
endured them; “and finally that German theologian, Johannes Tauler,
often alludes to such a state of soul in his sermons.”[368] Tauler,
however, when speaking of such afflictions, is thinking of those souls
who seek God and are indeed united to Him in love, but who are tried
and purified by the withdrawal of sensible grace, and by being made to
feel a sense of separation from Him and the burden of their nature.

In his church-postils he again summons Tauler to his aid in order to
depict the fears with which he was so familiar, seeking consolation,
as it were, both for himself and for others. In his sermon for the
2nd Sunday in Advent (1522) he speaks of “those exalted temptations
concerning death and hell, of which Tauler wrote.” Evidently speaking
from experience he says: “This temptation destroys flesh and blood,
nay, penetrates into the marrow of the bones and is death itself, so
that no one can endure it unless marvellously borne up. Some of the
patriarchs tasted this, for instance, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David and
Moses, but, towards the end of the world, it will become more common.”
Finally, he assures his hearers, that, there were such as were “still
daily tried” in this way, “of which but few people are aware; these
are men who are in the agony of death, and who grapple with death”;
still Christ holds out the hope that they are not destined to death
and to hell; on the other hand, it is certain that the “world, which
fears nothing, will have to endure, first death, and, after that,
hell.”[369]

_Other Ordeals_

Other temptations that assailed Luther must be taken into account.
Unfortunately he does not say what “new” form of temptation it was
of which he wrote to Johann Lang in 1519. He says: A temptation had
now befallen him which showed him “what man was, though he had fondly
believed that he was already well enough aware of this before”; he
felt it even more severely than the trials he had to endure before the
Leipzig Disputation; he would discuss it with him only by word of mouth
when Lang came to see him.[370] Is he here referring to temptations of
the flesh of an unusual degree of intensity? We have already heard him
bewail his temptations to ambition and hate. Moreover, in this very year
he speaks of temptations against chastity in his Sermon on Marriage:
It is a “shameful temptation,” he says; “I have known it well, and I
imagine you too are acquainted with it; ah, I know well how it is when
the devil comes and excites and inflames the flesh.… When one is on
fire and the temptation comes I know well what it is; then the eye is
already blind.”[371] Already before this he had had to fight against
“very many temptations” of the sort, which are “wont to attend the age
of youth.”[372] Later on they startled him by their waxing strength. Of
the temptations of the senses (“_titillatio_”) to which he was exposed
he had complained, for instance, in the same year (1519) in a letter to
his superior Staupitz,[373] and the worldly intercourse into which he
was drawn, “the social gatherings, excessive indulgence in the pleasures
of the table, and general lukewarmness,” of which he speaks on the same
occasion, make such temptations all the more likely in the case of a
young man of a temper so lively and impressionable, especially as his
lukewarmness took the shape of neglect of prayer and the means of grace,
and of the help he might have derived from the exercises of the Order.

Such fleshly temptations he bewailed even more loudly when at the
Wartburg. There, as we may recall, he became the plaything of evil lust
(“_libido_”) and the “fire of his untamed flesh.” “Instead of glowing in
spirit, I glow in the flesh.”[374] Admitting that he himself “prayed and
groaned too little for the Church of God,” he exclaims: “Pray for me,
for in this solitude I am falling into the abyss of sin!”[375] Though in
bodily health and well cared for, he is “being well pounded by sins and
temptations,” so he wrote to his old friend Johann Lang.

To all this was still added great trouble of conscience concerning his
undertaking as a whole. When he was passionately declaring that his
misgivings were from the devil and resolving never to flinch in his
antagonism to the hated vow of chastity he was himself falling into the
state which he himself describes: “You see how I burn within (‘_quantis
urgear æstibus_’).” This to Melanchthon, after having explained to him
the struggle waging within between his feelings and his knowledge of
the Bible in the matter of the vow of chastity. He is being carried
away to take action, and yet is unable, as he here admits, to prove
his object by means of the text of Scripture.[376] He feels himself
to be “the sport of a thousand devils” in the Wartburg on account of
this and other temptations; he falls frequently, yet the right hand of
God upholds him.[377] The castle is full of devils, so he wrote from
within its walls, and very cunning devils to boot, who never leave him
at peace but behave in such a way that he “is never alone” even when he
seems to be so.[378] Hence he was writing “partly under the stress of
temptation, partly in indignation.” What he was writing was his “_De
votis monasticis_,” by means of which, as he here says, he is about “to
free the young folk from the hell of celibacy.”[379]

Ten years later he still recalls the “despair and the temptation
concerning God’s wrath” which had then been raging within him.[380]

His temptations at that time must have been rendered even worse by the
morbid conditions then awakening in him, by the dismal, racking sense
of fear that peopled his imagination with thousands of devils, and the
mental confusion resulting from his state of nervous overstrain.

It would carry us too far to pursue the diabolical temptations to despair
(or what he held to be such) throughout the rest of his life, and to
examine their connection with his maladies. We shall only remark, that,
even at a later date, when we find him the butt of severe temptations
of this sort, an under-current of other trouble is frequently to be
detected. The “terrors” he endured in his youthful years indeed moderated
but never altogether disappear. The “spiritual sickness” of 1537 of which
he speaks, when for a whole fortnight he could scarcely eat, drink or
sleep, shows the degree to which these thoughts of despair and struggles
of conscience could reach.

_Summary_

To sum up what we have said of Luther’s temptations, a distinction must
be made between the temptations of the Evil One, which Luther himself
regarded as such, and certain other things the real nature of which he
failed to grasp. Moreover, there are those “temptations” which bore on
his work and doctrines and which he wrongly regarded as temptations of
the devil, whereas they were no more than the prick of conscience. All
three are at times reacted on by a morbid state which he likewise failed
rightly to understand, but which was made up of that predisposition
to anxiety to which his nature was so prone and a kind of nervous
irritability due to his struggles and over-great labours. Only those of
the first and second class have any title to be regarded as temptations.

To the first class, i.e. to the temptations he felt and described as
such, belongs first of all that despair which often disquieted him even
in his later years; then again the temptations of the flesh of which we
have also heard him speak. Though he ascribes both to the machinations
of the Evil One, yet his method of fighting them was fatally mistaken.
The temptations to despair he withstood by his erroneous doctrine of
grace and faith alone, and, the more such thoughts torment him, the more
defiantly does he stand by this doctrine. In the case of the temptations
against chastity he failed to make sufficient use of the remedies of
Christian penance and piety; on the contrary, under the stress of their
allurements, he finally saw fit to demolish even the barrier raised by
solemn vows made unto God.

The second class of temptations, which to him, however, did not seem to
be such, includes all the mental aberrations we have had occasion to
note during the course of his life story, particularly at the beginning
of his apostasy. Here we shall only indicate the more important. It
may be allowed that many of them masqueraded under specious pretexts
and the appearance of good (“_sub specie boni_”). Thus, e.g. there was
something fine and inspiring in his plans of exalting the grace of
Christ at the expense of the mere works of the faithful; of giving the
religious freedom of the Christian full play, regardless of unwarranted
human ordinances; of improving the cut-and-dry theology of the day by
a deeper and more positive study of the Bible; and of stopping the
widespread decline in ecclesiastical learning and ecclesiastical life by
stronghanded reforms. He allowed himself, however, to be altogether led
astray in both the conception and the carrying out of these plans.

There was grave peril to himself in that sort of spiritualism, thanks
to which he so frequently attributes all his doings to the direct
inspiration and guidance of Almighty God; real and enlightened dependence
on God is something very different; again, there was danger in his
perverted interpretation of the teaching of the mystics of the past,
in his exaggeration of the strength of man’s sinful concupiscence and
neglect of the remedies prescribed in ages past, particularly of the
practices of his own Order, also in his passionate struggles against the
so-called holiness-by-works prevalent among the Augustinians, in his
characteristic violence and tendency to pick a quarrel, and, above all,
in the working of his inordinate self-esteem and unbounded appreciation
of his own achievements as the leader of the new movement, which led him
to exalt himself above all divinely appointed ecclesiastical authority.

In the above we were obliged to hark back to Luther’s earlier days, and
this we shall again have to do in the following pages. The truth is,
that many of the secrets of his earlier years can be explained only in
the light of his later life, whilst, conversely, his youth and years of
ripening manhood assist us in solving some of the riddles of later years.
Hence we cannot be justly charged with repeating needlessly incidents
that have already been related.

* * * * *

Just as the Wartburg witnessed the strongest temptations that Luther
had ever to bear, so, too, it formed the stage of certain of those
manifestations from the other world of which he fancied himself the
recipient. Such manifestations, which lead one to wonder whether Luther
suffered from hallucinations, are of frequent occurrence in his story. We
shall now proceed to review them in their entirety.

3. Ghosts, Delusions, Apparitions of the Devil

In investigating the many ghostly apparitions with which Luther believed
he had been favoured, our attention is perforce drawn to the Wartburg.
We must, however, be careful to distinguish the authentic traditions
from what has been unjustifiably added thereto. As to the explaining
and interpreting of such testimonies as have a right to be regarded as
historical, that will form the matter of a special study. In order that
the reader may build up an opinion of his own we shall meanwhile only
set on record what the sources say, the views of those concerned being
given literally and unabridged. This method, essential though it be for
the purposes of an unbiassed examination, has too often been set aside,
recourse being had instead to mere assertions, denials and pathological
explanations.

_The Statements Concerning Luther’s Intercourse with the Beyond_

On April 5, 1538, Luther, in the presence of his friends, spoke of the
personal “annoyance” to which the devil had subjected him while at the
Wartburg by means of visible manifestations. The pastor of Sublitz,
then staying at Wittenberg, had complained of being pestered at his
home by noisy spooks; they flung pots and pans at his head and created
other disturbances. Referring to such outward manifestations of the
spirit-world, Luther remarked: “I too was tormented in my time of
captivity in Patmos, in the castle perched high up in the kingdom of the
birds. But I withstood Satan and answered him in the words of the Bible:
God is mine, Who created man and ‘set all things under his feet’ (Ps.
viii. 7). If thou hast any power over them, try what thou canst do.”[381]

On another occasion he related before his friend Myconius and in the
presence of Jonas and Bugenhagen, “how the devil had twice appeared at
the Wartburg in the shape of a great dog and had tried to kill him.”
It is Myconius who relates this, mentioning that it had been told him
by Luther at Gotha in 1538,[382] “in the house of Johann Löben, the
Schosser.”

Of one of these two apparitions, the physician Ratzeberger, Luther’s
friend, had definite information. He, however, quotes it only as an
instance of the many ghostly things which Luther had experienced there:
“Because the neighbourhood was lonely many ghosts appeared to him
and he was much troubled by disturbances due to noisy spooks. Among
other incidents, one night, when he was going to bed, he found a huge
black bull-dog lying on his bed that refused to let him get in. Luther
thereupon commended himself to our Lord God, recited Ps. viii. [the same
as that mentioned above], and when he came to the verse ‘Thou hast set
all things under his feet’ the dog at once disappeared and Luther passed
a peaceful night. Many other ghosts of a like nature visited him, all of
whom he drove off by prayer, but of which he refused to speak, for he
said he would never tell anyone how many spectres had tormented him.”[383]

According to the account of his pupil Mathesius, Luther often “called to
mind how the devil had tormented him in mind and caused him a burning
pain which sucked the very marrow out of his bones.”[384] Of visible
apparitions Mathesius has, however, very little to say: “The Evil
Spirit,” so we read in his account of Luther’s sayings, “most likely
wished to affright me palpably, for on many nights I heard him making a
noise in my Patmos, and saw him at the Coburg under the form of a star,
and in my garden in the shape of a black pig. But my Christ strengthened
me by His Spirit and Word so that I paid no heed to the devil’s
spectre.”[385] Mathesius, in his enthusiasm, actually goes so far as to
compare such things to Satan’s tempting of Christ in the wilderness.

The encounter with the great black dog in the Wartburg is related in an
old edition of Luther’s Table-Talk with a curious addition, which tells
how Luther, on one occasion, calmly lifted from the bed the dog, which
had frequently tormented him, carried him to the window, and threw him
out without the animal even barking. Luther had not been able to learn
anything about it afterwards from others, but no such dog was kept in the
Castle.[386]

Of the strange din by which the devil annoyed him within those walls
Luther speaks more in detail in the German Table-Talk. “When I was
living in Patmos … I had a sack of hazel nuts shut up in a box. On
going to bed at night I undressed in my study, put out the light, went
to my bedchamber and got into bed. Then the nuts began to rattle over
my head, to rap very hard against the rafters of the ceiling and bump
against me in bed; but I paid no attention to them. After I had got to
sleep there began such a din on the stairs as though a pile of barrels
was being flung down them, though I knew the stairs were protected
with chains and iron bars so that no one could come up; nevertheless,
the barrels kept rolling down. I got up and went to the top of the
stairs to see what it was, but found the stairs closed. Then I said:
‘If it is you, so be it,’ and commended myself to our Lord Christ of
Whom it is written: ‘Thou shalt set all things under his feet,’ as
Ps. viii. says, and got into bed again.” All this, so the account
proceeds, had been related by Luther himself at Eisenach in 1546.[387]
Cordatus, however, must have heard the story of the nuts from his own
lips even before this. He tells it in 1537 as one of the numerous
instances of the persecution Luther had had to endure from the spooks
of the Wartburg: “Then he [the devil] took the walnuts from the table
and flung them up at the ceiling the whole night long.”[388]

It also happened (this supplements an incident touched upon above in
vol. ii., p. 95), so Luther related on the above occasion, in 1546,
that the wife of Hans Berlips, who “would much have liked to see
[Luther], which was, however, not allowed,” came to the Castle. His
quarters were changed and the lady was put into his room. “That night
there was such an ado in the room that she fancied a thousand devils
were in it.”[389] This story is not quite so well authenticated as the
incidents which Luther relates as having happened to himself, for
it is clear that he had it directly, or indirectly, only from this
lady’s account. Her anxiety to see Luther would seem to stamp her as
a somewhat eccentric person, and it may also be that she went into
a room, already reputed to be haunted, quite full of the thought of
ghosts and that her imagination was responsible for the rest.

Luther goes on to allude to another ghostly visitation, possibly a
new one. He says: “On such occasions we must always say to the devil
contemptuously: “If you are Christ’s Master, so be it!” For this is
what I said at Eisenach.”[390] Nothing further is known, however, of
any such occurrence having taken place at Eisenach. He may quite well
have taken Eisenach as synonymous with the Wartburg.

* * * * *

To pass in review the other ghostly apparitions which occurred during
his lifetime, we must begin with his early years.

When still a young monk at Wittenberg Luther already fancied he heard
the devil making a din. “When I began to lecture on the Psalter, and,
after we had sung Matins, was seated in the refectory studying and
writing up my lecture, the devil came and rattled in the chimney three
times, just as though someone were heaving a sack of coal down the
chimney. At last, as it did not cease, I gathered up my books and went
to bed.”[391] “Once, too, I heard him over my head in the monastery,
but, when I noticed who it was, I paid no attention, turned over and
went to sleep again.”[392]

Luther can tell some far more exciting stories of ghosts and
“Poltergeists,” of which others, with whom he had come in contact in
youth or manhood, had been the victims. Since, however, he seems to
have had them merely on hearsay, they may be passed over. Of himself,
however, he says: “I have learnt by experience that ghosts go about
affrightening people, preventing them from sleeping and so making them
ill.”[393]

We find also the following statement: “The devil has often had me by
the hair of my head, yet was ever forced to let me go”;[394] from the
context this, however, may refer to mental temptations.

He says, however, quite definitely of certain experiences he himself
had gone through in the monastery: “Oh, I saw gruesome ghosts and
visions.” This was probably at the time when “no one was able
to comfort” him.[395] He was referring to incidents to which no
definite date can be assigned, when, anxious to refute their claim to
illumination by the spirits, he told the fanatics: “Ah, bah, spirits …
I too have seen spirits!”

The Table-Talk relates how on one occasion Luther himself, in a
strange house, was witness of a remarkable spectral visitation. He
is said to have related the incident and to “have seen it with his
own eyes as did also many others.”[396] A maiden, a friend of the
old proctor [at the University], was lying in bed ill at Wittenberg.
She had a vision; Christ appearing to her under a glorious form,
whereupon she joyfully adored her visitor. A messenger was at once
sent “from the college to the monastery” to fetch Luther. He came
and exhorted the young woman “not to allow herself to be deceived by
the devil.” She thereupon spat in the face of the apparition. “The
devil then disappeared and the vision turned into a great snake which
made a dash at the maiden in her bed and bit her on the ear so that
the drops of blood trickled down, after which the snake was seen
no more.” This story was introduced into the German Table-Talk by
Aurifaber (1566).[397] The young woman was probably hysterical and was
the only beholder of the vision. In all likelihood what the others
saw was merely the blood, which might quite well have come from a
scratch otherwise caused. The story has been quoted as a proof of the
dispassionate way in which Luther regarded visions.

As a further proof of the “sobriety which he coupled with a faith
so ardent and enthusiastic” Köstlin quotes the following:[398] “He
himself related this tale,” the Table-Talk says [the date is uncertain
but it was after he had already begun to preach the “Word”]; “he was
once praying busily in his cell, and thinking of how Christ had hung
on the cross, suffered and died for our sins, when suddenly a bright
light shone on the wall, and, in the midst, a glorious vision of the
Lord with His five wounds appeared and gazed at him, the Doctor, as
though it had been Christ Himself. When the Doctor saw it he fancied
at first it was something good, but soon he bethought him it must be
a devilish spectre, because Christ appears to us only in His Word and
in a lowly and humble form, just as He hung in shame upon the cross.
Hence the Doctor adjured the vision: ‘Begone thou shameless devil! I
know of no other Christ than He Who was crucified, and Who is revealed
and preached in His Word,’ and soon the apparition, which was no
less than the devil in person, disappeared.”[399]—This story told by
his pupils must refer to some statement made by Luther, though the
dramatic liveliness of its imagery may well lead us to suspect that
it has been touched up. Some natural effect of light and shade might
well account for the appearance which the young monk so “busy” at his
prayers thought he saw.

ed., 58, p. 129.

It is hardly possible to suppress similar doubts concerning other
accounts we have from his lips; his statements also refer to events
which occurred long previous. At any rate, in a select circle of his
pupils, the opinion certainly prevailed that Luther was tried by
extraordinary other-world apparitions, and this conviction was the
result of remarks dropped by him.

Greater stress must be laid on those statements of his which bear on
inward experiences, where the most momentous truths were concerned and
which occurred at certain crises of his life.

In Nov., 1525, he assured Gregory Casel, the Strasburg theologian, in so
many words, that “he had frequently had inward experience that the body
of Christ is indeed in the Sacrament; he had seen dreadful visions; also
angels (‘_vidisse se visiones horribiles, sæpe se angelos vidisse_’), so
that he had been obliged to stop saying Mass.”[400]

He spoke in this way in the course of the official negotiations with
Casel, the delegate of the Protestant theologians of Strasburg. The words
occur in Casel’s report of the interview published by Kolde. It is true
that Luther also speaks here of the outward “Word” as the support of his
doctrine, particularly on the Sacrament. “We shall,” he says, “abide
quite simply by the words of Scripture—until the Spirit and the unction
teach us something different.” He avers that the Strasburgers who denied
the Sacrament come with their “Spirit” and wish to explain away the words
of the Bible concerning the body of Christ in the Bread. This, however,
is not the “light of the Spirit,” but the “light of reason”; he himself
had long since learnt to reject reason in the things of God. They were
not convinced of their cause as he was, otherwise they would defend their
teaching publicly as he did, for he would rather the whole world were
undone than be silent on God’s doctrine, because it was God’s business to
watch over it.

His opponents declared they had their own inward experience. “How many
inward experiences have I not had,” he replies, “at those times when
my mind was idle (‘_cum eram otiosus_’)! All sorts of things came
before my mind and everything seemed as reasonable as could be. But,
by God’s grace, I addressed myself to greater and more earnest matters
and began to distrust reason. I too, like them, was ‘in dangers’ [2
Cor. xi. 26], and in even greater ones. And if it is a question of
piety of life, I hope that there, too, we are blameless.” Coming back
once more to the spirit which the Strasburgers had set up against the
Word of God, he describes in his own defence the “terrors of death
he himself had been through (‘_mortis horrorem expertus_’)” and then
speaks of the angelic visions referred to above which had disturbed
him even at the Mass.[401]

He also will have it that at other times he had been consoled by
angels, though he does not tell us that he had seen them. In 1532 he
said to Schlaginhaufen: “God strengthened me ten years ago by His
angels, in my struggles and writings.”[402]

Luther, repeatedly and in so many words, appeals to his realisation of
the divine truths, and it may be assumed he imagined he felt something
of the sort within him, or that he thus interpreted certain emotions.
“I am resolved to acknowledge Christ as Lord. And this I have not only
from Holy Scripture but also from experience. The name of Christ has
often helped me when no one was able to help. Thus I have on my side
the deed and the Word, experience and Scripture. God has given both
abundantly. But my temptations made things sour for me.”[403]

The Table-Talk assures us that, “Dr. Martin proved it from his own
experience that Jesus Christ is truly God; this he also confessed openly;
for if Christ were not God then there was certainly no God at all.”[404]
It was no difficult task for him to include himself in the ranks of those
“who had received the first fruits of the spirit.”[405]

In addition to this, however, as will be shown below,[406] he thinks his
doctrine has been borne in upon him by God through direct revelation.
More than once, without any scruple, he uses the word “_revelatum_”; he
is also fond of setting this revelation in an awesome background: it had
been “strictly enjoined on him (‘_interminatum_’) under pain of eternal
malediction” to believe in it.[407]

In fact a certain terror is the predominating factor in this gloomy
region where he comes in touch with the other world. He has not merely
had experience that there are roving spirits who affright men,[408]
but, in a letter from the Wartburg, he insists quite generally, that,
“the visions of the Saints are terrifying.” Of course, as we well know,
delusions and hallucinations very often do assume a terrifying character.

Luther also asserts that “divine communications” are always accompanied
by inward tortures like unto death, words which give us a glimpse into
his own morbid state.[409] And yet he fully admits elsewhere the very
opposite, for he is aware that God is, above all things, the consoler.
“It is not Christ Who affrights us”;[410] and “it is Satan alone who
wounds and terrifies.”[411] But, in practice, according to him, things
work differently; there the fear from which he and others suffer comes
to the fore. “We are oftentimes affrighted even when God turns to us the
friendliest of glances.”[412]

This change of standpoint reminds us of another instance of the same
sort. Luther’s teaching on the terrifying character of the divine
action is much the same as his theological teaching that fear is the
incentive to good deeds. While, as a rule, he goes much too far in
seeking to rid the believer of any fear of God as the Judge, preaching an
unbounded confidence and even altogether excluding fear from the work of
conversion, yet, elsewhere, he emphasises most strongly this same fear,
as called for and quite indispensable; this he did in his controversies
with the Antinomians and, even earlier, as on the occasion of the
Visitations, on account of its religious influence on the people.

No change or alteration is, however, apparent in the accounts he gives
above of the cases in which he came in touch with the other world; he
sticks firmly by his statement that he had experienced such things both
mentally and palpably. Hence the difficulty of coming to any decision
about them.

* * * * *

But there are further alleged experiences, also detailed at length, which
have a place here, viz. the apparitions of the devil himself.

In 1530 Luther was thrown into commotion by a glimpse of the devil,
under the shape of a fiery serpent, outside the walls of the Coburg.
One evening in June, about nine o’clock, as his then companion Veit
Dietrich relates, Luther was looking out of the window, down on the
little wood surrounding the castle. “He saw,” says this witness, “a
fiery, flaming serpent, which, after twisting and writhing about,
dropped from the roof of the nearest tower down into the wood. He
at once called me and wanted to show me the ghost (‘_spectrum_’) as
I stood by his shoulder. But suddenly he saw it disappear. Shortly
after, we both saw the apparition again. It had, however, altered
its shape and now looked more like a great flaming star lying in the
field, so that we were able to distinguish it plainly even though
the weather was rainy.” Here the pupil undoubtedly did his best to
see something. On his master, however, the firm conviction of having
seen the devil made a deep impression. He had just enjoyed a short
respite after a bout of ill-health. The night after the apparition he
again collapsed and almost lost consciousness. On the following day he
felt, so Dietrich says, “a very troublesome buzzing in the head”; the
apparition leads the narrator to infer that Luther’s bodily trouble,
which now recommenced in an aggravated form, had been entirely “the
work of the devil.”[413] So certain was Luther of having seen the
devil that he mentioned the occurrence in 1531 at one of the meetings
held for the revision of his translation of the Psalms. The words of
the Psalmist concerning “_sagittæ_” and “_fulgura_,” etc. (Ps. xviii.
(xvii.) 15), he applies directly to his own personal experiences and
to the incident in question, “Just as I saw my devil flying over
the wood at the Coburg.”[414] He means by this the fading away and
disappearance of the above-mentioned fiery shape; this psalm speaks of
a “_materia ignita_,” which no doubt suggested his remarks.—Later, as
Mathesius relates, he said he had seen the “evil spirit at the Coburg,
in the form of a star.”[415] Kawerau terms the apparition an “optical
hallucination.”[416]

By the word hallucination is understood an apparent perception of an
external object not actually present. That the “apparition” at the Coburg
and other similar ones already mentioned or yet to be referred to were
hallucinations is quite possible though not certain. It is true that
the excessive play Luther gave to his imagination, particularly at the
Wartburg and, later, at the Coburg, was such that it is quite within the
bounds of possibility that he fancied he saw or heard things which had
no real existence. On the other hand, moreover, we know what a large
share his superstition had in distorting actual facts. Hence, generally
speaking, most of the ghosts or visions he is said to have seen can be
explained by a mistaken interpretation of the reality, without there
being any need to postulate an hallucination properly so-called. Much
of what has been related might come under the heading of illusions,
though, probably, not everything. To analyse them in detail is, however,
impossible as the circumstances are not accurately known. Certainly no
one, however much inclined to the supernatural, who is familiar with
Luther and his times, will be content, as was once the case, to believe
that the devil sought to interfere visibly and palpably with his person
and his teaching.

As to the apparition of the devil at the Coburg in the shape of a
flame, a serpent and a star, we may point out that the whole may well
have been caused simply by a lantern or torch carried by somebody in
that lonely neighbourhood. We might also be tempted to think of St.
Elmo’s fire, except that the form of the apparition presents some
difficulty.—So, too, the black dog in the Wartburg was most likely
some harmless intruder. The noise of the nuts flying up against the
ceiling may have been produced by the creaking of a weather-cock, or
of a door or shutter in the wind [or by the rats]. Other tales again
may be rhetorical inventions, simple fictions of Luther’s brain, not
involving the least suggestion of any illusion or hallucination, for
instance, when he speaks of the angels who appeared to him at Mass.
Such an apparition was a convenient weapon to use against opponents
who alleged they were under the influence of the “Spirit.” Moreover,
some of these tales were told so long after the event as to leave a
wide scope to the imagination.

To proceed with the accounts of the apparitions of the devil: About the
reality of two of such, Luther is quite positive.

One of these took place close to his dwelling. The devil he then
espied in the shape of a wild-boar in his garden under his window.
“Once Martin Luther was looking out of the window,” so an account
dating from 1548 tells us, “when a great black hog appeared in the
garden.” He recognised it as a diabolical apparition and jeered at
Satan who appeared in this guise, though he had once been a “beautiful
angel.” “Thereupon the hog melted into nothing.”[417] He himself
refers to this apparition in the words already recorded, in which he
classes it with the work of the noisy spirits in the Wartburg and the
“appearance of the star” at the Coburg.[418]

Indeed the hog and the flaming vision at the Coburg even found their
way into his printed sermons. We read in the home-postils: “The devil
is always about us in disguise, as I myself witnessed, taking, e.g.
the form of a hog, of a burning wisp of straw, and such like”[419]
(cp. above, vol. v., p. 287 ff.).

The other apparition, the one which possibly suggests most strongly
an hallucination, was that which he experienced at Eisleben at the
time he was trying to adjust the quarrels between the Counts of
Mansfeld, i.e. just before his death. We have accounts of this from
two different quarters, based on statements made by Luther; first
that of Michael Cœlius, a friend who was present at his death, in the
funeral oration he delivered immediately after at Eisleben on Feb. 20,
and, secondly, that of Luther’s confidant, the physician Ratzeberger.
The former in his address recounts for the edification of the people
how Luther “during his lifetime” had suffered trials and persecutions
at the hands of the devil before going to his eternal rest; hence in
this world he had been “disturbed and troubled in his peace of mind”
by Satan. It was true that latterly he had “enjoyed some happiness”
at Eisleben, but “that had not lasted long; one evening indeed,” so
Cœlius continues, “Luther had lamented with tears, that, while raising
his heart to God with gladness and praying at his open window, he had
seen the devil, who hindered him in all his labours, squatting on the
fountain and making faces at him. But God would prove stronger than
Satan, that he knew well.”[420]—Ratzeberger’s account quite agrees
with this as to the circumstances; he had learnt that Luther “related
the incident to Dr. Jonas and Mr. Michael Cœlius.” His information
is not derived from the funeral oration just mentioned, but clearly
from elsewhere. He is right in implying that it was Luther’s habit to
say his night prayers at the window; he has, however, some further
particulars concerning the behaviour of the devil: “It is said that
when Dr. Martin Luther was saying his night prayers to God at the open
window, as his custom was before going to bed, he saw Satan perched
on the fountain that stood outside his dwelling, showing him his
posterior and jeering at him, insinuating that all his efforts would
come to nought.”[421] The first place, however, belongs to the account
of Cœlius, who, by his mention of the tears Luther shed, sets vividly
before the reader the commotion into which the apparition, which had
occurred shortly before, had thrown him.

Excitement and trouble of mind were then pressing heavily on the aging
man. His frame of mind was caused not merely by the quarrel between
the “wrangling Counts” of Mansfeld with whom “no remonstrances or
prayers brought any help,”[422] not merely by his usual “temptations,”
but also, as Ratzeberger tells us, by the healing up of the incision
in the left leg, he (Ratzeberger) had made, and which now led to
bodily disorders. The disorders now made common cause with his
“annoyance melancholy and grief.” The “violent mental excitement,”
together with the bad effects of the healing up of the artificial
wound, were, according to this physician, what “brought about his
death.” Ratzeberger was not, however, then at Eisleben and we are in
possession of more accurate accounts of the circumstances attending
Luther’s death.

In explanation of Luther’s singular delusion regarding the jeering
devil we may remark that he is fond of attributing the obstacles
in the way of peace to the devil’s wrath and envy. “It seems to me
that the devil is mocking us,” he writes of the difficulties on Feb.
6, “may God mock at him in return!”[423] The Eisleben councillor,
Andreas Friedrich, writes to Agricola on Feb. 17 (18) of these same
concerns, that Luther, when he found there was still no prospect of
a settlement, had complained: “As I see, Satan turns his back on me
and jeers as well.”[424] Here, curiously enough, we have exactly what
occurred at the fountain. If the apparition, as is highly probable,
belongs somewhat later, then we may assume that the vivid picture
of the devil under this particular shape with which Luther was so
familiar led finally to some sort of hallucination. His extravagant
ideas of Satan generally might, in fact, have been sufficient.
Everything that went against him was “Satanic,” and his only hope is
that “God will make a mockery of Satan.”[425]

The account Luther gives in his Table-Talk of the two devils who, in
his old age, accompanied him whenever he went to the “sleep-house” may
be dealt with briefly. In this passage he is alluding in his joking
way to his bodily infirmities.[426] Hence the “one or two” devils who
dogged his footsteps are here described as quite familiar and ordinary
companions, which is not in keeping with the idea of true apparitions;
they were the nicer sort, i.e. pretty, well-mannered devils; they
“attacked his head” and thus caused the malady to which he was most
subject, hence in his usual style he threatens to “bid them begone
into his a⸺,” in short he is here merely jesting. This forbids our
taking the statement as meant in earnest though it is twice quoted in
the German Table-Talk quite seriously. In the early days, immediately
after Luther’s death, the statements concerning the “two devils” were,
strange to say, reverently repeated by his pupils as an historic fact;
in reality they were all too eager to unearth miraculous incidents in
his life.

At a later period, when rationalism had made some headway, Protestant
biographers of Luther as a rule preferred to say nothing about the
apparitions Luther had met with, or to treat them as pious, harmless
jests misinterpreted by his pupils. This, however, is not at all in
accordance with historic criticism. Luther admirers of an earlier
date, on the other hand, went too far in the contrary direction and
showed themselves only too ready to follow their master into the other
world, or to represent him as holding intercourse with it. Cyriacus
Spangenberg (1528-1604), a Luther zealot, is an instance in point. In
his “Theander Lutherus,” speaking of Luther “the real holy martyr,”
he says: He deserved to be termed a martyr on account of the visible
hostility of the devil; one or two devils had been in the habit of
accompanying him in his walks in the dormitory in order to attack him,
and his illnesses were caused simply by the devil. Needless to say, he
does not allow the incidents mentioned above to escape him: Satan had
tormented him at the Coburg in the shape of a fiery star and in the
garden under that of a hog; he had tried to deceive him in his cell
under the dazzling image of Christ, had affrighted him in the Wartburg
by making a devilish noise with the nuts, and, finally, even in his
monkish days had driven the student at a late hour from his studies by
the din he made.[427]

It is a fact worthy of note that the older Protestant writers, when
speaking of the apparitions Luther had, never mention any such or any
revelations of a consoling character, but merely terrifying stories of
devils and diabolical persecutions. This agrees with the observation
already made above (p. 128 f.). It is evident that as good as nothing
was known of any consoling apparitions; nor would the mild and friendly
angels have been in place in the warlike picture which his friends
transmitted of Luther. That he did not think himself a complete stranger
to such heavenly communications has, however, been proved above, and it
may be that his imagination would have had more to relate concerning this
friendlier world above had he not had particular reasons for being chary
about speaking of such visions.

_The Disputation with the Devil on the Mass_

In Spangenberg even Luther’s famous disputation with the devil on private
Masses is also made to do duty among the other apparitions. He, like many
others, takes it as an actual occurrence and represents it as further
proof of the “real martyrdom” of his hero.[428] As, conversely, this
disputation also plays a part in the works of Luther’s adversaries, it
may be worth while to examine it somewhat more narrowly. It is urged
that Luther admits he had been instructed by the devil regarding the
falsity of the Catholic doctrine of the Mass, and, that, by thus tracing
it back to the devil, he stamps with untruth an important portion of his
teaching, seeing, that, from the father of lies, nothing but lies can be
expected.

What then are we to believe concerning this disputation, judging from
Luther’s own words which constitute our sole source? The only possible
answer is, that Luther is merely making use of a rhetorical device.

It is true, that, in his “Von der Winckelmesse” (1533), Luther speaks
in so elusive a way of his dispute with the devil, and of the truth
he had learnt from the latter, that the incident was taken literally,
not merely by Spangenberg and other of Luther’s oldest friends, but
actually by Cochlæus too, and was, at a later date, made the subject
of many disquisitions. Yet, if we look into the matter carefully, we
shall find he speaks from the very outset not of any actual apparition
of the devil, but merely of his inward promptings: “On one occasion,”
so he introduces the story, “I woke up at midnight and the devil began
a disputation with me _in my heart_,” such as he has with me “many a
night.”[429] He then goes on, however, to describe the disputation as
graphically as had it been a real incident.

Luther’s object with the writing in question is to fling at the
Papists his arguments against private Masses under a new and striking
form. He pretends that the Papists would be at a loss to answer
Satan, but would be forced to despair “were he to bring forward
these and other arguments against them at the hour of death.” Hence
he introduces himself and shows how the devil had driven him into
a corner on account of his former celebration of Mass. As for the
arguments they are his usual ones. Here, put in the mouth of the
devil, they are to overwhelm him with despair for his former evil
wont of saying Masses. The only reason he can espy why he should not
despair is that he has now repented and no longer says the Mass.

He himself alludes to the artifice; writing to a friend, he says, that
by the introduction of the devil he intends to attack the Papists
“with a pamphlet of a new kind”; even those friendly to the Evangel
would be astonished at his new way of writing; they were, however, to
be told that this was merely a challenge thrown to the Papists; that
it only represented himself as driven into a corner by the devil on
account of the Masses he had formerly said, in order to induce the
Papists to examine their consciences and see how they could vindicate
themselves with regard to the Mass.[430]—Thus, for once, the devil
might well figure as an upholder of Luther’s doctrine.

In the course of the drama the devil never grows weary of proving,
that, owing to the Masses Luther had said, and the idolatry he had
thus practised, he had been brought to the verge of everlasting
destruction. The devil’s arguments are given at great length and
Luther concedes everything save that he refuses to despair. The
statement that he should, so he urges, is worthy of the devil, who,
in his temptations, constantly confuses the false with the true.[431]
Luther, here, even introduces the devil in a quasi-comic light: “Do
you hear, you great, learned man?” etc. “Yes, my dear chap, that is
not the same,” etc. In a similar tone Luther then turns on the Papists
who say to him: “Are you a great Doctor and yet have no answer ready
for the devil?”

Certain Protestant writers, even down to our own times, have, however,
insisted that, at any rate inwardly, the devil had sought to reduce
Luther to despair on account of his celebration of Mass as a Catholic;
that the spirit of darkness had attached so much importance to the
suppression of the Gospel, that he attempted to disquiet Luther with
such self-reproaches.[432] It is true Luther once says that the devil
reproached him with his “misdeeds, for instance, with the sacrifice of
the Mass,” and other Catholic practices of which he had formerly been
guilty.[433] On other occasions, however, he quite absolves the devil
of any change concerning the Mass. He says, e.g.: “The devil is such a
miscreant that he does not reproach me with my great and awful crimes
such as the celebration of Mass,”[434] etc. Thus he had persuaded himself
quite independently of the devil that the Mass was a grievous crime. We
have, in fact, in Luther’s statements concerning his inward experiences
a crying instance of his changeableness. We shall return below to his
self-reproach on account of his celebration of Mass (see section 4).

_Possession and Exorcism_

We may conclude our examination of diabolical apparitions by some
statements concerning the exorcisms Luther undertook and his treatment of
cases of possession.

His first followers believed he had been successful in 1545 in driving
out Satan in the case of a person possessed. The testimony of two
witnesses of the incident must here come under consideration, both young
men who were present on the occasion, viz. Sebastian Fröschel, Deacon at
Wittenberg, and Frederick Staphylus, a man of learning who afterwards
abandoned Lutheranism and became Superintendent of the University of
Ingolstadt.[435] The latter knows nothing of any success having attended
Luther’s efforts, whereas the former boasts that such was the case,
though he somewhat invalidates his testimony by saying nothing of the
embarrassing situation in which Luther found himself at the close of
the scene. According to both accounts the incident was more or less as
follows:

A girl of eighteen from Ossitz in the neighbourhood of Meissen who was
said to be possessed was brought one Tuesday to Luther, and, while at
his bidding reciting the Creed, was “torn” by the devil as soon as she
reached the words “and in Jesus Christ.” Luther hesitated at first to
set about the work of liberation and expressed his contempt for the
devil whom he “well knew.” The next day, after his sermon, he caused
the “possessed” girl to be brought to him in the sacristy of the
parish church of Wittenberg by the above-mentioned Fröschel.

We hear nothing of any regular examination as to whether it was a
case of possession, or not rather hysteria, as seems more likely.
At any rate, the unhappy girl when passing from the church through
the entrance to the sacristy, was seen to “fall down and hit about
her.” The door of the sacristy, where several doctors, ecclesiastics
and students were gathered, was locked. Luther delivered an address
on his method of driving out the devil: He did not intend to do this
in the way usual in Apostolic time, in the early Church and later,
viz. by a command and authoritative exorcism, but rather by “prayer
and contempt”; the Popish exorcism was too ostentatious and of it the
devil was not worthy; at the time when exorcism had been introduced
miracles were necessary for the confirmation of the faith, but this
was now no longer the case; God Himself knew well when the devil had
to depart and they ought not to tempt Him by such commands, but, on
the contrary, pray until their prayers were answered. Thus Luther, not
unwisely, refused to perform any actual “driving out of the devil.”

The Church’s ritual for exorcism was, however, not so ostentatious as
Luther pretends, and combined commands issued in a tone of authority
in the name of Christ (Matt. x. 8; Mark xvi. 17) with an expression
of contempt for the devil and reprobation of his evil deeds. Fröschel
noted down the address in question together with everything that
occurred and said later in a sermon, that Luther’s action ought to
serve as a model in future cases.

In the sacristy the Creed and Our Father were recited, two passages on
prayer (from John xvi. and xiv.) were also read aloud by Luther. Then
he, together with the other ecclesiastics present, laid hands on the
head of the girl and continued reciting prayers. When no sign appeared
of the devil’s departure, Luther wished to go, but first took care to
spurn the girl with his foot, the better to mark anew his disdain for
the devil. The poor creature whom he had thus insulted followed him
with threatening looks and gestures. This was all the more awkward
since Luther was unable to escape, the key of the sacristy door having
been mislaid; hence he was obliged, he the devil’s greatest and
best-hated foe on earth, to remain cheek by jowl with the Evil One.

The satirical description Staphylus gives of the situation cannot be
repeated here, especially as the writer seems to have added to its
colour.[436] Luther was unable to jump out of the window, so he says,
because it was protected with iron bars; “hence he had to remain shut
up with us until the sacristan could pass in a strong hatchet to us
through the bars; this was handed to me, as I was young, for me to
burst open the door, which I then did.” In place of all this, Fröschel
merely says of the girl, who was taken home the following day, that
afterwards “on several occasions” reports came to Wittenberg to the
effect that the evil spirit no longer “tormented and tore her as
formerly.”

In the pulpit the Deacon immortalised the incident for his Wittenberg
hearers and made it known to the whole world in his printed sermon
“Vom Teuffel.”[437]

Luther himself says nothing of it, though disposed in later life to lay
great stress on stories of the devil.[438] Earlier than this, in 1540,
he had hastened to tell his Katey of the supposed deliverance of a girl
at Arnstadt from the devil’s power through the ministrations of the
Evangelical pastor there; the latter had “driven a devil out of the girl
in a truly Christian manner.”[439] He does not, however, mention this
incident in his published works.

On the other hand we have in the Table-Talk a full account of his
treatment of a woman “possessed,” or, rather, clearly ailing from a
nervous disorder. Her symptoms were regarded, as was customary at a time
when so little was known of this class of maladies, as “purely the work
of the devil, as something unnatural, due to fright and devil-spectres,
seeing that the devil had overlaid her in the shape of a calf.” Luther,
on visiting the woman thus “bodily persecuted by the devil,” again laid
great stress on the need of praying that she might be rid of her guest,
though this time he did not scorn the use of the formula of exorcism.
“The night after, she was left in peace, but, later, the weakness
returned. Finally, however, she was completely delivered from it;”[440]
in other words, the malady simply took its natural course.

Another much-discussed case which occurred after the middle of the
’thirties was that of a girl at Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, a report of which
came to Luther from Andreas Ebert, the Lutheran pastor there (see above,
vol. iii., p. 148). In his reply to the circumstantial account of how the
“possessed” girl was able to produce coins by magic Luther shows himself
in so far cautious that he is anxious to have it made clear whether the
story is quite true and whether the coins are real. Nevertheless, he
does not hesitate to declare, that, should the incident be proved, it
would be a great omen (“_ostentum_”), as Satan, with God’s permission,
was thus setting before them a picture of the greed of money prevailing
among certain of the princes. He was loath to see exorcism resorted
to, “because the devil in his pride laughs at it”; all the more were
they to pray for the girl and against the devil, and this, with the help
of Christ, would finally spell her liberation; meanwhile, however, he
expresses his readiness to make public all the facts of the case that
could be proved. In his sermons he spoke of the occurrence to his hearers
as a “warning.”[441]

Theodore Kirchhoff, who, in the “Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie,”
mentions “Luther’s exorcisms of hysterical women folk,” not without
bewailing his error, points out that it was in part his own fancied
experience with the devil which led him to regard “similar phenomena
in others as diabolical”; “his many nervous ailments,” he says,
“strengthened his personal belief in the devil.” “Indeed, so far did he
go in his efforts to drive out the devil that once he actually proposed
that an idiot should be done to death.”[442] “Such a doctrine [on the
devil’s action], backed by the authority of so great a man, took deep
root.” It would be incorrect, writes Kirchhoff, to say, that Luther
inaugurated a healthier view of “possession”; on the contrary his
opinion is, “that, owing to Luther’s hard and fast theories, the right
understanding and treatment of the insane was rendered more difficult
than ever; for, if we consider the immense spread of his writings and
what their influence became, it is but natural to infer that this also
led to his peculiar view becoming popular.”[443] Needless to say, other
circumstances also conspired to render difficult the treatment of the
mentally disordered; long before Luther’s day they had been regarded by
many as possessed, and as the physicians would not undertake to cure
possessions, this condition was neglected by the healing art. In many
instances, too, the relatives were against any cure being attempted by
physicians.

4. Revelation and Illusion. Morbid Trains of Thought

One ground for considering the question of Luther’s revelations
in connection with the darker side of his life lies in the gloomy
and unearthly circumstances, which, according to his own account,
accompanied the higher communications he received (“_sub æternæ iræ
maledictione_”),[444] or else preceded them, inducing within his soul
a profound disturbance (“_ita furebam._”…), “I was terrified each
time.”[445]

A further reason is the unfortunate after-effect that the supposed
revelations from above had upon his mind. Outwardly, indeed, he seemed an
incarnation of confidence, but, inwardly, the case was very different.
Chapter xxxii. (vol. v.) of the present work will have shown how it was
his new doctrines, and his overturning of the Church which accounted for
his “agonies of soul,” his “pangs of hell” and “nightly combats” with the
devil, or rather with his own conscience. “Why do you raise the standard
of revolt against the house of the Lord?… Such thoughts upset one very
much.”[446] His irritation, melancholy and pessimism were largely due
to his disappointment with the results of his revelations. “They know
it is God Whose Word we preach and yet they say: We shan’t listen.”
“We are poor and indifferent trumpeters, but to the assembly of the
heavenly spirits ours is a mighty call.” “My only remaining consolation
is that the end of all cannot be far off.” “It must soon come to a head.
Amen.”[447] And yet, for all that, he insisted on his divine mission so
emphatically (above, vol. iii., p. 109 ff.).

The revelations which confirmed him in the idea of his mission deserve
more careful examination than has hitherto been possible to us in the
course of our narrative.

That Luther ever laid claim to having received his doctrine by a personal
revelation from God has been several times denied in recent times by his
defenders. They urge that he merely claimed to have received his doctrine
from above, “in the same way that God reveals it to all true Christians”;
in this and in no other sense, does he speak of his revelations, nor
does he ascribe to himself any “peculiar mission.”

It is true Luther taught that the content of the faith to which every
true Christian adheres had come into the world by a revelation bestowed
on mankind; he also taught that the Holy Ghost lends His assistance
to every man to enable him to grasp and hold fast to this revelation:
“This is a wisdom such as reason has never framed, nor has the heart
of man conceived it, no, not even the great ones of this world, but
it is revealed from heaven by the Holy Ghost to those who believe the
Gospel.”[448]—This, however, is not the question, but rather, whether
he never gave out that he had reached his own fresh knowledge, and
that reading of the Bible which he sets up against all the rest of
Christendom, thanks to a private and particular illumination, and whether
he did not base on such a revelation his claim to infallible certainty?

_Luther’s Insistence on Private Revelation_

Luther certainly never dreamt of making so bold and hazardous an
assertion so long as a spark of hope remained in him that the Church of
Rome would fall in with his doctrines. It was only gradually that the
phantom of a personal revelation grew upon him, and, even later, its sway
was never absolute, as we can see from our occasional glimpses into his
inward struggles of conscience.

We may begin with one of his latest utterances, following it up with
one of his earliest. Towards the end of his life he insisted on the
suddenness with which the light streamed in upon him when he had at
last penetrated into the meaning of Rom. i. 17 (in the Tower), thus
setting the coping-stone on his doctrines by that of the certainty of
salvation.[449] Again, at the outset of his public career, we meet with
those words of which Adolf Harnack says: “Such self-reliance almost fills
us with anxiety.”[450]

The words Harnack refers to are those in which Luther solemnly assures
his Elector that he had “received the Evangel, not from man, but from
heaven alone, through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This he wrote in 1522 when
on the point of quitting the Wartburg.[451]

In the same year in his “Wyder den falsch genantten geystlichen Standt,”
full of the spirit he had inhaled at the Wartburg, he declared that he
could no longer remain without “name or title” in order that he might
rightly honour and extol the “Word, office and work he had from God.”
For the Father of all Mercies, out of the boundless riches of His Grace,
had brought him, for all his sinfulness, “to the knowledge of His Son
Jesus Christ and set him to teach others until they too saw the truth”;
for this reason he had a better right to term himself an “Evangelist by
the Grace of God” than the bishops had to call themselves bishops. “I am
quite sure that Christ Himself, Who is the Master of my doctrine, calls
and regards me as such.” Hence he will not permit even “an angel from
heaven to judge or take him to task concerning his doctrine”; “since
I am certain of it I am determined to be judge, not only of you, but,
as St. Paul says (Gal. i. 8), even of the angels, so that whoever does
not accept my doctrine cannot be saved; for it is God’s and not mine,
therefore my judgment also is not mine but God’s own.”[452]

Such Wartburg enthusiasm, where all that is wanting is the actual word
revelation, agrees well with his statement about the sort of ultimatum
(“_Interminatio_”) sent him by God: “Under pain of eternal wrath it had
been enjoined on him from above,” that he must preach what had been given
him; he describes this species of vision as one of the greatest favours
God had bestowed on his soul.[453] Nor did he scruple to make use of the
word “revelation.”

The dispute he had with Cochlæus in the presence of others at Worms
in 1521 shows not only that he had sufficient courage to do this but
also, that, previously, from whatever cause, he had hesitated to do
so. We have Cochlæus’s already quoted account of the incident in
the detailed report of his encounter with Luther.[454] It is true
he only published it in 1540, but it is evidently based on notes
made by the narrator at the time. In reply to the admonition, not
to interpret Holy Scripture “arbitrarily, and against the authority
and interpretation of the Church,” Luther urged that there might be
circumstances where it was permissible to oppose the decrees of the
Councils, for Paul said in 1 Corinthians: “If anything be revealed
to another sitting, let the first hold his peace,”[455] though, so
Luther proceeded, he had no wish to lay claim to a revelation. In the
event, however, as he was always harking back to this instance of
revelation mentioned by the Apostle it occurred to Cochlæus to pin him
down to this expression. Hence, without any beating about the bush,
he asked him: “Have _you_ then received a revelation?” Luther looked
at him, hesitated a moment and then said: “Yes, it has been revealed
to me, ‘_Est mihi revelatum._’” His opponent at once reminded him
that, before this, he had protested against being the recipient of
any revelation. Luther, however, said: “I did not deny it.” Cochlæus
rejoined: “But who will believe that you have had a revelation? What
miracle have you worked in proof of it? By what sign will you confirm
it? Would it not be possible for anyone to defend his errors in this
way?” The text in question speaks of a direct revelation. It was in
this sense that Luther had appealed to it before, and that Cochlæus
framed his question. It is impossible to understand Luther’s answer
as referring to a revelation common to all true Christians. Either
Luther made no answer to Cochlæus’s last words or it was lost in
the interruption of his friend Hieronymus Schurf.[456] In any case
his position was a difficult one and it was simpler for him when he
repeated the same assertion later in his printed writings quietly to
treat all objections with contempt. At any rate he never accused the
above account given by Cochlæus of being false.

Again, in 1522, Luther declares in his sermons at Wittenberg,[457]
that “it was God Who had set him to work on this scheme” (the reform
of the faith), and had given him the “first place” in it. “I cannot
escape from God but must remain so long as it pleases God my Lord;
moreover, it was to me that God first revealed that the Word must be
preached and proclaimed to you.” Hence his revelation was similar to
that of the prophets, for he is alluding to the prophet Jonas when he
says that he could “not escape from God.”[458] The Wittenbergers, he
says, ought therefore to have consulted him before rashly undertaking
their own innovations under Carlstadt’s influence: “We see here that
you have not the Spirit though you may have an exalted knowledge of
Scripture.”[459] Hence, on the top of his knowledge of Scripture, he
himself possesses the “Spirit.”

From the twelvemonth that followed Luther’s spiritual baptism at the
Wartburg also date the asseverations he makes, that his doctrine was,
not his, but Christ’s own,[460] and that it was “certain he had his
doctrines from heaven.”[461]

“By Divine revelation,” as we learn from him not long after, “he had
been summoned as an anti-pope to undo, root out and sweep away the
kingdom of malediction” (the Papacy).[462] In 1527 he assures us:
This doctrine “God has revealed to me by His Grace.”[463] And, at a
later period, though rather more cautiously, he does not shrink from
occasionally making use of the word revelation. From the pulpit in
1532 he urged opponents in his own camp to lay aside their peculiar
doctrines, because, “God has enjoined and commanded _one man_ to teach
the Evangel,” i.e. himself.[464]

So familiar is this idea to him that it intrudes itself into his
conversations at home. It was the “Holy Ghost” who had “given” to him
his doctrine, so he told his friends and pupils in his old age.[465]
At Wittenberg, according to his own words which Mathesius noted down,
they possessed, thanks to him, the divine revelation. “Whoever, after
my death, despises the authority of the Wittenberg school, provided
it remains the same as now, is a heretic and a pervert, for in this
school God has revealed His Word.” He also complains in the same
passage that the sectarians within the new fold who turned against him
had fallen away from the faith.[466]

At that time, i.e. during the ’forties, the idea of an inspiration
grew stronger in him. He boasts that his understanding of Romans i.
17 was due to the “illumination of the Holy Ghost,” and tells how he
suddenly felt himself “completely born anew,” as if he had passed
“through the open portals into Paradise itself,” and how, “at once,
the whole of Scripture bore another aspect.”[467]

Thus his idea of the revelation with which he had been favoured
gradually assumed in his mind a more concrete shape.

According to the funeral oration delivered by his friend Jonas on
Feb. 19, 1546, at Eisleben, Luther often spoke to his friends of his
revelations, hinting in a vague and mysterious way at the sufferings
they had entailed. Jonas tells the people in so many words, “that
Martin himself had often said: ‘What I endure and have endured for
the doctrine of the beloved Evangel which God has again revealed to
the world, no one shall learn from me here in this world, but on That
Day it will be laid open.’ Only at the Last Day will he tell us what
during his life he ever kept sealed up in his heart, viz. the great
victories which the Son of God won through him against sin, devil,
Papists and false brethren, etc. All this he will tell us and also
what sublime revelations he had when he began to preach the Evangel,
so that verily we shall be amazed and praise God for them.”[468]

Hence Luther had persuaded his friends that he had been favoured with
particular revelations.

From all the above it becomes clear that the revelation which Luther
claimed was regarded by him throughout as a true and personal
communication from above, and not merely as a knowledge acquired by
reflection and prayer under the Divine assistance common to all. It was
in fact only by considering the matter in this light that he was able
effectually to refute the objections of outsiders and to allay to some
extent the storms within him. The very character of his revolt against
the Church, against the tradition of a thousand years, against the
episcopate, universities, Catholic princes and Catholic instincts of the
nation demanded something more than could have been afforded by a mere
appeal to the revelation common to all. Of what service would it have
been to him in his struggles of conscience, and when contending with the
malice and jealousy of the sects, to have laid claim to a vague, general
revelation?

Nevertheless, the appeals Luther makes to the revelation he had received
are at times somewhat vague, as some of the passages quoted serve to
prove. We shall not be far wrong if we say that he himself was often not
quite clear as to what he should lay claim. His ideas, or at any rate his
statements, concerning the exalted communications he had received, vary
with the circumstances, being, now more definite, now somewhat misty.

Here, as in the parallel case of his belief in his mission, his
assertions are at certain periods more energetic and defiant than at
others (see above, vol. iii., p. 120 ff.).

However this may be, the idea of a revelation in the strict sense was
no mere passing whim; it emerges at its strongest under the influence
of the Wartburg spirit, and, once more, summons up all its forces
towards the end of his days, when Luther seeks for comfort amid his sad
experiences and for some relief in his weariness. Yet, in him, the idea
of a revelation always seems a matter of the will, something which he can
summon to his assistance and to which he deliberately holds fast, and
which, as occasion requires, is decked out with the necessary adjuncts
of angels descending from heaven, visions, spirits, inward experiences,
inward menaces, or triumphs over the temptations of the devil.

_Some Apparent Withdrawals_

Various apparently contradictory statements, such as the reader must
expect to meet with in Luther, are not, however, wanting, even concerning
his revelations.

Discordant statements of the sort do not, indeed, occur in the passages,
where, as in the quotations given above, he is defending his theological
innovations against the authority of the Church. Often they are a mere
rhetorical trick to impress his hearers with his modesty. In his sermons
at Wittenberg in 1522, for instance, he declared that he was perfectly
willing to submit his “feeling and understanding” to anyone to whom “more
has been revealed”; by this, however, he does not mean his doctrine but
merely the practical details of the introduction of the new ritual of
public worship, then being discussed at Wittenberg. This is clear from
the very emphasis he here lays on his teaching, thanks to which the
Wittenbergers now have the “Word of God true and undefiled,” and from his
description of the devil’s rage who now sees that “the sun of the true
Evangel has risen.”[469]

Again, when, in his later revision of the same course of sermons, we hear
him say: “You must be disciples, not of Luther, but of Christ,”[470]
and: “You must not say I am Luther’s, or I am the Pope’s, for neither
has died for you nor is your master, but only Christ,”[471] he has not
the least intention of denying the authority of the doctrine revealed
to him, on the contrary, on the same page, he has it that, “Luther’s
doctrine is not his but Christ’s own”;[472] he had already said, “Even
were Luther himself or an angel from heaven to teach otherwise, let
it be anathema.”[473] He is simply following St. Paul’s lead[474] and
pointing out to his hearers the supreme source of truth; he still remains
its instrument, the “Prophet,” “Evangelist” and “Ecclesiastes by the
grace of God,” favoured, like the inspired Apostle of the Gentiles, with
revelations.

Nevertheless, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact, that, subsequent to
1525, Luther tended at times to be less insistent on his revelations.
From strategic considerations he was careful to keep more in the
background his revelations from the Spirit now that the fanatics were
also claiming their own special enlightenment by the “Spirit.” His eyes
were now opened to the danger inherent in such arbitrary claims to
revelation, and, accordingly, he now begins to insist more on the outward
“Word.”[475]

It is true, that, in Nov., 1525, in refutation of the Zwinglian
theologians of Strasburg, he still appealed not merely to his visions of
angels (see above, p. 127) but also to the certain light of his doctrine
inspired by the Holy Ghost, and to his sense of the “Spirit.” “I see
very well,” he says, “that they have no certainty, but the Spirit is
certain of His cause.”[476] Even then, however, a change had begun and
he preferred to appeal to Holy Scripture, which, so he argued, spoke
plainly in his favour, rather than to inspirations and revelations. Hence
his asseveration that this outward Word of God has much more claim to
consideration than the inward Word, which can so easily be twisted to
suit one’s frame of mind. He now comes unduly to depreciate the inward
Word and the Spirit which formerly he had so highly vaunted, though, on
the other hand, he continues to teach that the Spirit and the inward
enlightening of the Word are necessary for the interpretation of Holy
Scripture.

His Commentary on Isaias contains a delightful attack on the “all-too
spiritual folk, who, to-day, cry Spirit, Spirit!” “Let us not look
for any private revelations. It is Christ who tells us to ‘search
the Scriptures’ [John v. 39]. Revelations puff us up and make us
presumptuous. I have not been instructed,” so he goes on, “either by
signs or by special revelations, nor have I ever begged signs of God;
on the contrary I have asked Him never to let me become proud, or be
led astray from the outward Word through the devil’s tricks.” He then
launches out against those who pretend they have “particular revelations
on the faith,” being “misled by the devil.” These words occur in the
revised and enlarged Scholia on Isaias published in 1534. It may,
however, be that they did not figure in Luther’s lectures on Isaias
(1527-30) but were appended somewhat later.[477]

After thus apparently disowning any title to private revelation and
a higher light Luther’s inevitable appeal to the certainty of his
doctrine only becomes the more confident. Thanks to his temptations and
death-throes, he had become so certain, that he can declare: Possessed of
the “Word” as I am, I have not the least wish “that an angel should come
to me, for, now, I should not believe him.”

“Nevertheless, the time might well come,” so he continues in this passage
of the Table-Talk, “when I might be pleased to see one [an angel] on
certain matters.” “I do not, however, admit dreams and signs, nor do I
worry about them. We have in Scripture all that we require. Sad dreams
come from the devil, for everything that ministers to death and dread,
lies and murder is the devil’s handiwork.”[478]

It is true Luther was often plagued by terrifying dreams, and as he
numbered them among his “anxieties and death-throes” what he says about
them may fittingly be utilised to complete the picture of his inward
state. To such an extent was the devil able to affright him, so he says,
that he “broke out into a sweat in the midst of his sleep”; thus “Satan
was present even when men slept; but angels too were also there.”[479] He
assures us, that, in his sleep, he had witnessed even the horrors of the
Last Judgment.

_The “Temptations” as one of Luther’s Bulwarks_

The states of terror and the temptations he underwent were to Luther
so many confirmations of his doctrine. Some of his utterances on this
subject ring very oddly.

To be “in deaths often” was, according to him, a sort of “apostolic
gift,” shared by Peter and Paul. In order to be a doctor above
suspicion, a man must have experienced the pains of death and the
“melting of the bones.” In the Psalms he hears, as it were, an echo
of his own state of soul. “To despair where hope itself despairs,”
and “to live in unspeakable groanings,” “this no one can understand
who has not tasted it.” This he said in 1520 in a Commentary on the
Psalms.[480] And, later, in 1530, when engaged at the Coburg in
expounding the first twenty-five psalms: “‘My heart is become like
wax melting in the midst of my bowels’ [Ps. xxi. 15]. What that was
no one grasps who has not felt it.”[481] “In such trouble there must
needs be despair, but, if I say: ‘This I do simply and solely at God’s
command,’ there comes the assurance: Hence God will take your part and
comfort you. It was thus we consoled ourselves at Augsburg.”[482]

Many others who followed him were also overtaken by similar distress
of mind. Struggles of conscience and gloomy depression were the fate
of many who flocked to his standard (cp. above, vol. iv., pp. 218-27).
Johann Mathesius, Luther’s favourite pupil, so frequently referred to
above, towards the end of his life, when pastor at Joachimsthal, once
declared, when brooding sadly, that the devil with his temptations was
sifting him as it were in a sieve and that he was enduring the pangs
of hell described by David. The very mention of a knife led him to
think of suicide. He was eager to hold fast to Christ alone, but this
he could not do. After the struggle had lasted two or three months his
condition finally improved.[483]

Such were Luther’s temptations, of which, afterwards, he did not
scruple to boast. “Often did they bring us to death’s door,” he says
of the mental struggles in which his new doctrine and practice of
sheltering himself behind the merits of Christ involved him. But,
nevertheless, “I will hold fast to that Man alone, even though it
should bring me to the grave!”[484]

Again, in 1532, we hear him making his own the words: “Out of the
depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord” (Ps. cxxix. 1). The prophet
is not complaining of any mere “worldly temptations,” but of “that
anguish of conscience, of those blows and terrors of death such as the
heart feels when on the brink of despair and when it fancies itself
abandoned by God; when it both sees its sin and how all its good works
are condemned by God the angry Judge.… When a man is sunk in such
anxiety and trouble he cannot recover unless help is bestowed on him
from above.… Nearly all the great saints suffered in this way and were
dragged almost to the gates of death by sin and the Law; hence David’s
exclamation: ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord!’”—The
whole trend of what he says, likewise the counsels he gives on the
remedies that may bring consolation, show plainly his attachment to
this dark night of the soul and his conviction that he is but treading
in the footsteps of the “great Saints” and “Prophets.”[485]

At any rate there is no room for doubt that this opened out a rich
field for delusion; what he says depicts a frame of mind in which
hallucinations might well thrive; we shall, however, leave it to others
to determine how far pathological elements intervene.

In the certainty that his cause was inspired he calmly awaits the
approach of the fanatics; they can serve only to strengthen in him his
sense of confidence. Of them and their “presumptuous certainty” he makes
short work in a conversation noted down by Cordatus:[486] Marcus Thomae
(Stübner) he requests to perform a miracle in proof of his views, warning
him, however, that “My God will assuredly forbid your God to let you work
a sign”; he also hurls against him the formula of exorcism: “God rebuke
thee, Satan” (Zach. iii. 2).[487] Nicholas Storch and Thomas Münzer,
so he assures us, openly show their presumption. A pupil of Stübner was
anxious to set himself up as a teacher, but the fellow had only been able
to talk fantastic rubbish to him. Of people such as these he had come
across quite sixty. Campanus, again, is simply to be numbered among the
biggest blasphemers. Carlstadt, who wanted to be esteemed learned, was
only distinguished by his arrogant mouthing. Nowhere was there profundity
or truth. “Not one of you has endured such anxieties and temptations
as I.”[488] “And yet Carlstadt wanted us to bow to his teaching.… Like
Christ, however, I say: ‘My doctrine is not mine but his that sent me’
(John vii. 16). I cannot betray it as the world would have me do. The
malice of all these ministers of Satan only serves my cause and exercises
me in indomitable firmness.”[489] Hence he derives equal benefit from the
malice of his opponents within the fold and from the inward apprehensions
of which Satan was the cause.

The manifold errors which had sprung from the seed of his own principles,
in any other man would have elicited doubts and scruples; Luther,
however, finds in them fresh support for his dominating conviction:
My glorious sufferings at the devil’s hands are being multiplied and,
thereby, too, the witness on behalf of my doctrine is being strengthened.

The mystical halo of the “man of suffering” certainly made a great
impression on some of his young followers and admirers such as
Spangenberg, Mathesius, Cordatus and Veit Dietrich. On others of his
circle the effect was not so lasting.

Melanchthon, for instance, was well acquainted with Luther’s fits of
mystic terror, yet how severe is the criticism he passes on Luther’s
ground-dogmas, particularly after the latter’s death.

The doctrine of man’s entire unfreedom in doing what is good may serve as
an instance.

This palladium of the new theology had been discovered by Luther when
overwhelmed with despair; by it he sought to commit himself entirely
into God’s hands and blindly and passively to await salvation from Him;
this he regarded as the only way out of inward trials; no man could
face the devil with his free will; he himself, so he wrote, “would not
wish to have” free-will, even were it offered him (“_nollem mihi dari
liberum arbitrium_”), in order that he might at least be safe from the
devil; nay, even were there no devil, free-will would still be to him an
abomination, because, with it, his “conscience would never be safe and
at rest.” The words occur in the work he declared to be his very best
and a lasting heirloom for posterity.[490] This particular doctrine,
Melanchthon was, however, so far from regarding as a “revelation,” that
he wrote in 1559: “Both during Luther’s lifetime and also later, I
withstood that Stoical and Manichæan delusion which led Luther and others
to write, that all works whether good or evil, in all men whether good
or bad, take place of necessity. Now it is evident that this doctrine
is contrary to God’s Word, subversive of all discipline and a blasphemy
against God.”[491] Melanchthon did not even scruple to call upon the
State to intervene and prohibit such things being said. In his Postils,
dealing with the question whether heretics should be put to death, he
declares: “By divine command the public authorities must proceed against
idolaters and also interdict blasphemous language, as, for instance,
when a man teaches that good or evil takes place of necessity and under
compulsion.”[492]

He could not well have said anything more deadly against the foundation
on which Luther’s whole edifice was reared.

In spite of all, Luther always stood by his pseudo-mystic idea of his
having received revelations. Without it he could never have ventured to
threaten as he did the secular and ecclesiastical authorities who opposed
his dogmas, with “extermination” and “great revolts,” or to proclaim so
confidently that they would fall, blown over by the breath of Christ’s
mouth, or to prophesy that, even beyond the grave, he would be to the
impenitent Papists, what, according to the prophet Osee, God threatened
to be to Israel, viz. “a bear in the road and a lion in the path.”[493]

His whole process of thought was, as it were, held captive in the heavy
chains of this idea.

_Three Perverted Theories Dominating Luther’s Outlook_

In order to enter even more deeply into Luther’s mentality three
categories of ideas by which he determined his life well deserve
consideration here. Only at the point we have now reached can some of his
statements be judged of aright.

Among his strange ideas must be reckoned his threefold conviction, first,
that he was called to be the opponent of Antichrist, secondly, that
Popery was a thing of boundless and utter depravity, thirdly, that in
his own personal experiences and gifts he was blessed beyond all other
men. Here again we shall have to refer to many passages already quoted
and also to some fresh ones of Luther’s which afford a glimpse into his
perverted mode of thought and incredible prejudice.

His obstinate belief in his mission against Antichrist keeps the thought
of a mortal combat ever before his mind; a decisive battle at the
approaching end of all, between heaven and hell, between Christ and the
dragon. This struggle, such as he viewed it, needless to say existed only
in his imagination. If, according to him, the devil fights so furiously
that at times Christ Himself seems on the point of succumbing, this is
only because Luther’s cause does not thrive, or because Luther himself
is again the butt of gloomy fears. As early as 1518, as we know, he
fancied he had detected the Papal Antichrist, and could read the thoughts
of Satan, who was at work behind his opponents.[494] In this idea he
subsequently confirmed himself by his reading of the Old-Testament
prophecies, on which, till almost the very end of his life, he was wont
laboriously to base new calculations. From the dawn of his career it has
been borne in on him with ever-growing clearness how Christ, using Luther
as His tool, will overthrow, as though in sport, this “man of sin” of
which Popery is the embodiment; at the very close of his days, when the
sight of the evils rampant in Germany was causing him the utmost anxiety,
he seems to hear the trump that heralds the Coming of the Judge.

Using images that suggest a positive obsession, he depicts the world as
full of the traces of Antichrist and the devil his forerunner. Yet all
the machinations of the old serpent avail only to strengthen the defiance
with which he opposes Satan and all his myrmidons. The signs in the
heavens above and on the earth below all point to him, the great, albeit
unworthy, champion of God’s cause. Though Antichrist and the powers
that are his backers in this world may for the time have the better of
the struggle this is but the last flicker of the dying flame which, by
prophecy and vision, he had been predestined to extinguish (above, vol.
iii., p. 165 ff., etc.).

Hence his confidence in unveiling the action of Antichrist as portrayed
in the birth of the Monk-Calf; like some seer he hastens to pen a special
work for the instruction of the people in the meaning of the Calf’s
anatomy.[495] His growing uncanny imagination goes on to describe, in
colours more and more glaring, the abominations of that Antichrist from
whom he has torn the veil. The fury of the Turk is but child’s play to
the horror of the Papal Antichrist. That portion of the Table-Talk which
deals with Antichrist, comprising no less than 165 sections brimful of
the maddest fancies, begins with the description of Antichrist’s head.
“The head is at the same time the Pope and the Turk. A living animal must
have both soul and body. The spirit or soul of Antichrist is the Pope,
his flesh or body the Turk”;[496] the concluding words on the subject
are in the same vein: “The blood of Abel cries for vengeance on them,”
viz. on the followers of the Pope-Antichrist.[497] These chapters of the
Table-Talk dealing with Antichrist scarcely do credit to the human mind.
We can, however, understand them, for to Luther nothing is plainer than
that the “nature of his foes is utterly devilish”; all he sees is the
claws, paws, horns and poison-fangs of Antichrist.[498]

Luther revealed the anti-Christian nature of the Pope, in accordance with
the prophet Daniel whom he read on the principle: “_Sic volo, sic iubeo,
sit pro ratione voluntas_”; “Nevertheless we attach but little importance
to our deliverance and are very ungrateful. This, however, is our
consolation, viz. that the Last Day cannot now be long delayed. Daniel’s
prophecy is fulfilled to the letter and paints the Papacy as plainly as
though it had been written _post factum_.”[499]

In spite of Antichrist and “all that is mighty” the Article concerning
Holy Scripture and the Cross still holds the field. And, so Luther
proceeds in the Table-Talk, “I, a poor monk, had to come,” with “an
unfortunate nun” [Catherine Bora who doubtless was present], and “seize
upon it and hold it. Thus ‘_verbum_’ and ‘_crux_’ are the conquerors;
they make us confident.”[500]

The reason why Luther longed with such ardour for the coming of the
Last Day has already been shown to have been his growing pessimism and
the depression resulting from the sad experiences with which he had met
(above, vol. v., p. 245 ff.). In his elastic way he, however, manages,
when preaching to the people, to give a rather different reason for
his prediction of the fall of Antichrist and the coming of the end. In
Popery, he declares, we were not allowed to speak of the Last Judgment;
“how we dreaded it”; “we pictured Christ to ourselves as a Judge to Whom
we had to give account. To that we came, thanks to our works.” But now
it is quite otherwise. “Now on the contrary I should be glad if the Last
Day were to come, because there is no greater consolation.”[501] Here
he speaks as though inspired solely by the purest of intentions when he
looked forward to the coming of the vanquisher of Antichrist.

* * * * *

The wickedness of his opponents and the weapons to be used against them
constitute a second group of ideas. Here, once again, the psychological
or pathological appreciation of Luther’s strange and morbid train of
thought makes imperative a further investigation of certain points
already discussed in other connections.

Often Luther seems unable to stem the torrent of charges and insults
that streams from him as soon as adversaries appear in his field of
vision. Frequently it almost looks as though some superhuman agency
outside himself had opened the sluice-gates of his terrible eloquence.
He is determined to rage against them “even to the very grave”; his
wrath against them “refreshes his blood.” It is actually when expressing
his hatred in the most incredible language that he is most sensible of
the “nearness of God.” Do not his Popish foes deserve even worse than
he, a mere man, is able to heap on them? Those scoundrels who “only
seek a pretext for telling lies against us and misleading simple folk,
though quite well aware that they are in the wrong.”[502] Their palpable
obstinacy, in spite of their better judgment, was so great, so he argued,
that it was only because Luther advocated it that they refused to hear of
any moral reform, for instance, of the clergy marrying, etc., otherwise
they would have held it “quite all right.” He does not shrink from
demanding that such roguery should “be hunted down with hounds,” no less
than the wickedness of these “most depraved of brothel-keepers, open
adulterers, stealers of women and seducers of maidens.”[503]

The most curious thing, however, one, too, that must weigh heavily in the
balance when judging of his mental state, is that, as shown elsewhere, by
dint of repeating this he actually came to believe that his caricature
of Catholicism was perfectly true to fact. The calumnies become part of
his mental framework, the very frequency and heat of his charges blinding
him to all sense of their enormity, and clouding his outlook. What is
even worse is, that, even when he occasionally glimpses the truth he
yet believes it lawful to deviate from it where this suits his purpose.
Thus he came to formulate the dangerous theory of the lie of necessity
and the useful lie which we have already described in his own words. He
goes so far as to say, that the nature of his foes was utterly devilish
(above, p. 155, n. 4), and, when assailing the wickedness of Popery, he
considers “everything lawful for the salvation of souls” (“_omnia nobis
licere arbitramur_”).[504] Our “tricks, lies and stumblings” may “easily
be atoned for, for God’s Mercy watches over us.”[505]

On other occasions his opponents become “a pack of fools”; they deserve
nothing but scorn and no heed should be paid to their objections. Even
should the world write against him he will only pity them. All earlier
ages and “a thousand Fathers and Councils of the Church” cannot rob him
of the golden grains of truth which he alone possesses.

No sooner does he speak of the Papists and their religion, than,
irresistibly, there rises up before his mind the picture of the
“tonsures, cowls, frocks and bawling in the choir,” in short the
so-called holiness-by-works, on which he seizes to load ridicule on all
that is Popish.

This Luther is apt to do even when treating of subjects quite alien to
this sort of polemics.

In his “Von den Conciliis und Kirchen” (1539) he has a lengthy
dissertation on the marks of the Church; the subject being a wide
one he is anxious to get on with it, yet, even so, his pen again
and again wanders off into vituperation. He apostrophises himself
incidentally as follows: “But how is it that I come again to speak of
the infamous, filthy menials of the Pope? Let them begone, and, for
ever,” etc. With these words he breaks off a wild outburst in which he
had declared that the Pope and his men were persecuting the Word of
God, i.e. Luther’s doctrine, “though well aware of its truth; very bad
Apostles, Evangelists and Prophets must they be, like the devil and
his angels.”[506]

Yet, on the very next page, the same subject crops up again. A lay
figure serves to introduce it. To him Luther says: “There you come
again dragging in your Pope with you, though I wanted to have no more
to do with you. Well, as you insist on annoying me with your unwelcome
presence I shall give you a thoroughly Lutheran reception.” He then
proceeds to enlarge in “Lutheran” fashion on the fact, that the Pope
“condemns the wedded life of the bishops and priests.” “If a man
has seduced a hundred maidens, violated a hundred honourable widows
and has besides a hundred prostitutes behind him, he is allowed to
be not merely a preacher or parson but even a bishop or Pope, and
though he keeps on in his evil ways he would still be tolerated in
such an office.” “Are you not mad and foolish? Out on you, you rude
fools and donkeys!… Truly Popes and bishops are fine fellows to be
the bridegrooms of the Churches. Better suited were they to be the
bridegrooms of female keepers of bawdy houses, or of the devil’s own
daughter in hell! True bishops are the servants of this bride and she
is their wife and mistress.” According to you “matrimony is unclean,
and a merdiferous sacrament which cannot please God”; at the same
time it is supposed to be right and a sacrament. “See how the devil
cheats and befools you when he teaches you such twaddle!” Further on
he begins anew: “To violate virgins, widows and married women, to
keep many prostitutes and to commit all sorts of hidden sins, this he
is free to do, and thereby becomes worthy of the priestly calling;
but this is the sum total of it all: The Pope, the devil and his
Church are enemies to the married state as Dan. (xi. 37) says, and
are determined to abuse it in this way so that the priestly office
may not thrive. This amounts to saying that the state of matrimony is
adulterous, sinful, impure and abominated of God.”

Bidding farewell to Popery, Luther gives it a truly “Lutheran” send
off: “So for the present let us be done with the Ass-Pope and the
Pope-Ass, and all his asinine lawyers. We will now get back to our own
affairs.”

This, however, he only partially succeeds in doing. After discussing
the 6th and 7th mark of the Church the “spirit” once more seizes
him. The caricature of Popery with which he is wont to pacify his
conscience here again figures with the whole of the inevitable
paraphernalia: “[Holy] water, salt, herbs, tapers, bells, images,
Agnus Dei, pallia, altar, chasubles, tonsures, fingers, hands. Who can
enumerate them all? Finally the monks’ cowls,” etc. A page further we
again read: “Holy water, Agnus Dei, bulls, briefs, Masses and monks’
cowls.… The devil has decked himself out in them all.”

Weary as he is at the end of the lengthy work, he is still anxious to
“tread under foot the Pope, as Psalm xci. [xc., verse 13] says: ‘Thou
shalt walk upon the asp and the basilisk, and shalt trample under foot
the lion and the dragon’; this we will do with the help and strength
of the Seed of the woman that has crushed and still crushes the
serpent’s head, albeit we know that he will turn and bite our heel. To
the same blessed Seed of the woman be all praise and glory together
with the Father and the Holy Ghost, One True God and Lord for ever and
ever. Amen.”

Here, in the few pages we have selected for quotation, the whole
psychological Luther-problem unrolls itself.

In the pictures his imagination conjures up, the sacrifice of the
Mass—the most sacred mystery of Catholic worship—occupies a special
place. It is the idolatrous abomination foretold by the prophet, or
rather the idol Moasim itself (above, vol. iv., p. 524). One wonders
whether he really succeeded in persuading himself that his greatest sin,
a sin that cried to heaven for vengeance and deserved eternal damnation
(above, p. 136; cp. vol. iv., p. 509), was his having—as a monk and at
a time when he knew no better—celebrated the sacrifice of the Mass? It
is true that, in the solemn profession he makes of his belief in the
Sacrament (1528), when resolved to confess his faith “before God and the
whole world,” he says: “These were my greatest sins, that I was such a
holy monk and for over fifteen years angered, plagued and martyred my
dear Master so gruesomely by my many Masses.” The words occur at the
close of his “Vom Abendmal Christi Bekentnis,” with the asseveration,
that he would stand firm in this faith to the very end; “and were I,
which God forbid, under stress of temptation or in the hour of death to
say otherwise, then [what I might say] must be accounted as nought and I
hereby openly proclaim it to be false and to come from the devil. So help
me My Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Who is blessed for ever and ever.
Amen.”[507]

According to what he once remarked in 1531 (above, p. 136 f.) it was,
however, not the devil who was prompting him to despair by calling up his
crying sin of having said Mass. If Luther is indeed telling the truth,
and if his doings as a zealous monk really seemed to him to be his worse
sins, then we can only marvel at his confusion of mind having gone so
far. From other admissions we should rather gather that what disquieted
his conscience was more the subversion of the olden worship, the ruin of
the religious life and, in fact, the whole working of the innovations.
And yet, here, we have a solemn assurance that the very contrary was the
case.

It is in itself a problem how he contrives to make such frightful sins
of his monastic life—into which, on his own showing, he had entered
in ignorance—and of the Masses which he had said all unaware of their
wickedness.

But, in his polemics, such is the force with which he is swept along,
that he does not pause to consider his blatant self-contradictions, or
how much he is putting himself at the mercy of his opponents, or how
inadequately his rhetoric and all his playing to the gallery hides the
lack of valid proofs and the deficiencies of his reading of Scripture.

As for his foes, in his mind’s eye he sees them wavering and falling,
blown over, as it were, by the strength of his reasoning, even when they
are not overtaken and slain by the righteous judgment of God. When need
arises he has ready a list of deaths, particularly of sudden ones, by
which opponents had been snatched away.[508] The “blessed upheaval,”
however, which is one day to carry them all off together, is, so at least
his morbid fancy tells him, still delayed by his prayers.

* * * * *

As for himself personally, he stood under the spell of a train of thought
displaying pathological symptoms, which, taken in the lump, must raise
serious questions as to the nature of his changing mental state.

Being chosen by God for such great things, being not merely the “prophet
of the Germans” but also destined to bring back the Gospel to the whole
Christian world, Providence, in his opinion, has equipped him with
qualities such as have hitherto rarely graced a man. This he does not
tire of repeating, albeit he ever refers his gifts to God. He is fond
of comparing himself not merely with the Popish doctors of his day but
also with the most famous of bygone time. In the same way he is fond of
measuring foes within the fold by the standard of his own greatness. He
is thus betrayed into utterances such as one usually hears only from
those affected with megalomania; this sort of thing pleases him so well,
that, intent on his own higher mission, he fails to see the bad taste of
certain of his exaggerations and how repulsive their tone is.[509]

God at all times has saved His Church “by means of individuals and for
the sake of a few”; this Luther pointed out to his friends in 1540,
instancing Adam, Abraham, Moses, Elias, Isaias, Augustine, Ambrose and
others. “God also did something by means of Bernard and now again through
me, the new Jeremias. And so the end draws nigh!”[510] The end, however,
for which he has made everything ready, may now come quite peacefully and
speedily, for he has not merely done “something,” but “everything that
pertains to the knowledge of God has been restored”; “the Gospel has been
revealed and the Last Day is at the door.”[511]

Fancying himself the passive tool of Divine Providence, it becomes lawful
for him deliberately to scatter over the world his literary bomb-shells,
exclaiming: God wills it, for, did He not, He could prevent it! He
flings broadcast atrocious charges of a character to arouse men’s worst
passions, and, at the same time, writes to his friends: If it is too
much, God at our prayer must provide a remedy.[512] Hence it is God Who
must bear the blame for everything, seeing that He works through Luther.
God made him a Doctor of Holy Scripture, let Him therefore see to it.

He “throws down the keys at the door” of God when the work goes ill.
Why did He will it? “I cannot stop the course of events,” he says
somewhat more truly in 1525, “for matters have gone too far”; he adds,
however: “I will shut my eyes and leave God to act; He will do as He
pleases.”[513]

This way of thinking was nothing new in Luther, but may be traced in
his earliest literary efforts, which only shows how deeply it was
rooted in his mind. “In all I do I wish to be led, not by the rede and
deed of man, but by the rede and deed of God!” so he said in 1517,
when declining the advice of those who only wished to serve his best
interests; yet, in the same letter in which these words occur, he
confesses his “precipitancy, presumption and prejudice,” qualities “on
account of which he was blamed by all.”[514]

Later, too, as we know, he saw in things both great and small the hand
of God at work in him; all his efforts and even his very mistakes were
God’s, not his. It was by God that, while yet a monk, he had been
“forcibly torn from the Hours,”[515] i.e. freed from the duty of
reciting the Divine Office; God had led him like a blinkered charger
into the midst of the battle; it was God, again, Who had “flung him
into matrimony” and Who had laid upon him, the “wonderful monk,” the
burden of preaching to the great ones and the tenor of his message.
“Hence you ought to believe my word absolutely … but, even to this
day, people do not believe that my preaching is the Word of God.… But,
on it I will stake my soul, that I preach the true and pure Word of
God, and for it I am also ready to die.… If you believe it you will be
saved, if you don’t you will be damned.”[516]

Seeing the tumults and disorders that had arisen through him, he
cries: “It is the Lord Who does this”; “we see God’s plan in these
things”; “It was God Who began it”; “in our doings we are guided by
the Divine Counsel alone.”[517]

It is when in such a frame of mind that he detects those signs and
wonders that witness against his foes; given the magnitude of the war
he was waging whilst waiting for the coming of the Judge, these signs
were no more to be wondered at than the obstinacy of his foes: “Now
that the end of the world is coming the people [the Papists] storm and
rage against God most gruesomely, blaspheming and condemning the Word
of God, though knowing it to be indeed the Word and the Truth. And,
on the top of this, are the many dreadful signs and wonders in the
skies and among almost all creatures, which are a terrible menace to
them.”[518]

Though quite full of the idea that his own doctrine was alone right,
yet, as already shown, he went in early days so far as to grant to every
man freedom of belief and the right to read Scripture according to his
lights; for to him every Christian is a judge of Holy Scripture, a doctor
and a tool of the Holy Ghost. The assumption underlying this, viz. that,
in spite of all, the necessary unity of doctrine would be preserved, is
not easy to explain. When, however, experience stepped in and disproved
the assumption, Luther’s behaviour became even more inexplicable.
He was by nature so disposed to ignore the claims of logic that the
contradiction between his demand that all should bow to his doctrine,
and such theories as that the Bible is, for all, the true and only fount
of knowledge, and that no other outward ecclesiastical authority exists,
never seems to have troubled him. Though he claimed to be the “liberator
of minds and consciences,” he, nevertheless, called on the authorities to
put down all other doctrines.[519]

The dignity of his chair at Wittenberg is exalted by him to giddy
heights. “This university and town,” he said of Wittenberg, may vie with
any others. “All the highest authorities of the day are at one with
us, like Amsdorf, Brenz and Rhegius. Such men are our correspondents.”
In comparison, the sects are simply ludicrous in their insignificance.
Woe to those within the fold who dare to run counter to Luther, “like
‘Jeckel’ and ‘Grickel’; they imagine that they alone are clever and
that they, like ‘Zwingel’ also, never learnt anything from us! Yet who
knew anything 25 years ago? Who stood by me 21 years since, when God,
against both my will and my knowledge, led me into the fray? Alas, what
a misfortune is ambition!” This he said in 1540,[520] but already eight
years before he had complained bitterly: “Each one wants to make himself
out to be alone in knowing everything.… Everywhere we find the same
Master Wiseacre, who is so clever that he can lead a horse by its tail.”
Though one alone has received from God the mission of preaching the
Gospel, yet “there are others, even among his pupils, who think they know
ten times more about it than he.… Then, hey presto, another doctrine is
set up.”[521] “Deadly harm” to Christianity is the result; nevertheless,
according to Christ’s prophecy, “factions and sects” there must be; but
their source is and remains the devil[522]—who, according to Luther, is
the true God of this world in which indeed his finger can everywhere be
seen. (See above, vol. v., p. 275 ff.)

Strange indeed is the frame of mind here presented to the observer. So
much is Luther the plaything of his fancy and the feeling of the moment,
that, at times he seems the victim of a sort of self-suggestion and to be
following blindly the idea which happens to hold the field.

His judgment being seen to be so confused, it becomes easier to estimate
at their right value certain of his ideas, particularly his conviction
that he and his cause owed their preservation to a series of palpable
miracles. He contrived to spread among his pupils the belief that “holy
Luther” was the greatest prophet since the time of the Apostles.[523] Yet
anyone who reflects how Luther could devote a special tract to proving
that so everyday an occurrence as the “escape” of a nun from her convent
was worthy of being deemed a great miracle for all time, can only marvel
at the facility with which Luther could delude himself.[524]

_Other Abnormal Lines of Thought and Behaviour_

Luther’s action presents many other problems to the psychologist, for
instance, in its waverings and contradictions. Strong in his belief in
his Divine mission, he roundly abuses kings and princes in the vilest
terms, and yet, at the same time, he teaches respect and obedience
towards them and even sets himself up as a model in this respect, all
according to his mood and as they happen to be favourable to him or
the reverse. On the one hand, he presumes to incite the people to acts
of violence, and, on the other, he preaches no less cogently the need
of calmness and submission. He boasts of the courage with which he had
dashed into the very jaws of Behemoth, and of his utter contempt for his
foes; yet this same Luther is obsessed by the idea that his own life is
threatened by poison and sorcery, just as his party is menaced by the
hired assassins of the monks and Papists. While he extols the University
of Wittenberg as the bulwark of theological unity, he is at the same time
so distrustful of the doctrine of his friends that his intercourse with
them suffers, and, to at least one of his intimates, Wittenberg becomes a
“cave of the Cyclops.”

Such contradictions and many of the like combined to induce in him an
abnormal state of mind. Harmony and consistency of thought and feeling
was something he never knew. Hence the charge brought against him, not
merely by opponents, but even by many of his own followers, viz. of being
muddled, illogical and not sure of his ground.

While he is perfectly able at times to speak and write with such
candour and truth that one cannot but admire the wholesome sense, and
sober, witty, cheery style of his literary productions, yet their tone
and character change entirely as soon as it becomes a question of his
polemics or of his Evangel. Then his mind becomes overcast, his thoughts
pursue one another like storm-clouds, assuming meanwhile the strangest
shapes and the reader is over whelmed by a torrent of mingled abuse
and paradox. His very proofs are caught up in the whirl and become so
distorted that it is often impossible even to tell whether they are meant
in earnest or are merely in the nature of a challenge.

According to Luther, to mention only a few of the strangest of his
sayings, his doctrine of justification and the forgiveness of sins is
present “in all creatures” and is confirmed by analogy.[525] The very
doctrine of creation rests on the doctrine of justification as on “its
foundation.”[526] “If the article of our souls’ salvation is embraced
and adhered to with a firm faith, then the other articles follow
naturally, for instance, that of the Trinity.”[527]

Marriage he finds stamped on the whole of nature, “even on the hardest
stones.” New-born infants he assumes capable of eliciting an act of
faith in baptism; simply because he could not otherwise defend against
the Anabaptists the traditional infant baptism and at the same time
maintain that the efficacy of the sacraments depends on faith. His
doctrine of the spiritual omnipresence of the body of Christ is an
absurdity involving the presence of Christ in all food; but even this
is not too much for him if it enables him to defend his theory of the
Supper. His imputation-theory led him to that considered utterance
which has shocked so many: “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe
more boldly still.”[528] “_Sic volo, sic iubeo, sit pro ratione
voluntas_,” was elsewhere his answer to another objection.[529]

He made no odds about declaring rhetorically, of all classes of men
and all branches of religious knowledge: that, “in a word, before
me no one knew anything.”[530] Of the daring eloquence he can use
when expressing such ideas we have a sample in the statement: “Were
the Papists, particularly those who are now bawling at me in their
writings, all stamped together in the wine-press and then boiled down
and distilled seven times over, not a quarter would be left capable
of using their tongues to teach even one article [of the Catechism],
nor from the whole of their doctrine could so much be drawn as would
serve to teach a manservant how to behave in God’s sight towards his
master or a maid towards her mistress.”[531] He alone, Luther, it was,
who had brought to all ranks and classes throughout the world “a good
conscience and order.”[532]

Finally we have the paradox apparent in his practical instructions and
the curious behaviour into which his belief in his mission occasionally
led him. We may recall the means to be employed for overcoming
temptations, one of the mildest of which was a good drink,[533] and the
measures to be taken to induce peace of soul. “Break out into abuse,”
such is his advice, and that will bring inward peace.[534] If this does
not work, then coarse humour will often succeed, one of those jests, for
instance, where the sacred and sublime is vulgarised simply to raise
a laugh. “Against the devil Luther makes use of ‘stronger buffoonery’
and dismisses him curtly, nay, often rudely.”[535] Pointless jests
often spoil the force of his words. For instance, he found himself in
a difficulty about the second wife whom one of Carlstadt’s followers,
acting on Luther’s own principles, wished to take in addition to his
ailing spouse; whilst stipulating that the man must first “feel his
conscience assured and convinced by the Word of God,” and doing his
best to dissuade him from taking such a step, Luther adds in a jesting
tone, that it were perhaps better to let the matter take its course, as
at Orlamünde (under the rule of Carlstadt and his Old-Testament ideas)
they would soon be introducing circumcision and the Mosaic Law in its
entirety.[536]

His instability of mind and ever-changing feeling ended by impressing a
peculiar stamp on his whole mentality.

At one time he is delighted to see all things subject to the new Evangel,
and extols the gigantic success of his efforts; at another he complains
bitterly that the world is turning its back on the Word and deserting
the little flock of true Evangelicals. Thus the world could promptly
assume in his mind quite contradictory aspects. Of his alternating moods
of confidence and despair he told his friends: “My moods vary quite a
hundred times a day—nevertheless I stand up to the devil.”[537] Hence he
was aware of his vacillations, though on the same occasion he declares
that he knows right well how Holy Scripture strengthens him against
them. He also feels and acknowledges his inconsistency, in being, for
all his changeableness, so rigid and obstinate in his dealings with his
friends. They knew his character, he said, and called it “obstinate.”[538]

Profound depression can alone account for the step he took in 1530, when,
for a while, he discontinued his sermons at Wittenberg because he was
sick of the indifference of his hearers to the Word of God and disgusted
with their conduct. The editor of the sermons of this year, which have
only recently been published, remarks justly, that “the only possible
explanation of this step is a pathological one.”[539] Luther even went
so far as to declare from the pulpit that he was “not going to be a
swine-herd.”[540] Yet, a little after, during the journey to the Coburg,
a sudden change occurred, and we find Luther making jokes and writing in
a quite optimistic vein, and, no sooner had he reached his new abode,
than he plunged into new literary labours. Nevertheless, whilst at the
Castle, he was again a victim of intense depression, was visited by
Satan’s “embassy” and even vouchsafed a glimpse of the enemy of God. On
his departure from the Coburg good humour again got the better of him,
as we see from his jovial letter to Baumgärtner of Oct. 4, 1530, and on
reaching Wittenberg, he was soon up to his ears in work, so that he could
write: “I am not only Luther, but Pomeranus, Vicar-General, Moses, Jethro
and I know not who else besides.”[541] The facility with which his moods
altered is again apparent when, in his last days, he left Wittenberg
in disgust only to return again forthwith in the best of spirits. (See
below, xxxix., 1.)

Yet in his attitude to the olden Church this same man, who otherwise
shows himself so instable, knows how to display such defiant obstinacy
that Protestants who look too exclusively at this side of his character
have even been able to speak of his inflexible firmness. What steels him
here is his ardent belief in his calling.

The idea of his vocation ever serves to help him over his difficulties.
An instance of that marvellous elasticity of mind with which he seizes
on his calling to pacify both himself and his friends, is to be found in
an intimate conversation held after the “greatest of his temptations”
in 1527, and recorded by Bugenhagen. After Luther had declared that he
saw nothing to regret in his severity towards his foes he went on to
speak, with tears in his eyes, of the sects that would spring up and
which his friends would not be able to withstand. He proceeded to admit
that “he was sorry if he had given scandal by his buffoonery and by
his vituperation,[542] but that the cause could not be displeasing to
the pious, for he loved mankind [this is Bugenhagen’s remark] too much
and was an enemy to all hypocrisy.” “God had not ordained” that he, so
Luther here declares, “should appear as a stern and austere figure. The
world finds no sins (‘_crimina_’) wherewith to reproach me, but, because
it follows its own judgment, it takes great offence at me, as I see.
Possibly,” so he goes on, “God wishes to delude the blind and ungrateful
world (‘_mundum stultum facere_’) so that it may perish in its contempt
and never see what excellent gifts God has bestowed on me alone out of
so many thousands, wherewith I am to minister unto those who are His
friends. Thus the world, which refuses to acclaim the word of salvation
which God sends through me, will find in me, according to the divine
counsel, what offends it and is to it a stumbling-block. For this God
is answerable; for I shall pray that I may never be to any a cause of
scandal by my sins.”

“This I learnt with wondrous joy from his own lips,” adds
Bugenhagen.[543] Others will, however, find Luther’s enigmatical train of
thought more difficult to understand.

* * * * *

The above are but a few instances of an abnormal turn of mind; of the
like the present work contains others in abundance. Anyone desirous of
penetrating further into the folds and windings of a mind so involved
should study Luther’s letters, particularly those dating from 1517 to
1522 and from 1540 to 1546. He will there find much of the same sort,
which can hardly be termed either sane or reasonable; but even the
passages we have quoted suffice to reveal in him an uncanny power of
self-deception such as few historic characters display. Many a great
genius has betrayed psychological peculiarities, indeed it seems at
times to be the fate of those endowed with eminent gifts to overstep
the boundaries and to venture further than the reason and reflection
of thinking men can follow.[544] That Luther carried certain mental
peculiarities to their utmost limit is plain from what we have seen, nor
can it be right to close one’s eyes to the fact.

Luther showed the defects of a “genius” not least in his vituperation
and in the other far from commendable methods he used in his polemics.
It was precisely these defects which led Erasmus to question whether he
was quite in his right mind. “Had a man said this in the delirium of
fever, could he have uttered anything more insane?” Thus Erasmus in his
“Hyperaspistes.”[545] He often speaks of his opponent’s feverish fancies.
He denies that his spirit is a “sober” one, and maliciously supposes
that he was drunk. In spite of his usual moderation and reticence, the
scholar, when dealing with Luther’s assertions, constantly uses such
words as “_delirus_,” “_insanus_,” “_lymphatus_,” “_sine mente_,” “_mera
insania_.” On one occasion he says of the “devils, spectres, ‘_lamiæ_,’
‘_megæræ_’ and other more than tragic words” which Luther was addicted to
flinging at his foes, that such a habit was a “sign of coming madness”
(“_venturæ insaniæ præsagia_”); elsewhere he views with misgiving the
sort of compulsion (“_non agere sed agi_”) which urges Luther to abuse
all who differ from him.[546]

In other circles, too, the opinion prevailed that Luther was suffering
from some sort of mental disease. We may recall the remarks of Boniface
Amerbach, who was not unkindly disposed to Luther, in sending the
latter’s tract of 1534 against Erasmus, to his brother Basil (above, vol.
iv., p. 183).

In Luther’s immediate surroundings we also find traces of a fear that the
Master stood in some danger of losing his mind.

A thoroughgoing investigation of the matter by some unbiassed expert in
mental diseases would, however, be of immeasurably greater value than the
mere opinions of contemporary admirers and opponents. But the difficulty
is to find an impartial expert. Protestant theologians will not easily be
found ready to agree with Catholic writers regarding the process which
made of a quondam monk the founder of the Protestant faith, or to see
Luther’s scruples in quite the same light. Entire agreement would seem
for ever excluded, owing to differences of outlook so deep-seated. If,
to some, Luther appears as a “new Paul,” and as one who removed every
obstacle to free religious research, then the view they take of his
inward change and later spiritual life must perforce be coloured to some
extent by this idea.

Nor must the fact be lost to sight that many of the apparently suspicious
symptoms were, in Luther’s case, quite wilful. Thus his outbreaks of
fury against Popery, the psychological origin of which we have already
described (vol. iv., p. 306 ff.), are largely an outcome of the feelings
of hatred he deliberately encouraged, and a reaction against his earlier
and better convictions. Again, self-deception and lack of self-control,
i.e. moral elements, played a great part in him. Since, however, even at
the outset of his career he already displayed these moral defects, they
must be carefully distinguished from his morbid states and no less from
his doubts and remorse of conscience.

At the very least, however, we should give to the purely historical facts
such unbiassed, broadminded recognition as that editor of the great
Weimar Edition of Luther’s works (see above, p. 168), who, as we heard,
spoke of the “pathological” explanation of certain acts and statements
of Luther’s as the only one possible. The word “pathological,” and other
similar ones, had, however, been used even earlier, and, that, even by
non-Catholics, as descriptive of certain of Luther’s states, nor was
the remark entirely new, that in many a great genius we find something
pathological.[547]

5. Luther’s Psychology according to Physicians and Historians

It is not our intention in the following to criticise the opinions
quoted; they have been collected chiefly with the object in view of
providing those qualified to judge with matter on which to exercise their
wits. Nevertheless, we have no intention of depriving ourselves of the
right of making occasional observations. Thus Hausrath’s opinion, to be
given immediately, calls for some revision, as will be clear even to the
lay mind. No disturbance of Luther’s intellectual functions or mental
malady amounting to actual “psychosis” can be assumed at any period of
his life. This, however, is a quite different thing from admitting that
his case was not entirely normal.

“The psychology of men, who, like him, are engaged in such a struggle,”
rightly remarks a Protestant theologian, “is exceedingly complicated.
Discrepancies are to be met with side by side, and, according to the
circumstances, now one element now another comes to the fore.”[548] In
Luther’s case the co-existence of bouts of illness with the unfettered
use of his powers, of fundamental delusions with true though misapplied
ideas, of frivolity, sensuality and temptations to despair, and, on the
top of all this, the contradictory statements he himself makes about
himself, i.e.—he, the only man who could have told us how the facts
really stood—all these circumstances render any sure conclusion extremely
difficult.

No Protestant hitherto has used terms so strong to describe Luther’s
overwrought nerves as his most recent biographer, Hausrath, the
Heidelberg theologian, in his first edition of his “Life of Luther.”
His assertions do undoubtedly err on the side of exaggeration.[549] For
instance, when he says, that, owing to his illness in the monastery
Luther had more than once been in danger of sinking into “the abyss of
religious melancholia.”[550] Erroneously regarding the “temptations”—in
reality mere remorse of conscience—from which Luther suffered, as the
outcome of his morbid bodily and mental state, he even ventures to hint
expressly at the nature of the malady: “The regularity with which the
attacks return during all the years spent in the monastery and after he
had commenced his public career, leads us to infer a recurrent psychosis,
the attacks of which became less frequent after his marriage, but never
altogether ceased.”[551]

In recent times, apart from Hausrath, two other writers, both of them
non-Catholics, have looked more closely into Luther’s pathology. Dr.
Berkhan in an article in the “Archiv für Psychiatrie” entitled “Die
nervösen Beschwerden Luthers,” and Gustav Kawerau in the study “Etwas
vom kranken Luther,” printed in the “Deutsch-evangelische Blätter.” The
two Protestants, Küchenmeister and Ebstein, who also dealt with Luther’s
maladies,[552] failed to discuss the psychological phenomena here under
consideration; what interested them was more Luther’s ordinary illnesses
though, it is true, they bring forward various data which may prove of
interest here; these, nevertheless, must be cautiously used, as the
authors are somewhat deficient in historical criticism. Older writers
who treated of Luther’s illnesses, e.g. the Protestant pastor Friedrich
Siegmund Keil, Garmann, the Chemnitz physician and an anonymous writer in
the “Neues Hannöversche Magazin” are even less satisfactory.

Of the two first mentioned, Kawerau supplies a careful review of those
statements of Luther’s which concern his nervous maladies, not, however,
carrying them back to his earliest years. He gives us the picture “of
a man occupying a most responsible position, ever in friction with his
surroundings” and “in a state of nervous overstrain due to too much
work of body and mind.”[553] With these words he seeks to pave the way
for a psychological appreciation of all that, as he says, “so often
appears repulsive or regrettable in Luther, for instance, his waxing
irritability, his unbridled anger, the excesses he commits by word and
pen, and his sudden changes of mood.” He even opines that “the spiritual
temptations may be accounted for by his all-too-great labours and
anxieties, and their effect upon his constitution”;[554] his conclusion
is that a fuller knowledge of Luther’s ailments “helps us to understand
him aright and better to appreciate his greatness.”[555]

The other writer, Dr. Berkhan, a Brunswick physician, had, previous
to Kawerau, attempted to lift the veil which shrouds the “anomalies”
presented by Luther; he did not, however, properly sift his materials,
nor did he consider the various symptoms in their complexus.[556] He
comes to the conclusion that some of Luther’s troubles, for instance,
his “hallucinations,” “must be ascribed to an affection of the nerve
centres.” These “hallucinations” he attributes to “fluxions” due to
overwork. Such hallucinations, according to him, were, in Luther’s case,
of two kinds; some optical and some auditory. They were induced, so he
thinks, not only by the permanent excitement of Luther’s life, but also
by “his doubts and controversies.” What Luther terms temptations Berkhan
also regards as, in the main, mere psychic depression bound up with nerve
disturbance. In view of certain other symptoms he diagnoses a case of
præcordial trouble.[557]

After Kawerau and Berkhan we must refer to P. J. Möbius, the Leipzig
expert in mental ailments. He is known in connection with his highly
original studies on Rousseau, Goethe, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; on
Luther he has not expressed his views at any great length, but, such as
they are, they are drastic enough.[558]

Möbius points out[559] that “in Luther’s case the pathological element
is of the utmost significance.” “Even Luther’s recent biographer,
Professor Hausrath,” he writes, “spoke of ‘recurrent psychosis.’[560]
According to what Kraepelin now says, it would be better to term it a
mild form of maniacal depression.[561] The main point is that Luther,
from his youth upwards, suffered at times from the dumps without any
apparent cause, was oppressed with gloomy forebodings, sadness, fear
and despair. The melancholic phases may easily be traced throughout
Luther’s life; probably, too, the periods when he felt his power and
gave vent to his boundless wrath should be regarded as morbid and
maniacal. We may take it that, in Luther’s case, the morbid mood
made the illness, and that his fantastic interpretation of certain
incidents—combats with the devil, intercourse with spirits and Divine
inspirations—are to be explained, not as delusions, but as the
explanations he sought in the ideas then current.”

“The present writer,” continues Möbius, “does not in the least believe
that Luther suffered from hallucinations. It seems always to have been
a case of placing a superstitious interpretation on real phenomena.
The black pig in the garden and the black dog on his bed, were, most
likely, of flesh and blood. In many instances (the wrestling with
the demon, and so forth) the language is simply figurative. With
Luther the pathological element made history. His morbid fear led
him to brood over justification; the sense of his own utter weakness
convinced him that man can do nothing of his own strength and by
his own works, and that the only possible course is to stretch out
yearning hands and seize on Grace. In his melancholic state he fell
in with the doctrine of justification by faith alone of St. Paul (who
himself suffered from the same ailment [!]), and, around this centre,
his theological ideas grouped themselves, and, with ‘_sola fides_’ as
his war-cry, he proceeded to do battle with the ancient Church. Thus,
from the monk’s melancholia, sprang the Reformation.”

Proceeding on similar lines, Professor Willy Hellpach, of Carlsruhe,
observed in the Berlin “Tag” (“Psychologische Rundschau,” Jan. 18,
1912): “Several years ago the Jesuit scholar, Pater Grisar, published
in the ‘Kölnische Volkszeitung’ an article entitled ‘Ein Grundproblem
aus Luthers Seelenleben.’ Of this work Möbius said, and quite rightly,
that it was the best account so far given of the pathology of Luther’s
mind. That Luther’s mind was at times morbidly depressed without any
reasonable cause has never been doubted by any who knew him, even when
they happened to be Evangelicals. Hausrath, in his biography, had
spoken of ‘recurrent psychosis’ a statement, which, it is true, he
modified later on account of the storm of indignation which broke out
among those queer folk who seem to look upon a gifted man’s malady as
a worse blot than the greatest crime.” Hellpach points out that laymen
are wrong when they imagine that “psychosis” involves “an absolute
derangement of the power of thought.”

Wilhelm Ebstein, a Professor of Medicine,[562] recently, and not without
reason, registered a protest against the view of those who maintain that
Luther was actually out of his mind. Himself interested in the treatment
of cases of gout and calculus, he comes to the conclusion that Luther’s
chief sufferings were caused by uric acid and faulty digestion, the two
together constituting the principal trouble, and being accompanied, as
is so often the case with gout, by “neurasthenic symptoms which at times
recall psychosis”;[563] his “hypochondriacal depression which passed
all bounds” was entirely due to these ailments. Not only these “nervous
symptoms,” but also the other ailments of which Luther had to complain,
his palpitations, headaches, dizziness, sore-throat, defective hearing,
impaired digestion, fainting fits, and particularly his oppression in the
region of the heart and the feelings of fear which accompanied it, all
these were, according to Ebstein, due more or less to gout and the other
troubles resulting from the presence of uric acid.[564]

There can be no doubt that this learned physician gives us many useful
observations, but he has not himself selected his historical matter
and carefully tested its source. Much of it comes from Küchenmeister,
whereas, at the present stage of research, a medical opinion, to carry
real weight, must necessarily enter at greater length into the facts
more recently brought to light. Some of Küchenmeister’s opinions have,
however, been revised by Ebstein, and not without good reason.

Among those of Ebstein’s statements that must be characterised
as historically untenable are the following, viz. that Luther’s
hallucinations and visions occurred “almost without exception at a
time when he was yet under the influence of the asceticism of the
monastery, with its night-vigils, spiritual exercises and strenuous
mental labours,” i.e. in his Catholic days; likewise, that, in the
monastery, he had striven “most diligently to outdo the other monks in
the matter of fasting, watching,” etc.; that, in later days, he had
“_always_ been able to master his morbid states, and to bid defiance
to his moods of depression,” and that these latter had “in no way
detracted” from his mental labours; that his method of controversy had
never been a morbid one, as Küchenmeister had asserted on insufficient
grounds, and that, when even Luther referred to mental sufferings and
temptations, his “bodily ailments” _always_ occupied the first place
and constituted the leading factor.[565]

His theory that Luther suffered from gout is also eminently doubtful.

Of any symptoms of gout, for instance, of gouty swellings, we hear
nothing from Luther[566] though he was wont to expatiate on his
complaints, and though, according to Ebstein, he possessed a “rare
knowledge of medical matters.”[567] Nor did Luther permanently suffer
from sluggishness and constipation of the bowels; we hear of it only
at Worms and at the Wartburg in 1521, and then again in 1525. To put
down “his moodiness, melancholia and depression” as Ebstein terms the
remorse of conscience experienced in 1528 at the time of his greatest
“temptations” to an attack of piles, described by Luther in a letter
to his friend Jonas on Jan. 6, 1528, is to misapprehend the facts of
the case; for, actually, it was three years before this that Luther
had for a while been troubled with hæmorrhoids, as is evident both
from the text of the inquiry made by Jonas (“_ante triennium_”), and
from Luther’s answer: “My illness _was_ as follows,” etc.[568]

Moreover, Luther was not suffering from stone in 1521, and it is only
in 1526 that we hear him speaking of it for the first time; after this
the malady was for a long time in abeyance,[569] until, between 1537
and 1539, it once more attacked him severely; it is again referred to
in 1543.

Hence we must still await a more accurate medical diagnosis to
determine—if indeed this be possible—how far the history of Luther’s
outward and inward troubles was dependent on uric acid.[570] Maybe,
eventually, greater stress than hitherto will be laid on Luther’s
heart troubles; if so, then it will become necessary to find out what
the so-called “cardiogmus” was, from which, according to Melanchthon,
Luther suffered severely early in 1545; for, in his friend’s opinion,
it was to this that Luther’s death later on was due.[571] Ebstein
himself says of the oppression in the region of the heart and the
resultant anxiety[572] from which Luther suffered, until his death
was ultimately brought about by “heart failure,” that it “leads us
to diagnose some heart affection”; this, according to his theory,
was due, in part directly to gout, in part also to the obstinate
constipation which accompanied it. According to him the periodic
attacks of heart-oppression suggest heart asthma or angina pectoris,
which, notoriously, often co-exists with gout.

As regards Luther’s mental sufferings, Ebstein will not hear of Berkhan’s
hypothesis of “fluxions”; he himself, however,—and herein lies his
principal fault,—does not make sufficient account of his patient’s
frequent nervous states. He thinks that Luther’s black outlook, which,
according to him, resulted from gout, was not bound up directly with
any sufferings.[573] As regards the “hallucinations of sight and
hearing,”[574] which Luther regarded as the work of the devil, he
declares, that Luther, from time to time, fell into a condition of
“weakness and irritability which make the temporary disturbance of his
brain-powers quite intelligible”; as to the cause of the lapses, Ebstein
finds it in “the strenuous mental labour” leading to a “condition of
inanition.”[575] He also allows, that, even as a monk, and in early
life, Luther was a victim of moodiness.[576] He is, however, quite right
when he says: “Insanity cannot be thought of, nor even epilepsy.”[577]
In his admiration for Luther, he also credits him with having in his
lifetime endured “more days of suffering than of well-being.” To make
this statement entirely true it would, however, be necessary to include
amongst the days of suffering, those when he was so paralysed by remorse
of conscience as to be incapable of work. At any rate we quite admit with
Ebstein that, in Luther, we have “a man, during a great part of his life,
sorely tried by bodily ailments,”[578] a fact which can only make one
wonder the more at the extent of his labours.

* * * * *

To pass now to some older Catholic writers. In 1874 Bruno Schön, of
Vienna, published an essay in which he depicted Luther as mentally
deranged.[579]

The author, who was chaplain to a lunatic asylum, was not merely no
historian and still less an expert in mental disease, but lacked even
a proper acquaintance with Luther’s life and writings. His historical
groundwork he took from second-rate works, and his opinion was biassed
by his conviction that Luther could not but be insane. He makes no
real attempt to prove such a thing; all he does is to give us an
account, clothed in psychiatric terminology, of the different forms
of madness from which Luther suffered; in the first place he was
afflicted with megalomania and the mania of persecution, two forms of
insanity frequently found together.—But nervous irritability, anxiety,
moodiness, excitability, a too high opinion of himself, perversion
of judgment and even hallucinations—could such be proved in Luther’s
case—all these would not entitle us to say that he was ever really
insane. Nervous derangement, says Kirchhoff, is not psychosis, and
people subject to hallucinations are not always insane.[580]

Long before this other Catholic writers had instanced certain
peculiarities in Luther’s mental state, though they, like almost all
recent writers, with the exception of Hausrath, were ignorant of one
of the most remarkable elements to be taken into consideration, viz.
the fits of terror to which Luther had been subject from early youth.
The treatment of this matter was made all the harder by the fact that
Luther’s extravagant after-accounts of his life in the monastery, and
the growth of his ideas, were received with too much credulity, and that
his letters, his Table-Talk and many details of his life were but little
known.

Maximilian Prechtl, Abbot of Michaelfeld (†1832), though he refuses
to regard Luther as insane, nevertheless calls attention to the many
“phantoms of a sick brain” which he had seen; “Luther believed,”
so he says, “that he often saw the devil, and that under different
shapes.”[581] The learned Abbot brought out a new annotated edition of
Luther’s “Against the Papacy founded by the Devil,” which he published
at the time of the Reformation-Festival in 1817, in order to show the
mad fury, hate and mental confusion to which its author had fallen a
victim. Luther’s writing betrays, so he opines, “no common fury but the
insane passion of the man, then almost at death’s door.”[582] Too great
stress must not be laid on some of the opinions he here advances, which
overstep the limits he himself had traced and appear to credit Luther
with insanity. Prechtl spoke out more strongly in his “Rejoinder” to the
attacks made on his remarks. He emphasises “the incontrovertible proofs”
to be found in Luther “of a troubled fancy,” and asserts that “he was not
always in his right mind.”

Somewhat earlier, in 1810, the Catholic layman Friedrich von Kerz, who
continued Stolberg’s “Geschichte der Religion Christi,” published a book
“Über den Geist und die Folgen der Reformation” in which he comes to a
far too unfavourable opinion of Luther’s mental state, which he seeks to
bolster up by statements incapable of historical proof. In a nutshell,
what he tentatively advances is, that, “owing to the shock following the
death of a friend struck down at his side, Luther had lost his reason”;
“the symptoms of a twisted mind soon became apparent.” “Luther not seldom
appears in the light of an inexplicable moral enigma, so that we are
led, not indeed willingly, to wonder whether a certain recurrent mental
aberration and periodic madness was not in reality the first and perhaps
the only source of his vocation as a Reformer, of all his public acts
and of the greater part of his reforms.”[583]

As against Kerz, Schön and even Prechtl, we must urge that we have no
proof that Luther was actually the slave of his morbid fancies, or
mentally diseased; no such proof to support the hypothesis of insanity
is adduced by any of the writers named. Of the temporary clouding of the
mind they make no mention.

As for the kind of megalomania met with in Luther, when he insists on
his being the mouthpiece of revelation, this is not the sort usual in
the case of the mentally deranged, when the patient appears to be held
captive under the spell of his delusion. Luther often wavered in his
statements regarding his special revelation, indeed sometimes went so
far as to deny it; in other words he was open to doubt. Moreover, at the
very times when he clung (or professed to cling) to it with the greatest
self-complacency, he was suffering from severe attacks of depression,
whereas it is not usual for megalomania and depression to exist side
by side. As for the periodic fits of insanity suggested by Hausrath
his moods alternated too rapidly. His morbid ideas do not constitute a
paranoic system of madness, and still less is it possible to attribute
everything to mere hypochondriacal lunacy.

The theory of Luther’s not being a free agent is excluded not only by his
doubts and remorse of conscience, but also by the bitter determination
with which at the very beginning he persuades himself of his ideas,
insists upon them later when doubts arise, and finally surrenders himself
to their spell by systematic self-deception. Such behaviour does not
accord with that of a man who is not free. It must also be noted that
the morbid symptoms of which Schön speaks, in whatever light they be
regarded, do not occur simultaneously; some disappear while others become
more marked as time goes on. This, however, also makes it difficult and
wellnigh impossible to discover what were the components which originally
went to make up Luther’s mentality before it had been seared by the
errors and inward commotion of his later passionate life. Above all a
fact repeatedly pointed out already must not be overlooked, viz. that,
throughout, wilful giving way to passion, lack of self-control and too
high an opinion of himself, united with self-deception played a great
part with him, particularly in those outbreaks of fury against Pope and
Papists in which one might be tempted to see the work of a maniac. In
view of Luther’s aptitude to pass rapidly from craven fear to humorous
self-confidence it would be necessary in order to prove his insanity,
to show clearly as far as possible—a demonstration which has not yet
been attempted—that periods of depression or fear really alternated with
periods of exaltation, and what the duration of these periods was.

We cannot too much impress on those who may be inclined to assume that,
at least at times, Luther was not in his right mind the huge and truly
astounding powers of work displayed by the man. Only comparatively
seldom do we hear of his being disinclined to labour or incapable of
work, and almost always the reason is clear. Even were the advocates
of intermittent insanity ready to allow the existence of lengthy lucid
intervals still so extraordinary a power for work would prevent our
agreeing with them any more than with Schön, Möbius, Hausrath and the
older authors referred to above.

As to the question of the possibility of such a disability having been
inherited either from his father or his mother—a matter into which modern
psychiaters are always anxious to inquire: Here, again, we find nothing
to support the theory of mental derangement. Hans Luther, his father,
was a stern, rude man of violent temper, and his wife, Margaret, would
also appear to have been a harsh woman, without any joy in life and
displaying small traces of the more winning traits of affection. Neither
of the pair did much to sweeten the lad’s hard boyhood and youth. This
certainly explains to some extent the thread of depression and pessimism
which runs side by side with the lively and more cheerful one in the
monk and university professor. Of greater importance to the question
in hand is the irritability and violence of temper which showed itself
in his father. If the latter really committed manslaughter in a fit of
anger, as seems probable, and as has also been admitted by Protestant
scholars,[584] then the son’s irritability, and his startling tendency
to break out into foaming rage against his opponents, may doubtless be
traced back in part to the effects of heredity. In 1906 the fact came
to light that another Hans Luther, besides Martin’s father, resided at
Mansfeld, and the latter, according to the records of the law-courts,
would appear to have borne a bad character and to have been frequently
punished for brawling and for being too ready with his knife. If the
latter, as the name would imply, was a relative of Martin’s we have
here one more argument to prove that the family was exceptionally
irritable.[585]

Luther’s nervous irritability ought, indeed, to be made more account of
than it has hitherto been.

_Addendum. Some Medical Opinions on Nervous Degeneration, and Abnormal
Ideas._

What was said above about Luther’s “nervousness” (p. 105 ff) may here
be supplemented by some quotations from August Cramer, the expert
psychiater, now of Berlin. It is true that what we shall quote is not
intended to refer to Luther, yet what he says may serve to explain
certain of Luther’s symptoms, and, possibly, to show that some which were
put down to mental derangement may have been due rather to a form of
neurasthenia.[586]

“Even perfectly normal children are sometimes inclined in their
growing period to display great variations of temper, and to be
violent and changeable in their affections about the age of puberty.
This, however, is far more noticeable in the case of people of a
strongly developed nervous temperament. Groundless outbreaks of
anger, marked pathological absence of mind and entire inability to
concentrate their thoughts are often the result. Fits of oppression
and anxiety are not unknown; headaches are fairly frequent and the
patients seem at times not to be masters of themselves. They also
tend to swing from an exaggerated idea of their own importance to a
despondent lack of self-confidence. In their bents and friendships
they are very fickle.” Hence we have here already in a very marked
degree that instability which von Magnan has pointed out as
characteristic of degenerates.

In later life, too, such highly strung temperaments are often, at
least in the worse cases, predisposed to sudden changes of views,
and to fly to extremes, their varying moods tend at times to become
periodic, they are over-sensitive, are frequently unable to bear
alcohol, their sexual inclinations are abnormal and they are often
addicted from an early age to masturbation.… Thus the predominant
characteristic of the degenerate is lack of constancy (p. 175).

Of “nervosity” where it is combined with fear the same author says:
“The change of mood is often entirely without cause and is by no
means of a regular type, though instances of a periodic character
are occasionally to be met with.… We meet, for example, persons whom
we cannot possibly describe as ill, who at times are exceptionally
capable, lively and good-tempered, and yet at other times give the
impression of being downhearted, self-centred and scarcely able to get
through their daily tasks.”

“Apart from those who are habitually depressed, there are others who
suffer from time to time, without any outward cause, from slight fits
of depression, mostly accompanied by more or less severe fits of
anxiety. Looking more carefully into these various types, we shall
find that they belong almost exclusively to strongly marked nervous
temperaments.… In bad cases the periodic changes of mood may become
stronger and stronger, and lead eventually between the fortieth and
sixtieth year to actual ‘_folie circulaire_.’ Anxiety is, of course,
common to all nervous people, but in many cases it plays the prominent
part.… Often the patients complain of all kinds of accompanying
symptoms, not seldom of palpitations, weakness in the legs, headaches,
attacks of dizziness, and, particularly, of the paralysing effects
of their vague dreads. When this anxiety overtakes them they become
unable to work as usual, and their spirit of enterprise is checked”
(p. 207 ff.).

As to how far what Cramer says is applicable to Luther’s mental
states may here be left open. The same holds good of what we shall
quote below from C. Wernicke and H. Friedmann. What the former says
of “autochthonous” ideas may conceivably be applicable to Luther’s
conviction of the private revelations he had received and of which he
speaks so strongly above (p. 142 ff.) as even to suggest actual auditory
hallucination; that there was no real hallucination seems more likely
for the reason that Luther elsewhere is disposed to regard the incidents
as of an inward character and is not quite so wholly under their sway as
would have been the case had they been strictly speaking hallucinatory.

As to “exalted ideas,” of which both speak, they put us in mind of some
of Luther’s ideas concerning his own person, position, achievements and
persecutions (cp. our summary in vol. iv., pp. 329-41).

It must, however, be noted that “exalted ideas” can be present in a mind
otherwise perfectly sound, and that, consequently, even if Luther had
such ideas it would not prove him to have been mentally deranged; the
same holds good of “autochthonous” ideas, which, occurring singly, are no
warrant of insanity.

Again, even should Luther’s idea of his revelations turn out to be
originally “autochthonous,” yet the reception he accorded it, the
interpretation he placed on it and the use he made of it seem, as we have
already set forth, to have been both deliberate and responsible. This
is confirmed by the circumstance that, in time, his keen sense of such
impressions waned under the objections brought against them, and that his
insistence on the “revelations” and his interpretation of them no longer
found quite the same vigorous expression as before. Nevertheless, we
repeat it once more: It is for experts to pass a definite judgment, but,
in order to do so fairly, they must not submit to the microscope merely
one class of Luther’s mental manifestations, but consider him as a whole,
as monk no less than as Reformer, and examine his mentality on all its
sides.

Writing of certain kinds of abnormal ideas, viz. those which he
calls “autochthonous,” Carl Wernicke says:[587] “The patient becomes
aware of ideas springing up in his mind that are alien to him and
not his own, i.e. which have not arisen along the normal ideas and
on the ordinary lines of association.” Speaking of those actually
suffering from mental derangement, Wernicke again alludes to this
class: “Objective observers, who are quite conscious of the alien
character of the autochthonous ideas and attach no fundamental
importance to them, are only to be found as the exception among those
who are really mentally unsound. Almost always the ideas are conceived
as ‘ready-made,’ as ‘forced upon the mind,’ as ‘inspired,’ or as
‘derived,’ but, from whom, depends entirely on the individuality of
the patient and on the nature of the autochthonous idea (which is
not uninfluenced by the former). Pious thoughts are inspired by God,
evil thoughts by the devil; more enlightened people have recourse to
material remedies and put their case in the hands of a doctor.”

Of the so-called “exalted ideas” Wernicke says: “These are sharply
defined from autochthonous ideas by the fact that they are in no
way regarded by the patient himself as alien intruders into his
consciousness: on the contrary, he sees in them the stamp of his
innermost self, and fancies that, in vindicating them, he is in
reality asserting his own personality.”

“One has to determine in each individual case whether the idea
is truly morbid and ‘exalted,’ or does not come within normal
bounds.”[588] On the next page he declares: “That almost any incident
may give rise to an ‘exalted idea,’ that the nature of the emotion
may be of the most varied character, and that ideas exist, which,
though in themselves normal, are nevertheless able so to determine the
individual’s action as to impress on it a morbid stamp.”

H. Friedmann[589] says of the same class of ideas: “According to its
origin the ‘exalted’ idea … may find a place in the mental process
without any apparent cause. A strong emotion may, so to speak, fling
itself on a single idea, and, without any actual derangement of the
mind, allow it, and it alone, to assume a morbid supremacy.” A few
pages further we read:[590] “Hence, as a matter of fact, in the case
of the ‘exalted’ idea, we have not an isolated monomaniacal affection
but a general disturbance of the emotions and judgment. The result,
likewise, is not an _idée fixe_ as in the case of mania, but merely a
strong belief.”

CHAPTER XXXVII

LUTHER’S LATER EMBELLISHMENT OF HIS EARLY LIFE

In later life, looking back on his past, Luther was in the habit
of depicting certain of its principal phases in a way which is at
variance with the facts, and which even Protestants in recent times
have characterised, as “a picture in which he becomes a myth unto
himself.”[591]

It will be no matter for surprise to the dispassionate observer that the
memory of the vows Luther had broken and the thought of his early days
in the monastery—which presented so striking a contrast with his later
life—were subject-matters of warped and distorted images. Particularly is
this true of his monastic years which he insists on depicting as one long
night of sadness and despair.

Not merely in the fictions in which he came to shroud the more fervent
days of his life as a monk, but also in his explanations of the
various stages of his apostasy, Luther affords us fresh data for the
psychological study of his personality, and thus the present chapter
may serve to supplement the previous one. Only after having studied the
legend he wove around himself and compared it with the truth as otherwise
known, will it be possible to arrive at a considered judgment concerning
Luther’s mental states.

1. Luther’s later Picture of his Convent Life and Apostasy

What Luther says of his life as a monk is what will chiefly interest us,
but, before proceeding to consider his words and the strange problems
they present, we must first refer to the legendary traits comprised in
his statements on the first period of his struggle; how false they are
to the facts will be clearly perceived by whoever has read the detailed
accounts already given.

_The Legend about his First Public Appearance_

“Not only have the dates been altered,” says Hausrath, of Luther’s later
statements concerning his first public appearance, “but even the facts.
No sooner does the elderly man begin to tell his tale than the past
becomes as soft wax in his hands. The same words are placed on the lips,
now of this, now of that, friend or foe. The opponents of his riper years
are depicted as his persecutors even in his youth. Albert of Mayence
had never acted otherwise towards him than as a liar and deceiver. Even
previous to the Worms visit he had sought to annul his safe-conduct.… Of
Tetzel he now asserts, that, unless Duke Frederick had pleaded for him to
the Emperor Max, he would have been put in a sack and drowned in the Inn
on account of his dissolute life.… The same holds good of the [equally
untrue] statement that Tetzel had sold indulgences for sins yet to be
committed.… It is also an exaggeration of his old age when Luther asserts
that, in his youth, the Bible had been a closed book to all.… To the old
Reformer almost everything in the monastery appears in the blackest of
hues.”[592]

“The reason of my journey to Rome,” he declares, “was to make a
confession from the days of my boyhood and to become pious.”[593]
“But at Rome I came across the most unlearned of men.”[594]—God
“led me, all unwittingly, into the game [his struggle].”[595]
“I behaved with moderation, yet I brought the greatest ruin on
them all.”[596] “I thought I was doing the Pope a service yet I
was condemned.”[597]—“One, and that not the least of my joys and
consolations, is, that I never put myself out of the Papacy. For I
held fast to the Scarlet Woman and served the murderess in all things
most humbly. But she would have none of me, banished me and drove
me from her.”[598] “I only inveighed against abuses and against the
godless collectors of alms and [indulgence] commissioners from whom
even Canon Law itself protects the Pope. The Pope wanted to defend
them contrary to his own laws; this annoyed me. Had he thrown them
over I should in all likelihood have held my tongue, but the hour
had rung for his downfall; hence there was nothing to be done for
him, for when God intends to bring about a man’s fall He blinds and
hardens him.”[599] “I was utterly dead to the world until God thought
the time had come; then Junker Tetzel stung me with his indulgences,
and Dr. Staupitz spurred me on against the Pope.”[600] “Silvester
[Prierias] thereupon entered the lists and sought to overwhelm me with
the thunders of the following syllogism: Whoever raises doubts against
any word or deed of the Roman Church is a heretic; Martin Luther
doubts, etc. With that the ball began.”[601]

Generally speaking, however, Luther prefers to trace the whole of his
quarrel with the Church back to Tetzel and to his righteous censure
of the abuse of indulgences. He seems to have completely forgotten
the deep theological chasm that separated him from the Church even
before his quarrel with Tetzel. His theological attitude at that time,
the starting-point of his whole undertaking, has disappeared from his
purview; he has forgotten his burning desire to win the day for his
own doctrines against free-will, against the value of works, against
justification as taught by Catholic tradition, and for his denial
of God’s Will that all men should be saved. His early antagonism to
the theological schools and to Canon Law as a whole has lapsed into
oblivion.[602]

In the preface to the 1545 edition of his Latin works Luther asserts,
as a fact, that he had been estranged from the Church only through the
indulgence controversy.

He had, so we there read, taken his vocation as a monk quite in
earnest; he “feared and dreaded the Day of Judgment and yet had longed
with all his heart to be saved.… It was not my fault that I became
involved in this warfare, as I call God Himself to witness.”

In order to make the “beginning of the business” plain to all he goes
on to relate to the whole world, how, as a young Doctor in 1517,
relying on the Pope’s approval, he had raised his voice in protest
against the “shamelessness” of the indulgence-preachers; how, when his
small outcry passed unheeded, he had published the indulgence-theses
and, then, in the “Resolutions,” “for the Pope’s own sake,” had
advocated works of neighbourly charity as preferable to indulgences.
Here was the cause of all the world’s hostility! His teaching was
alleged “to have disturbed the course of the heavenly spheres and to
be setting the world in flames. I was delated to the Pope and then
summoned to Rome; the whole might of Popery was up in arms against
poor me.”

He records his trial at Augsburg, the intervention of Miltitz and the
Leipzig Disputation, but records it in a way all his own. At that date
he already knew almost the entire Bible by heart and “had already
reached the beginning of the knowledge and faith of Christ, to wit,
that we are saved and justified, not by works, but by faith in Christ,
and that the Pope is not the head of the Church by right Divine; but
I failed to see the inevitable consequence of all this, viz. that the
Pope must needs be of the devil.” Like the “blameless monk” that he
was, his only trouble in life was his keen anxiety as to whether God
was gracious to him and whether he could “rest assured that he had
conciliated Him by the satisfaction he had made.” The words of the
Bible on the justice of God had angered him because he had erroneously
taken this to mean His punitive justice instead of the justice
whereby God makes us just. Then, when he was setting about his second
Commentary on the Psalms (1518-19), amidst the greatest excitement
of conscience (“_furebam ita sæva et perturbata conscientia_”) the
light from above had dawned on him which brought him to a complete
understanding of the Divine justice whereby we are justified. Paul’s
words concerning the just man who lives by faith (Rom. i. 17) had
then, and only then, become clear to him (through his discovery of the
assurance of salvation).

After referring to the Diet of Worms he again reverts to his pet
subject, viz. the indulgence-controversy: “The affair of the
controversy regarding indulgences dragged on till 1520-21; then
followed the question of the Sacrament and that of the Anabaptists.”

This is how Luther wrote—confusing the events and suppressing the
principal point—when, towards the end of his life, he penned for
posterity a record of what had occurred. Otto Scheel, in a compilation of
the texts bearing on Luther’s development prior to 1519, rightly places
this later account, together with the other statements made by him in
old age, under the heading: “second and third rate authorities.”[603]
What, however, are we to think when the considered narrative, written
by a man of such eminence, of events in which he was the chief actor,
has to be relegated to the category of second-rate and even third-rate
authorities?[604]

To enumerate some other misrepresentations not connected with his monkish
days: Luther assures us that sundry opponents of his “had blasphemed
themselves to death”; men who had the most peaceful of deathbeds he
alleges to have died tortured by remorse of conscience and railing at
God. He boasts aloud that it was the Papists who made a “good theologian”
of him, since, “at the devil’s instigation,” they had so battered,
distressed and frightened him out of his wits, that he necessarily came
to obtain a more profound knowledge.[605] Boldly and exultingly he points
to the many “miracles” whereby the Evangel had been proved.[606] He says
of the Diets, that the Papists always succeeded in wriggling out of a
hole by dint of lies, so that they looked quite white and “without ever a
stain.”[607] Of his own writings he says, that he “would gladly have seen
all his books unwritten and consigned to the fire.”[608] This in 1533,
and again in 1539.[609] Before this, however, he had declared he would
not forswear any of his writings, “not for all the riches of the world,”
and that, at least as a good work wrought by God, they must have some
worth.[610]

In such wise does the picture he gives of his life vary according to his
moods. He does not hesitate to sacrifice the sacred rights of truth when
this seems to the advantage of his polemics (see above, vol. iv., p. 80
ff.), and, owing to the peculiar constitution of his mind, the fiction
he so often repeats becomes eventually stamped as a reality to which he
himself accords credence.

_The Legend about his Years of Monkish Piety_

We may now turn to Luther’s fictions regarding his monkish days,
prefacing our remarks with the words of Luther’s Protestant biographer,
Adolf Hausrath. “The picture of his youth is forced to tally more and
more with the convictions of his older years. What he now looks upon as
pernicious, he declares he had found in those days to be so by his own
experience.… The oftener he holds up to his listening guests the warning
picture of the monk sunk in the abyss of Popery, the more gloomy and
starless does the night appear to him in which he once had lived.”[611]

That the use hitherto made of Luther’s statements concerning his convent
life calls for correction has already been admitted by several Protestant
students of reformation history. As early as 1874 Maurenbrecher protested
strongly against the too great reliance placed on Luther’s own later
statements, which, however, at that time, constituted almost the only
authority for his early history. “How wrong it is to accept on faith and
repeat anew Luther’s tradition is quite obvious. Whoever wishes to relate
Luther’s early history must first of all be quite clear in his mind as to
this characteristic of the material on which he has to work.… The history
of Luther’s youth is still virgin soil awaiting the labours of the
critic.”[612] The objections recently brought forward by Catholics have
drawn from W. Friedensburg the admission that we have unreliable, and,
“in part, misleading statements of Luther’s concerning himself.”[613]
G. Kawerau also at least goes so far as to admit that the historian of
Luther at the present day “is inevitably confronted by a number of new
questions.”[614] The publication of Luther’s Commentary on Romans of
1515-16 finally proved how necessary it is to regard the theology of his
early years as the chief authority for the history of his development.
Hence, in the account of his youth given above in vol. i., we took this
Commentary as our basis.

A preliminary sketch of the picture he handed down in his later sayings
is given us by Luther himself in the following:

God had caused him to become a monk, he says, “not without good
reasons, viz. that, taught by experience, he might be able to
write against the Papacy,” after having himself most rigidly
(“_rigidissime_”) abided by its rules.[615]—“This goes on until
one grows quite weary”; “now my other preaching has come: ‘Christ
says: Take this from me: You are not pious, I have done it all for
you, your sins are forgiven you.’”[616] According to the “Popish
teaching,” however, one cannot be sure “whether he is in a state
of grace”; hence, when in the cloister, though I was such a “pious
monk,” I always said sorrowfully to myself: “I know not whether God
is well pleased or not. Thus I and all of us were swallowed up in
unbelief.”[617]

Hence churches and convents are nothing but “dens of murderers”
because they “pervert and destroy doctrine and prayer.” “Indeed no
monk or priestling can do otherwise, as I know, and have myself
experienced”; “I never knew in the least how I stood with God”;
“I was never able to pray aright.”[618] This holiness-by-works of
Popery, in which I was steeped, was nothing but “idolatry and godless
worship.”[619]

“Learn,” he says, thus unwittingly laying bare the aim of his fiction,
“learn from my example.” “The more I scourged myself, the more was I
troubled by remorse of conscience.”[620] “We did not then know what
original sin was; unbelief we did not regard as sin.”[621] Their
“unbelief,” however, consisted in that we Papists fancied “that we had
to add our own works” (to the merits of Christ).[622] “Hence, for all
my fervour, I lost the twenty years I spent in the cloister.”[623]
But I did not want to “stick fast and die in sin and in this false
doctrine”;[624] for such a pupil of the law must in the end say to
himself “that it is impossible for him to keep the Law”; indeed he
cannot but come to say: “would there were no God.”[625]

Roughly, this is the tone of the testimony he gives of himself. It is
not our intention here simply to spurn it, but to examine whether there
is any call to accept it unconditionally—simply because it comes from
Luther’s lips—and whether it comprises a certain quota of truth.[626]

First, it must be noted that he represents himself as a sort of fanatical
martyr of penance. He assures us: Even the heroic works of mortification
I undertook brought me no peace in Popery: “_Ergo_,” etc. He here opens
an entirely new page in his past. He tells his friends, for instance: “I
nearly killed myself by fasting, for often, for three days on end, I did
not take a bite or a sip. I was in the most bitter earnest and, indeed,
I crucified our Lord Christ in very truth; I was not one of those who
merely looked on, but I actually lent a hand in dragging Him along and
nailing Him. May God forgive me! … for this is true: The more pious the
monk the worse rogue he is.”[627]

“I myself,” he says in his Commentary on Genesis, “was such an one [a
pious monk]. I nearly brought about my death by fasting, abstinence
and penance in work and clothing; my body became dreadfully emaciated
and was quite worn out.”[628]

The menace of death is also alluded to in a sermon of 1537: “For more
than twenty years I was a pious monk,” “I said Mass daily and so
weakened my body by prayer and fasting that I could not have lived
long had I continued in this way.”[629] Elsewhere he says that he had
allowed himself only two more years of life, and that, not he alone,
but all his brethren were ripe for death: “In Popery in times bygone
we howled for everlasting life; for the sake of the kingdom of heaven
we treated ourselves very harshly, nay, put our bodies to death, not
indeed with sword or weapon, but, by fasting and maceration of the
body we begged and besought day and night. I myself—had I not been set
free by the consolation of Christ in the Evangel—could not have lived
two years more, so greatly did I torment myself and flee God’s wrath.
There was no lack of sighs, tears and lamentations, but it all availed
us nothing.”[630]

“Why did I endure such hardships in the cloister? Why did I torment my
body by fasting, vigils and cold? I strove to arrive at the certainty
that thereby my sins were forgiven.”[631] The martyrdom he endured
from the cold alone was agonising enough: “For twenty years I myself
was a monk and tormented myself with praying, fasting, watching
and shivering, the cold by itself making me heartily desirous of
death.”[632]

Besides his penances another main feature of his later picture is his
extraordinary, albeit misguided, piety and virtue.

It is not enough for Luther to say that he had been a pious monk,
“an earnest monk,” who “would not have taken a farthing without the
Prior’s permission,” and who “prayed diligently day and night”;[633]
he will have, that “if ever a monk got to heaven by monkery then I
should have got there; of this all my brother monks will bear me
witness.”[634]

He had been more diligent in his monastic exercises of piety than any
of the Papists who took the field against him.[635]

Nay, “he had been one of the very best.”[636] He “confessed daily” [Is
this a reference to the Confession made in the Mass?] and “tried hard”
to find peace, but did not succeed.[637] Daily, he tells us, he “said
Mass and imposed on himself the severest hardships,” in order, “by
his own works, to attain to righteousness.”[638] It was because the
devil had remarked his righteousness, that he tempted him when engaged
in prayer in his cell by appearing to him in the shape of Christ, as
already narrated.[639] God, however, tried him by temptations just
as He tries those of the elect through whom He intends to do great
things for the salvation of mankind.[640] He, like the other cloistral
Saints, had been so penetrated with his sanctity, that, after Mass,
he “did not thank God for the Sacrament but rather God had to thank
him.”[641] He fancied himself in “the angel-choirs,” but had all the
while been “among the devils.”[642] Cloistral life was indeed “a
latrine and the devil’s own sweet Empire.”[643]

Other characteristic lines of the picture are, first, the dreadful way
in which his mind was torn by doubts concerning his own salvation,
doubts arising simply from his works of piety, and, secondly, his speedy
deliverance from such sufferings and attainment of peace and tranquillity
as soon as he had discovered the Evangel of faith. He cannot find colours
sombre enough in which to paint his former state of misery, which is also
the inevitable experience of all pious Papists.

“In the convent I had no thought of goods, wealth or wife, but my soul
shuddered and quaked at the thought of how to make God gracious to me,
for I had fallen away from the faith and my one idea was that I had
angered God and had to soothe Him once more by my good works.”[644]
“As a young Master at Erfurt I always went about oppressed with
sadness.”[645] But, after his discovery he had felt himself “born
anew,” as though “through an open door he had passed into Paradise.”
The words Justice of God suddenly became “very sweet” to him and the
Bible doctrine in question a “very gate of heaven.” “Holy Scripture
now appeared to me in quite a new light.”[646]

He had, indeed, studied the Bible diligently in his early monkish
years, but he had, nevertheless, been greatly tempted and plagued by
the “real difficulties”; his confessors had not understood him. “I
said to myself: No one but you suffers from this temptation.” And he
had become “like a corpse,” so that his comrades asked him why he was
“so mournful and downhearted.”[647]

Particularly the doctrine of penance had, he says, so borne him down
that “it was hardly possible for him, at the price of great toil and
thanks to God’s grace, to come to that hearing that gives joy [Ps. 1.
10].” For “if you have to wait until you have the requisite contrition
then you will never come to that hearing of joy, as, in the cloister,
I often found to my cost; for I clung to this doctrine of contrition,
but the more I strove after rue, the more I smarted and the more
did the bite of conscience eat into me. The absolution and other
consolations given me by my confessors I was unable to take because
I thought: Who knows if such consolations are to be trusted.”[648]
On one occasion, however, the master of novices strengthened and
encouraged him amidst his tears by asking him: Have you forgotten that
the Lord Himself commanded us to hope?[649]

Nevertheless, according to the strange description given by Luther
in a sermon in 1531, his keen anxiety about his confessions lasted
until after his ordination. “I, Martin Luther,” so he told the people,
“when I went up to the altar after confession and contrition felt
myself so weighed down by fear that I had to beckon to me another
priest. After the Mass, again, I was no more reassured than before.”
His trouble—which was possibly caused, or at any rate heightened,
by the spirit of obstinacy and scepticism he describes—was, however
(and it is on this that he lays stress), common to all Papists whose
consciences could never be at rest. “They became its victims chiefly
at the hour of death. How much did we dread the Last Judgment!… That
was our reward for our works.”[650] The truth is, that, on his own
showing, he scarcely knew what inward contrition was, and that he
remained too much a stranger to the motive of holy fear.[651]

To the period subsequent to his ordination must be assigned assurances
such as the following, the tone of which becomes more and more crude
the older he grows. “From that time [of his first Mass] I said Mass
with great horror, and thank God that He has delivered me from
it.”[652] “When I looked on [a figure of] Christ I fancied I was
looking at the devil. That is why we say: O, Mary, pray for us to thy
beloved Son and appease His wrath.” If I follow the principles of the
monks and Papists, then “I lose Christ my Healer and Consoler and make
Him into the taskmaster and hangman of my poor soul.”[653]

“As long as I remained a Papist I should have blushed with shame to
speak of Christ; Jesus is a womanish name; we preferred to speak of
Aristotle or Bonaventure.”[654] He also says: “Often have I trembled
at the name of Jesus; when I saw Him on the cross it was like a
thunderbolt and when His Name was mentioned I would rather have heard
the devil invoked, for I raved that I had to go on doing good works
until I had thereby made Christ friendly and gracious to me.”[655]

They used to say: “Scourge yourself until you have yourself blotted
out your sin. Such is the Pope’s doctrine and belief.”[656] Thus, in
the monastery, I had “long since lost Christ and His baptism. I was of
all men the most wretched, day and night there was nothing but howling
and despair which no one was able to calm. Thus I was bathed and
baptised in my monkery and went through the real sweating sickness.
Praise be to God that I did not sweat myself to death.”[657]

Those Protestants who take Luther’s statements too readily, without
probing them to the bottom and eliminating the rhetorical and fabulous
element, are apt to urge that Luther’s descriptions of the monastic state
show that nothing but mental derangement could result from such a life.

Dr. Kirchhoff, a medical man, basing his remarks on Luther’s accounts, is
inclined to assume the existence of some severe temperamental malady. He
even goes so far as to say that, at any rate, countless numbers of monks
lost their reason. “In the course of time,” he adds, Luther “acquired a
greater power of resisting the temptations, and, possibly, in his quieter
after-life the physical causes may have diminished; it would appear that
the accompanying conditions disquieted him greatly.”[658]

The fact is that Protestant authors as a rule fight shy of undertaking
any criticism of Luther’s account of himself. They accord it far too
ready credence and usually see in it a capital pretext for attacking the
olden Church.

If Luther is to be taken literally and is right in his generalisations,
then we should have to go even further than such writers and argue that,
one and all, those who sought to be pious in the religious life were mad,
or at least on the verge of insanity; the Church, by her doctrine of
works, of satisfaction and of man’s co-operation with Grace, infects all
who address themselves zealously to the performance of good works with
the poison of a subtle insanity.

We need waste no further words here on the falsehood of Luther’s
objections against the Catholic doctrine of works.[659]

We may pass over the countless clear and authentic proofs furnished by
Luther’s elders and contemporaries, and even by Luther himself previous
to his apostasy, which place the Catholic doctrine on works in a very
different light. The Church, in point of fact, always refused to hear
of works done solely by man’s strength being efficacious for salvation,
and regarded only those works performed by the aid of God’s supernatural
Grace as of any value—and that through the merits of Christ—whether for
the purpose of preparing for justification or for winning an everlasting
reward; she always recognised faith, hope and charity as conditions for
forgiveness and justification, and as the threefold spring whereby good
works are rendered fruitful.

There can be no question that Luther’s picture of his holiness-by-works
in Popery is meant to include all his earnest brother monks and their
mistaken way of life, and the doctrine and religious practices of Popery
as such. The fiction serves a twofold purpose. On the one hand, as its
author gives us to understand quite openly, it was his excuse for having
shaken off the yoke of the religious life, on the other, it was to be
used as a weapon against the olden doctrine of the importance of works
for personal salvation. To be true to history, one must judge of his
account of his Catholic life from these two standpoints. How extremely
unreliable it is will then be more apparent. The following observations
on the contrast his account presents with historical truth, particularly
with the well-authenticated incidents of his development, and even with
the elements of truth which he introduces into the legend, will place the
grave shortcomings of the latter in an even clearer light.

Since Luther would have us believe that God caused him to become a
monk, in order that, taught by his own experience, he might write
against the Papacy,[660] no sooner does he begin to speak of himself
than he includes in the same condemnation his brother monks and all
those Christians who were zealous in the practice of works.

Under the Pope’s yoke he and all other Papists had been made to feel
to their “great and heavy detriment” what it spelt when one tried
to become pious by means of works. We grew more and more despondent
concerning sin and death.… For the more they do the worse their state
becomes.[661] “Thus I, and all those in the convent, were bondsmen
and captives of Satan.”[662]—“We hoped to find salvation through
our frock.”[663]—With us all it was “rank idolatry,” for I did not
believe in Christ, etc.[664]—Because we endured so many “sufferings
of heart and conscience and performed so many works,” no one must now
come and seek to excuse Popery.[665]—“We fled from Christ as from the
very devil, for we were taught that each one would be placed before
the judgment seat of Christ with his works”[666]—a teaching which is,
indeed, almost word for word that of St. Paul (2 Cor. v. 10).

Remembering the other utterances in which he makes all Papists share
in his alleged experiences, for instance, in his “unbelief,” we soon
perceive how unreliable are all such statements of his concerning the
history of his personal development. The whole is seen to be primarily
but a new form of controversy and self-vindication; only by dint
of cautious criticism can we extract from it certain traits which
possibly serve to illustrate the course of his mental growth in the
monastery.

Again, several details of the picture—quite apart from the obvious
effort to burden the olden Church with a monstrous system of
holiness-by-works—warn us to be sceptical. First of all there is the
customary rhetoric and playing to the gallery. The palpable exaggeration
it contains, its references to the howling by day and by night, to the
scourgings, to the tortures of hunger and cold, to the endless prayers
and watchings, and to the ravings of the woebegone searchers after peace,
do not prepossess us in favour of the truth of the account. Luther, in so
much of what he says on the point, has shown us how little he is to be
taken seriously, that one cannot but wonder how his statements, even when
exaggerated to the verge of the ludicrous, can ever have been regarded in
the light of real authorities.

He is not telling the truth when he assures us that, as Doctor of
Divinity, he had never rightly understood the Ten Commandments, and
that many other famous doctors had not known “whether there were
nine, or ten, or eleven of them; much less did we know anything
of the Gospel or of Christ.”[667] After outward works, indeed, we
ran, but “what God has commanded, that we omitted … for the Papists
trouble themselves about neither the Commandments nor the promises
of God.”[668] In choir the community daily chanted Psalm li. (l.),
in which joy in the Lord is extolled, but “there was not one who
understood what joy to the pious is a firm trust in God’s Mercy.”[669]

We have, for instance, his remarkable saying, that he had looked upon
it as a deadly sin for a monk ever to come out of his cell without
his scapular, even though otherwise fully dressed. Yet no reasonable
man acquainted with the religious life, however observant he might
be, would have been capable of such fears. Luther declares that he
had seen a sin in every infringement of the rule of his Order; yet
the Rule was never intended to bind under pain of sin, as indeed was
expressly stated. He asserts that he had believed, that, had he made
but a slight mistake or omission in the Mass, he “would be lost”; yet
no educated priest ever believed such a thing, or thought that small
faults amounted to mortal sins.

As an instance of the Papal tyranny over consciences he was wont to
tell in his old age how he had tortured himself on the Saturday by
reciting the whole of the Breviary that he had omitted to say during
the week owing to his other occupations. “This is how we poor folk
were plagued by the Pope’s decretals; of this our young people know
nothing.” His account[670] of these repetitions varies considerably in
the telling. He expects us to believe he was not aware of the fact,
familiar to every beginner in theology, that the recitation of the
Hours and the Breviary is imposed as an obligation for the day, which
expires as soon as the day is over, so that its omission cannot be
afterwards made good by repetition. From his account it would on the
contrary appear that the “Pope’s decrees” had imposed such subsequent
making good. Even should he really, in his earlier days when he first
began to neglect the Breviary, have occasionally repeated the task
subsequently, yet it is too bad of him to make it part of the monkish
legend and an instance of how “we poor fellows were tormented.”[671]

“It is an astonishing and dreadful thing,” he proceeds, “that men
should have been so mad!” Those who live in the religious life and
according to man-made ordinances “do not deserve to be called men nor
even swine”;[672] a “hateful and accursed life” was it, with “all their
filth!”[673]

The young monk too—could we trust Luther’s account—must have been
seriously wanting in discretion where mortification was concerned, and
a like indiscretion was evinced by all others who took the religious
vocation in earnest. But the extravagant asceticism such as Luther would
have us believe he practised, and the theological assumption underlying
it, viz. that salvation depends on bodily mortification, are quite
against the older teaching in vogue in his time. We may quote a few
instances of the teaching to the contrary.

Thomas Aquinas declares: “Abstinence from food and drink in itself
does not promote salvation,” according to Rom. xiv. 17, where we read:
“The kingdom of heaven is not meat and drink.” He recognises only the
medicinal value of fasting and abstinence, and points out that by
such practices “concupiscence is kept in check”; hence he deduces the
necessity of discretion (“_ad modicum_”) and warns people against the
“vain glory” and other faults which may result from these practices.
Not by such works, nor by any works whatsoever, is a man saved and
justified, but “man’s salvation and justice,” so he teaches, “consist
mainly in inward acts of faith, of hope and of charity, and not in
outward ones.… Man may scorn all measure where faith, hope and charity
are concerned, but, in outward acts, he must make use of the measure
of discretion.”[674]

But perhaps the best ascetical writer to refer to in this connection
is John Gerson of Paris, who was so much read in the monasteries and
with whom Luther was well acquainted. He assigns to outward works,
particularly to severe acts of penance, the place they had, even from
the earliest times, held in the Church. He bids Religious care above
all for inward virtue, which they are to regard as the main thing, for
self-denial and for obedience out of love of God. He appeals to the
Fathers and warns his readers that “indiscreet abstinence may more
easily lead to a bad end than even over-feeding.” Discretion could not
be better practised than in humility and obedience, by forsaking one’s
own notions and submitting to the advice of the expert; such obedience
was never more in place than in a Religious.[675]

These are but two notable witnesses taken from the endless tale of those
whose testimony is at variance with the charges implied in Luther’s
legend, that the monks were regardless of discretion where penance was
concerned.

That Luther is guilty of self-contradiction in attributing to the
Catholic teachers and monks of his day such mistaken views and practices
and the doctrine of holiness-by-works generally is fairly obvious.

If the young monk really “kept the Rule,” then his extravagant
penances for the purpose of gaining a gracious God can have had no
existence outside his brain; the Rule prohibited all exaggeration in
fasting and maceration, wilful loss of sleep and senseless exposure
to cold. The Augustinian Rule, devised expressly as it was, to be
not too severe in view of the exacting labours involved by preaching
and the care of souls, had been further mitigated on the side of its
penitential exercises by Staupitz’s new constitutions in 1504.[676]
It was true the prior might sanction something beyond what the Rule
enjoined, but it is scarcely credible that a beginner like Luther
should have been allowed to exceed to such an extent the limit of
what was adapted to all. His bodily powers were already sufficiently
taxed by his studies, the more so since he threw himself into them
with such impetuous ardour. It is all the less likely that any such
special permission was given him, seeing that, as we know, Staupitz
had, in consideration of his studies, dispensed the young monk from
the performance of the humbler duties of the monastery.

If what has been said holds good of the years spent at Erfurt, much
less can there be any question of his having indulged in excessive
rigour during his Wittenberg period. Here Luther began at an early
date to inveigh against what he thought was excessive strictness on
the part of his brother monks, against their observance and against
all so-called holiness-by-works. In his sermons and writings of that
time we have an echo of his vexation at the too great stress laid
on works;[677] but such a frame of mind, which was by no means of
entirely new growth, surely betrays laxity rather than over-great
zeal. The doctrine of the all-sufficiency of faith alone and of
Christ’s Grace was already coming to the front.

Yet he continued—even after he had set up his new doctrine and
completely broken with the Church—to recommend works of penance
and mortification, declaring that they were necessary to withstand
sinful concupiscence; nor does he even forget, agreeably with the
Catholic view, to insist on the need of “discretion.” He also knows
quite well what is the true purpose of works of penance in spite of
all he was to say later in his subsequent caricature of the Catholic
doctrine and practice. We hear him, for instance, saying in a sermon
of 1519, when speaking of the fight to be waged against concupiscence:
“For this purpose are watching, fasting, maceration of the body and
similar works; everything is directed towards this end, nay, the
whole of Scripture but teaches us how this grievous malady may be
alleviated and healed.”[678] And, in his Sermon on Good Works (1520),
he says: Works of penance “were instituted to damp and deaden our
fleshly lusts and wantonness”; yet it is not lawful for one to “be
one’s own murderer.”[679] All this militates against his own tale,
that, in the convent, discretion had never been preached, and that,
thanks to the trashy holiness-by-works, he had been on the highroad
to self-destruction. The Sermon in question was preached some five
years before the end of those “twenty years” during which, to use his
later words, he had been his own “murderer” through his excessive and
misguided penances.

It may, however, be, that, for a short while, e.g. in the time of his
first fervour as a novice, he may have failed now and then by excess
of zeal in being moderate in his exercise of penance. This would also
have been the time, when, tormented by scruples, he was ever in need
of a confessor. To a man in such a state of unrest, penance, however,
even when practised with discretion, may easily become a source of
fresh confusion and error, and, when undertaken on blind impulse and
used to excess, such a one tends to find excuses for himself for
disregarding the prohibition both of the Rule and of his spiritual
director.

It is interesting to note the varying period during which Luther,
according to his later sayings, was addicted to these excessive penances
and to holiness-by-works. We already know that it was only gradually that
he broke away from his calling, and that he had in reality long been
estranged from it when he laid aside the Augustinian habit.

According to one dictum of his, he had been a strict and right pious
monk for fifteen years, i.e. from 1505-20, during which time he had
never been able “to do enough” to make God gracious to him.[680]
Again, elsewhere, he assures us that the period of misery during which
he sought justification through his works had lasted “almost fifteen
years.”[681] On another occasion, however, he makes it twenty years
(i.e. up to 1525): “The twenty years I spent in the convent are lost
and gone; I entered the cloister for the good and salvation of my soul
and for the health of my body, and I fondly believed … that it was
God’s Will that I should abide by the Rule.”[682] What a contrast this
alleged lengthy period of fifteen or even twenty years during which
he kept the Rule presents to the reality must be sufficiently clear
to anyone who remembers the dates of the events in his early history.
To make matters worse, in one passage[683] he actually goes so far as
apparently to make the period even longer during which he had “been
a pious monk,” and had almost brought about his death by fasting,
thus bringing us down to 1526 or 1527 if the reading in the text be
correct. It certainly makes a very curious impression on one who bears
in mind the dates to see Luther, the excommunicate, after his furious
attack on religious vows and the laws of the Church, and after his
marriage, still depicted as an over-zealous and pious monk, whose
fasting is even bringing his life into jeopardy. But if Luther was so
careless about his dates does not this carelessness lead one to wonder
whether the rest of the statements he makes in conjunction with them
are one whit more trustworthy?

“For over thirty years,” he says in a sermon of 1537, “I knew nothing
but this confusion [between Law and Gospel] and was unable to believe
that Christ was gracious to me, but rather sought to attain to
justification before God by means of the merits of the Saints.”[684]
This statement is again as strange as his previous ones, always
assuming that the account of the sermon in question, which Aurifaber
bases on three separate reports, is reliable. In this passage he is
speaking not of the years he spent in the convent but of the whole
time during which he was a member of the Popish Church. If this be
calculated from his birth it brings us down to about 1515, i.e. to
about the date of his Commentary on Romans where the new doctrine of
how to find a Gracious God is first mooted. But what then of the other
account he gives of himself, according to which, for more than ten
years subsequent to 1515, his soul remained immersed in the bitter
struggle after holiness-by-works? If, on the other hand, we reckon the
thirty years from the first awakening of the religious instinct in his
boyhood and youth, i.e. from about 1490 or 1495, we should come down
to 1520 or 1525 and find ourselves face to face with the still more
perplexing question as to how the darkness concerning the Law could
have subsisted together with the light of his new discovery.

Luther’s versatile pen is fond of depicting the quiet, retiring monk of
those days. As early as 1519 he wrote to Erasmus that it had always been
his ardent wish “to live hidden away in some corner, ignored alike by the
heavens and the sun, so conscious was he of his ignorance and inability
to converse with learned men.”[685] These words in their stricter sense
cannot, however, be taken as applicable to the period when they were
written but rather to the first years of his life as a monk.

The historical features of his earlier life in the monastery deserve,
however, to be examined more carefully in order better to understand the
legend.

2. The Reality. Luther’s Falsification of History

The legend of Luther’s abiding misery during his life as a monk previous
to his change of belief contradicts the monk’s own utterances during that
period.

_Monastic Days of Peace and Happiness. The Vows and their Breach_

The fact is, that, for all his sufferings and frequent temptations,
Luther for a long while felt himself perfectly at ease in monasticism.
In the fulness of his Catholic convictions he extolled the goodness of
God, who, in His loving-kindness, had bestowed such spiritual blessings
on him. In 1507 he wrote that he could never be thankful enough “for
the goodness of God towards him, Who of His boundless mercy had raised
him, an unworthy sinner, to the dignity of the priesthood.”[686] The
elderly friend to whom he thus opened his heart was the same Johannes
Braun, Vicar of the Marienstift at Eisenach, to whom he again gave an
account of his welfare in 1509. To him he then wrote: “God is God; man
is often, in fact nearly always, wrong in his judgments. God is our
God, and will guide us sweetly through everlasting ages.”[687]—The
inward joy which he found in the monastery gave him strength to bear
his father’s displeasure. He not only pointed out to him that it was “a
peaceful and heavenly life,”[688] but he even tried so to paint the happy
life he led in his cell as to induce his friend and teacher Usingen to
become an Augustinian too.[689] We may also recall his praise of his
“preceptor” (i.e. novice master), whom he speaks of as a “dear old man”
and “a true Christian under the damned frock.” He repeats some of his
beautiful, witty sayings and was always grateful to him for his having
lent him a copy, made by his own hand, of a work by St. Athanasius.[690]
The exhortations addressed to him by Staupitz when he was worried by
doubts and fears, for instance his excellent allusion to the wounds of
Christ,[691] found an echo in Luther’s soul, and, in spite of his trouble
of mind, brought him back to the true ideal of asceticism. We also know
how he praised Usingen, his friend at Erfurt, as the “best paraclete
and comforter,” and wrote to a despondent monk, that his words were
helpful to troubled souls, provided always that they laid aside all
self-will.[692]

Hence, for a considerable part of his life in the monastery, Luther was
not entirely deprived of consolations; apart from the darker side of
his life, on which his legend dwells too exclusively, there was also a
brighter side, and this is true particularly of his earlier years.

The effort to attain to perfection by the observance of poverty,
chastity and obedience was at first so attractive to Luther, that,
for a while, as we have already pointed out, he really allowed it to
cost him something. Some years later, when he had already begun to
paint in stronger hues his virtues as a monk, he said, perhaps not
exaggerating: “It was no joke or child’s play with me in Popery.” His
zealous observance was, however, confined to his first stay at Erfurt.
A brother monk of his whom Flacius Illyricus chanced to meet in that
town in 1543 also bore witness to Luther’s piety there as a monk. The
“old Papist,” then still a faithful Augustinian, had told him, writes
Flacius, how he had spent forty years in the Erfurt monastery where
Luther had lived eight years, and that he could not but confess that
Luther had led a holy life, had been most punctilious about the Rule
and had studied diligently. To Flacius this was a new proof of the
“mark of holiness” in the new Church.[693]

Nor are statements on the part of the young monk wanting which
prove, in contradiction with the legend he invented later, that his
theoretical grasp of the religious life was still correct even at a
time when he had already ceased to pay any great attention to the
Rule.[694]

Even as late as 1519, i.e. but two years before he wrote his book
against monastic vows, he still saw in these vows a salutary
institution. In a sermon he advised whoever desired “by much practice”
to keep the grace of baptism and make ready for a happy death “to
bind himself to chastity or join some religious Order,”[695] the
Evangelical Counsels still appeared to him, according to statements
he made in that same year, “a means for the easier keeping of the
commandments.”[696]

It was only after this that he began to think of tampering with the
celibacy of the priesthood, and that only in the hope of winning many
helpers in his work of apostasy. A little later he attacked with equal
success the sacred obligations freely assumed by the monks. Yet we
find nothing about the legend in his writings and letters of this
time, though it would have been of great service to him. Everything,
in fact, followed a much simpler and more normal course than the
legend would have us imagine: The spirit of the world and inordinate
self-love, no less than his newly unearthed doctrine, were what led to
the breaking of his vows.

Many of his brother monks had already begun to give an example of
marrying when, in the Wartburg (in Sep., 1521), while busy on his work
against monastic vows he put to Melanchthon this curious question:
“How is it with me? Am I already free and no more a monk? Do you
imagine that you can foist a wife on me as I did on you? Is this to
be your revenge on me? Do you want to play the Demea [the allusion is
to Terence] and give me, Mitio, Sostrata to wife? I shall, however,
keep my eyes open and you will not succeed.”[697] Melanchthon was,
of course, neither a priest nor a monk. Luther, who was both, was
even then undoubtedly breaking away at heart from his vows. This he
did on the pretext—untenable though it must have appeared even to
him—that his profession had been vitiated by being contrary to the
Gospel, because his intention had been to “save his soul and find
justification through his vows instead of through faith.” “Such a
vow,” he says, “could not possibly be taken in the spirit of the
Gospel, or, if it was, it was sheer delusion.” Still, for the time
being, he only sanctioned the marriage of other monks who were to be
his future helpers; as for himself he was loath to give the Papists
“who were jawing” him the pleasure of his marriage. He also denied in
a public sermon that it was his intention to marry, though he felt
how hard it was not to “end in the flesh.” All these are well-known
statements into which we have already gone in detail, which militate
against Luther’s later legend of the holy monk, who tormented himself
so grievously solely for the highest aims.

When, nevertheless, yielding to the force of circumstances, he took
as his wife a nun who had herself been eighteen years in the convent,
his action and the double sacrilege it involved plunged him into new
inward commotion. His statements at that time throw a strange light on
the step he had taken. By dint of every effort he seeks to justify the
humiliating step both to himself and to others.

In his excitement he depicts himself as in the very jaws of death
and Satan. Fear of the rebellious peasants now so wroth with him,
and self-reproach on account of the marriage blamed by so many even
among his friends, inflamed his mind to such a degree that his
statements, now pessimistic, now defiant, now humorous, now reeking
with pseudo-mysticism, furnish a picture of chaos. The six grounds
he alleges for his marriage only prove that none of them was really
esteemed by him sufficient; for, that it was necessary for him to
take pity on the forsaken nun, that the Will of God and of his own
father was so plain, and that he was obliged to launch defiance at the
devils, the priestlings and the peasants by his marriage, all this had
in reality as little weight with him as his other pleas, such as, that
the Catholics looked on married life as unevangelical, and that it
was his duty to confirm the Evangel by his marriage even in the eyes
of his Evangelical critics.[698] To many of his friends his marriage
seemed at least to have the advantage of shutting the mouths of those
who calumniated him. He himself, however, preferred to say, that he
had had recourse to matrimony “to honour God and shame the devil.”[699]

When once Luther had entered upon his new state of life all remaining
scruples regarding his vows had necessarily to be driven away.

As was his wont he tried to reassure himself by going to extremes.
“The most successful combats with the devil,” so he tells us, are
waged “at night at Katey’s side”; her “embraces” help him to quell
the foe within.[700] He declares even more strongly than before,
that marriage is in fact a matter of downright necessity for man; he
fails to think of the thousands who cannot marry but whose honour is
nevertheless untarnished; he asserts that “whoever will not marry must
needs be a fornicator or adulterer,” and that only by a “great miracle
of God” is it possible for a man here and there to remain chaste
outside the wedded state; more and more he insists, as he had already
done even before, that “nothing rings more hatefully in his ear than
the words monk and nun.”[701] He seizes greedily on every tale that
redounds to the discredit of the monasteries, even on the silly story
of the devils dressed as spectral monks who had crossed the Rhine at
Spires in order to thwart him at the Diet.

In all this we can but discern a morbid reaction against the disquieting
memory of his former state of life, not, as the legend asserts, peace
of mind and assurance of having won a “Gracious God,” thanks to his
change of religion. The reaction was throughout attended by remorse of
conscience.

These struggles of soul in order to find a Gracious God, which lasted, as
he himself says (above, vol. v., pp. 334 f.; 350 f.), even down to his
later years, constitute a striking refutation from his own lips, of the
legend of the wonderful change which came over him in the monastery.

On the other hand, the story of his long-drawn devotion to the monastic
practice of good works is no less at variance with the facts. On the
contrary, no sooner did Luther begin his official career as a monk at
Wittenberg, than he showed signs of his aversion to works; the trend of
his teaching was never in favour of strictness and penance, which, as he
declared, could only fill the heart with pride. (Above, vol. i., pp. 67
ff., 117 ff.) At a later date, however, he sought to base this teaching
on his own “inner experiences” and with these the legend supplied him
(above, vol. iv., p. 404, n. 2).

_Some Doubtful Virtues_

It is worth while to examine here rather more narrowly than was
possible when giving the history of his youth, the zeal for virtue and
the self-sacrificing industry for which, according to the legend, the
youthful monk was so conspicuous. What in our first volume was omitted
for the sake of brevity may here find a place in order to throw a clearer
light on his development. Two traits are of especial importance: first
humility as the crown of all virtue, on account of the piety Luther
ascribes to himself, and, secondly, the exact character of his restless,
feverish industry.

Luther’s humility presents some rather remarkable features. In
the documents we still possess of his we indeed find terms of
self-depreciation of the most extravagant kind. But his humility and
forced self-annihilation contrast strangely with his intense belief in
his own spiritual powers and the way in which he exalts himself above all
authorities, even the highest.

This comes out most strongly at the time when, as a young professor
at Wittenberg, Luther first dipped into the writings of the mystics.
The latter, so one would have thought, ought rather to have led him to
a deeper appreciation and realisation of the life of perfection and
humility.

He extols the books of certain mystics as a remedy for all the
maladies of the soul and as the well-spring of all knowledge. To the
Provost of Leitzkau, who had asked for his prayers, he expressed his
humility in the language of the mystics: “I confess to you that daily
my life draws nigh to hell (Ps. lxxxvii. 4) because daily I become
more wicked and wretched.”[702] At the same time he exhorts another
friend in words already quoted, taken from the obscure and suspicious
“Theologia Deutsch,” “to taste and see how bitter is everything that
is ourselves” in comparison with the possession of Christ.[703] “I am
not worthy that anyone should remember me,” so he writes to the same,
“and I am most thankful to those who think worst of me.”[704]

Yet mystical effusions are intermingled with charges against the
opponents of his new philosophy and theology which are by no means
remarkable for humility. “For nothing do my fingers itch so much,”
he wrote about this time,[705] “as to tear off the mask from that
clown Aristotle.” The words here uttered by the monk, as yet scarcely
more than a pupil himself, refer to a scholar to whom even the
greatest have ever looked up, and, who, up till then, had worthily
represented at the Universities the wisdom of the ancients. The young
man declares, that “he would willingly call him a devil, did he not
know that he had had a body.” Luther also has a low opinion of all the
Universities of his day: “They condemn and burn the good books,” he
exclaims, “while fabricating and framing bad ones.”[706]

Self-confidence had been kindled in the monk’s breast by a conviction
of future greatness. He speaks several times of this inkling he had
whilst yet a secular student at the Erfurt University; when ailing
from some illness of which we have no detailed account, the father of
one of his friends cheered him with certain words which sank deeply
into his memory: “My dear Bachelor, don’t lose heart, you will live to
be a great man yet.” In 1532 Luther related to his pupil Veit Dietrich
this utterance which he still treasured in his memory.[707] How
strong an impression such lightly spoken words could make on his too
susceptible mind is evident from a letter of 1530 where he speaks of
his vivid recollection of another man, who, when Luther was consoling
him on the death of his son, had said to him: “Martin, you may be sure
that some day you will be a great man.” Since, on the same occasion,
he goes on to refer to the remark made by Staupitz, viz. that he was
called to do great things, and declares that this prediction had been
verified, it becomes even clearer that this idea had taken root and
thriven in his mind even from early years.[708] But how does all this
harmonise with the humility of the true religious, and with the pious
self-forgetfulness of the mystic? There can be no doubt that it is
more in accordance with the quarrelsomeness and exclusiveness, the hot
temper and lack of consideration for others to which the testimonies
already recorded have repeatedly borne witness. (Above, vol. i.,
_passim_.)

There is a document in existence, on which so far but little attention
has been bestowed, which is characteristic of his language at one time.
Its tone of exaggeration makes it worthy to rank side by side with the
mystical passage quoted above, in which Luther professes to have himself
experienced the pangs of hell which were the earthly lot of chosen
souls.[709] Owing to its psychological value this witness to his humility
must not be passed over.

Luther had received from Christopher Scheurl of Nuremberg, a learned
lawyer and humanist, a letter dated Jan. 2, 1517, in which this warm
partisan and admirer of the Augustinians, who was also a personal
friend of Staupitz after a few words in praise of his virtue and
learning, of which Staupitz had told him, expressed the wish to enter
into friendly correspondence with him.[710] The greater part of
Scheurl’s letter is devoted to praising Staupitz, rather than Luther.
Yet the young man was utterly dumbfounded even by the meagre praise
the letter contained. His answer to it was in an extravagant vein,
the writer seemingly striving to express his overwhelming sense of
humility in the face of such all-too-great praise.[711]

The letter of one so learned and yet so condescending, so Luther
begins, while greatly rejoicing him had distressed him not a
little. He rejoiced at his eulogies of Staupitz, in whom he simply
extolled Christ. “But how could you sadden me more than by seeking
my friendship and decking me out in such empty titles of honour? I
cannot allow you to become my friend, for my friendship would bring
you, not honour but rather harm, if so be that the proverb is true:
‘Friends hold all in common.’ If what is mine becomes yours then you
will receive only sin, unwisdom and shame, for these alone can I call
mine; but such things surely do not merit the titles you give them.”
Scheurl, indeed, would say, so he goes on in the same pathetic style,
that it was only Christ he admired in him; but Christ cannot dwell
together with sin and folly; hence he must be mindful of his own
honour and not fall so low (‘_degeneres_’) as to become the friend
of Luther. Even the Father-Vicar Staupitz praises him (Luther) too
much. He made him afraid and put him in peril by persisting in saying:
“I bless Christ in you and cannot but believe Him present with you
now.” Such a belief was, however, hard, and the more eulogies and
friends, the greater the danger in which the soul stood (then follow
three superfluous quotations from Scripture). The greater the favour
bestowed by men the less does God bestow His. “For God wills to be
either the only friend or else no friend at all. To make matters
worse, if a man humbles himself and seeks to fly praise and favour,
then praise and favour always come, to our peril and confusion. Oh,
far more wholesome,” he cries, “are hatred and disgrace than all
praise and love.” The danger of praise he elucidates by a comparison
with the cunning of the harlot mentioned in Proverbs vii. He is
writing all this to Scheurl, not by any means to express contempt for
his good-will but out of real anxiety for his own soul. Scheurl was
only doing what every pious Christian must do who does not despise
others but only himself; and this, too, he himself would also do.

And, as though he had not yet said enough of his love of humility,
the writer makes a fresh start in order to explain and prove what he
has said. Not on account of learning, ability and piety does a true
Christian honour his fellow-men; such a thing had better be left to
the heathen and to the poets of to-day; the true Christian loved the
helpless, the poor, the foolish, the sinful and the wretched. This he
proves first from Ps. xli., then from the teaching of Christ and from
His words: “For that which is high to men is an abomination before
God” (Luke xvi. 15). “Do not make of me such an abomination,” so he
goes on, “do not plunge me into such misery if you would be my friend.
But, from so doing you will be furthest if you forbear from praising
me either before me or before others. If, however, you are of opinion
that Christ is to be extolled in me, then use His Name and not mine.
Why should the cause of Christ be besmirched by my name and robbed of
its own name? To everything should be given its right name; are we
then to praise what is Christ’s without using His Name? Behold,” so
he breaks off at last very aptly, “here you have your ‘friend’ and
his flood of words; have patience friendly reader”—words which may
apply to the modern reader of this effusion no less than to its first
addressee. It cannot well be gainsaid that something strange lay in
this kind of humility. It would be difficult to find an exact parallel
to such language in the epistles of the humanists of that day, and
still less in the correspondence of truly pious souls. What may,
however, help us to form our opinion is the fact that, in the letters
written immediately after the above, we again find the young professor
condemning wholesale everything that did not quite agree with his own
way of thinking.

The passion, precipitancy and exaggeration which inspired him during
his monkish days is the other characteristic which here calls for
consideration. His fiery and unbridled zeal was of such a character as to
constitute a very questionable virtue in a monk.

We may recall what has already been said of the youthful Luther’s
passionate and unmeasured abuse, even in public, of the “Little
Saints” and “detractors” in his Order, for instance at the Chapter of
the Order held at Gotha in 1515. Bitter exaggerations are met with
even in his first lectures. In the controversy with the Observantines
he goes so far as to make the bold assertion, that it was just the
good works of his zealous brother monks that were sinful, though they
in their blindness refused to believe it.[712] In his Commentary on
the Psalms in 1513-15 he even goes so far as to denounce as “rebellion
and disobedience” their vindication of strict observance in the
Order.[713] His imagination makes him fancy that they are guided by
a light kindled specially for them by “the devil.”[714] Such is his
ardour when thundering against the abuses in the Order that he forgets
to make the needful distinctions, and actually, in the presence of the
young Augustinians who were his pupils, attacks the very foundations
of their Mendicant Order. Yet elsewhere, in the narrowest spirit of
party prejudice, he inveighs against worthy scholars who happened to
belong to other Orders, for instance, against Wimpfeling, on whom he
heaps angry invective.[715] The slightest provocation was enough to
rouse his ire.

Soon his passion began to vent itself on the Church outside. In his
lectures on the Psalms he laments that Christianity was hardly to
be found anywhere, such were the abuses; he can but weep over the
evil; all pious men were, according to him, full of sorrow that
the Incarnation and Passion of Christ had come to be so completely
forgotten. We know how the young religious, from the abyss of his
inexperience, declared in the most general terms, as though he had
been familiar with all classes and all lands, that the desecration
of what was most sacred in the Church had gone so far that they
had sunk below even the Turk; “owing to the unchastity, pomp and
pride of her priests, the Church was suffering in her property, in
the administration of her sacraments and of the Word of God, in
her judicial authority and finally in her government,” etc., “the
Sanctuary was, so to speak, being hewn down with axes,” churchmen
doing spiritually what the Turk was doing both spiritually and
materially; in vain was the Word of God preached “seeing that every
entrance was closed to it.”

Holy men, of real zeal, had always been able to discern the good side
by side with the bad. But the youthful Luther sees on every side, and
everywhere nothing but false teaching (“_scatet totus orbis_,” etc.),
nay, a very “deluge of filthy doctrines.”[716] To be made a bishop is
to him tantamount to branding oneself a “Sodomite”; so full of vice
is the episcopate that those wearers of the mitre were the best who
had no sin on their conscience beyond avarice.[717] As for the men of
learning, they rank far below Tauler, and, thanks to their narrowness,
had made the age “one of iron, nay, of clay.”[718] When setting faith
and grace against the alleged heathenism of the scholars he goes
so far as to say, that his man is he “who outside of grace knows
nothing.”[719] As early as 1515 he thinks himself qualified to attack
the authorities and the highest circles because “his teaching-office
lent him apostolic power to say and to reveal what was being done
amiss.”[720]

Why, we may, however, ask, did not the reformer of the Church begin
with himself, seeing that, in the lectures on the Psalms just
mentioned, he already laments the coldness of his own religious
life?[721] Even then he felt temptations pressing upon him; already
in consequence of his manifold and distracting labours he had lapsed
into a state in which prayer became distasteful to him, and of which
he writes to an intimate friend in 1523: “In body I am fairly well
but I am so much taken up with outward business that the spirit is
almost extinguished and rarely takes thought for itself.”[722] These
words and other earlier admissions (above, vol. i., p. 275 ff.) throw
a strange light on the legend according to which he had wrestled in
prayer by day and by night.

Even in his devotion to his studies and in his manner of writing on
learned subjects his natural extravagance stands revealed. His love
for study was all passion; his mode of thought and expression was
simply grotesque. It was the young monk’s passion for learning which
led him on the occasion of his visit to Rome to petition the Pope to
be allowed for a term of several years to absent himself from home
and devote himself in the garb of a secular priest to his studies
at the Universities. At Wittenberg we find him in the refectory pen
in hand in the silent watches of the night when all the other monks
had gone to rest, and, in his excited state, he fancies he hears the
devil making an uproar. Though, according to his admission of Oct. 26,
1516, he was so busy and overwhelmed with literary work, as “rarely to
have time to recite the Hours or to say Mass,”[723] yet he still had
time enough to inveigh against the “sophists of all the Universities”
as he had, even then, begun to term the professors of his day. He
professed his readiness, were it necessary, to find time to go to
Erfurt in order to defend in a public disputation there the Theses set
up at Wittenberg in his name by his pupil Franz Günther; the Erfurt
Augustinians were not to denounce these propositions as “paradoxical,
or actually cacodoxical,” “for they are merely orthodox.” “I wait
with eagerness and interest to see what they will put forward against
these our paradoxes.”[724] In April, 1517, when Carlstadt caused some
commotion by publishing his erroneous views on nature and grace in
152 theses, Luther called them in one of his letters the paradoxes
of an Augustine, excelling the doctrine in vogue as much as Christ
excels Cicero; there were some who declared these propositions to be
paradoxical rather than orthodox, but this was “shameless insolence”
on the part of men who had studied and understood neither Augustine
nor Paul; “to those who understand, however, the theses ring both
pleasantly and beautifully, indeed to me they seem to have an
excellent sound.”[725]

His restless style and love of emphasis is characteristic of his own
inner restlessness and excitement. He himself was quite aware of
the source of this disquiet, at least so far as it was the result
of a moral failing. In 1516 he lays his finger deliberately on his
besetting fault when he admits to a friend, that the “root of all
our unrest is nowhere else to be found than in our belief in our own
wisdom”; “I have been taught by my own experience! Oh, with how much
misery has this evil eye [belief in my own wisdom] plagued me even to
this very day!”[726]

And yet he takes for one of his guiding principles the curious idea
that the opposition of so many confirmed the truth of what he said.
His work on the Penitential Psalms, so he wrote to his friend Lang
on March 1, 1517, would “then please him best if it displeased
all.”[727] And, two years later, he said to Erasmus, when speaking of
the system he followed in this respect: “I am wont to see in what is
displeasing to many, the gifts of a Gracious God as against those of
an Angry God”; hence, so he assures him, the hostility under which
Erasmus himself was suffering, was, for him, a proof of his real
excellence.[728]

His burning enthusiasm at the time when he thought he had discovered
the sense of the passage: “The just man lives by faith,” has already
been described elsewhere.[729] This and other incidents just touched
upon recall those morbid sides of his character referred to in the
previous chapter.

As we might expect, during the first years of his great public struggle
his restlessness was even more noticeable than before. The predominance
of the imagination has hardly ever been so fatally displayed by any other
man, though, of course, it is not every man whose life is thrown amid
times so stirring. “Because,” so he wrote in 1541, recalling his audacity
in publishing the Indulgence-Theses and the fame it brought him, “all the
Bishops and Doctors kept silence [concerning the abuse of indulgences]
and no one was willing to bell the cat.… Luther was vaunted as a doctor,
and as the only man who was ready to interfere. Which fame was not at all
to my taste.”[730] This latter assertion he is fond of making to others,
but his letters of that time show how greatly the charm of notoriety
contributed to unbridle his stormy energy. It was his opponents’ defiance
which first opened the flood-gates of his passionate eloquence. At the
very outset he warns people that contradiction will only make his spirit
more furious and lead him to have recourse to even stronger measures;
elsewhere he has it: “The more they rage, the further I shall go!”[731]

We may recall his reference to the “gorgeous uproar,” and the passages
where he assures his friends: “I am carried away and know not by what
spirit,”[732] and “God carries me away, I am not master of myself.”[733]

In the light of his pathological fervour the contradictions in which he
involves himself become more intelligible, for instance, what he wrote to
Pope Leo X in his letter of May, 1518,[734] which so glaringly contrasted
with his other words and deeds. His unrest and love of exaggeration
caused him to overlook this and the many other contradictions both with
himself and with what he had previously written.

* * * * *

The picture of the monk which we have been compelled to draw differs
widely from the legendary one of the pious young man shut up in the
cloister, who, according to Luther’s account at a later date, led a
fanatical life of penance and, because he saw Popish piety to be all too
inadequate, “sought to find a Gracious God.”

_Luther’s Alterations of the Facts_

It was not altogether arbitrarily that Luther painted the picture of the
monk forced by his trouble of mind to forsake Popery. Rather he followed,
possibly to some extent unconsciously, the lines of actual history,
though altering them to suit his purpose.

He retained intact not a few memories of his youth, which, under the
stress of his bitterness and violence, and with the help of a lively
imagination unfettered by any regard for the laws of truth, it was no
difficult task to transform. Among these memories belong those of his
time of fervour during his Noviciate and early days as a priest. They it
was which evidently formed the groundwork of his later statements that
he had been throughout an eminently pious monk. Then again, among the
remarkable traits which made their appearance somewhat later, the two
elements just described have a place in his legend, viz. his extravagant
self-conscious humility and his fiery zeal. In his later controversies he
is disposed to represent this strange sort of humility as real humility
and as a sign of genuine piety. The pious, humble monk hidden in a corner
had all unwittingly grown into a great prophet of the truth. In the same
way the ardour of those years which he never afterwards forgot, was
transformed in his fancy into a fanatical hungering and thirsting after
Popish holiness-by-works, in discipline and fasting, watching, cold and
prayer.

In addition to these there were memories of the transition period of
religious scruples, of temptations to doubts about predestination, of his
passing paroxysms of terror, gloom and inherited timidity. These elements
must be considered separately.

Scrupulosity, with the doubts and nervousness it brings in its train,
probably only troubled him for a short time during the first period of
his life in the cloister. The admonitions of his novice-master, given
above (p. 206), may refer to some such passing condition through which
the young man went, and which indeed is by no means uncommon in the
spiritual life. The profound impression made by these first inward
experiences seems to have remained with him down to his old age; indeed
it is the rule that the struggles of one’s younger days leave the deepest
impression on both heart and memory. His quondam scruples and groundless
fear of sin, eked out by his ideas of the virtues of a religious,
probably served as the background for the picture of the young monk
“sunk” in Popish holiness-by-works and yet so profoundly troubled at
heart.

But all this would not suffice to explain the legend of his mental
unrest, of his sense of being forsaken by God, of his howling, etc.

What promoted this portion of the legend was the recollection of
those persistent temptations to despair which arose from his ideas on
predestination during the time of his mystical aberrations.

The dreadful sense of being predestined by God to hell had for many years
stirred the poor monk’s soul to its lowest depths, even long before he
had thought out his new doctrine. It is no matter for surprise, if,
later, carried away by his polemics, he made the utmost use in his legend
of his former states of fear the better to depict the utter misery of
the monk bent on securing salvation by the practice of good works. The
doctrine of faith alone which he had discovered and the new Evangelical
freedom were, of course, supposed to have delivered him from all trouble
of mind, and thus it was immaterial to him later to what causes his fears
and sadness were assigned.

Yet his supposed new theological discoveries became for him, according to
the testimony of the Commentary on Romans, in many respects a new source
of fear and terror. The doctrine of the Divine imputation or acceptation
did not sink into his mind without from its very nature causing
far-reaching and abiding fears. His then anxieties, which, as a matter of
fact, were in striking contrast with his later assertion of his sudden
discovery of a Gracious God, together with the mystical aberrations in
which he sought in vain for consolation, doubtless furnished another
element for the legend of the terrors he had endured throughout his life
as a monk.

We need only refer to the passage in the Commentary where he declares:
Our so-called good works are not good, but God merely reckons
(“_reputat_”) them as good. “Whoever thinks thus is ever in fear
(‘_semper pavidus_’), and is ever awaiting God’s imputation; hence he
cannot be proud and contentious like the proud self-righteous, who
trust in their good works.”[735]

What is curious, however, is that, here and elsewhere in the
Commentary, the so-called self-righteous, both in the cloister and
the world, appear to be quite “confident” and devoid of fear; they
at least fancy they may enjoy peace; hence, as depicted in the
Commentary, they are certainly not the howling and anxious spirits of
whom the later legend speaks. On the contrary it is Luther alone who
is sunk in sadness, and whose melancholy pessimism presents a strange
contrast to all the rest. His mysticism also veils a deep abyss.

Almost on the same page the pessimistic mystic speaks of that
resignation to hell which has a place in his new system of theology.
“Because we have sin within us we must flee happiness and take on
what is repugnant, and that, not merely in words and hypocritically;
we must resign ourselves to it with full consent, must desire to be
lost and damned. What a man does to him whom he hates, that we must
do to ourselves. Whoever hates, wishes his foe to be undone, killed
and damned, not merely seemingly but in reality. When we thus, with
all our heart, destroy and persecute ourselves, when we give ourselves
over to hell for the sake of God and His Justice, then indeed we have
already satisfied His Justice and He will deliver us.”[736] It can
hardly be considered normal that a monk should wish to live—among
brethren, who rejoiced in the promises of Christ and in the Church’s
means of grace—the life of a lonely mystic sunk in the depths of an
abyss, where “a man does not strive after heaven but is perfectly
ready never to be saved, but rather to be damned, and where, after
having been reconciled by grace, a man fears, not God’s punishments,
but simply to offend Him.”[737]

Luther’s recollections of the mental ailments he went through as a monk
also undoubtedly had their effect on the legend. We know that Luther
never rightly understood the nature of these ailments and that he
regarded his fits of terror, his nervousness and his gloom as anything
but what they really were. It would appear that, in his old age, he
simply lumped all his sad experiences together as typical of the sort of
poison which Popery and Monkery, owing to their false doctrines, offered
to their adepts. Nothing seemed to him to show better from what horrors
he had snatched mankind. Whether involuntary self-deception played a part
here, or whether, by dint of constant repetition, he came to believe in
the truth of his tale, who can now venture to say? In any case his spirit
of bitterness led him to make of his own sufferings a sort of spectre
of terror common to all, who, like himself, had raved that they were
zealously serving God whether in the monastery or in Popery at large.
Even “great Saints” had, according to him, lived amidst the “devil’s
factions and errors, under Rules and in monasteries and institutions,”
but had finally “cut themselves loose and been saved by faith in Jesus
Christ.”[738]

He completely shuts his eyes to the fact that both his fears concerning
predestination and his morbid states of terror accompanied by fainting
fits recurred in his case even in later life, and, that, after his
apostasy he had in addition to suffer from remorse of conscience on
account of his doings against the Church. Nor does he seem to see that
he himself betrays the falsity of what he says of the general depression
to which all monks were subject when he relates above, that _he alone_
had gone about in the monastery labouring under such oppression and that
no one had understood him or been able to console him (above, p. 113);
hence, according to this, his brother monks cannot have suffered from the
terrors he afterwards attributed to them.

_The Monkish Nightmare_

The strange “terrors” under which he was labouring when he first knocked
at the gate of the Augustinian convent at Erfurt were, according to
Melanchthon’s definite assurance already quoted, closely bound up with
his habitual states of fear. They were extraordinary states of mental
perturbation (“_terrores_”) and can only be explained when looked at
in the light of his other mental troubles.[739] Of the incidents that
impelled him to enter the convent[740] Luther himself says in a passage
which has also been quoted above, that (on the occasion of his first
Mass) he had tried to reassure his father Hans by pointing out that he
had been called “by terrors from heaven” (“_de coelo terrores_”); to
which his father had harshly replied: “Oh, that it may not have been a
delusion and a diabolical vision” (“_illusio et præstigium_”).[741] The
happenings immediately previous to his entering the monastery are of a
rather mysterious character. The inmates of the Erfurt convent declared
at that time in consequence of what they had gathered from Luther, that
he, like “another Paul, had been miraculously converted by Christ.”[742]
Oldecop, who began his studies at Wittenberg in 1514, speaks in his
Chronicle of “strange fears and spectres” on account of which Luther
had taken the habit.[743] Still more remarkable is the report based on
the account of Luther’s intimate friend Jonas, and dating from 1538. He
says: When Luther, as a student, was returning to Erfurt after having
been to Gotha to buy some books “there came a dreadful apparition from
heaven which he then interpreted as signifying that he was to become a
monk.”[744] If these statements were correct it would appear as though
we have here already an instance of hallucination worthy of being classed
with the “sights and visions” elsewhere mentioned. Even his earliest
monastic days would assume a suspiciously pathological character if, even
then, he was convinced of having been the recipient of heavenly messages.
It must, however, remain doubtful whether Jonas’s report means exactly
what it seems to mean and whether his sources are to be relied upon.

The possibility of his having been the victim of hallucination at such an
early date also raises the question whether his later abnormal states can
be explained by heredity or his upbringing.

By their “harsh treatment,” so Luther says on one occasion, his parents
had “driven him into the monastery”; here we have an entirely new version
of the motives of his choice of the religious life; he adds that, though
they meant well by him, yet he had known nothing but faintheartedness
and despondency.[745] Poverty still further darkened his early youth.
It is quite possible that the young monk may have suffered for some
considerable time from feelings of timidity and depression as a result of
his education and mode of life. The natural timidity which was apparent
during a part of his youth may also have contributed its quota to the
rise of the legend of the monk who was ever sad. But all this does not
explain as well as an hereditary malady would the terrors or seeming
hallucinations. Unfortunately the question of heredity is still quite
obscure, though the highly irritable temper of his father referred to
above (p. 182) may have some bearing on it. Luther, however, says very
little about his parents and even less of his manner of bidding good-bye
to the world.

The statements he makes, whether in jest or in earnest, concerning his
vow to enter a religious Order, differ widely.

He declares he made the vow to God in honour of St. Anne, but that God
had “taken it in the Hebrew meaning,” Anne signifying grace, and had
understood that Luther wished to become a monk “under grace and not
under the Law,” in fact not a monk at all.[746] Very likely it is no
jest, however, when he adds that, “he had soon regretted his vow, the
more so since many sought to dissuade him from entering the convent”;
he had, nevertheless, persisted, in spite of the objections of his
father and, after that, he had had no further thought of quitting the
convent, “until God deemed the time had come” (to thrust him out of
it).[747]

On another occasion he assures us he had entered the convent only
“because he despaired of himself.”[748] And again: “God let me become
a monk,” “though I entered forcibly and contrary to my father’s
wishes”;[749] for I had “to learn to know the Pope’s trickery.”[750]
As a rule, however, he leaves God out of the matter. He had taken the
vow only “under compulsion,” so he says in self-defence; he had not
become a monk “gladly and willingly”; he did not then know that a
father had to be obeyed, or that vows rested only on “the commandments
of men, on hypocrisy and superstition,”[751] but, during his life in
the cloister, the suspicion of his father, who had now been reconciled
with him, about the possibility of its having all been a diabolical
delusion had sunk deeply into his mind; in his father’s words he had
perforce to recognise the Voice of God.[752]

Again, the legend makes out the monk, in the time of his first fervour,
to have looked more like a corpse than a man; yet, so far as we can
judge, it was only after he had begun his public struggle, i.e.
subsequent to 1517, that he began to show signs of physical exhaustion
and emaciation, and this, too, was only owing to the way in which he went
to work. On the other hand, on March 17, 1509, i.e. nearly four years
after his entry into the religious life, when about to quit Erfurt, he
wrote, that, “as to himself, by God’s grace, all was going well.” The
expression he uses seems to imply that, not merely his spiritual, but
also his bodily, state was satisfactory.[753]

* * * * *

In his legend Luther speaks repeatedly of certain morbid states from
which he had suffered and which he duly uses to lash the Popish
conception of holiness. They are too closely bound up with other facts
in his mental life to be set aside as simple inventions, though it must
also be added that they contain an element of uncertainty.

In the case of people who have been brought up as Christians but
who suffer from certain nervous disorders, particularly when their
temperament is of the melancholy variety, a notable aversion for sacred
objects may occasionally be observed. “Many such patients cannot bear
the sight of a cross, cannot listen to prayers, stop their ears at the
ringing of the Angelus, cannot mention the word ‘sacrament,’ but use some
circumlocution instead.” “Among perfectly normal people we do not meet
with this sort of thing, still it is nothing extraordinary.”[754]

Now, oddly enough, we find Luther, in 1532, telling the people quite
seriously in his sermons on Matt. v.-vii., that, as a novice, he had not
been able to endure the sight of the crucifix. “When I saw a picture or
statue of Christ hanging on the Cross, etc., I was so affrighted that I
averted my eyes.”[755] And, again, in the same sermons: “When I looked at
Him on the Cross He seemed to me like a flash of lightning.” He also adds
that he “had often been affrighted at the name of Jesus.”[756] “The Last
Day,” he says in a sermon of 1534, he could not bear to hear spoken of,
and “my hair stood on end when I thought of it.”[757] These statements
are doubtless exaggerations, but Luther has others even stronger: He
would “rather have heard the devil spoken of than Christ”; he would
rather have seen “the devil than the Crucified”; “rather have heard of
the devils in hell than of the Last Day.” It may be queried whether the
above were simply inventions designed to vilify the monastic life and the
faith in which he had grown up. Nevertheless, whoever calls to mind the
“terrors” Luther experienced at his first Mass and in the procession with
Staupitz, whoever keeps before him the part played by Luther’s “fears”
even at a later date,[758] will certainly not think it beyond the bounds
of possibility that, at times, he should have shuddered at the sight of
the cross or at the mention of Christ or of the Last Judgment.

To all this, his bodily condition may have contributed, yet, in his
legend, Luther makes of these doubtless morbid states of his the
inevitable result of the holiness-by-works practised in the convent and
taught by Catholic doctrine. It was because they had known Christ only
as the Judge, Who must be placated by works, that he had so dreaded the
Crucifix and the very mention of the Judgment. He says that he could not
but tremble at the sight of the Crucifix, because, like the rest of the
Papists, he had been taught to think that “I must go on performing good
works until I have thereby made Christ my friend and gracious toward
me.”[759] For this reason alone he had “so often shrunk back affrighted
at the name of Jesus” and at the “Cross” as at a “flash of lightning,”
because he, like all the rest, had lost his faith; “I had fallen away
from the faith and had no other thought than that I had angered God Whom
I must once more propitiate by my works.” “But praise and thanks be to
God that now we have His Word once more, which leads us to Christ and
depicts Him as our Righteousness”; our heart need no longer “tremble and
quake.”[760]

After assuring us that he was often unable to gaze upon the Cross, he
also at once proceeds to make capital out of this against the olden
Church: “For,” so he continues, “my mind was poisoned by this Popish
doctrine,” a doctrine according to which “Christ, our Healer, had been
turned into a devil.”[761]

Nor does he hesitate to make out that the sight of the Saviour was
likewise terrifying to all the zealous and earnest “saints-by-works”
in the religious life and Popery generally.[762] In another passage he
speaks of the dreadful emotion all felt at the mention of the coming
Judgment and the Last Day: “And so we were all sunk in the filth of our
own holiness and fancied that, by our life and works, we could pacify the
Divine Judgment”; formerly they used to start “if anyone spoke of death
or of the life to come”; but, since the light of the Evangel has risen,
it is otherwise.

It is true that the way in which Luther here allows his prejudice to
exploit these terrifying experiences may raise doubts as to whether
they had ever actually existed even in his own case, or whether he did
not rather invent them with the object of afterwards ascribing them to
all. At the same time it is easier to believe in their existence than to
credit him with having deliberately evolved them out of his own fancy.

The utmost caution must indeed be exercised in accepting his assertions
on this subject. We cannot sufficiently express our amazement at the
credulity with which Luther’s rhetorical statements about his life in the
convent have often been accepted, for instance even by Köstlin. The fact
is, that the ground on which Luther’s later account rests, the elements
that he introduces into his transformation of the facts, and above all
the bitter and aggressive spirit which directs and permeates everything,
have not been adequately recognised and thus the mythological nature of
his fiction has remained undetected. Otherwise it would surely have been
impossible to assert, that, just as Paul had been through the mill of
the Law, so Luther also had been through that of the religious life, in
order, by virtue of his experience, to discover the supreme truth.

* * * * *

Various traits in the picture he drew, which, owing to its difficulties,
has puzzled many people, may, as we have seen, be explained by his
misapprehension or misinterpretation of the phenomena of his own morbid,
melancholy mind. Other moral factors have, however, also to be taken into
account.

As already pointed out, his depression of mind, due primarily to physical
causes, became so pronounced owing to his refusal to submit to proper
direction.

His dissatisfaction was increased by his growing impatience with the
religious life, by remorse of conscience arising from his tepidity and
worldliness, and by his growing antipathy to his vocation.

* * * * *

It may be said, that, had the convent been wisely governed, Luther would
never have been admitted to profession but have been quietly dismissed
while yet a novice. Both for his superiors and for himself this would
have been the better course. A morbid temperament such as his, whatever
may have been its cause, was not suited for the religious life, even
apart from the obstacles in Luther’s character. The monotony and the
penances of the monastic life, the self-discipline and obedience; also
the annoyances with which he had to put up from his brother monks, whose
habits and upbringing were not his, must necessarily have aggravated his
case, particularly as he refused to submit to guidance. His superiors
should have foreseen that this brother would be a source of endless
difficulties. Instead of this, Staupitz, the vicar, clung to his
favourite. He even gave him to understand that he would make of him a
great scholar and an ornament of the Order. Had he remained in the world,
in a different and freer sphere of action, Luther might possibly have
succeeded in shaking off his ailments and the resultant depression. But,
in the convent, particularly as he went his own way, he became the victim
of ideas and imaginations which promoted the growth of his doctrine and
helped to pave the way for his apostasy. Nevertheless, his morbid states
could not annul the vows he had taken in the Order, hence his leaving and
his breach of the vows cannot be excused on the ground of his illness,
though the latter may help to explain his step.

From all the above it is plain how unwarrantable is the assumption that
to set aside Luther’s legend is to shut one’s eyes to the severe inward
struggles through which he went previous to making his great decision.

There can be no doubt that, previous to his unhappy change of religion,
the monk had to wage a hard fight with himself. He was striving against
his conscience, and, by overcoming it, he consciously and deliberately
incurred the guilt of his apostasy. “A frightful struggle of soul,”[763]
may, and indeed must, be assumed, though a very different one from that
usually pictured by Protestants and by Luther himself. It would indeed
be “stupid” (to use the words of a Protestant biographer of Luther) to
seek to “obliterate from history” the deep-down inward struggle which,
“maybe, lasted longer than we think.” It is, however, gratifying to
find that the same author admits that, as a monk in the Erfurt priory,
Luther “found some inward contentment,” in other words, that the legend
is false in this particular; he also grants that, at least “in this
or that statement,” Luther, in his later accounts, has been guilty of
“exaggeration”; that his “development” did not proceed quite on the lines
he fancied later, at least that the “change was not quite so sudden,”
and, finally, that “physical overstrain” had something to do with his
struggles.[764]

3. The Legend receives its last touch; how it was used

It is only after 1530 that we find Luther’s legend of his monkish life
fully developed. Before this we see only the first hints of the tale.

It cannot be argued that, till then, he had been silent on his inward
experiences as a monk, or that the MSS. of the Table-Talk only commence
subsequent to 1530. That, even before this, he had frequently spoken of
his earlier spiritual experiences is evident from the passages already
quoted, and might be proved by many others; moreover the absence of any
recorded Table-Talk is a detail, since the latter is far from being our
sole source in the present question.

We are justified in assuming that the idea matured in 1530, during his
stay at the Castle of Coburg where he had to wage so severe a struggle
with himself. Amid the trials he endured during his days of retirement
at the Wartburg he had found time to pen his violent attack on monastic
vows; so also, it was in the quiet of the Coburg, amidst the ghostly
conflicts and delusions, that he wove the caricature of his own monkish
life into the web of his history. At the very time when Luther was at
the Coburg the burning question of German monasticism was being debated
at the Diet of Augsburg; the Catholic Estates hoped that recognition
might again be won for it from the Protestants, or that it might at least
secure toleration in the districts where allegiance was divided. It was
also at the Coburg that Luther penned many of the furious passages of his
“Warning to the Clergy forgathered at Augsburg.”

He there says: “For the monks I know not how to plead. For I am well
aware you would rather they were all of them given over to the devil,
please God, whether they take wives or not.”[765] In these words he
erroneously takes for granted that all ecclesiastics shared his own
hatred for the monks. He boasts in this writing that he “had destroyed
the monks by his teaching”;[766] he trusts that “the Bishops will not
allow such bugs and lice to be stuck again on their fur cappas.”[767]
The reason why his doctrine had destroyed the monks was, because it
had revealed how they were merely “intent upon works.” “For what else
could come of it? If a conscience is intent on its works and builds on
them, then it is stablished on loose sand which is ever slipping and
sliding away; it must ever be seeking for works, for one and then for
another and ever more and more, until at last even the dead are clothed
in monks’ cowls the better to reach heaven.”[768] The last words are
a caricature, a misrepresentation of a pious custom by which no one
ever dreamt infallibly to win heaven. The “loose sand” is, however, a
favourite expression with him when speaking of his teaching on works. It
is the same teaching that he wants to bring before the eyes of all by
means of his fiction. How, at that time, his thoughts were harking back
to his former life in the convent is plain from a letter of consolation
he then wrote to his “tempted” pupil Weller. He tells him that he
himself had also had his sadnesses and temptations, but that what he had
suffered as a monk had in the end proved a schooling for his present high
calling.[769]

Had he really been the butt of such “temptations” as the legend depicts
and contrived so successfully to vanquish them by his doctrine on
justification, then we might expect to find some trace of this in
his first writings subsequent to his change of outlook. Now, in the
Commentary on Romans we have a vivid document bearing on his change of
opinions, yet, full as it is of information about the author, we may seek
in vain for the legend. On the contrary it breathes a high esteem for
the religious state.[770] In the “Resolutions” to the Indulgence-Theses
likewise, Luther speaks of the phases through which he had passed and of
the mystical sufferings he had endured.[771] Yet here again the features
of the legend are wanting. Is it not somewhat remarkable that an author
usually so candid and talkative as Luther should have kept silence about
those experiences of which, just at that time, i.e. at the beginning of
his public struggle, he must have been so full?

Nor is the legend to be found in Luther’s writings dating from between
1520 and 1530. All the passages quoted above date from a later period.

Had the tale it tells been based on history he would surely have made
capital out of it during this long spell of controversy with the monks
and Papists. Thus, in his violent “_De votis monasticis_” of 1521, he as
yet has nothing to say of his supposed so pious life, of his excessive
penance, misguided holiness-by-works, and the despair he endured in the
convent, though, in the Preface, he alludes to his own life as a monk.
Nor, again, in his “_De servo arbitrio_” of 1525, does he as yet put
forward the actual legend. It is true that here, when explaining his
doctrine of Predestination, he refers to the fears from which as a monk
he had suffered regarding his election, fear which arose from his doubts
as to the fate decreed for him by God from all eternity. As it is also
here that he for the first time airs his theory that his doctrine of
absolute predestination and his dogma of justification were alone able
to give peace,[772] this would seem to have been the place to give an
account of his own life in the monastery and its attendant circumstances.
But the legend was not as yet ready. We have merely a hint of what is
to come: The Catholic doctrine that heaven may be won by works spells
the end of all peace; “this is proved by the experience of all the
holy-by-works, and this, to my cost, I also learnt by the experience
of many years.”[773] About his heroic works of penance, his vigils,
fastings, extraordinary piety, and the sudden and gratifying change, he
has not a word to say.

Heralds of the legend are certain statements met with in a sermon of
1528 where he describes himself as having been a “very pious monk,” who
was, however, wanting in constancy and like a “shaking reed,” not being
firmly rooted in Christ;[774] again at the end of his “Vom Abendmal
Bekentnis” he declares his “greatest sins” were his having “been such
a holy monk and having plagued God for more than fifteen years with so
many masses.”[775] In the latter writing he at least admits that “many
great saints had lived in the monasteries”;[776] he even thinks that “it
would indeed be a fine thing if the monasteries and foundations were
retained, to the end that young folk might there be taught God’s Word,
the Scriptures and how to live a Christian life,” in short as educational
establishments for both boys and girls. “But, to seek in them the road to
salvation, that is the devil’s own doctrine and belief.”[777]

Finally, in the sermons on John vi.-viii. which he began in 1530 after
his return from the Coburg to Wittenberg and continued till 1532 we
have the legend more or less complete: He had been a monk and had kept
the nightly watches (i.e. had chanted the usual matins), had “fasted
and prayed, scourged his body and tormented it”; he had been one of
the pious and earnest monks who took their life seriously, “who, like
me, were at some pains and examined and plagued themselves, and wanted
to attain to what Christ is in order to be saved. But what did they
gain thereby?”[778] At the same time he begins to enlarge in the most
incredible way on the beliefs and habits of the Papists with regard to
their own merits and the merits of Christ. All had held their tongues
concerning the Saviour, so he says, and he emphasises his statement by
adding: “I myself, I should have blushed to say that Christ was the
Saviour.” Thus in a sermon of Dec., 1530.[779]

In the period that follows, what he says of his piety, and especially
of his works of penance, grows more and more emphatic. The argument
at the back of his mind is this: “If even so mortified, penitent,
and holy a monk as he could find no peace in Popery but only black
despair, must not then all admit that he was in the right in
protesting against both the Church and her vows?”

So strictly had he kept his Rule, that, if ever monk got to heaven, it
should have been he; he had plagued himself to death with watching,
prayer, study and other labour.[780] This was the time when he “sought
to be a holy monk and to be reckoned among the most pious.”[781] “If
ever a monk was earnest then it was I.… I was at the utmost pains to
keep the ordinances” (of the Fathers).

He “had been one of the best”[782] and was “wholly given over” to
“fasting, watching and prayer”;[783] “I nearly killed myself with
fasting, watching and cold … so mad and foolish was I.”[784] By
fasting, sleeplessness, hard work and coarse clothing “my body was
dreadfully broken and worn out.”[785]

In short, he had “sunk deeper into the quagmire [of mortification,
obedience to the Church and monastic piety] than many an other”; so
much so that “it had been hard and bitter” to him to cut himself
adrift from the ordinances of the Pope; “God knows how hard I found
it!”[786]

As he himself gradually came to believe in his extraordinary
“holiness-by-works” it may be that his thoughts dwelt too exclusively
to his earlier days as a monk, i.e. on those passed at Erfurt, during
which he certainly was more zealous than in later years, though never
such a fanatic as he afterwards makes out. He may also have compared his
life as a monk with the small efforts after virtue he made subsequent to
his public apostasy, and the contrast may have led him to make too much
of his piety in the convent. The contrast, indeed, often troubled him,
and we find him seeking for grounds to excuse his later lukewarmness in
prayer, so different from his earlier fervour.[787] This also helps us to
explain the line of thought followed in the legend.

The true character of the legend becomes clearer when Luther begins
to exploit it in his polemics. He depicts himself as a sort of
“caricature of the monastic saint,”[788] and then complains: This
damnable life could not but keep me ever in a state of fear, and yet
the Popish Church recommends and sanctions it; the more zealous I grew
the further I withdrew from Christ—nay, brought even my baptism into
danger! He had never been able to “find comfort in it,” nay, he had
been compelled to “lose” it, to “lend a hand in denying it.” “This is
the upshot and reward of their doctrine of works.”[789] He even goes
so far as to say that the Papists “truly and indeed made nought of
the baptism” of Christ, for which reason “their doctrine is as baneful
as that of the Anabaptists”; they “make of us Jews or Turks, as though
we had never been baptised.”

Luther’s persistent and obtrusive exploitation of his legend in his
controversies must not be lost to sight.

In his new-found zeal he not only as a rule passes too confidently
from the _I_ (_I_ did so and so) to the _we_, or _they_, the better
to clap the blame attaching to himself on the monks in general, the
Pope and all the Papists, and then to conclude with the praise of the
new Evangel, but—and this reveals even more plainly the origin of the
invention,—he also follows the reverse order, speaking first of the
New Evangel, then of the senseless martyrdom endured by all the monks
with their works, and, lastly, of his own personal experiences, as
though they had been necessarily implied in his earlier premisses.

_I_ cruelly disciplined my body, he says, and goes on: “_They_ plagued
and tormented themselves”; for all that, “did they find Christ? Christ
says: ‘You shall die in your sins.’ To this they came.” “The Pope,
too, labours and seeks,” to find what Christ is; “but never will he
find it.” All this leads to the conclusion: “But now God has given His
Grace, so that every town and thorp has the Gospel.”[790]

Above we heard him speak of the “quagmire” in which he was sunk;
in the same connection he remarks: “_We_ wore out the body with
fasting,” etc., “and some even went crazy through it.” Then follows
the inference: “And, at last, _we_ lost our very souls.” For, to our
“great and notable injury,” _we_ were made to feel “in our anxious and
troubled conscience” what it means “to try to become pious by works
and so to redeem ourselves from sin.” “_We_ would gladly have had a
cheerful conscience,” but “it was all of no use, and _we_ naturally
became more and more downhearted about sin and death, so that no folk
more unhappy are to be found on earth than the priestlings, monks and
nuns who are wrapped up in their works.” “The more _they_ do, the
worse things fare with them.” But, since my doctrine has come into
the world, people have unlearnt their faintheartedness: “_We_ run to
the Man Who is called Christ and say: Yes indeed, we must take it
from the Man without any merit whatsoever [on our part].… He gives me
freely that for which formerly I had to pay a high price. He gives me,
without any works or merit, that for which formerly I had to stake
body, strength and health.”[791]

His supposed experiences as a monk are even made to do service in his
interpretation of Holy Scripture. In order to understand the Scriptures,
so he argues, deep inward experience is called for. This he maintained
when withstanding the fanatics and their system of illuminism. Here he
actually carries back the beginning of his own experience to his convent
days.

Already in the convent, so he declares, he had been compelled to bow to
the idol of scepticism, because he, and all the rest, knew nothing of any
real faith in the Gospel. Far less had he learned to pray Evangelically.

“That Christ was a mystery, as St. Paul says, I looked upon formerly,
when I had to submit to being called a Doctor of Holy Scripture, as a
lying statement which I very well understood. But now that, praise be
to God, I have once more become a poor student of Holy Writ, and that,
the longer I live, the less I know of it, I begin to see the marvel of
such sayings, and find by experience that they must necessarily remain
mysteries.… Our experience must bear witness to this, how amply, fully
and clearly we now possess this same Word of Christ.”[792] But, by the
Pope, it was “gruesomely murdered.”[793]

Of the Saints of their Order the monks made their God, and of their
miracles they made their Gospel. “For know you this, that I, Dr.
Martin Luther, who am now living and write this, was also one of
the crowd who were forced to believe and worship such things [lying
fables]. And had anyone been so bold as to doubt one whit of it, or
to raise a finger against it, he would have gone to the stake or to
some other evil end.”[794] That the latter was an exaggeration and the
merest invention Luther was perfectly well aware.

He also speaks untruthfully of the manner of prayer in the convent.
That he himself, when once he had fallen away from his vocation, no
longer prayed in a right spirit is very likely. He, however, says:
“I and all the others had not the right conception” (of prayer);
it was no true “raising of the heart to God because we fled from
God (‘_fugiebamus Deum_’).… We only prayed ‘conditionally’ and
‘hypothetically,’ not ‘categorically.’” This he said in 1537,
admitting, however, with regard to his own then family prayers,
that they “were not so fervent, because he was always forced to
protest,” i.e. to pour out his anger against the Papists; but, “in the
congregation as a whole, it comes from the heart and also serves its
purpose.”[795]

His wilful misrepresentation of the truth becomes more pronounced,
when, in the exploitation of the legend, he seeks to moderate the
monks’ practices of penance and mortification—with the help of Terence
and Aristotle.

In his Commentary on Genesis he complains: “The religious life of the
monk is so crooked that no exception (‘_epikia_’) is allowed, nor any
moderation. Hence it is all wickedness and unrighteousness. No heed is
paid to the object of the Law, or to charity.… And yet what Terence
says is still true: ‘_summum ius esse summam iniuriam_.’ God does not
wish the body to be put to death, but that it be preserved for each
one’s calling and for the service of our neighbour.”[796] “Learn,
therefore, that peace and charity must govern and direct all virtues
and laws, as Aristotle points out in the 5th book of his Ethics.”[797]

Now, as a matter of fact, the Rule of the Hermits of St. Augustine,
with which he was thoroughly conversant, enjoined consideration for
the health of the individual.[798] Brother Jordan of Saxony, whose
book was regarded as a standard work in the Order, insists on care
being taken of the body and only permits penitential exercises “in
moderation, with the superiors’ approval and without scandal to the
brethren.”[799]

His falsehoods are coupled with the outbursts of fury against Catholicism
into which he was so prone to fall when attempting to describe the
religious life he had forsaken.

Because we endured so much “pain and such martyrdom of heart and
conscience” no one must now seek to excuse the Papacy; on the contrary
“we cannot blame and scold the Pope enough”; “that he should have so
wasted the beautiful years of my youth, and martyred and plagued my
conscience is really too bad.” Popery is the “scarlet whore of Rome,
the arch-whore, the French whore, chock-full of blasphemies”; “we must
thank our Lord God that He has revealed and discovered to us the Pope
as the dragon with his head, belly and tail.”[800]—The monks are a
“devilish crew,” and monkery a “hellish cauldron”; by day and by night
Christ is to all monks a “hangman and devil”; even the best and most
learned, and St. Thomas of Aquin himself, were all driven to despair
and died of the ghostly poison.[801] The last words occur in the work
he wrote in self-defence against Duke George of Saxony (1533), who had
twitted him with having committed perjury in breaking his religious
vows.

The thought of his own infidelity and his abuse of the graces of the
religious life was at times quite enough in itself to fill him with
fury. At any rate his whole picture of his earlier years is steeped in
polemics and the spirit of hate.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

END OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. THE CHURCH-UNSEEN AND THE VISIBLE CHURCH-BY-LAW

1. From Religious Licence to Religious Constraint

_Freedom as the Watchword_

In the early days of his public protest against the olden Church, when
Luther proclaimed the “universal priesthood of all Christians,” there
could as yet be no question of any compulsion in matters of doctrine,
seeing that he expressly conceded to the Christian congregations the
right and power to weigh all doctrines and “to set up or send adrift
their teachers and soul-herds.” Every Christian, so he wrote, who saw
that a true teacher was lacking, was taught and consecrated by God as a
priest and was also bound, “under pain of the loss of his soul and of
incurring the Divine displeasure, to teach the Word of God.”[802] It
is not necessary after all we have already said[803] to point out how
impossible it is to square such far-reaching concessions to freedom with
any idea of a positive body of doctrine. The concessions may, however,
have appealed to him particularly because he himself was disposed to
claim the utmost freedom in respect of the dogmas of Catholicism. In
those days he was delighted to hear himself extolled as the champion
of freedom and the right of private judgment. The interests of his
party made such extravagant toleration commendable, for any attempt at
compulsion in doctrinal matters, particularly at the beginning, would
have lost him many friends. He was also anxious that it should be said of
the new Church that it had spread of its own accord and only owing to the
power of the Word.

In the sermon he preached at Erfurt in 1522 in support of the change
of religion in that town he had declared, that every Christian, thanks
to his kingly priesthood, was an “image of Christ” and a “cleric,” and
“able to judge of all things”; to his decision, based on the Word of
Christ, “the Pope and all his followers were subject”; “he judges all
things and is judged of none.”[804]

Even two years later, in words proclaiming universal freedom of
belief, he had dissuaded the Saxon Princes from taking violent
measures against the fanatics: “Let the spirits fall upon each other
and clash!” What cannot stand must in any case succumb in the fight,
and only those who fight rightly are assured of the crown. “Just let
them preach as they please!”[805]

In 1525 he told Carlstadt and the Sacramentarians that each one was
free to follow his own conscience and to question the Sacrament or
refuse to receive it.[806] This agrees with his statement of 1521: “No
one must be forced into the faith, but the Gospel must be set before
everyone and all be admonished to believe, yet left free to obey or
not. All the Sacraments must be free to everyone.”[807]

Luther registered a formal protest against the ancient right of
proceeding against heretics by means of temporal penalties, particularly
that of death. “To burn heretics is against the will of the Holy Ghost,”
so he declared in 1518 and again in 1520.[808] In 1520 he said: “Heretics
must be overcome by argument, not by fire.”[809]

Most of what he was to say subsequently on the question of public
toleration refers to the bearing of the authorities, especially towards
the Anabaptists and Zwinglians. That he himself, however, and every
follower of his Evangel, were bound to regard all opinions which diverged
from his own as godless heresies and brand them as such, that he had
never doubted from the moment he had discovered his new Evangel. In
accordance with this he proceeds to demand more and more strongly of the
“heretics” within the pale unconditional acceptance of all the articles
of faith.[810]

What were the authorities to do faced by teachings so divergent? In 1523,
in a writing indeed intended mainly for the Catholic rulers and opponents
of his doctrine, Luther is decidedly quite against any interference on
the part of the authorities: “To resist heretics, that is the bishops’
duty to whom this office is committed, not the princes’; for heresy can
never be overborne by a strong hand.… Here God’s Word must fight.”[811]
In April, 1525, in the midst of the Peasant War, in his “Ermanunge,” he
enunciates, not without some thought of his personal ends, this general
principle—“Yes, the authorities must not oppose what each one chooses to
believe and teach, whether it be Gospel or lie; it is enough that they
hinder the preaching of feud and lawlessness.”[812]

Boehmer justly points out, that Luther’s standpoint and doctrine as a
whole, essentially spelt not only “unfettered freedom of teaching, but
also entire freedom of worship.”

Meanwhile, however, Luther had already repeatedly urged those in power,
especially his own sovereign, to do their supposed duty, and back up the
new Evangel by their authority and by forbidding Catholic worship, the
Mass and Catholic sermons.

In what follows we shall deal with Luther’s behaviour towards the
Catholics, as distinguished from his attitude towards sectarians within
his own camp.

_Intolerance Towards Catholics in Theory and Practice_

We should be making a serious mistake were we to judge of Luther’s
tolerance towards the olden religion from his statements above on behalf
of freedom. In Protestant literature, even to the present day, such a
one-sided view has found a place, though it has long since been rejected
by clear-sighted historians of that faith. In the course of the above
narrative instances have been met with repeatedly of Luther’s intolerance
in theory and practice with regard to those who thought differently. Here
we shall refer concisely to various details already set on record and
then draw some new facts and utterances from the abundant store bearing
on the matter in hand.

It was “his duty to oppose false teachers,” Luther had written to his
Elector on May 8, 1522, of the Canons of Altenburg.[813] In the same
way, with much storming, he had insisted that the secular power should
make an end of Catholic worship in the collegiate church of Wittenberg.

From the standpoint of his principles it is rather remarkable that,
when the persecuted Canons of Wittenberg appealed to the Elector’s
authority, Luther retorted: “What has the Elector to do with us in
such things?”[814] and that, later, in one of his sermons, he boldly
replied to their objections in law: “What care we about the Elector?
He commands only in worldly matters.”[815] In making a stand against
the celebration of Mass at Wittenberg he had frankly declared: “It
is the duty of the authorities to resist and to punish such public
blasphemy,” just as they are bound to punish the blasphemies uttered
in the streets by godless men. The Elector and his Councillors were
quite aware of the contradictions involved in Luther’s teaching.
Hence, at the Prince’s instance, the Court pointed out to him on Nov.
24, 1524, that “he himself preached that the Word should be left to
fight its own way, and that this it would do in its own good time, so
God willed”; he ought himself to be the first “to practise what he
taught and preached.”[816] In spite of this Luther, soon after, was
successful in violently making a clean sweep of the Catholic Mass at
Wittenberg.[817]

The theory that the Evangelical ruler must use force to root out
Catholic worship was proclaimed by the Court chaplain Spalatin, a
man “standing altogether under Luther’s influence, and who, as a
rule, merely voiced his views”;[818] this he did in a letter of May
1, 1525, where he cites the prescriptions of the Mosaic law (Deut.
vii.). According to this the secular authorities are bound “by the Law
of God to abrogate idolatrous and blasphemous worship”; any further
toleration on the part of the Elector of “idolatry” in his lands would
be a great sin; on the other hand it would be a “great, consoling and
Christian work” were he “to put the Christian bit in the mouth of
all the clergy.” “Ah, that would indeed be a noble work!”[819] To the
successor of the then Elector who died shortly after this, Spalatin
wrote on Oct. 1, 1525: “Dr. Martin also says, that Your Electoral
Highness ought in no way to suffer anyone to proceed any longer with
the unchristian ceremonies, or to set them up again”;[820] on Jan.
10, 1526, he, together with two Altenburg preachers, backed up the
petition to the Elector for the extirpation of “idolatry” by pointing
to the example of the pious kings of the Jews.[821] At Altenburg and
elsewhere such exhortations were crowned all too speedily with success.

“A secular ruler,” Luther himself wrote to the Elector Johann on Feb. 9,
1526, “must not permit his underlings to be led into strife and discord
by contumacious preachers, for this may issue in uproar and sedition, but
in each locality there must be but one kind of preaching.”[822]

On such grounds, however, Protestantism itself might just as well have
been denied a hearing, seeing that it had come to disturb the peace, the
“one kind of preaching” and the one faith. The princes, however, spurred
on by their theologians, seized only too eagerly on this principle, using
it in favour of the innovations. The Elector Johann declared as early as
Feb. 31, 1526, that he had “graciously taken note of the Memorandum” and
would, “for the future, conduct himself in such matters as beseemed a
Christian”;[823] and he kept his word.

The intolerance shown to Catholics and their systematic oppression in
Saxony stands in blatant contrast with the claim made, that Luther by
his preaching had won religious freedom for the German lands. Banishment
was the punishment incurred by those who chose to remain steadfast in
their attachment to the Catholic faith. Thus, in 1527, it was expressly
laid down in the regulations for the Saxon Visitation, that: “Whoever is
suspected in the matter of the Sacraments, or of any other error in the
faith” is to “be summoned and questioned, and, if necessary, witnesses
against him are also to be called.” “Such an ‘inquisition’ is also to
be instituted by the Visitors in the case of the laity.”[824] If they
refuse to abjure their “errors” they are to be given a certain time to
sell their possessions and to quit the land, with a “warning of the
severe penalties” with which any ecclesiastic or layman will be visited
who is again found in the country.[825] Bearing in mind the difficulty
emigration presented at that time, particularly in the case of the people
on the land, one can appreciate the injustice of the measure.

Luther and his followers frequently enough appealed to theological
grounds in support of such measures, above all to the Old Testament
enactments against blasphemers and contemners of religion. One-sidedly
they simply applied to their own day and to their own controversial
purposes, the exceptional regulations of the Mosaic dispensation which
sought to preserve the religion of the chosen people in the midst of a
heathen world. In this connection Luther appeals to Moses without the
slightest hesitation though, as a rule, armed with the New Testament,
he is ready enough to assail the Mosaic Law; he also set up the pious
“Kings of Juda and Israel” as patterns. Wenceslaus Link did much the
same when he summoned the Altenburg Town-Council to make a stand
against Catholicism and abrogate the “lies and fond inventions of the
idolaters”;[826] nor did Spalatin hesitate to point out to the Saxon
Elector the commendation the pious rulers of the Jews had earned from
God for their bloody repression of idolatry.[827]

Another ground for compulsion, to which Spalatin gives expression in
a letter to the Elector, was, that: They must not forget how “many a
poor man would more readily come to the Evangel, were that wretched
system [of Popery and its idolatry] no longer in existence.” In other
words, were Catholic worship rooted out, Catholics would more easily
be won over to the Evangel.[828] It was on such a standpoint as this
that the Augsburg declaration of 1530 made by the theologians of
the Saxon Electorate was based. The Emperor had demanded from the
Protesting Princes toleration of the Catholic worship for those of
their subjects who chose to remain Catholic. The theologians thereupon
expressed themselves against such an arrangement, and urged that, in
this case, Lutheran proselytism would be hampered: “Were it to be
said that the rulers were not to hinder it, though the preachers were
to preach against it, it is clear of what [small] good would be all
the teaching and preaching of the ministers.”[829]

In the Duchy of Saxony, as everybody knows, the introduction of
Lutheranism was opposed by Duke George. His severity he justified by
appealing to the thousand-year-old law of the one great world-wide
Church, the Church of the Apostles, of the Fathers and martyrs and
Œcumenical Councils and great missioners of all ages, a law, moreover,
sanctioned by the Empire. When, in 1533, a number of Lutherans were
banished from the Duchy[830] Luther seized upon this as a pretext for
controversy. Roundly scolding the “Ducal tyrant,” he declared this
sentence of banishment to be “a devilish and criminal thing.” The
authority of the sovereign, so he now wrote, again contradicting himself,
“only extends over life and property in secular matters.”[831] But, after
George’s death in 1539 and the accession of his brother Henry, Luther’s
tone changed, for Henry held Lutheran views. In a letter he sent about
that time to the Elector Johann Frederick, he is angry because more than
500 of the Saxon clergy, all of them “venomous Papists,” had not yet been
driven out. “For the sake of the poor souls, many thousands of whom live
neglected under such parsons,” he urges the Elector to do his best “to
help and promote a Visitation.”[832] He demands that Duke Henry, as the
sovereign and protector of the bishopric of Meissen, should “put a damper
on the blasphemous idolatry” as best he could, for “the Princes who are
able to do so should at once abolish Baal and all idolatry.”[833] He also
wished that the bishop of Meissen, though a Prince of the Empire, should
“at once bow his head to the Evangel”; in this matter there is no need
for “much disputing.”

It was but natural that such intolerance often led to scenes of
brutality; such was the case in the cathedral of Meissen, where the
splendid tomb of Benno, the saintly bishop of Meissen, was hewn in
pieces, and the statue of the patron, which was an object of veneration
to all the people, was set up headless at the church door as a
laughing-stock for the Lutherans.[834]

Hand in hand with such legal coercion, which he both approved and
furthered, went Luther’s declaration—which, though seeming to promote
freedom, really constituted a new encroachment on the rights of
conscience—viz. that: No one was to be forced to believe in his heart,
but that “the people were to be driven to the sermons for the sake of the
Ten Commandments, so that they might at least learn the outward works
of obedience.”[835] “It would be grand,” so he told Margrave George of
Brandenburg, “if your Serene Highness on the strength of your secular
authority enjoined on both parsons and parishioners under pain of
penalties the teaching and learning of the Catechism, in order, that, as
they are Christians and wish to be called such, they may, please God, be
compelled to learn and to know what a Christian ought to know, whether
he believes it or not.”[836] At his instance attendance at the sermons
was imposed on all people in the Saxon Electorate under pain of penalty,
whatever they might think of the preaching.[837]

God Himself has abrogated “all authority and power where it is
opposed to the Evangel,”[838] so, as early as 1522, ran one of the
principles he used for the violent suppression of Catholic worship. Of
the Catholic foundations he says in the same year: “If the preacher
does not make men pious (i.e. does not preach according to Luther’s
doctrine), the goods are no longer his.”[839] Violent interference
with the Mass was, according to him, no revolt when it came from the
established authorities.[840] “It is the duty of the sovereign, as
ruler and brother Christian, to drive away the wolves,”[841] and those
who do not preach the Evangel are “wolves”; it is “an urgent duty
to drive away the wolf from the sheepfold.”[842] The Pope himself,
however, deserves the worst fate, for he is the “werwolf who devours
everything. Just as all seek to kill the werwolf, and very rightly,
so is it a duty to suppress the Pope by force.”[843]

“Not only the spiritual but also the secular power must yield to the
Evangel, whether cheerfully or otherwise.”[844]

Hence it follows that the salvation of his soul requires of a
Christian prince the prohibition of the Popish worship.[845] If it is
his duty to resist the Turk far more must he oppose the Pope: “What
harm does the Turk do?” It is clear that, “as regards both body and
soul the government of the Pope is ten times worse than that of the
Turk.”[846]

“Whoever wishes to live amongst the burghers must keep the laws of the
borough and not dishonour or abuse them, else he must pack and go.”
The authorities are not to “allow themselves and their people to be
forced into idolatry and falsehood.”[847] Hence “let the authorities
step in and try the case and whichever party does not agree with
Scripture, let him be ordered to hold his tongue.”[848] The Prince
must behave like David, and hold that, as regards “God and the service
of His Sovereignty everything must be equal and made to intermingle,
whether it be termed spiritual or secular,” being “kneaded together
into one cake.”[849] How many false teachers had David, his model, not
been forced “to expel or in other ways stop their mouths.”[850]

It is not, however, enough to impose silence on them. They must—so
Luther began to teach about 1530—be treated as public blasphemers and
punished accordingly:[851] They “must not be suffered but must be
banished as open blasphemers.” Thus must we act with those who “teach
that Christ did not die for our sins but that each one must atone
for them on his own; for this also is a public blasphemy against the
Gospel.”[852] Hundreds of times does he charge the Catholics with
thus robbing the saving death of Christ of all significance by their
doctrine of good works.

These intolerant principles, which could not but lead to persecution,
were made even worse by the abuse and invective which Luther publicly
showered on the representatives of Catholicism. He taught the mob to
call them “blasphemous ministers of the Babylonian whore,” knaves,
bloodhounds, hypocrites and murderers. In the Articles of Schmalkalden
which found a place among the Symbolic Books, he introduces the Pope as
the “dragon” who leads astray the whole world, as the “real Antichrist”
and as the “devil himself” whom it was impossible to “worship as Master
or as God,” for which reason he would not suffer the Pope as “Head or
Lord”; they must say to him: “May God rebuke thee, Satan!” (Zach. iii.
2).[853] Among his monstrous caricatures of the Pope he also included
one depicting the “well-deserved reward of the Most Satanic Pope and his
Cardinals,” as the inscription runs below. Here the Pope is seen on the
gallows with three Cardinals; their tongues which have been torn out by
the root are nailed to the gibbet and devils are scurrying off with their
souls. The picture is embellished with the following doggerel:

“Did Pope and Card’nal here below
Their due reward receive,
Then would their tongues to gibbets cleave,
As our draughtsman’s lines do show.”[854]

_Threats of Bloody Reprisals against Papists, Priestlings and Monks_

At the right moment let us fall upon the Turks “and the priests and smite
them dead!” Only then shall we be successful against the Turks! So runs
one of Luther’s sayings in the Table-Talk.[855]

“Oh, that our Right Reverend Cardinals, Popes and Roman Legates had more
kings of England to put them to death!”[856] This he wrote in 1535, after
the execution of Thomas More and John Fisher by Henry VIII.

As early as 1520 he had exclaimed against Prierias: If thieves are
punished by the rope, murderers by the sword and heretics by fire,
why not proceed against “these noxious teachers of destruction—these
Cardinals, Popes and the whole swarm of the Roman Sodom, who are ever
ceaselessly destroying the Church of God—with every kind of weapon, and
wash our hands in their blood?”[857]

Towards the end of his life, in 1545, he showed that he was still
faithful to such views in spite of all the changes which had come
over some of his other leading ideas. Let “the Pope, the Cardinals
and the whole scoundrelly train of his idolatrous, Popish Holiness
be seized,” so he declares in “Das Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” and
put to the death they deserve, either on the gallows to which their
tongues may be nailed, or by drowning the “blasphemous knaves” in the
Sea at Ostia.[858]

“It pleases me,” he wrote on Dec. 2, 1536, to King Christian of
Denmark, “that Your Majesty has extirpated the bishops who never cease
to persecute God’s Word and to worry the secular power; I shall do my
best to explain and vindicate your action.”[859] At Wittenberg, as we
see from a letter of a Wittenberg theologian, the report was current
that the Danish king had “struck off the heads of six bishops.”[860]
This false account “seems to have been credited by Luther.”[861] If
this be so, then it seems that he was perfectly ready to justify so
cruel a deed. The truth is, that, King Christian, after having had the
bishops arrested (Aug. 20, 1536), released them as soon as they had
promised to resign their bishoprics.

In the summer of 1540 Luther had it that the Pope and the monks were
to blame for the many fires in Northern and Central Germany. “If this
turns out true, then there will be nothing left for us but to take up
arms in common against all the monks and shavelings; I too shall join
in, for it is right to slay the miscreants like mad dogs.”[862] The
worst of the lot, according to him, were the Franciscans. “If I had
all the Franciscan friars in one house,” he said a few days later, “I
would set fire to it, for, in the monks the good seed is gone, and
only the chaff is left. To the fire with them!”[863]

No one, in the least familiar with Luther’s writings, will be so foolish
as to believe that it was really his intention to kill the Catholic
clergy and monks. His bloodthirsty demands were but the violent outbursts
of his own deep inward intolerance. They were called forth occasionally
by other alleged misdeeds of Popery, of its advocates and friends, for
instance, by the burdensome taxes imposed by the Church, by her use
of excommunication, and by the action taken against the Lutherans,
particularly by the resolutions of the Diets for the suppression of
Protestantism. Nor must we forget that the religious dissensions grew
into a sort of permanent warfare and that war tends to produce effusions
such as would be unthinkable in times of peace; nor was the warlike
feeling a monopoly of the Lutheran side.

But who was it who was responsible for having provoked the war?

Occasional counsels to patience and endurance, to self-restraint and
consideration were indeed given by Luther from time to time[864] (they
have been diligently collected by his modern supporters), but, generally
speaking, they are drowned in the din of his controversial invective.

What was to be expected when the people, who were already profoundly
excited by the social conditions, were told: “Better were it that all
bishops were put to death, and all foundations and convents rooted
out than that one soul should be seduced” by Popish error.[865] “What
better do they deserve than to be stamped out by a great revolt?”[866]
If his reforms were rejected then it was to be wished that monasteries
and foundations “were all reduced to one great heap of ashes.”[867]
“A grand destruction of all the monasteries, etc., would be the best
reformation!”[868] What wonder “were the Princes, the nobles and the
laity to hit Pope, bishop, priest and monk on the head and drive them out
of the land?”[869] The “Rhine would hardly suffice to drown” the many
“bull-mongers,” Cardinals and “knaves.”[870]

_The Death-Penalty Sectarians within the New Fold_

In the above we have dealt with Luther’s intolerance in theory and
practice towards the Catholic Church. It remains for us to look at his
attitude towards the sects within his own camp.

The question, how far they were to be tolerated, or whether it would be
better forcibly to suppress them was first brought home to Luther by
the Anabaptist movement under Thomas Münzer. Sure of the upper hand,
Luther decided, as we know, at the end of July, 1524, to advise the Saxon
Princes to leave the Anabaptists in peace so far as their doctrines were
concerned. “Let them preach as they please,” was his advice, for “there
‘must needs be heresies’” (1 Cor. xi. 19).[871] He explained to Lazarus
Spengler of Nuremberg on Feb. 4, 1525, that the Anabaptists were not
to be punished, particularly with “bodily penalties,” because, in his
opinion, they were no real blasphemers, but merely “like the Turks or
straying Christians.”[872] In May of the same year he showed himself
disposed to universal toleration. “The authorities are not to hinder
anyone from teaching and believing what he pleases”;[873] a principle
which, as we have shown above (p. 239), he himself had contravened in
practice as early as 1522, and was finally to set aside altogether.

As for the Anabaptists, in 1527 Luther was not yet in favour of the
“putting to death” and bloody “rooting out” of these sectarians. In 1528
he even taught in his exposition of the Parable of the Good Seed and
the Tares that “we are not to fight the fanatics with the sword.”[874]
What made him hesitate to advise the putting to death of these heretics
was, as he told his friend Wenceslaus Link of Nuremberg in 1528, the
apprehension that this might lead to abuses; he feared lest, in the time
to come, we might turn the sword against the best “among us.”[875] But
without a doubt he approved of the Edict of the Elector Johann (Jan. 17,
1528) which proscribed the writings of the Anabaptists, Sacramentarians
and fanatics throughout the land—if indeed the Edict itself may not be
traced directly to Luther, as Zwingli suspected.[876] In 1528 it also
seemed to him right to decree the penalty of banishment in the case of
the Anabaptists.[877]

When, however, the danger had become more evident, which the Anabaptist
heresy spelt both to the land-frith and the foundations of Christianity,
not to speak of the Lutheran teaching, Luther adopted a sterner line of
action.

His views altered in 1530. After a Mandate had been issued in the Saxon
Electorate against the “secret preachers and conventicles, Anabaptists
and other baneful novel teaching,” six Anabaptists were executed early in
the year at Reinhardsbrunn in the duchy of Saxe-Gotha. The discussion
which took place on this event gave Melanchthon occasion to declare in
Feb., 1530, that, “even though the Anabaptists do not advocate anything
seditious or openly blasphemous” it was, “in his opinion, the duty of
the authorities to put them to death.”[878] In the spring of 1530, with
the Anabaptists in his mind, Luther, in his commentary on Ps. lxxxii.
dealt with the question whether the authorities “ought to forbid strange
teachings or heresies and punish them, seeing that no one should or can
force men into the Faith.”[879]

His detailed reply to the question which it was then impossible any
longer to blink, centres round the distinction he makes of two kinds
of heretics, viz. those who were seditious, and those who merely
“teach the opposite of some clear article of faith.” Of the latter,
i.e. the non-revolutionary, he says expressly: “These also must not
be allowed but must be punished like public blasphemers.” Of those,
who, though holding no office, force themselves in as preachers, and
thus imperil the faith and lead to risings, he writes, that their oath
of allegiance obliged the burghers not to listen to them but rather
to report them either to their parson or to the authorities. If such
a one will not desist “then let the authorities hand over knaves
of that ilk to their proper master, to wit Master Hans” (i.e. the
hangman).[880] As for those Anabaptists who preached open revolt, they
had, in his opinion, by that very fact incurred the penalties of the
law. At any rate it was not merely on account of their sedition that
Luther wished to see the Anabaptists punished.

Another statement of his has come down to us from an outside source.
Luther’s friend, Lazarus Spengler of Nuremberg, had a little before
this, on March 17, 1530, sought to secure from Luther, through Veit
Dietrich, some directions on how to deal with heretics. Dietrich
verbally obtained from his master the desired instructions and
promptly sent them to Spengler by letter.[881] They were to the effect
that not merely the heretics who offend against public order were
to be punished, but also those who merely do harm to religion, such
as the Sacramentarians (Zwinglians) and Papists; as they are to be
looked upon as blasphemers, they cannot be suffered. It is noteworthy,
that, in Luther’s correspondence in 1530, in a letter from the Coburg
to Justus Jonas, we find him congratulating himself on the report
(a false one) of the execution of a certain heretic. On receiving
the announcement that Johannes Campanus, the anti-Trinitarian, had
suffered death as a heretic at Liége, Luther wrote: “I learnt this
with joy” (“_lætus audivi_”).[882]

Early in October, 1531, agreeably with the Saxon Elector’s Mandate,
a number of persons suspected of holding Anabaptist views were taken
to Eisenach for punishment and were there put to the torture; it was
now judged advisable to obtain a fresh memorandum from the Wittenberg
theologians.

Accordingly, at the end of 1530, Melanchthon at the instance of the
Electoral Court once more took the matter in hand. He drafted a
memorandum on the duty of the secular authorities in the matter of
religious differences, with particular reference to the Anabaptists.
In it he set forth at length the grounds for a regular system of
coercion by the sword. Luther, too, set his name to the document with
the words: “It pleases me, Martin Luther.” In it the sectarians were
reprobated as blasphemers because they reject “the public preaching
office [the ministry] and teach that men can become holy without any
preaching and ecclesiastical worship.” They ought to be visited with
death by the public authorities whose duty it is to “befriend and uphold
ecclesiastical order”; and in like manner should their adherents and
those whom they have led astray be dealt with, who insist, “that our
baptism and preaching is not Christian and therefore that ours is not the
Church of Christ.”[883] Nevertheless, we can see from the words Luther
adds after his signature that the decision, or at least its severity,
aroused some misgivings in him. He says: “Though it may appear cruel to
punish them by the sword, yet it is even more cruel of them to condemn
the preaching office and not to teach any certain doctrine, to persecute
the true doctrine, and, over and above all this, to seek to destroy the
kingdoms of this world.”

It is quite true that Luther and Melanchthon had an eye on the seditious
character of these sects, yet present-day Protestant theologians are
not justified when they try to explain and excuse their severity on
this ground. On the contrary, as we have already pointed out, the texts
plainly show that they were chiefly concerned with the punishment of
the sectarians’ offences against the faith. This was made the principal
point, as we see in Melanchthon’s memorandum just referred to. He says,
for instance: “Though many Anabaptists do not openly teach any seditious
doctrines,” yet “it was both sedition and blasphemy for them to condemn
the public ministry.” It was therefore the duty of the authorities, above
all “on account of the second commandment of the Decalogue, to uphold the
public ministry” and to take steps against them. If, to boot, they also
taught seditious doctrines then it was “all the easier to judge them,”
as we read in another memorandum of the Wittenberg theologians (1536) of
which Melanchthon was also the draughtsman.[884]

To N. Paulus belongs the credit of having thrown light on the true state
of affairs, for, even previous to the publication of his “Protestantismus
und Toleranz im 16 Jahrhundert” (1911) he had discussed Luther’s attitude
both in his shorter writing, “Luther und die Gewissensfreiheit” (1905)
and in various articles in reviews. After him, the Protestant historian
P. Wappler took up the same views, particularly in his “Die Stellung
Kursachsens … zur Täuferbewegung” (1910). In the “Neues Archiv für
sächsische Geschichte” (1911) O. A. Hecker also quite agrees in rejecting
the opinion of certain recent Protestant theologians, who, as he says,
“all try to exonerate Luther from any hand in the executions for heresy,
though they can only do so by dint of forced interpretations, as Paulus
pointed out.”[885]

Between 1530 and 1532 Luther’s intolerance comes yet more to the fore;
it was indeed his way, when once he had made any view his own, to
urge it in the strongest terms. Thus, at the end of 1531, he again
alludes to Master Hans: “Those who force themselves in without any
office or commission are not worthy of being called false prophets but
are vagrants and knaves, who ought to be handed over to the tender
mercies of Master Hans.”[886] “It is not allowed that each one should
proceed according to his own ideas and set up his own doctrine and
fancy himself a sage, and dictate to, and find fault with, others.”
“This I call judging of doctrine, which is one of the greatest and
most scatheful vices on earth, whence indeed all the fanatics have
sprung.” The two last sentences occur in his sermons on St. Matthew’s
Gospel.[887]

Still more striking is the demand he makes of Duke Albert of Prussia
concerning the Zwinglians; here his zeal against these heretics
seems to blind him, for his arguments recoil against himself,
though apparently he does not notice it. Every Prince, he says in a
psychologically remarkable passage, who does not wish “most gruesomely
to burden his conscience” must cast out the Zwinglians from his land,
because, by their denial of the presence of Christ in the Supper, they
set up a doctrine “contrary to the traditional belief held everywhere
and to the unanimous testimony of all.”

But how many doctrines had not Luther himself set up contrary to the
ancient faith and to the unanimous testimony of all? It was, so he
goes on, “both dangerous and terrible” to “believe anything contrary
to the unanimous testimony, belief and teaching of the whole of the
Holy Christian Church, which, from the beginning and for more than
1500 years, had been universally received throughout the world.” This
was tantamount to “not believing in the Christian Church at all, and
not merely to condemn the whole of the Holy Christian Church as a
damned heretic, but also Christ Himself together with all the Apostles
and Prophets, who had formulated the Article which we now recite, ‘I
believe one Holy Christian Church,’ and borne such powerful witness to
it.”[888]

“The worldly authorities bear the sword,” so Luther said in his
Home-Postils, “with orders to prevent all scandal, so that it may not
intrude and do harm. But the most dangerous and horrible scandal is
where false doctrine and worship finds its way in.… For this reason the
Christian authorities must be on the look-out for such scandal.… They
must resist it stoutly and realise that nothing else will do save they
make use of the sword and of the full extent of their power in order to
preserve the doctrine pure and the worship clean and undefiled.”

“Then everything will go well.”[889]

We have also his exposition of Ps. ci. (1534), where there occurs the
eulogy of David, the “scourge of heretics.”[890]

How he was in the habit of dealing with the Sacramentarians at a later
date the following instance may serve to show, which at the same time
reveals his coarseness and his reliance on the secular authorities. To
Luther’s doctrine that Christ was bodily present, not only in the Host,
but throughout the world, the Sacramentarians had rejoined: Good, then we
shall partake of Him everywhere, in “spoon, plate and beer-can!”[891] To
this Luther’s reply ran: See “what graceless swine we abandoned Germans
for the most part are, lacking both manners and reason, who, when we
hear of God, esteem it a fairy tale.… All seek to do their business into
it and to wipe their back parts on it. The temporal authorities ought
to punish such blasphemers.… God knows I write of such high things most
unwillingly because they must needs be set before such dogs and swine.…
Hearken you, you pig, dog, or fanatic, or whatever brainless donkey you
may be: Though Christ’s body is everywhere, yet you will not be able to
lay hold of it so easily.… Begone to your pigsty and wallow in your own
muck! … there is a distinction between His Presence and your laying hold
of Him; He is free and nowhere bound,” etc.—Luther himself was, however,
very far from making clear what the distinction was. After much else not
to the point he concludes: “Oh, how few there are, even among the highly
learned, who have ever meditated so profoundly on this article concerning
Christ!”[892]

* * * * *

The treatment of the sectarians in the Saxon Electorate was in keeping
with the theories and counsels of Luther and his theologians.

Relentless measures were taken against them on account of their deviation
from the faith even when no charge of sedition was forthcoming. On Jan.
15, 1532, the Elector Johann admitted the following as his guiding
principle for interfering: “It is the duty of the authorities to punish
such teachers and seducers, with God and with a good conscience.… For
were heretics and contemners of the Word of God not punished we should
be acting against the prescribed laws which we are in every way bound to
observe.”[893]

As early as 1527 twelve men and one woman, who had received baptism at
each other’s hands, were beheaded.[894] Similar executions took place
in 1530, 1532 and 1538.[895]

In 1539 the members of the Wittenberg High Court wrote concerning
three Anabaptists then in prison at Eisenach: “If they do not recant
or allow themselves to be reduced to obedience, it will be right and
proper that they be put to death by the sword, on account of such
blasphemy and because they have allowed themselves to be baptised
elsewhere.” Of any seditious teaching there was no question in these
proceedings.[896]

One Anabaptist, Fritz Erbe, who had only gone astray in matters
of faith, was kept in jail from 1530 to 1541, when death set him
free.[897] Hans Sturm and Peter Pestel, both of Zwickau, were harmless
sectarians without any seditious leanings; the first was put in prison
in 1529 and died there; the latter was beheaded on June 16, 1536.[898]
Hans Steinsdorf and Hans Hamster, were condemned to death in 1538 as
“stubborn blasphemers.”[899] In the ’forties Duke Henry of Saxony
caused an Anabaptist to be burnt as a heretic at Dresden.[900]

The Saxon lawyer, Matthias Coler (†1587), taught in his “_Decisiones
Germaniæ_,” that, according to the laws of Saxony those were to be
punished by death at the stake (“_de iure saxonico cremandi veniunt_”)
who openly denied either the Divinity of Christ, or other important
truths of faith; before being burnt they were, however, to be questioned
under torture concerning their confederates in order that the land might
be purged of such wicked men.[901]

In thus interfering the sovereigns were well aware that they had the
warm official approval of Luther and his fellows. To this, for instance,
the Elector Johann Frederick appealed in 1533 when milder measures were
suggested. He referred to the memorandum which his father had obtained
from the Wittenberg theologians and lawyers concerning the execution of
the Anabaptists; their decision had been, “that His Highness might with
a good conscience cause those charged with Anabaptism to be punished by
death,” and, soon after, several of them were executed.[902] The person
who had thought otherwise, and to whom this vindication was accordingly
addressed, was no less a man than Landgrave Philip of Hesse.

Luther himself, too, had been obliged on various occasions to justify the
severity of his opinions.

_Luther’s Self-justification and Excuses_

Philip of Hesse, though he treated Catholics with the utmost intolerance,
refused to hear of punishing the Anabaptists with death unless indeed
they were the cause of public disturbances. “We cannot find it in our
conscience to put anyone to death by the sword on account of religion
unless we have sufficient proof of other crimes as well.” Such was the
declaration he made in 1532 to Elector Johann of Saxony, and which
he emphasised in 1545 to the latter’s successor: “Were all those to
be executed who are not of our faith what then should we do to the
Papists, to say nothing of the Jews, who err even more greatly than the
Anabaptists?”[903]

Luther was apparently far surer of his case. He is as confident,
subsequent to 1530, in drawing from Scripture the principles for the
treatment of the heretics as he is in defending them against the obvious
objections so often brought against them.

Luther had it that the line of action for which he stood was not coercion
to any definite religious practices. “Our Princes,” so he sought to
reassure himself as early as 1525, “do not force people to the faith and
to the Evangel but merely set a term to outward abominations.”[904]

The Elector, as was to be expected, expressed himself likewise: “Though
it is not our intention to prescribe to anyone what he must hold or
believe, yet, in order to guard against harmful uprisings and other
disorders, we refuse to recognise or permit any sects or schisms within
our Princedom.”[905]

Many a one amongst the new Doctors had begun, as a Protestant
historian of Saxony points out,[906] “to claim for his conscience the
same right” (as Luther), while “following other paths than Luther
had trodden” (in his search after God). May not, indeed, must not,
such a one, so ran the objection, follow his conscience, seeing that
Luther himself tells us to consult our conscience? Yes, he may, is
Luther’s reply, but, if he be truthful, then he will admit my plain
interpretation of the Bible as the right one, for “I have floored and
overcome all my foes on the sure groundwork of Holy Scripture.”[907]

Moreover, might not the Princes holding Popish views seize on the
coercion taught by the Lutherans as a pretext for similar measures
against the Lutherans in their territories?

No, replies Luther, they must not do so for they would be committing
the same sin as the Kings of Israel when they “slew the true
prophets”; but on account of the injustice of such slaughter, we
are not to make nought of the law or refrain from stoning the false
prophets. “Pious authorities will not punish anyone unless they see,
hear, learn or know for certain that they are blasphemers.”[908]—Even
should Kaiser Charles come and tell us, that he is convinced that
“the doctrine of the Papists is true, and that he must therefore, in
accordance with God’s command, use all his power to extirpate our
heretical doctrines in his Empire,” we must answer, that: “We know he
is not certain of this, and, in fact, cannot be certain.”[909]

But does this not come to much the same as imposing faith by some sort
of compulsion?

No, is his answer. “The faith is not thereby forced on anyone, for he
is free to believe what he pleases. He is only forbidden to indulge
in that teaching and blaspheming whereby he seeks to rob God and
Christians of their doctrine and Word, whilst all the while enjoying
their protection and all temporal advantages. Let him go where there
are no Christians and have things his way there.”[910]

The severity of his demands is hardly mitigated or excused by the right
he gives people to leave the country. At any rate those who do not see
eye to eye with him must get themselves gone, for, as he frequently
remarks, whoever wishes to dwell among the burghers must not disregard
the laws of the borough.[911]

“By all this, however,” so he says on another occasion, “no one is forced
into the faith but the common man is merely set free from troublesome and
obstinate spirits, and the knavery of the hole-and-corner preachers is
checked.”[912] Thus, if the man who thinks otherwise wishes to lock up
his convictions in his own breast, he is quite free to do so. Within, he
may enjoy the most far-reaching freedom, since no earthly power extends
to his thoughts. The reply of those concerned was, however, obvious;
what right, they asked, had the new religious tribunal to prevent a man
from revealing his convictions and openly living up to them, and was not
the order to keep silence tantamount to a stifling of conscience and to
forcing people to become hypocrites?

Hence, in the ensuing discussions, we find that Luther and his friends
were ever making fresh efforts to meet the objections; in itself this
was a sign of the weakness of the exclusivism adopted by the Lutherans,
in spite of all they had formerly said, as soon as they had succeeded in
winning the favour of the State.

“Some argue,” we read in the memorandum of the Wittenbergers published in
1536, “that the secular authorities have no concern whatever with ghostly
matters. This is going much too far.… The rulers must not only protect
the life and belongings of their underlings, but their highest duty is
to promote the honour of God and to prevent blasphemy and idolatry,”
etc.[913]

The memorandum was intended for Philip of Hesse. As Luther was aware that
the Landgrave was loath to proceed to extremities with the Anabaptists,
he added to the memorandum a note of his own. “Seeing that His Serene
Highness the Landgrave reports that certain leaders and teachers of the
Anabaptists … have not kept their promise (viz. to quit the land) Your
Serene Highness may with a good conscience cause them to be punished with
the sword, for this reason also, to wit, that they have not kept their
oath or promise. Such is the rule. Yet Your Serene Highness, needless to
say, may at all times allow justice to be tempered with mercy, according
to the circumstances.”[914]

If meant in earnest the latter recommendation to mercy does the speaker
credit and is the more noteworthy because, in his later years, we do not
often hear him pleading for the heretics. As a rule he is all too intent
on emphasising the wickedness of what he terms “blasphemy and idolatry,”
i.e. of whatever was at variance with his own teaching.

But what—and this is the main objection—entitles Luther’s doctrine
to be regarded as the standard of belief? This point Luther usually
evaded. He says: Those heretics are to be punished “whose teaching
is at variance with the public articles of the faith which are
plainly grounded on Scripture and believed throughout the world by
the whole of Christendom.”[915] “Such articles, common to the whole
of Christendom, have already been sufficiently tested, examined,
proved and determined by Scripture and by the confession of the whole
of Christendom, confirmed by many miracles, sealed by the blood of
the holy Martyrs, witnessed to and defended by the books of all
the Doctors and are not now to become the prey of faultfinders or
cavillers.”[916] A sharp answer, one very much to the point, was given
by Bullinger of Zürich, who spoke of it as “truly laughable” that his
opponent should suddenly appeal to the fact “of the Church having so
long held this.” “If Luther’s argument, based on longstanding usage,
be admitted, then is Popery quite in the right when it harps on the
Church and her age. But then the whole of Luther’s own doctrine
tumbles over, for his teaching is not that which the Roman Church
has held for so long.”[917]—Nor is it easy to tell which points of
doctrine Luther, in his elastic fashion, included among the articles
“clearly founded on Scripture” and held unquestioningly by the whole
of Christendom. His words occasionally presuppose that all divergent
doctrines, not only those of the Sacramentarians and Anabaptists, but
even those of the Papists, were to be punished by the authorities.
If everyone is to be punished who teaches “that Christ has not died
for our sins but that each one must himself make satisfaction for
them,”[918] (a doctrine unjustly foisted on the Papists by Luther),
or who “condemns the public ministry and draws the people away from
it,” or who “insists that our baptism and preaching are not Christian
and therefore that our Church is not the Church of Christ,”[919]
etc.,—then many Catholics could not but fall victims to the sword of
the authorities. How often did not Luther designate every specifically
Catholic doctrine as rank “blasphemy,” and stigmatise every Catholic
practice as idolatry? Blasphemy and idolatry were, however, according
to him, to be rooted out by violence. Truly his words gave promise of
an abundant harvest of persecution.

As a reason of his animus against heretics within his own fold Luther
finally brings forward those personal considerations which are familiar
to all who have followed his controversies.

His natural foes are those who in their “peculiar wisdom” “seek to
teach something besides Christ and beyond our preaching.”[920] Hence
he was fond of insisting that Christ was slaying the Papacy through
him, and of rejecting all who “make a great pother” and “claim to know
something new.” They come, and, like Carlstadt, want to “seize upon
the prize and poach upon my preserves.” Had not Carlstadt come along
“with the fanatics, Münzer and the Anabaptists, all would have gone
well with my undertaking.”[921] These men want to “darken the sun of
the Evangel” so that the world “may forget all that has hitherto been
taught by us.”[922]

“They want to have nothing to do with me,” he complains of the
fanatics, “and I want to have nothing to do with them. They boast that
they have nothing from me, for which I heartily thank God; I have
borrowed even less from them, for which, too, God be praised.”[923]
The rupture with the Swiss came about because they “wished to be
first.”[924]

In all these dissensions he finds many a one saying to the Christians:
“I am your Pope, what care I for Dr. Martin.” And yet he alone had the
right to call himself the “great Doctor” “to whom God first revealed
His Word to preach.”[925]

But did not his very self-reliance finally broaden the ideas of the
preacher of coercion? Did not Luther in a sermon preached at Eisleben on
Feb. 7, 1546, as good as repudiate his former exclusivism?

It is true that this has been confidently asserted by Protestants,
but the text of this sermon, known only through Aurifaber’s Notes,
does not justify such an inference.[926] In it the preacher is not
treating of the attitude of the Christian authorities towards heresy,
but is only showing how the faithful and the preachers must behave,
surrounded as they are by wicked folk, by Anabaptists and sectarians.
The occasion for speaking of this was supplied by the Sunday Gospel of
the Tares, Matt. xiii. 24-30, which grow up together with the wheat in
God’s field, and which the Lord wishes to be left undisturbed until
the Day of Judgment. Hence he explains how this must be understood,
the local conditions probably supplying him with a particular reason
for doing so, seeing that, in the County of Mansfeld, there must
still have been some Catholics and that the Jews stood in favour. The
greater part of the Sermon on the Tares is devoted to describing the
passions and lusts which Christians must fight against in their own
hearts with patience and perseverance. It is only towards the end
that he speaks of the wickedness rampant in the world. He refutes
the opinion of those, who “would have a Church in which there is no
evil but where all are prudent and pious, and pure and holy”; thus
“the Anabaptists, Münzer and such like, wish to root out and put to
death everything that is not holy.” Hence “how are we to suffer the
heretics and yet not to suffer them? How am I to act? If I tear up
or root out the tares in one place then I spoil the wheat [according
to the Parable], and the weeds will still grow up again elsewhere.
Thus if I root out one heretic, yet the same devil-sown seed springs
up again in ten other places.” Hence we must look to it that we do
not make matters worse by violence and suppression. “Papists and
Jews will ever be with us.” “You will not succeed in this world in
entirely separating the heretics and false Christians from the just.”
“Look to it that you remain master in your own household; see to it,
you preachers, parsons and hearers [it is only to these that he is
addressing himself, not to the State authorities], that heretics and
seditious men, such as Münzer was, do not rule or dominate; grumble
in a corner, that indeed they may do, but that they should mount the
rostrum, get into the pulpit or go up to the altar, that, so far as
in you lies, you must not allow.” Care must be taken that the “pulpit
and the Sacrament are kept undefiled.” “By human might and power we
cannot root them out, or make them different. For, in this point, they
are often far superior to us, can get themselves a following, draw the
masses to them, and, on the top of it all, they have on their side the
prince of this world, viz. the devil.”

The main thing therefore is that the heretics “should not rule in our
Churches.”

But what are we to do against the tares, against the Papists and
Sophists, against Cologne, Louvain and the devil’s other thistles? Of
boils it holds good: “Let them swell until they burst. So too it is in
secular and domestic government: Where [whether in the Town Council or
among the servants] we cannot get rid of the wicked without harm or
detriment, there we must put up with them until the time is ripe.”

In this much-discussed Sermon on the Tares Luther is very far from
wishing to give the authorities directions as to how to treat the
sectarians. On the contrary he makes it plain that some other line
of action than that described by him must be followed even by the
faithful and the preachers, and much more so by the Christian
authorities, whenever the heretics come out of their “corner” and try
to climb into the pulpit or mount the altar. What was to be done that
the pulpit and the Sacrament might remain undefiled, he had already
sufficiently explained elsewhere. Naturally, a sermon on the Gospel
which tells us to leave the Tares until the harvest was scarcely the
place for Luther to expound his severer theories on the treatment to
be meted out to unbelievers and misbelievers, so that his silence here
cannot be taken as a repudiation of the measures for which he so long
had stood. At the close of the next sermon, the last he was ever to
preach, addressing himself to the nobility, he speaks very harshly
of the Jews. “If they refuse to be converted, then, as blasphemers,
they deserve that we should not suffer or endure them among us.” “You
Lords ought not to tolerate but rather expel them.” This duty he bases
on his usual principle: “Were I to tolerate the man who dishonours,
blasphemes and curses Christ my Master, I should be making myself a
partaker in the sins of others.”

His system of coercing and punishing heretics he certainly never
repudiated.

_Compulsory Attendance at Church_

“Facts have shown,” Luther wrote to Spalatin in 1527 of the conditions
in his new churches, “that men despise the Evangel and insist on being
compelled by the law and the sword.”[927] He was very anxious to make
attendance at the Lutheran preaching a matter of obligation.

According to his earlier statements, attendance at the preaching had
been voluntary, for the matter of the sermons was to be judged by the
hearers, in order that they might avoid what was harmful; his subsequent
practice of driving all to the preaching made an end of this freedom,
or rather duty. Through the authorities, so far as his influence went,
he insisted on this principle: “Even though they do not believe they
must nevertheless, for the sake of the Ten Commandments, be driven
to the preaching, so that they may at least learn the outward work
of obedience.” He wrote this at a time when he had already justified
such coercion at Wittenberg, viz. on Aug. 26, 1529, in a letter to the
“strict and steadfast” Joseph Levin Metzsch of Mila, who was shortly
after appointed by the Elector to take part in the Visitation.[928]
Instructions sent by Luther on the same day to Thomas Löscher, pastor of
the same locality, are to the same effect (“_cogendi sunt ad conciones …
audiant etiam inviti_”).[929] The orders of the authorities concerning
public worship were represented in the Visitation Rules for the pastors
(1528) as universally binding: “All secular authority is to be obeyed
because the secular powers are not ordering a new worship but enforcing
peace and charity.”[930] The Preface of the Smaller Catechism (1531) was
on the same lines. “Although we neither can nor should force anyone into
the faith, yet the masses must be held and driven to it in order that
they may know what is right or wrong in those among whom they live.”[931]

In the same year Luther advised Margrave George of Brandenburg to
compel the people to attend the Catechism “at the behest of the secular
authority,” for, since they “are Christians and wish to be so called,” it
was only fitting “they should be obliged to learn what a Christian ought
to know.” The Ansbach preachers embodied this requirement in the same
year in the alterations they proposed in the church-regulations.[932]

Wittenberg served as the pattern. It was to Wittenberg that Leonard Beyer
addressed himself when he succeeded Luther’s friend, Nicholas Hausmann,
as pastor of Zwickau. Luther answered his letter by describing the system
of coercion practised in Wittenberg and the neighbourhood when people
persistently neglected to attend the sermons: “With the authority and in
the name of our Most Noble Prince it is our custom to affright those who
disregard all piety and fail to attend the preaching, and to threaten
them with banishment and the law. This is the first step. Then, if they
do not amend, the pastors are enjoined by us to ply them for a month or
more with instructions and representations, and, finally, in the event
of their still proving contumacious, to excommunicate them, and to break
off all intercourse with them as though they were heathen.” He concludes:
“The words of the Bible [Matt. xviii. 17; 2 Thes. iii. 6] concerning the
avoidance of heretics are quite clear.”[933]—He, however, forgets to add
that neither he nor the pastors had ever been quite successful in their
attempts at excommunication.

The above regulations of the authorities were to remain in force. In
1533 the Prince once more insisted that: No one is to be permitted
to absent himself from the “common church-going,” everyone must be
“earnestly reminded of this.”[934] In the General Articles of 1557 it
was determined by the Elector August, that, whoever absented himself
without permission from the sermon on Sundays and festivals, whether in
the morning or afternoon, “more particularly in the villages” was to be
fined, or, if he was poor, “to be punished with the pillory, either at
the church or at some prison.”[935] The parsons, however, were to notify
the authorities of any who contemned the preaching and the sacraments,
or who obstinately persisted in their false opinion. Even the practice
of auricular confession was, at a later date, made a strict law; whoever
evaded confession and the Supper was liable to banishment.[936] The
Saxon lawyer, Benedict Carpzov (1595-1666) in his “_Iurisprudentia
ecclesiastica_” defended as self-evident the legal principle based
on the practice of Luther’s own country: “Those, who, after repeated
admonitions, maliciously absent themselves from the Supper, are to be
expelled from the land; they are to be compelled to sell their goods and
emigrate.”[937] The same scholarly lawyer elsewhere alludes to the Saxon
custom of condemning seditious and blasphemous heretics to die at the
stake.[938]

* * * * *

At Wittenberg strong ramparts were set up for the protection of the
Lutheran doctrine and to prevent divergent opinions finding their way in.

The Statutes of the Theological Faculty, probably drawn up in 1533 by
Melanchthon with Luther’s approval,[939] made it strictly incumbent
on the teachers to preach the pure doctrine in accordance with the
Confession of Augsburg; in the event of any difference of opinion a
commission of judges was to decide; “after that the false opinion
shall no longer be defended; if anyone obstinately persists in so
doing, he is to be punished with such severity as to prevent him any
more spreading abroad his wicked views.”[940] “The same Luther,” says
Paulsen of this, “who, twelve years before, had declared that his
conscience would not allow of his conceding to Christendom assembled
in Council the right to determine the formula of faith, now claimed
for the Wittenberg faculty—for this is what it amounts to—the
unquestionable right to decide on faith. From 1535 to the day of his
death Luther was without a break Dean of this Faculty.”[941]

Again, subsequent to 1535, the preachers and pastors sent out or
officially recommended by Wittenberg had to take the so-called
“Ordination Oath” which had been suggested by the Elector in order
to exclude false preachers. The ministers to be appointed within
the Electorate, and likewise those destined to take up appointments
elsewhere, had to submit at Wittenberg to a searching examination on
doctrine; only after passing it and taking an oath as to the future
could they receive their commission. The examination is referred
to in the Certificate of Ordination. Thus, in the Certificate of
Heinrich Bock (who was sent to Reval in Livonia) which is dated May
17, 1540, and signed by Luther, Bugenhagen, Jonas and Melanchthon,
it is set forth that he had undertaken to “preach to the people
steadfastly and faithfully the pure doctrine of the Gospel which
our Church confesses.” It is also stated that he adheres to the
“consensus” of the “Catholic Church of Christ,” and, for this reason,
is recommended to the Church of Reval.[942] A similar Certificate for
the schoolmaster Johann Fischer, who had received a call to Rudolstadt
“to the ministry of the Gospel,” is dated a month earlier. His
doctrine, so it declares, had been found on examination to be pure and
in accordance with the Catholic doctrine of the Gospel as professed
by the Wittenbergers; a promise had also been received from him to
teach the same faithfully to the people; for this reason “his call has
been confirmed by public ordination.”[943] Fischer had received the
“diaconate.”

As early as 1535 we read of the solemn ordination of a certain Johann
(Golhart?), “examined by us and publicly ordained in the presence of
our Church with prayers and hymns.” He was “ordained and confirmed by
order of our sovereign,” having been called and chosen as “assistant
minister” at Gotha by the local congregation headed by their pastor
Myconius.[944]

The doctrine of the punishment of heretics was afterwards incorporated by
Melanchthon in 1552, in the Wittenberg instructions composed by him and
entitled: “The Examination of Ordinands.”[945]

_Opinions of Protestant Historians_

The above account of Luther’s intolerance is very much at variance with
the Protestant view still current to some extent in erudite circles, but
more particularly in popular literature. Luther, for all the harshness
of his disposition, is yet regarded as having in principle advocated
leniency, as having been a champion of personal religious freedom, and
having only sanctioned severity towards the Anabaptists because of the
danger of revolt. Below we shall, however, quote a series of statements
from Protestant writers who have risen superior to such party prejudice.

Walther Köhler, in his “Reformation und Ketzerprozess” (1901), wrote:

“In Luther’s case it is impossible to speak of liberty of conscience
or religious freedom.” “The death-penalty for heresy rested on the
highest Lutheran authority.”[946] According to Köhler there can
be no doubt that prosecution for heresy among the Protestants was
practically Luther’s doing. “The views of the other reformers on
the persecution and bringing to justice of heretics were merely the
outgrowth of Luther’s plan, they contributed nothing fresh.”[947] The
same writer is of opinion that the question, whether Luther would have
approved of the execution of Servetus “must undoubtedly be answered
in the affirmative.”[948] “It is certain that Luther would have
agreed to the execution of Servetus; heresy as heresy is according
to him deserving of death.”[949] One observation made by Köhler
is significant enough, viz. “that, when the preaching of the Word
proved ineffectual against the heretics,” Luther had recourse to the
intervention of the secular authorities.[950]

The matter has been examined with equal frankness by P. Wappler
in various studies in which he utilises new data taken from the
archives.[951]

“That Luther in principle regarded the death penalty in the case of
heretics as just, even where there was no harm done to the ‘_regna
mundi_,’” says Wappler, “is plain from the advice given by him on
Oct. 20, 1534, to Prince Johann of Anhalt in reply to his inquiry
concerning the attitude to be adopted towards the Anabaptists at
Zerbst.” “The fact is, that from the commencement of 1530 the
reformers cease to make any real distinction between the two classes
of heretics [the seditious ones and those who merely taught false
doctrines]. Heretics who merely ‘blasphemed’ were always regarded by
them, at least where they remained obdurate, as practically guilty
of sedition, and, consequently, as deserving the death penalty.”
“The principal part in this was played by Luther, Melanchthon being
merely the draughtsman of the memoranda in which Luther’s ideas on
the question of heretics were reduced to a certain system.”[952]
“The many executions, even of Anabaptists who are known to have
not been revolutionaries and who were put to death on the strength
of the declarations of the Wittenberg theologians, refute only too
plainly all attempts to deny the clear fact, viz. that Luther himself
approved of the death penalty even in the case of such as were merely
heretics.”[953]

Wappler, after showing how Luther’s wish was, that everyone who
preached without orders should be handed over to “Master Hans,”
adds: “And what he said, was undoubtedly meant in earnest; shortly
before this, on Jan. 18, 1530, as Luther had doubtless learned from
Melanchthon, at Reinhardsbrunn near Gotha, six such persons had
been handed over to Master Hans, i.e. to the executioner, and duly
executed.” Wappler regards it as futile to urge that: “Luther could
not prevent executions taking place in the Saxon Electorate”; it is
wrong to put the blame on Melanchthon rather than on Luther for the
putting to death of heretics.[954]

Speaking of the execution of Peter Pestel at Zwickau, the same
author[955] declares that it was “a sad sign of the unfortunate
direction so early [1536] taken by the Lutheran reformation that its
representatives should allow this man, who had neither disseminated
his doctrine in his native land nor rebaptised … to die a felon’s
death.” “Even contempt of the outward Word,” he says, “carelessness
about going to church and contempt of Scripture—in this instance
contempt for the Bible as interpreted by Luther—was now regarded as
‘rank blasphemy,’ which it was the duty of the authorities to punish
as such. To such lengths had the vaunted freedom of the Gospel now
gone.”[956] The introduction of the Saxon Inquisition (See above, vol.
v., 593) leads him to remark: “The principle of evangelical freedom of
belief and liberty of conscience, which Luther had championed barely
two years earlier, was here most shamefully repudiated, particularly
by this lay inquisition, and yet Luther said never a word in
protest.”[957]

In 1874 W. Maurenbrecher expressed it as his opinion that “Luther’s
tolerance in theory as well as in practice amounted to this: The
Church and her ministers were to denounce such as went astray in the
faith, whereupon it became the duty of the secular authorities to
chastise them as open heretics.”[958] In 1885 L. Keller declared:
“It merely displays ignorance of the actual happenings of that
epoch, when many people, even to-day, take it for granted that such
executions and the wholesale persecution of the Anabaptists were only
on account of sedition, and that the reformers had no hand in these
things.”[959] “Luther indeed demands toleration,” says K. Rieker, “but
only for the Evangelicals; he demands freedom, but merely for the
preaching of the Evangel.”[960] According to Adolf Harnack “one of the
Reformer’s most noticeable limitations was his inability either fully
to absorb the cultural elements of his time, or to recognise the right
and duty of unfettered research.”[961]

In Saxony, so H. Barge, Carlstadt’s biographer, complains, “the
police-force was mobilised for the defence of pure doctrine”;
“and Luther played the part of prompter” to the intolerant Saxon
government.[962] “Luther’s harsh, violent and impatient ways” and
their “unfortunate” outcome are admitted unreservedly by P. Kalkhoff,
another Luther researcher.[963] G. Lœsche calls Paulus’s studies on
Strasburg a “Warning against the edifying sentimentality of Protestant
make-believe.”[964] Luther “demanded freedom for himself alone and
for his doctrine,” remarks E. Friedberg, “not for those doctrines,
which he regarded as erroneous.”[965] Neander, the Protestant
Church-historian, speaking of Luther’s views in general as given by
Dietrich, says they “would justify all sorts of oppression on the
part of the State, and all kinds of intellectual tyranny, and were in
fact the same as those on which the Roman Emperors acted when they
persecuted Christianity.”[966]

Two quotations from Catholic authors may be added. The above passage
from Köhler reads curiously like the following statement of C.
Ulenburg, an olden Catholic polemic; writing in 1589 he said: “When
Luther saw that his disciples were gradually falling away from him
and, acting on the principle of freedom of conscience, were treating
him as he had previously treated the olden Church, he came to think of
having recourse to coercion against such folk.”[967]

“Historically nothing is more incorrect,” wrote Döllinger in his
Catholic days, “than the assertion that the Reformation was a movement
in favour of intellectual freedom. The exact contrary is the truth.
For themselves it is true, Lutherans and Calvinists claimed liberty
of conscience as all men have done in every age, but to grant it to
others never occurred to them so long as they were the stronger side.
The complete suppression and extirpation of the Catholic Church, and
in fact of everything that stood in their way, was regarded by the
reformers as something entirely natural.”[968]—Luther’s principles,
aided by the arbitrary interference of the secular power in matters
of faith, especially where Catholics were concerned, led both in his
age and in the following, “to a despotism” “the like of which,” as
Döllinger expresses it, “had not hitherto been known; the new system
as worked out by the theologians and lawyers was even worse than the
Byzantine practice.”[969]

_Luther’s Spirit in his Fellows_

The question concerning Melanchthon raised by Protestant historians,
viz. whether it was he who converted Luther to his intolerance, or,
whether, on the other hand, he himself was influenced by Luther, cannot,
on the strength of the documents, be answered either affirmatively or
negatively. In some respects Melanchthon struck out his own paths, in
others he merely followed in Luther’s wake.[970] He was by no means loath
to making use of coercion in the case of doctrines differing from his
own. His able pen had the doubtful merit of expressing in fluent language
what Luther thought and said in private, as we see from the Memoranda
still extant. His ill-will with the Papacy and the hostile sects within
the new fold, was, it is true, as a rule not so blatant as Luther’s; he
was fond of displaying in his style that moderation dear to the humanist;
yet we have spontaneous outbursts of his which sound a very harsh note
and which doubtless were due to his old and intimate spiritual kinship
with Luther.

For instance, we have the wish he expressed, that God would send
King Henry VIII a “valiant murderer to make an end of him,”[971]
and, again, his warm approval of Calvin’s execution of the heretic
Michael Servetus in 1554 (a “pious and memorable example for all
posterity”)[972]. He himself wrote about that time a special treatise
in defence of the use of the sword against those who spread erroneous
doctrines.[973]

With regard to Melanchthon A. Hänel says: To Protestantism “religious
freedom was denied at every point.” When Melanchthon wrote to Calvin
in praise of the execution of Servetus, his letter, according to
Hänel, “was not, as has been imagined, dictated by the mere passion of
the moment, but was the harsh consequence of a harsh doctrine.”[974]
It must be admitted, remarks the Protestant theologian A. Hunzinger,
“that Melanchthon was wont to lose no time in having recourse to
fire and sword. This forms a dark blot on his life. Many a man fell
a victim to his memorandum, who certainly had no wish to destroy the
‘_regna mundi_.’”[975]

In consequence of the precipitate and often brutal intervention of
the authorities against real or alleged heretics Melanchthon had
afterwards abundant reason to regret his appeal to the secular power.
He himself, as early as Aug. 31, 1530, had foretold, “that, later,
a far more insufferable tyranny would arise than had ever before
been known,” viz. the tyranny due to the interference of the Princes
in whose hands the power of persecution had been laid. Hence his
exclamation: “If only I could revive the jurisdiction of the bishops!
For I see what sort of Church we shall have if the ecclesiastical
constitution is destroyed.”[976] As we know, he was anxious gradually
to graft the old ecclesiastical constitution on Luther’s congregations.

Coming from Luther and fostered by Melanchthon, these intolerant ideas
profoundly influenced all their friends.

Not as though there was ever any lack of opponents of the theory of
coercion among the Protestants, or even in Luther’s own flock. On the
contrary there were some who had the sense of justice and the courage
to resist the current of intolerance coming from Wittenberg. Indeed it
was the protests which Luther encountered at Nuremberg which led him to
emphasise his harsh demands.

Already in 1530 Luther’s follower Lazarus Spengler wrote from
Nuremberg to Veit Dietrich begging him to seek advice of Luther and to
request his literary help; in the town there were some who opposed any
measures of coercion against the divergent doctrines, “some of ours,
who are not fanatics but are regarded as good Christians,” desire that
neither the “Sacramentarians nor the Anabaptists” should be prosecuted
so long as they do not “stir up revolt,” nor yet the errors prohibited
of “the preachers of the godless Mass and other idolatries”; “they
appeal on behalf of this to Dr. Luther’s booklet, which he some while
ago addressed to Duke Frederick the Elector of Saxony against the
fanatic Thomas Münzer, in which he approves this view and admits it to
be quite sound.”[977]

At Augsburg (1533) the Lutheran lawyer, Conrad Hel, siding with his
Catholic-minded confrères Conrad Peutinger and Johann Rehlinger[978]
openly and courageously denied the Town-Councils any rights in the
matter. In 1534 Christoph Ehem, a patrician of Augsburg, who also held
Lutheran views, wrote a little work in which he demanded universal
and unconditional toleration and invited the Council to place some
“bridle and restraint” on the new preachers.[979] At that time (1536)
the Lutheran preacher Johann Forster protested very strongly against
Bucer, and refused to hear of the forcible suppression of Catholic
worship in Cathedral churches outside the jurisdiction of the civic
authorities; he appealed in this matter to Luther. Bucer just then
was bent on suppressing the Catholic worship with the help of the
magistrates. Forster was finally silenced by dint of “ranting, raging
and shouting” and was indignantly asked: “Whether he wished to
tolerate Popery and submit to such idolatry?”[980]

At Strasburg in 1528 the Protestant Town-Clerk, Peter Butz, set a
brave example by openly and severely condemning in the Council the
system of coercion planned by some of the preachers. Against the
intolerance towards sectarians advocated by Bucer, preachers and
scholars like Anton Engelbrecht, Wolfgang Schultheiss, Johann Sapidus
and Jacob Ziegler were not slow to protest,[981] though they had
nothing to say against the violent abolition of Catholic worship.

At Coire the preacher Johann Gantner came into conflict with Bullinger
on account of the coercive measures favoured by the latter; he
reproached the inhabitants of Zürich and Berne with having fallen
away from the freedom of the Evangel into the Mosaic bondage. Gantner
and others, in support of their protest, usually appealed against the
prevailing tendency to Sebastian Franck’s “Chronica,” published at
Strasburg in 1531.[982]

Sebastian Franck, the witty and learned opponent of Luther, “after Luther
himself, the best and most popular German prose writer of the day,” took
the line of pushing to its bitter end Luther’s subjectivism. He declared
that the new preachers had made of Holy Scripture a paper idol for the
benefit of their private views, and that the Lutheran Church was the
invisible kingdom of Christ and as such numbered among its members men
of every sect; hence he argued that what was termed false doctrine and
false worship should not be interfered with.[983] As Kawerau points
out, Franck found in the 16th century “not a few readers wherever
dissatisfaction prevailed with the Papacy of the theologians”;[984]
nevertheless, in 1531, he was expelled from Strasburg on account of
his liberal views; later on, when he had taken up his residence at
Ulm, Melanchthon wrote thither, in 1535, that he should be “dealt with
severely” (“_severe coercendum_”) no less than Schwenckfeld.[985] Driven
from Ulm he went to Basle in 1539, but even there the echo of the verdict
of the Wittenbergers reached him; in March, 1540, the theologians
assembled at Schmalkalden, condemned him and charged him with “inducing
people to seek the spirit while neglecting the ‘Word’”; they themselves,
they added, had broken with the Churches of the Pope because of their
idolatry, but there was “no reason whatever for throwing over the
ministry in our own Churches.”[986]

As we have already shown, Landgrave Philip of Hesse was likewise
disposed to be less intolerant than Luther, at least with regard to
the Anabaptists. Relentlessly as he refused any public toleration to
the Catholic faith and banished those Catholics who persisted in their
religious practices, yet, in a letter of 1532, addressed to Elector
Johann of Saxony, he declared himself against the execution of the
Anabaptists; the actual words have been quoted above (p. 256). In another
letter, in 1545, to the Elector Johann Frederick, he also points out,
that: “If this sect be punished so severely by us, then we, by our
example, give our foes, the Papists, reason to treat us in the same way,
for they regard us as no better than the Anabaptists.”[987]

* * * * *

These and similar remonstrances were unavailing to change the views which
had taken root at Wittenberg.

George Major, Professor of theology at Wittenberg University, was a
learned and zealous disciple of Luther’s. He, like Melanchthon, on
hearing of the execution of Servetus at Geneva, declared that Calvin
was to be commended for having put to death the heretic, and, at a
Disputation held in 1555, expressly defended the thesis, that it was
the duty of the authorities to punish contumacious heretics with death.
They must “get rid of blasphemers, perjurers and wizards. Amongst the
blasphemers must, however, be reckoned those who persistently defend
idolatrous worship, or heresies which clearly disagree with the articles
of the faith.”[988]

Luther’s code of penalties for any deviation from the Wittenberg teaching
fitted in well with Bugenhagen’s natural harshness, who showed himself
only too ready to make his own the words of Moses concerning the slaying
of unbelievers. We may recall how, in conversation, when Luther mentioned
the difficulties he had with Carlstadt, Agricola and Schenk, Bugenhagen
broke in with the remark: “Sir Doctor, we ought to do what is commanded
in Deuteronomy where Moses says they should be put to death.”[989]
Bugenhagen, in the many places into which he brought the new faith, was
relentlessly severe in enforcing against the Catholics the principles
he had carried with him from Wittenberg. Very characteristic is the
tone in which he reported to Luther that the Mass had been forbidden
in Denmark and the monks driven out of the land as “seditionmongers”
and “blasphemers.”[990] Not only had the bishops been imprisoned, but,
according to the account of Peter Palladius the superintendent, some of
the monks “had been hanged.”[991]

Justus Jonas began his labours at Halle in 1542 by a written invitation
to the Town-Council “completely to purge the town of false doctrine
and every kind of idolatrous worship”; Luther and Melanchthon had
sufficiently proved in their works that this “was incumbent on Christian
magistrates.” He declared that the monks still living in the town were
“obstinate and impenitent idolaters,” “adders and snakes” whom he “must
reduce to silence with the use of the gag”; already, throughout the
whole neighbourhood, “merely at the exhortations of the preachers, the
monasteries, with their Masses and idolatrous worship, had crumbled
into ruins.”[992] Later, in a memorandum addressed to the Town-Council
in 1546, Jonas again inveighed against the remaining handful of
well-disposed and zealous monks, and called to mind how “our beloved
father, Dr. Martin, in the very last sermon he preached at Halle
shortly before his decease, had exhorted the Town-Council and the whole
Church with all his burning, stormy earnestness to rid themselves of
the crawling things.”[993] Jonas appealed to his own “conscience” and
threatened to report matters to the Elector of Saxony and “his Electoral
Highness’s scholars at Wittenberg.”[994] With the outbreak of the
Schmalkalden war, when the Electoral troops laid waste the monasteries
his hopes at last found their fulfilment. He announced on March 3, 1547,
that, at Halle, the “Papistic idolatry” had now been swept away;[995]
when he wrote this he did not expect the change in the position of the
Catholics in the town, for which the defeat of the Elector’s troops in
the following month was responsible.

We are reminded how greatly Spalatin was imbued with Luther’s exclusivism
and spirit of intolerance by his words concerning the “Christian bit”
which he wished placed in the mouths of all the clergy.[996] He was
at great pains to press upon the sovereign that he was not to permit
“unchristian ceremonies” and “idolatry.”[997]

The Elector Johann was merely giving expression to the views with which
Spalatin and Luther had inspired him when he declared that, “heretics
and contemners of the Word” must in every instance be punished by the
authorities.[998] His successor, Johann Frederick, likewise followed
obediently the “Wittenberg theologians and lawyers,” as he terms his
authorities.[999] He instructed Melanchthon in 1536 to write and have
printed a popular “Answer to sundry unchristian articles” against the
Anabaptists, which was to be read aloud from the pulpit every third
Sunday, and which insisted that the secular authorities were bound to
punish “all contempt of Scripture and the outward Word” as “blatant
blasphemy.”[1000]

At the Religious Conference at Worms in 1557 quite a number of
respected Lutheran theologians (J. Brenz, J. Marbach, M. Diller,
J. Pistorius, J. Andreæ, G. Karg, P. Eber and G. Rungius) signed
a lengthy statement by Melanchthon aimed at the Anabaptists. As
one of the errors of the sect is instanced their teaching that God
communicates Himself without the intermediary of the ministry, of
preaching or the Sacrament. Those “heads and ringleaders” of the
sect who persisted in their doctrines were “to be condemned as
guilty of sedition and blasphemy and put to death by the sword”; the
death penalty prescribed in Leviticus for blasphemers was asserted
to be a “natural law, binding, by virtue of their office, on all in
authority,” hence “the judges had done the right thing” when they
condemned to death the heretic Servetus at Geneva.[1001]

Johann Brenz, who helped to promote Lutheranism in Würtemberg, had,
in 1528, written and published a pamphlet in which he deprecated the
Anabaptists’ being put to death “merely on account of heresy” when
not guilty of sedition.[1002] He was for this reason regarded by
Melanchthon as “too mild.”[1003] His later writings, however, show
that the intolerant spirit of Wittenberg finally seized on him too.
In his treatment of Catholics—both previous to 1528, and, even more
so when the olden worship had been suppressed at Schwäbisch-Halle and
he had been called to Stuttgart—he was in the forefront in advising
violent measures against Catholic practices. When he reorganised the
Church in Würtemberg, in 1536, after the victory of Duke Ulrich,
attendance at the Protestant sermons was made obligatory on the
Catholics of Stuttgart under pain of a fine, or of imprisonment in
the tower on bread and water.[1004] Brenz, though widely extolled
as tolerant and broadminded, in his quality of spiritual adviser to
Duke Christopher, stooped to the meanest and most petty regulations
in order to induce the nuns who still remained faithful to their
religion—many of whom were of high birth and advanced in years—to
accept the new faith; they were compelled to attend the sermons and
religious colloquies, deprived of their books of devotion, their
correspondence was supervised, they had to entertain Protestant guests
at table and to be served by Lutheran maids, etc.[1005]

* * * * *

The unenviable distinction of having most thoroughly assimilated
Luther’s intolerant views was enjoyed by two men in close mental
kinship with him, viz. Justus Menius and Johann Spangenberg.

Johann Spangenberg, an enthusiastic pupil of Luther’s, and, later,
Superintendent at Eisleben, when preacher at Nordhausen declared in
a tract that “fear of God’s wrath and His extreme displeasure” had
rightly led the Town-Council to forbid Catholics to attend Catholic
sermons, because, there, souls were “horribly murdered”; even
Nabuchodonosor and Darius had set the authorities an example of how
“blasphemy against religion” was to be treated.[1006]

Justus Menius, Luther’s friend, who worked as superintendent at
Eisenach and Gotha, followed Luther in qualifying the Anabaptists as
the emissaries of the devil, as “rebels and murderers,” who had fallen
under the ban of the authorities because they did not “profess the
true faith according to the Word of God” and live a “godly life.” Of
the authorities who were negligent in punishing them he exclaims: “The
devil rides such rulers so that they sin and do what is unrighteous.”
Luther himself wrote laudatory prefaces to his works on the subject.
In 1552 Menius demanded from Duke Albert of Prussia a severe
prohibition against the new believers’ teaching or writing anything
that was at variance with the Confession of Augsburg. When, however,
his opponents secured the ear of the Court he had himself to suffer;
the ruler pointed out to him that, in accordance with his own theories
of the supremacy of the sovereign, it was the duty of the authorities,
by virtue of their princely office, to withstand false doctrine and,
consequently, he himself must either submit or go to prison; upon this
Menius made his escape to Leipzig (†1558).[1007]

Urban Rhegius, appointed General Superintendent by Duke Ernest of
Brunswick-Lüneburg after the Diet of Augsburg, not only defended
in his writings a relentless system of compulsion whereby Catholic
parents were no longer permitted even in their homes to instruct
their children in the Catholic faith, but also allowed “Zwinglians
and Papists to be beaten with rods and banished from the town.” The
authorities he invited to appropriate the property of the clergy. The
inglorious war he waged against the nuns of Lüneburg, who, in spite of
every kind of persecution, stood true to their religion, has recently
been brought to light, and that, thanks to Protestant research;
it forms one of the blackest pages in the history of Lutheran
intolerance.[1008]

A memorial of the Strasburg preachers dating from 1535 (printed in
1537) which might be termed the fullest and most complete exposition
of the Royal Supremacy in church affairs drafted in that period,
is the work of Wolfgang Capito, a preacher often extolled for his
moderation and prudence.[1009] In it we have the picture of a
Government-Church with a “Caliph” (Döllinger’s expression) at its
head, who combines in himself the highest secular and spiritual
authority.

Martin Bucer though differing from Luther in much else was yet at one
with him in asserting that it was the duty of the secular authority to
abolish “false doctrine and perverted ceremonials,” and that, as the
sole authority, it was to be obeyed by “all the bishops and clergy.”
Though anxious to be regarded as considerate and peaceable, he defended
the prohibition against Catholic sermons issued at Augsburg by the
City-Council in 1534, and even incited it to still more stringent
measures against the Catholics. He advocated quite openly “the power of
the authorities over consciences.”[1010] “Among us Christians,” he asks,
“is injury and slaughter of souls by false worship of less importance
than the ravishing of wives and daughters?”[1011] He never rested until,
in 1537, with the help of such hot-heads as Wolfgang Musculus, he brought
about the entire suppression of the Mass at Augsburg. At his instigation
“many fine paintings, monuments and ancient works of art in the churches
were wantonly torn, broken and smashed.”[1012] Whoever refused to submit
and attend public worship was obliged within eight days to quit the
city-boundaries. Catholic citizens were forbidden under severe penalties
to attend Catholic worship elsewhere, and special guards were stationed
at the gates to prevent any such attempt.[1013]

In other of the Imperial cities Bucer acted with no less violence and
intolerance, for instance, at Ulm, where he supported Œcolampadius and
Ambrose Blaurer in 1531, and at Strasburg where he acted in concert with
Capito, Caspar Hedio, Matthæus Zell and others. Here, in 1529, after
the Town-Council had prohibited Catholic worship, the Councillors were
requested by the preachers to help to fill the empty churches by issuing
regulations prescribing attendance at the sermons. Bucer adhered till
his death (1551), as his work “_De Regno Christi_” (1550) proves, to
the principle of the rights and duties of authorities towards the new
religion.[1014]

In the above survey of those who preached religious intolerance only
Luther’s own pupils and followers have been considered; the result would
be even less cheering were the leaders of the other Protestant sects
added to the list.

At Zürich, Zwingli’s State-Church grew up much as Luther’s did in
Germany; Œcolampadius at Basle and Zwingli’s successor, Bullinger, were
strong compulsionists. Calvin’s name is even more closely bound up
with the idea of religious absolutism, while the task of handing down
to posterity his harsh doctrine of religious compulsion was undertaken
by Beza in his notorious work “_De hæreticis a civili magistratu
puniendis_.” The annals of the Established Church of England were
likewise at the outset written in blood.

The sufferings endured by the Catholics in Germany owing to the wave of
intolerance which spread from Wittenberg are reflected in the countless
complaints we hear at that time. Many writings still tell to-day of
the injustice under which they groaned. In a “Manual of Complaint and
Consolation for all oppressed Christians” we read as follows: “Oh, what
a mockery it is that these tyrants and abusers of power should exclaim
everywhere that their gospel is Christian freedom, that they have no wish
to tyrannise over consciences when there could never have been worse
tyrants than those men who do not scruple to go on unceasingly tormenting
the consciences of the people, robbing them of the consolation of the
holy sacraments of the religious ministrations of consecrated priests,
of all their prayer-books and devotional works, and, even on their
death-beds, in spite of their piteous entreaties refusing them the Holy
Viaticum!”[1015] This touching complaint is made more particularly in the
name of those most defenceless members of society, who were devoid of
legal protection and whose very poverty made emigration impossible. “All
the iniquities committed in German lands and cities are attested at the
Judgment-Seat of God by the souls of thousands of consecrated nuns, who
never did wrong to anyone and who asked for nothing more than permission
to live and die in their ancient faith, even though their worldly
goods should be taken away from them and they shut up within closed
walls.”[1016]

2. Luther as Judge

It must not be overlooked that Luther’s severity towards heretics within
his fold is to be set down largely to his nervous irritability arising
partly out of his natural temperament, partly out of his unceasing
labours, so that, if we are to be just to him, his conviction that his
doctrine was the only authorised one must not be held to be entirely
responsible for his behaviour. At the same time it is plain how deeply he
was affected by belief in his higher mission. Thus he practically made
himself a religious dictator, when, in 1542, he demanded that the Meissen
nobles who had come over to him should not only ratify their new belief
by doing penance, but also should “signify their approval of everything
which has hitherto been done by us and shall be done in the future.”[1017]

Another point on which we must also do him justice is the service
performed by him in his controversies with rivals, in the field both
of theology and Scripture-exegesis, by repressing with such energy and
general success the dangerous tendencies apparent in the Anabaptist
heresy and the Antinomianism of Johann Agricola. In the attacks of
the Antinomians on all law, even on the Decalogue, there undoubtedly
lay a great danger for morality and religion. Certain of Luther’s
own principles were carried to rash, nay, foolhardy, lengths by the
Antinomians. Hence it was not unfortunate that Agricola found pitted
against him so redoubtable an opponent as Luther who, as was his wont,
interfered and nipped the evil in the bud.

_The Conceit and the Obstinacy of the “Heretics”_

Luther bitterly accuses of boundless presumption all the heretics within
the New Faith, but particularly Agricola. The latter might even be
classed with those doctors who might most fittingly be compared with
Arius and treated in the same way.

“This man,” he says of Agricola, “is presumption itself. Neither with
the flute nor with tears is he to be won.… I see it is my goodness
that puffs him up. He says he is a guiltless Abel. He is, forsooth,
being made a martyr at my hands.…” But, so Luther continues, he will
be such a martyr as was Arius and Satan.[1018]

In 1542, when the conversation at table turned on the teachers of the
New Faith whose opinions differed from Luther’s, a good many names
were mentioned, “Those at Zürich” (Zwingli’s pupils), Carlstadt, Bucer
and Capito, “Grickel and Jeckel”—some of them living and some of them
already dead—all of whom were insufferably presumptuous. It was then
that Bugenhagen, who was present, could not refrain from quoting the
passage in the Old Testament where Moses had commanded in God’s name
“That prophet shall be slain because he spoke to draw you away from
the Lord your God.… If thy brother would persuade thee (to serve other
gods), thou shalt presently put him to death. Let thy hand be the
first upon him and afterwards the hands of all the people. With stones
shall he be stoned to death: because he would have withdrawn thee
from the Lord thy God. If in one of the cities thou hear that some
have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, inquire carefully and
diligently the truth of the thing by looking well into it, and if thou
find that which is said to be certain and that this abomination hath
been committed, thou shalt forthwith kill the inhabitants of that city
with the edge of the sword, and shalt destroy it and all things that
are in it, even to the cattle.”[1019]

Hence it was perhaps rather lucky that the Wittenberg tribunal
was presided over by the sovereign of the land, and that the
sentences pronounced at Luther’s table or in the learned circles
of the Theological Faculty required subsequent ratification by the
authorities.

Luther’s complaints elsewhere about the pride of the heretics throw
still further light on the jealousy which was at work in him (above,
p. 260).

“How is it that all the insurgents say ‘I am the man?’ They want all
the glory for themselves and hate and are grim with all others, just
like the Pope who also wants to stand alone.”[1020] Zwingli appears to
be one of the foremost among those desirous of robbing him of his due
glory. “He was ambitious through and through.”[1021] On hearing that
Zwingli had said that, in three years, he would have France, Spain and
England “on his side and for his share,” Luther became very bitter
and several times complained of Zwingli’s intention to seize upon his
harvest; such words seemed to him the “boasting of a braggart.”[1022]
“Œcolampadius, too, fancied himself the doctor of doctors and far
above me, even before he had ever heard me.” And in the same way
Carlstadt said: “As for you, Sir Doctor, I don’t care a snap! Münzer,
too, preached against two Popes, the old one and the new,[1023]
said I must be a Saul, and that though I had made a good beginning,
the Spirit of God had left me.… Hence let all the theologians and
preachers look to it and diligently beware lest they seek their glory
in Holy Scripture and in God’s Word; otherwise they will have a
fall.”[1024]—“Mr. Eisleben [Johann Agricola] labours under great pride
and presumption; he wants to be the only one, and, with his pride and
his puffed-up spirit, to surpass all others.”[1025] “They are scamps,”
so he abuses them in another passage, “fain would they get at us and
surpass us, as though forsooth we were blind and could not see through
their tricks.”[1026]

Elsewhere in the Table-Talk we read: “My best friends,” said Dr.
Martin, with a deep sigh, “seek to stamp me under foot and to trouble
and besmirch the Evangel; hence I am going to hold a disputation.”
“Alas, that, in my own lifetime, I should see them strutting about and
seeking to rule.” It was with him as with St. Paul to whom God wished
to show how much he must suffer for His Name’s sake (Acts ix. 16).
Some indeed were trying to persuade him that these foes in his own
household were not really against Luther, but only against Cruciger,
Rörer, etc. But this was false. “For the Catechism, the Exposition
of the Ten Commandments and the Confession of Augsburg are mine, not
Cruciger’s or Rörer’s.”[1027]

Of those near him “Mr. Eisleben” (Agricola) seemed to him his chief
rival; those abroad troubled him less; for a while Luther was obsessed
by the idea that Agricola, “with his cool head, was set on securing
the reins and was seeking to become a great lord.”[1028]

Of Carlstadt Luther once said, referring to the rivalry between
the pair: “He persuaded himself that there was no more learned man
on earth than he; what I write that he imitates and seeks to copy
me.” After a profession of personal humility, Luther concludes: “And
yet, by God’s Grace, I am more learned than all the Sophists and
theologians of the Schools.”[1029]

Though Luther never grows weary of insisting against the heretics at
home on the “public, common doctrine,” and of instancing the fell
consequences of pride and obstinacy, even going so far as to predict that
they will in all likelihood never be converted because founders of sects
rarely retrace their steps and recant,[1030] yet he never seems to have
perceived that the point of all this might equally well have been turned
against himself.

The blindness of such heretics he describes in a tract of 1526 dedicated
to Queen Mary of Hungary:

“Here we may all of us well be afraid, and particularly all heretics
and false teachers.… Such a temper [obstinacy in sticking to one’s
own opinion] penetrates like water into the inmost recesses and like
oil into the very bone, and becomes our daily clothing. Then it comes
about that one party curses the other, and the doctrine of one is rank
poison and malediction to the other, and his own doctrine nothing
but blessing and salvation; this we now see among our fanatics and
Papists. Then everything is lost. The masses are not converted; a few,
whom God has chosen, come right again, but the others remain under
the curse and even regard it as a precious thing.… Nor have I ever
read of heresiarchs being converted; they remain obdurate in their
own conceit, the oil has gone into the bone … and has become part of
their nature. They allow none to find fault with them and brook no
opposition. This is the sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is
no forgiveness.”[1031]

In the same writing he describes the heretics’ way of speaking: “The
heretics give themselves up to idle talk so that one hears of nothing
but their dreams.… They overflow with words; all evildoers tend to
become garrulous. As a boiling pot foams and bubbles over, so they too
overflow with the talk of which their heart is full.… They stand stiff
upon their doctrine about which there is no lack of ranting.”[1032]

The description (which seats so well on Luther himself) proceeds:
“Those are heretics and apostates who follow their own ideas rather
than the common tradition of Christendom, who transgress the teaching
of their fathers and separate themselves from the common ways and
usages of the whole of Christendom, who, out of pure wantonness,
invent new ways and methods without cause, and contrary to Holy
Writ.”[1033]—“They misread the Word of God according to their whim and
make it mean what they please. In short they undertake something out
of the common and invent a belief of their own, regardless of God’s
Word.… God must put up with their doctrine and life as being alone
holy and Godly.”[1034]

Again and again he brands pride as the cause of all heresy: “This
is the reason; they think much of themselves, which, indeed, is the
cause and well-spring of all heresies, for, as Augustine also says,
‘Ambition is the mother of all heresies.’ Thus Zwingli and Bucer
now put forward a new doctrine.… So dangerous a thing is pride in
the clergy.”[1035]—“We cannot sufficiently be on our guard against
this deadly vice. Vices of the body are gross, and we feel them to
be such, but this vice can always deck itself out with the glory of
God, as though it had God’s Word on its side. But beneath the outward
veil there is nothing but vain glory.”[1036]—“Lo, here you have in
brief the cause and ground of all idolatry, heresy, hypocrisy and
error, what the prophets inveigh against, and what was the cause of
their being put to death, and against which the whole of Scripture
witnesses. It all comes from obstinacy and conceit and the ideas of
natural reason which puffs itself up … and fancies it knows enough,
and can find its way for itself, etc.”[1037]

Such statements of Luther’s are of supreme importance for judging of his
Divine Mission. In his frame of mind it became at last an impossibility
for him to realise that his hostility and intolerance towards “heretics”
within his fold could redound on himself, or that he was contradicting
himself in continuing to proclaim freedom, or at least in continuing
to make the fullest use of it himself. In reality he was living in a
world of his own, and his mental state cannot be judged of by the usual
standards.

_“Heretics” who cannot be sure of their Cause_

Apart from the “pride of the heretics,” another idea of Luther’s deserves
attention, viz. that those teachers who differed from him, in their heart
of hearts, knew him to be in the right, or at least neither were nor
could be quite certain of their own doctrines. Of any call in their case
there could be no question; his call, however, was above doubt, seeing
his certainty. Hence, in his dealings with the “sectarians” we once
again find the same strange attitude, as he had exhibited towards the
“Papists,” who, according to him, likewise were withstanding their own
conscience and lacked any real call.

To a man so full of such fiery enthusiasm for his cause and so dominated
by his imagination as Luther, it seems to have been an easy task to
persuade himself ever more and more firmly, that all his opponents’
doings were against their own conscience.

The “teachers of faith,” he says, speaking of the sectarians, ought
first of all “to be certain about their mission. Otherwise all is
up with them. It was this [argument] that killed Œcolampadius. He
could not endure the self-accusation: How if you have taught what is
false?”[1038] Concerning Œcolampadius Luther professed to know that,
even in his prayers, he had been doubtful of his own doctrine. But,
so he argues, if a man goes so far as to pray for the spread of his
doctrine he must surely first be “quite certain and not doubt thus
of the Word and of his doctrine, for doubts and uncertainty have
no place in theology, but a man must be certain of his case in the
face of God.” Before the world, indeed, he continues, with a strange
limitation of his previous assertion, “it behoves one to be humble,
to proceed gently and to say: If anyone knows better, let him say so;
to God’s Word I will gladly yield when I am better instructed.”[1039]
Yet, in the same works, where seemingly he professes such willingness
to listen to others, he himself proclaims most emphatically his great
mission and its exclusive character.[1040]

All heretics, he once remarked, were disarmed by this one question:
“My friend, is it the command of our Lord God [that you should teach
thus]? At this, one and all are struck dumb.”[1041] Only by dint
of lying are they able to boast of their inward assurance of their
cause. Here we have Campanus for instance: “He boasts that he is
as sure as sure can be of his cause and that it is impossible for
him to be mistaken.” “But he is an accursed lump of filth whom we
ought to despise and not bother our heads about writing against, for
this only makes him more bold, proud and brave.… Whereupon Master
Philip [Melanchthon] said: his suggestion would be that he should be
strung up on the gallows, and this he had written to his lord [the
Elector].”[1042]

With his own “certainty” Luther triumphantly confronts his opponents
who at heart were uncertain: “Every man who speaks the Word of Christ
is free to boast that his mouth is the mouth of Christ”; such a one,
confiding in his certainty, may help to “tear Antichrist out of men’s
hearts, so that his cause may no longer avail.”[1043]—“But, now,
the articles of pure doctrine are proved [by me] from Scripture in
the clearest way, and yet it carries no weight with them; never has
an article of the faith been preached which has not more than once
been attacked and contradicted by heretics, who, nevertheless, read
the same Scriptures as we.”[1044]—“In short, ‘heretics must needs
arise’ (1 Cor. xi. 19), and that cannot be stopped, for it was so
even in the Apostles’ time. We are no better off than our fathers;
Christ Himself was persecuted.”[1045] “No heretic allows himself to
be convinced. They neither see nor hear anything, like Master Stiffel
[Michael Stiefel]; he saw me not nor heard me.… It is forbidden to
curse, swear, etc., far more to cause heresy.”[1046]—Then one becomes
hardened against God the Holy Ghost; these fanatics “do not even
doubt”—which is astonishing—“they stand firm.” He had warned the
Anabaptist Marcus (Stübner), so he relates, “to beware lest he err,”
to which he answered that “God Himself shall not dissuade me from
this.”[1047]

In short, since Luther’s own cause is so clear and certain, those who
disagree, particularly the sectarians, must simply have discarded the
faith. For instance, “of Master Jeckel [Jacob Schenk] I hold that he
believes nothing.”[1048] He, Luther, has “at all times taught God’s
Word in all simplicity; to this I adhere, and will surrender myself
a prisoner to it or else—become a Pope who believes neither in the
again-rising of the dead nor in life everlasting.”[1049] Thus he sees
no middle course between the most frivolous unbelief and the Word of
God as he believes and interprets it. Hence, with heretics, whether
among the Pope’s men or in his own flock, “he will have nothing to do
outside of Scripture—unless indeed they start working miracles.”

_Where are your Miracles?_

The stress Luther lays on miracles as a proof of doctrine is another
trait to add to the picture of his psychology. Again and again he
repeated anew what he had already, in 1524, said of Münzer and some of
the preachers: They must be told to corroborate their mission by signs
and wonders, or else be forbidden to preach; for whenever God wills
to change the order of things He always works miracles.[1050] There
is something almost tragic in the courage with which he appealed to
miracles in this connection, when we bear in mind his own difficulties,
in accounting for their absence in his own case.[1051] Here it is
enough to recall Hier. Weller’s words: “I still remember right well,”
Weller writes, “how he once said that he had never thought of asking
God for the gift of raising the dead, or of performing other miracles,
though he did not doubt he might have obtained such of God had he
wished; he had, however, preferred to be content with the rich gift of
Scripture-interpretation; he further said that he had raised two persons
from the dead, one of them being Philip Melanchthon and the other a
God-fearing man.”[1052]

As against the sects and fanatics, Luther urges that he himself laid
no claim to any extraordinary mission; as they, however, did make such
a claim, they must vindicate it by miracles. “I have never preached or
sought to preach unless I was asked and called for by men, for I cannot
boast as they do that God has sent me from heaven without means; they
run of their own accord, though no one sends them, as Jeremias writes
[xxiii. 21]; for this reason they work no good.”[1053] Neither here nor
elsewhere does he explicitly state by whom it is necessary to be “asked”
or “called.” His account of the source whence he derives his mission also
varies, being now the Wittenberg magistrates, now his Doctor’s degree,
now the sovereign, now the enthusiastic hearers and readers of his
word.[1054]

Such was his confidence that Luther forgot that it was by no means
difficult for the “false brethren” within his camp to pick out the
weak spots in his doctrine. He refused to recognise that much of
their criticism was valid; on the negative side it even took the
place of miracles. It was not every Catholic polemic who succeeded in
demonstrating so clearly and convincingly the anomalies in Luther’s
views, for instance, on the Law and Gospel, as the Antinomian, Johann
Agricola.

On the other hand, Luther could well note with satisfaction the inability
of the heretics to bring forward anything positive of importance.
They were dwarfs compared with him. With his knowledge of the Bible
it was child’s play to him to overthrow the fanatics’ often ludicrous
applications of Scripture. Of Zwingli, too, it was easy for him to get
the better by dint of sticking to the literal sense of Christ’s words
of institution: “This is My Body.” Luther was not slow in pointing out
the blemishes of the “fanatics,” their vanity and blind obedience to
ambition and self-will, and the impracticability of their fantastic, and
often revolutionary, theories. The very truth of his strictures, for all
his lack of miracles, raised him in his own eyes, far above these clumsy
teachers; this perhaps enables us to understand better the utter contempt
he expresses for them.

_His Anger with Lemnius and Others_

One had but to praise those whom he condemned to call forth Luther’s
implacable anger.

This was the experience in 1538 of the humanist, Simon Lemnius (Lemchen)
of Wittenberg, a man otherwise kindly disposed to the new teaching. A
humanist above all, he had won Melanchthon’s favour on account of his
talent.

Lemnius had thoughtlessly dared to publish two books of epigrams in
which he not only attacked with biting sarcasm certain Wittenberg
personages, but actually ventured to praise Archbishop Albert of
Mayence, Luther’s powerful opponent. The poet, no doubt, was anxious
to curry favour with the Archbishop so as to find in him a Mæcenas;
he even went so far as to extol him as the man who “had kept alive
the olden faith.” The censorship for which Melanchthon as Rector of
the University was then responsible, was caught napping. Lemnius
was indeed arrested by the University, but he escaped and fled from
Wittenberg. On Trinity Sunday, June 16th, Luther read out from the
pulpit a Mandate in which he abused Archbishop Albert in disgraceful
terms, and scourged as a criminal act the praise bestowed in the
“shameful, shocking book of lies” on Bishop Albert, “a devil out of
whom it made a saint.” In it he also declared that, “by every code of
law, and no matter whither the fugitive knave had fled, his head was
forfeit.”[1055] Thus Lemnius was as good as outlawed—though no Court
of Justice had yet sentenced him. On July 4th Melanchthon formally
expelled him from the University on account of “faithlessness, perjury
and slander.”[1056] The “perjury” consisted in his having fled, in
defiance of the obedience he owed to the University, so as to evade
the harsh penalties he had reason to apprehend. The whole edition of
the Epigrams was destroyed.

“It is the devil who hatches out such knaves,” remarked Luther,
“particularly among the Papists, through whom he attacks and thwarts
us.… Because we preach Christ alone he persecutes us in every way he
can.” The bishops deserve to be called “lost and godless knaves and
foes of God,” hence “those must not be tolerated here who praise them
in verse and prose.”[1057]

When Lemnius had a second edition of the Epigrams printed at
Wittenberg this also was suppressed. He had added a third book,
devoted to abuse of Luther and containing the famous “Merd-Song” on
Luther, who was then ailing from diarrhœa. Luther retorted with a
“Merd-Song” of his own on Lemnius. His verses he read aloud to his
friends and they became public property through being incorporated in
Lauterbach’s notes of the Table-Talk.[1058]

Lemnius, whose career had been wrecked by Luther’s anger and revenge,
then wrote an “Apologia against the unjust and lying decree” which the
Wittenberg University had published against him at the instigation
(“_imperio et tyrannide_”) of Martin Luther and Justus Jonas. He still
retained his loose humanistic style after his return in 1538 to his
native Switzerland, where he obtained a position as schoolmaster at
Coire.

The above Apologia was printed at Cologne, it would seem in 1539,
but very few copies survive owing to the energy shown in their
suppression. It is only of recent years that the complete text has
become generally known;[1059] till then Protestants like Schelhorn
and Hausen had only ventured to give fragments of the work. In it
the writer complains bitterly that Luther “has published a pamphlet
against him [the mandate read aloud in the church] in which, playing
both the judge and the sovereign, Luther had condemned and abused
him.” “Such authority in civil matters” does this soul-herd arrogate
to himself. He robs the bishops of their secular power, but he himself
is a tyrant. The charges against Luther’s private life made in this
work are glaring, and they come, moreover, from a man who knew his
Wittenberg, but it must not be forgotten that he was now a bitter foe
of Luther.[1060] He goes so far as to declare that Luther’s shameless
attacks on the sovereigns, for instance on the Elector of Mayence,
gave grounds for apprehending contempt of all authority and the
outbreak of a war that would spell the ruin of Germany.

Meanwhile “Luther sits like a dictator at Wittenberg and rules;
what he says must be taken as law.”[1061] He calls his opponent the
“Wittenberg Pope” (“_Papa Albiacus_”), who had been faithless to his
Vows.

In order rightly to appreciate, from their psychological side, Luther’s
angry outbursts against the heretics in his party we must above all
remember his fears of a coming collapse of theology among his following;
that he foresaw something of the sort has already been shown above.[1062]

He was also keenly alive to the harm these dissensions were doing to
his reputation. Nor must we forget the threatening and highly insulting
behaviour of many of these heretics. Taking all things together, it is
easy to understand how a temper such as his was lashed to fury when
denouncing the “presumption and foolhardiness” of his foes.[1063]

“A muddled and obstinate head” sits on the neck of the fanatics’
ringleader; “his horns must be blunted.”[1064]—“Carlstadt and Zwingli
behave with insolence and defiance”; “We must needs decry the fanatics
as damned”; “they actually dare to pick holes in our doctrine; ah,
the scoundrelly rabble do a great injury to our Evangel even in the
outland and enable our foes to scoff at us.”[1065]—“Their pride and
audacity will bring about their downfall.”[1066]

In truth, he says, “Carlstadt blasphemed himself to
death.”[1067]—Œcolampadius saw the “curse” of God fulfilled in
himself, “and withered away with fear the night after Zwingli had been
struck down” (at Cappel).[1068] Zwingli himself, like the rest, was
urged on merely by “his boundless ambition.”[1069]—Egranus (Johann
Wildenauer) was a “proud donkey.”[1070]—Bucer is a “gossip,”[1071]
“a miscreant through and through, in every case, inflection and rule
of grammar; I trust him not at all, for Paul says [Titus iii. 10]
‘A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition,
avoid.’”[1072]—Sebastian Franck is a “wicked, venomous knave and it
is a wonder to me that those at Ulm care to keep him.”[1073] “He only
loved to do harm, is inconstant and boasts of the spirit; but his
wife has plenty of spirit and it is she who inspirits him with her
spirit.”[1074]—Schwenckfeld deserves as little as Franck to be written
against. “Agricola is only puffed up with hatred and ambition.”[1075]

He “is and should be called a godless man who denies God, which
is what the Sacramentarians do.”[1076]—“Of false brethren we must
above all things beware.”[1077]—With such a one “there is no hope of
repentance; he is bold, impudent.”[1078]—“He remains obdurate,” he
says of one of these heretics, “a cunning, evil-minded scoffer”; he
betrays us as “Judas betrayed Christ.”[1079]

The depth of the yawning abyss between the heretics and Luther and also
the hatred they bore him on account of his treatment of them is plain
from the words of Münzer and Ickelsamer already quoted.[1080]

3. The Church-Unseen, its Origin and Early History

His doctrine of the Church may in many respects be regarded as the
key-stone and centre of the rest of Luther’s theology.

It is practically important in that it affords a clue to anyone desirous
of ascertaining to which of the competing religious bodies he should
belong. It was usually to this article on the Church that those who
afterwards returned to Catholicism appealed in vindication of their step.
It was also the practice of Catholic writers, in their controversies
with Luther, to appeal to the doctrine of the one Church which has never
erred in dogma in order to convict him more speedily of the guilt of his
separation. All of them started from the old definition, according to
which the Church is the visible commonwealth of the faithful, founded by
Christ on Peter, the Rock, which confesses the same Christian belief and
unites in the same Sacraments under the guidance of its lawful pastors,
in particular of the successors of St. Peter.

Luther himself was fully aware of the supreme importance of this
doctrine; he frequently enough brings his opponents on the scene “crying
Church, Church!”[1081] Among the Papists, he says, they do nothing
but shriek Church, Church, Church, and this is the chief obstacle to
reunion.[1082] “Hence there is indeed need that we should see what the
Holy Christian Church is. If it is the clergy and their mob, then the
devil has won and we two, God and His Word, are the losers.”[1083] “The
Pope quotes this text [John xiv. 17: ‘The spirit of truth shall remain
with you’] strongly and impressively.… They have become so certain of
their cause that they take their stand on it as on a wall of iron.… This
we ourselves must believe and say, viz. that the Holy Ghost is with
the Church which is certainly on earth and will remain.”[1084] But was
Luther’s Church a visible or an invisible one?

_Invisibility of Luther’s Church_

Bearing in mind the religious compulsion practised by Luther, the
question would seem already answered. His practice involved the existence
of an outward ecclesiastical authority with outward rules, a congregation
to which it was impossible to belong without submitting to the doctrine
of a visible head or corporation. Of the visible nature of this Church
there can be no question. It is with this tangible authority that he
confronts the Anabaptists, for instance when he says: “The presumption
of these fanatics is unbearable, for they altogether repudiate the
authority of the Church and will have it all their own way.”[1085]
The best-grounded maxims of the best teachers are despised by them,
so he complains, and they only esteem the opinions they themselves
have rummaged for in Scripture! “Yet great heed should be paid to the
Church.”[1086]

Nevertheless, according to Luther’s own views which had not changed much
since 1519, the Church is in reality invisible.

The Church is not an outward, tangible institution, with a divinely
appointed spiritual government and direction, such as it had been to
Catholics through all the ages; rather it is the ghostly congregation of
true believers known to Christ alone, Who alone is their head, guide and
teacher. Men holding “office” in the Church there must indeed be, but
only in order to preach and to dispense the sacraments; any spiritual
authority with full powers for legislating and guiding the faithful is
non-existent.[1087] It is the “true” faith and the possession of the
“right” sacraments that constitute the Church. It is accordingly clear to
him that the Holy Church in which we are to believe, must be a “ghostly,
not a bodily one,” “for what we believe,” so he proceeds, “is not bodily
but ghostly. The outward Roman Church we can all of us see, hence she
cannot be the true Church in which we believe which is a congregation
or assembly of the saints in faith; but no one can see who is a saint
or who has the faith.” This he said in his “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome”
(1520).[1088]

“The Church is altogether in the spirit,” so he again says in the
following year, “she is altogether a spiritual thing.”[1089] “Christ,”
so he says later, “works in the spirit so that it is hardly possible
to smell His Church and bishops from afar, and the Holy Ghost behaves
as though He were not there”; but that Church which is so close at
hand “that it is possible to lay hold on her,” as is the case with
the Popish Church, is only the Church of the devil.[1090] “Who will
show us the Church,” he asks, “seeing that she is hidden in the spirit
and is only believed in, just as we say: ‘I believe in one Holy
Church.’”[1091] “The Church is _believed_ in but she is not seen,
and for the most part she is oppressed and hidden, under weakness,
crosses and scandals.”[1092] In short, as a Lutheran theologian puts
it, “he is speaking merely of a Holy Church or congregation whose real
complement of Saints is not apparent, and which is therefore termed
invisible.”[1093] Nor could he speak otherwise, for the absence of
a divinely appointed hierarchy, and likewise his principle of the
free examination of Scripture, could not but lead him to assume an
invisible Church which lives only in the hearts of those who share the
faith and the possession of the Holy Ghost.

Although, as the theologian in question points out, in Luther’s idea
of the Church visible elements are not lacking, e.g. preaching and
the sacraments, yet the actual congregation of Saints is visible to
God alone; indeed the Church would still be there even should her
only members consist of “babes in the cradle.”[1094] For instance,
according to him, the Church before his day comprised very few people,
and those unknown, who kept the Gospel undefiled and thus preserved the
Church; some “elect souls must needs have come back, at least on their
death-beds, to the true path.”[1095]—“Such persons [inspired by the Holy
Ghost] there must always be on earth, even though there should only be
two or three, or just the children. Of the old there are, alas, but few.
Such as do not belong to this class have no right to look upon themselves
as Christians; nor are they to be consoled as though they were Christians
by much talk of the forgiveness of sins and the Grace of Christ.”[1096]

Thus, in so far as the visible elements were recognised by Luther,
Protestants are justified in teaching that Luther’s Church-Unseen was
“not a mere idea or empty phantom”; if, however, they go on to say that,
according to Luther, the Church is “the living sum total of all who are
united in the Spirit,” one sees at a glance that, though, mentally, we
can make a class of all who come under the category of “believers,” this
implies no actual relation between such, and consequently no “Church” or
real though invisible _society_.[1097]

_The Marks of the Church. Gradual Disappearance of the Old Conception of
the Church_

It is a matter of common knowledge that the marks or “_notæ_” of the
Church had been the subject of many disquisitions before Luther’s day.
We may now inquire whether Luther himself also admitted the existence of
these “marks,” by which the true Church of Christ might be known.

Though the admission of such marks seems incompatible with his theory of
the Church-Unseen, Luther repeatedly seeks to prove the truth of his own
Church and the falsehood of Catholicism by this means. Especially is this
the case in his “Von den Conciliis und Kirchen” (1539).

Thus he asks: How can “a poor, blundering man know where to find this
holy Christian folkdom [the Church]? For we are told that it is [to
be found] in this life and on this earth … where it will also remain
till the end of time.”[1098] This leads him to speak of the marks of
the true Church.

“First of all the holy Christian people can be told by its having
the Holy Word of God.” Luther forgets to say how the latter is to be
recognised, though on this all depends; for he was far from being the
only one who laid claim to possessing the pure Word of God. Hence
many were not slow in pointing out how useless it was on his part to
say: “Where you hear or see this Word preached, believed, confessed
and acted upon, have no doubt that there, assuredly, must be the true
‘_ecclesia sancta catholica_,’ and the Holy Christian people, even
though in number they be but few.”[1099] Nor did his theological
opponents think any more highly of the other marks of the true Church
which he sets up in the same work. They urged that the distinguishing
marks should surely be clearer than what was to be distinguished, and
patent and evident even to the unlearned. Concerning the marks set
up by Luther, however, there was doubt even among those who had cut
themselves adrift from Catholicism.

For instance, the second mark was “the Sacrament of Baptism where it
is rightly taught and believed, and administered according to Christ’s
ordinance.”[1100] But, among the Zwinglians and Anabaptists, baptism,
so at least they claimed, was also rightly administered according to
the ordinance of Christ; and, as for the Popish Church, Luther himself
admits that she had always preserved baptism in its purity. Hence,
here again, we have no clear, distinctive mark.

The other marks, according to Luther’s “Von den Conciliis,” were,
thirdly, “the Sacrament of the Altar where it is rightly given,
believed and received according to the institution of Christ”;
and, fourthly, “the keys [forgiveness through faith] of which they
make public use.” “Fifthly, the Church is known outwardly by her
consecrating or calling of ministers of the Church, to the offices
which it is her duty to fill.” Sixthly, “by her public prayer, praise,
and thanks to God.” “Seventhly, the Christian people is recognised
outwardly by the sacred emblem of the holy Cross since it has to
suffer misfortune and persecution, all kinds of temptation and
trouble—as we learn from the Our Father—from the devil, the world
and the flesh; must be inwardly in pain, foolish and affrighted, and
outwardly poor, despised, weak and sick.”[1101]

Bellarmine, the sharp-witted controversialist, and other polemics
even earlier, dealt with these marks and showed their inadequacy.
As regards the last mark Bellarmine, not unnaturally, expressed his
wonder that Luther should have spoken of it, seeing that inward
suffering, sadness and apprehension are of their very nature hidden
things. Luther, however, hit upon this mark because he was accustomed
to regard his “temptations” as a witness to the truth of his doctrine,
and was convinced that the devil was causing them solely out of hatred
for the truth.[1102] He thus carried his fancied experiences[1103]
into his teaching on the Church, a fresh proof that his theology was
the outcome rather of his inner life than of revealed doctrine. The
idea that the Church was ever to be sick, weak, foolish and despised
appealed to him all the more because his Evangel had not brought forth
the good moral fruits he desiderated, and because he had vainly to
struggle against the dissensions within his congregations and their
abuse of the freedom of the Gospel.

It was this experience of his which led him to the fantastic plan
already described of forming an “assembly of earnest Christians,”
i.e. a Church-apart enrolled from the true believers who would then
realise the idea of a Church even to the extent of having the power of
excommunicating.

The seven marks of the Church were reduced to two in the Augsburg
Confession of 1530, viz. pure doctrine, and true sacraments, and it is
thus that they appear in the “Symbolic Books” of Lutheranism. On the
other hand, Luther makes no appeal to the marks of the Church as given
in the olden so-called Nicene Creed, “though all the olden Councils
had insisted that it was these marks, particularly the attribute of
‘Apostolicity,’ which distinguished the Church from the sects.”[1104]

As a matter of fact the marks on which Catholic theologians laid
stress, viz. the Church’s “oneness, holiness, Catholicity” and
apostolicity furnished a striking answer to the question: Where is
the Church? She is Apostolic because her connection with the Apostles
has never been broken; Catholic because of her universal existence
throughout the world; holy in her aims and means and in the practice
of Christian virtue by the generality of her followers, and also on
account of the special gifts of grace which have ever brightened her
path through the ages; lastly, she is one, outwardly in being alone,
and also inwardly, in the unity of her faith and belief, liturgy and
sacraments, and in her character as a society in which a divinely
appointed spiritual authority rules which the rest obey. In the
latter respect the Church, to the Catholic mind, is even a “_societas
perfecta_,” visible, moreover, to the whole world like the “city set
on a hill” (Matt. v. 12) in which the Fathers of the Church indeed
always saw an image of the Church;[1105] she is as a building built
upon a rock, as a flock gathered round the shepherd, both of them
comparisons which we owe to the Church’s Divine Founder.

It was not without reason that Luther was averse to any appeal to the
four marks of the Church just referred to. What unity had he wherewith
to confront that of Catholicism under its Pope? Apostolicity, as an
historical union with Christ’s Apostles was so evidently wanting in
his case that he declared that the doctrine he had come to preach had
died out shortly after Apostolic times. Any claim to Catholicity in
the usual sense of the word was not to be thought of for a moment.
The only olden marks which he does not throw over is that of holiness.
He here relies on the existence of holiness in the case of a few as
being sufficient for his purpose.

Nevertheless, due justice must be done to the stress he is ever
disposed to lay on the holiness of the Church. He practically makes
all the other marks to centre in this, for he speaks of the seven
marks mentioned above as the sevenfold “sanctuary whereby the Holy
Ghost sanctifies Christ’s holy nation.”[1106]

“Even though it was impossible for him,” remarks Johann Adam Möhler,
“to teach that the Church was to be regarded as a living institution
in which men become holy, yet he sticks fast to the idea that she
ought by rights to be composed of saints.… The inner Church [called
by theologians the “soul” to distinguish it from the outward “body”
of the Church] is everywhere in evidence, and the fact that no one is
a true citizen of the heavenly kingdom if he belongs only outwardly
to the Church and has not entered into the spirit of Christ and felt
within himself its vivifying power, is pointed out [by Luther] in a
way which merits all praise.”[1107]

Such true believers, according to Luther’s teaching, are so much the sole
representatives of the visible Church that the wicked, the unbelieving,
the hypocritical Christians who only expose her to the scorn and derision
of her foes, do not really belong to the Church at all.[1108] They are
members of the Church merely in name, but, in reality, are not Christians
at all.[1109]

It was not, however, easy for him to shake off the true feeling he had
inherited from youthful days, viz. that whoever wished to be pious
and pleasing to God, must become so through the true Church. “Let us
therefore pray in the Church,” so we hear him say, “let us pray with the
Church and for her.”[1110] According to him the Church was the ghostly
Eve taken from the side of Christ, a pure virgin and one body with
Christ, great and splendid in God’s sight, the chief of His works, dear
to Him, precious and highly esteemed in His sight, etc.[1111] Hence we
find him re-echoing the beautiful words in which Catholic mystics had
been wont to extol the Church and her “soul.”

Yet there is no doubt, that, in spite of all this, Luther had explained
away the Church’s very essence.

It was indeed his tendency to spiritualise, and his favourite idea
that true believers must be enlightened by God directly concerning His
outward “Word” that helped him thus to explain away the Church. As for
any outward doctrinal establishment or institutional Church having an
authority of her own, no such thing existed. Thus the Church which Luther
extols as so holy turns out to be something quite intangible—water that
for want of a holder runs away and is lost. Even Köstlin admits this,
though in guarded words: “Certain main problems which the Reformed view
of the Church must necessarily face” “were only very insufficiently
grasped and discussed” by Luther and his friends. Among such questions
Köstlin includes some that touch the Church’s very essence: How far
is purity of doctrine necessary in order to belong to the Church; how
far are the old Creeds still professed by Protestantism obligatory or
binding upon preachers; where, finally, does the freedom preached by
Luther precisely end?[1112] But, in spite of all the _lacunæ_ in his
doctrine of the Church, Luther bitterly insists, that, outside the
Church there can be no salvation.[1113] Nor did he even admit the usual
Catholic limitation, viz. that those, who through no fault of their own
are ignorant of the Church, may possibly be saved if their life has been
otherwise good. Luther indeed, as already shown (p. 292), is of opinion
that some olden Catholics may have been saved, if, in the end, they laid
hold on Christ as Luther taught;[1114] he also opines that salvation had
been brought to all “worthy men of every nation” who had died before the
coming of Christ, through His preaching during His visit to Limbo;[1115]
yet he does not believe that it was the Will of God that _all_ men,
whether within or outside the Church, should be saved.[1116]

After having in the above examined Luther’s conception of the Church,
irrespective of its mode of growth, we may now turn our attention to the
genesis and historical development of this conception.

_Origin and Early Outbuilding of the New Idea of the Church_

A curious psychological process accompanies the growth of Luther’s idea
of the Church. We know that, even long after he had fallen a victim to
his theory of justification by faith alone, he had still no thought
of breaking away from the Church’s communion or of questioning the
conception then in vogue of the Church. It was only when the olden Church
refused to come over to his new doctrine and prepared to condemn it, that
he decided, after great struggles within, to cut himself adrift, and it
was in order to justify this step to himself and to vindicate it to the
world that he gradually formed his new views on the Church. (Cp. above,
vol. i., p. 321 ff.)

Characteristically enough we find a first trace of what was to come,
in his sermon on the power of the Papal Ban, which he published in
Latin in 1518 and in German in the following year. Here, of course,
he had to deal with the question of the effects of the threatened
excommunication; in so doing he reached the false proposition,
censured amongst his 41 errors in the Bull Exsurge Domine of May 16,
1520: “Excommunications are merely outward penalties and do not rob a
man of the Church’s common spiritual prayers.”[1117] Not long after,
according to his wont, he went a step further. Among the condemned
Theses we find the paradoxical one: “Christians must be taught to love
excommunication rather than to fear it.”[1118]

At Dresden on July 25, 1518, when he was found fault with on account
of his Wittenberg Sermon on Excommunication (which was then probably
not yet known in its entirety), he seems to have shown scant respect
for the supreme authority in the Church. Emser, his then opponent,
writes expressly that Luther had declared he cared nothing for the
Pope’s Ban.[1119]

Some weeks later, on Sep. 1, Luther himself wrote to Staupitz, his
superior, that his conscience told him he was in the right and with
the truth on his side; “Christ liveth and reigneth yesterday, to-day
and for ever”; he also tells him, that, in his “Resolutions,” and in
his replies to Prierias he had spoken freely, and in a language that
would wound the Romanists, and that he was ready, nay anxious, to
give the brassy Romans an even ruder German answer in the service of
Christ, the Shepherd of the people. “Have no fear; I shall continue
untrammelled my study of the Word of God without any fear of the
citation [to Augsburg].”[1120]

During the negotiations in the presence of Cajetan at Augsburg we can
see even more clearly how Luther stood under the spell of his idea,
that the only Church was a spiritual one, and that, even should he
break away from ecclesiastical authority by rising against the Ban, he
would still remain in this Church.

It was after his return from Augsburg, during the stormy days when
he appealed “from the Pope to a General Christian Council,” i.e. in
the winter of 1518, that he discovered the true “Antichrist” who
reigned at Rome.[1121] This discovery deprived him of the last vestige
of respect for the authority of the Church and for her head.[1122]
His own inward state when he made this discovery was one of curious
turmoil. In his letter to Link, of Dec. 11, 1518, we hear him speaking
of his commotion of mind, of new projects just on the point of birth
which would show that, so far, he had hardly made a serious beginning
with the struggle; he had a “premonition” then that Antichrist
described by St. Paul (2 Thes. ii. 3 ff.) was seated in Rome where he
behaved even worse than the Turk.[1123] At the beginning of 1519 with
bated breath he announced to his friends the impending war on all the
Papal ordinances.[1124]

Thus, even previous to the Leipzig Disputation, he must have busied
himself with his new idea of the Church.

It was, however, only during the Disputation that, pressed hard by
Eck, he was induced to deny openly the Primacy and to proclaim his
belief in an invisible Church controlled by no authority.[1125] In the
Disputation on July 4 and the following days, he attacked the divine
institution of the Pope’s authority, asserted that even Œcumenical
Councils could err, and, on July 6, declared that the Council of
Constance had actually done so in rejecting the doctrine of Hus that
there is “a Holy Catholic Church which is the whole body of the elect.”

In thus cutting the idea of the Church to his own measure, Luther had
reached the Husite theory of the predestined as the sole members of the
Church. “Luther found in this his own view of the Church, for, according
to him, on the one hand there was no need of submission to Rome, and, on
the other, only the real Christians and the elect were actual members
of the Church.”[1126] In the “Resolutions,” which he published at the
end of August immediately after the Disputation, he adheres to the
statement that even Œcumenical Councils had erred and that, even on the
most important questions of the faith. Still, strange to say, he does not
think there is any reason for fearing that the Church had been forsaken
by the Spirit of Christ, for by the Church was to be understood neither
the Pope nor a Council.[1127] Here we have the basis of his new idea
of the Church.… It is combined with another idea towards which he had
long been drifting, viz. of seeing in Holy Scripture the sole source of
faith.[1128] In the “Resolutions” he says: “Faith does not spring from
any external authority but is aroused in the heart by the Holy Ghost,
though man is moved thereto by the Word and by example.”[1129] Wherever
Luther’s doctrine is believed, there is the Church.[1130]

The Papal Bull of 1520 condemned among the other selected theses of
Luther’s, his attack on the Primacy and the Councils, though saying
nothing of his doctrine of the Church, then still in process of growth.
“The Roman Pope, the successor of Peter,” so the 25th of these condemned
Theses runs, “is not the Vicar of Christ set over all the Churches
throughout the whole world and appointed by Christ Himself in the person
of St. Peter.” And the 29th declares: “It is open to us to set aside the
Councils, freely to question their actions and judge their decrees and to
profess with all confidence whatever appears to be the truth whether it
has been approved or reproved of any Council.”[1131]

The originator of principles so subversive to all ecclesiastical
order had perforce to reassure himself by claiming freedom in the
interpretation of Scripture.

Hence, for himself and all who chose to follow him, he set up in the
clearest and most decided terms the personal reading of the written Word
of God, above all tradition and all the pronouncements of the teaching
office of the Church; in this he went much further than he had done
hitherto in the questions he had raised concerning justification, grace,
indulgences, etc. It is easy to understand why it was so necessary for
him to claim for himself a direct enlightenment by the Spirit of God
in his reading of the Bible;[1132] in no other way could he vindicate
his daring in thus setting himself in opposition to a Church with a
history of 1500 years. At the same time he saw that this same gift of
illumination would have to be allowed to others, hence he declared that
all faithful and devout readers of the Bible enjoyed a certain kind of
inspiration, all according to him being directly guided by the Spirit
into the truth without any outward interference of Church doctrine,
though the first fruits of revelation belonged to him alone.[1133]

By thus exalting the personal element into a principle, he dealt a
mortal blow at the idea of a Church to whom was committed the true
interpretation of doctrine.

Before pointing out, how, in spite of the boundless liberty proclaimed by
Luther, he nevertheless was anxious to retain some sort of Church in the
stead of the ancient one, we may here put on record certain statements
of his on the illumination of the individual by God that have not as
yet been quoted; albeit difficult to understand this is of the very
essence of Lutheranism and quite indispensable to the new doctrine of an
invisible Church.[1134]

According to the “Resolutions” he published after the Leipzig
Disputation, every man is born into the faith through the Evangel
owing to the bestowal of certainty from on high without the
intervention of the Church’s authority or of any doctrine outwardly
binding upon him. Satan and all the heretics, so he declares, could
not have forged a more dangerous opinion than that in vogue among
Catholics concerning the relations between the Church’s authority
and the Bible Word; needless to say Luther makes out that, in their
opinion, the Pope was put above the Written Word and even above God
Himself.[1135] The genuine Catholic doctrine, viz. that the Church is
the guardian of the true sense of Holy Scripture and at the same time
a witness to the faithful of the authenticity and inspiration of the
Holy Books, is indeed poles asunder from the teaching foisted on her.
Moreover, it is in these very Resolutions to the Leipzig Disputation
that Luther disparages the Epistle of James, arguing that its style
falls far short of the apostolic dignity and could in no way compare
with that of Paul. Here the “freedom” which he exalts into a principle
already begins to undermine his new foundation, viz. the Bible itself.

Not long after this, in 1520, he lays claim in his “Von dem Bapstum”
and “_De captivitate Babylonica_,” to having been instructed solely
by the Holy Ghost and out of the Bible regarding the sense of Holy
Scripture.

In the “_De captivitate Babylonica_” he teaches: the faithful who
surrender themselves to the Spirit of God and allow Him to work upon
them through the “Word” (he calls them the Church), received from the
same Spirit an infallible sense and an inspiration by which to judge
of doctrine, a sense which is indeed not susceptible of proof yet
which creates absolute certainty. The same thing held good here as
in the case of the truth, of which Augustine had said, that the soul
was so laid hold of and carried away by it as to be enabled by its
means to judge of all things, though unable to prove the truth itself
which nevertheless it was forced to acknowledge with an infallible
certainty.[1136] Luther also appeals as a comparison to the evidence
of certain fundamental truths of mathematics or philosophy. This would
at first sight make it appear as though he excluded arbitrary freedom
in the interpretation of the Bible, since the mind must necessarily
bow to such logical and unquestionable truths as he instances; this
is, however, not the case, and we may recall what a wide field he
opened up for delusion in this matter of inspiration.[1137]

When he teaches that the perception of the truth of religion
penetrates into every Christian soul as the direct result of a
certainty operated by God Himself we must, in order to understand him,
keep in view the other points of his teaching, above all his opinion
of man’s utter incapacity to do what is good, the depravity of man’s
mental powers, his lack of free-will and absolute passivity under the
hand of God. Above all he needed some such theory in order to justify
his attack on the olden conception of the Church and to defend his own
alleged certainty.

The universal priesthood also serves him as a prop for his idea of the
Church. This priesthood, with the right to judge of doctrine, such
as he pictures in his “To the German Nobility” and “On the Freedom
of a Christian Man,” was a logical outcome of the above doctrine
of inspiration and of his own inclination to break away from the
olden Church. It gave to all complete independence in spiritual and
ecclesiastical matters.[1138]

The above writings were followed in 1521 by his “_Ad librum Ambrosii
Catharini Responsio_.” Here he treats in detail of the Church, and of
Christ the spiritual and invisible rock on which alone she is built
(without Peter and his successors); the Church’s nature is therefore
spiritual and invisible; he emphasises anew the right of all the
faithful individually to disregard all teaching authority and to give
ear to the voice of the Holy Ghost Who speaks inwardly through the
Evangel, and thus brings forth, nourishes, educates, strengthens and
preserves the true Church. In this work Luther is, however, already at
greater pains to bring down the Church to the region of the visible;
he points out that at least she possesses visible elements, Baptism,
the Supper and the Gospel. Nevertheless, direct inspiration of the
Holy Ghost still looms large in the “_Responsio_” as we may gather
from the elucubrations embellished with Bible texts in which he
declares that the Papal Antichrist had been foretold in the Word of
God and his appearance and workings even described in detail.[1139]

In “Von Menschen leren tzu meyden” (1522), which is still saturated
with the spirit of the Wartburg he had just left, he insists that:
“Each one must simply believe that it is God’s Word because he feels
in his heart that it is the truth, even should an angel from heaven
or all the world preach the contrary.”—His writing of 1523, “Das eyn
Christliche Versamlung odder Gemeyne Recht und Macht habe alle Lere
zu urteylen,” etc., was intended to promote unfettered freedom of
spirit, but, of course, only in the interests of the removal of the
Popish-minded clergy, for, naturally, there could be no question of
such freedom being used against Luther, or of anyone setting himself
up as judge of Luther’s new doctrine. Here, and even more strongly
in the “_De instituendis ministris Ecclesiæ_,” which he published in
the same year, he starts again from the standpoint of the universal
priesthood; this was inconsistent with the clerical order of the
Popish Church; by it every man was qualified to decide independently
on doctrine in accordance with Scripture; but whoever preached
openly in the Church of God only did so as representing the others
and at their request; hence no preacher was to be at the head of any
congregation unless the latter wanted him, and, taught by the unction
of the Holy Spirit, found his doctrine right. A Christian might
also, so he continues, whether amongst other Christians or amongst
those who had formerly been unbelievers, instruct his fellow-men
in the Gospel merely by virtue of his Christian calling; anyone, if
he detected the ordinary teacher in error, might stand up and teach
without any call, as the Apostle says (1 Cor. xiv. 30) “if anything be
revealed to another, let the first hold his peace.”[1140]

But how is a man to be so certain in his heart as to be able to come
forward in this way? “You can then be certain of the matter if you
are able to decide freely and surely and to say this is the pure
and simple truth, for it I will live or die, and whoever teaches
otherwise, whatsoever be his title and standing, is accursed.”[1141]

It would be a waste of words to point out that this was to deal a
death-blow at the olden conception of the Church.

Startling, nay, utterly stupefying, is the sharp contrast all this
presents to Luther’s later attitude already described above (pp. 241,
251, 262). There we have a rigid, coercive Church held fast in the ban
of the Wittenberg doctrine, whereas here, in the days of the early
development of Lutheranism, we find an exuberant wealth of individual
freedom which scoffs even at the possibility of any ecclesiastical order.

Only a dreamer and hot-head like Luther could have seen in such an
individualism, where each one is teacher and priest, anything else than
chaos.

Luther’s expectations in those early days were strange indeed and
quite incapable of realisation; not only were all delusions to be
excluded but everything, as he says of the enduring of opposition,
was to be done “decently and piously”! If he is really speaking in
earnest, then he shows himself a hermit utterly ignorant of human
nature. And yet even in the seclusion of the convent walls, the
greatest enthusiast should have seen that this was not the way to form
a congregation on earth of believers, or anything resembling a Church.

We can, nevertheless, easily understand, to cite Möhler in
confirmation of what has been said, “how the doctrine in question
could, nay, had to, arise in Luther’s mind: Since the authority of the
existing Church was against him he had perforce to seek for support
in the authority of God working directly in him.… He saw no other way
than to appeal to an intangible, inward authorisation.”[1142]—This he
then proceeded to work out into a system for the other believers.
“In the fashion of the true demagogue he flatters every Christian
and invests him with such perfection as any unprejudiced mind must
repudiate on the most cursory glance into his own heart.”[1143]

The truth is, the doctrine put forward by Luther against the Church,
i.e. that Holy Scripture is the sole judge, has no meaning except on
the assumption of a certainty through direct divine illumination.

Luther was quite right in declaring Holy Scripture to be the source of
the doctrine of salvation; but it was a very different thing to assert
that Holy Writ is the judge which determines what is the doctrine of
salvation contained therein. He only reached the latter assertion by
taking for granted the direct action of God in man for imparting a
knowledge of the true sense of Scripture. Hence in his statements on
Holy Scripture we frequently find one thing strangely confused with
the other, the outward Book with the inward knowledge of the same,
so that, as Möhler puts it, “the direct transmission of its contents
to the reader is assumed in a quite childish fashion.”[1144] Even
Köstlin has to admit this confusion, though he does so with reserve:
“In Luther,” he says, “we see in many passages an intermingling of the
pure Word and pure doctrine.”[1145]

_Luther’s Later Attitude Towards the Idea of the Church. Objections_

Henceforward there remained deeply rooted in Luther’s mind the
conviction that the individual was taught by God and that this Divine
enlightenment was always leading to the adoption of his own chief
articles of faith and to the promotion of the Lutheran Church.[1146]

There is no call to follow up this idea through all his various
writings. We may, however, call to mind a remarkable and warlike
statement with which, towards the end of his life, he sought to
justify his attacks on the Pope and the ancient Church, and that,
too, at a time when he must long since have been disappointed at the
results of the freedom of judging which he had once allowed but had
now already in many ways curtailed.

In his “Wider das Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” he quotes the words
of Christ which refer to prayer in common: “Where two or three are
gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.”
This leads him to conclude, strange to say, “that even two or three
gathered together in Christ’s name hold all the power of St. Peter
and all the Apostles.” And, at once, he proceeds in his old vein
to declare that two or three, nay, even a single one, who has been
enlightened by Christ, is as good a teacher as the whole Church,
and, indeed, in certain cases, even takes precedence of her. “Hence
it comes,” he says, “that, often, a man who believes in Christ has
withstood a whole crowd … as the prophets withstood the Kings of
Israel, the priests and the whole nation [to say nothing of Luther
himself who had withstood the whole Church]. In short, God will
not be bound as to numbers, greatness, height, power, or anything
personal to man, but will only be with those who love and keep His
Word even though they be no more than stable boys. What does He care
for high, great and mighty lords? He alone is the greatest, highest
and mightiest.”[1147] Thus he practically claims a Divine dignity
for an undertaking such as his, and paints his career afresh as that
of a prophet who had a right to exalt himself even over the topmost
hierarchy; only that he invests all the faithful, and even the “stable
boy,” with the like high calling.

But, in such a system, what place was there left for anything more than a
phantom Church? Obviously the Church had to withdraw into the region of
the invisible. For her again to become visible and assume the shape to be
considered below, seems almost a paradox.

In view of the elasticity and vagueness of Luther’s teaching on the
Church it is not surprising that his followers, to this very day, are
divided as to whether, in point of fact, Luther wanted a “Church” or not.

A well-known Lutheran theologian admits in plain language that Luther
left the problem of the Church unsolved; only after the Reformer’s
time did certain “important problems” arise in respect of Luther’s
tentative definition of the Church.[1148] Another theologian, writing
in a Protestant periodical, says that Luther left behind him no
“Evangelical Church.” “The Reformation,” he says, “spelt Christendom’s
deliverance from the Church.… His great anticlerical bias was never
repudiated by Luther.… He committed the care of the pure Evangel to
the hands of the civil authorities. It ought no longer to be disputed
that Luther and the Reformers were not the founders of the Evangelical
Church—and that their ideal Protestantism was one minus a Church.
It is only necessary to take the idea of the Church in its strict
sense—not as the congregation, or the people of God, nor yet as a body
of men holding the same opinions, nor as the kingdom of Christ—but as
an independent complexus of regulations ordering the religious life,
as a special institution to provide for the particular needs of the
religious commonwealth within traditional limits.” Hence “the fact
that, in our homeland, three hundred years after Luther’s time, we
find the Evangelical preacherdom firmly consolidated in a body not
unlike the State, and professing to be the official representative
of Protestantism is one of the most astounding paradoxes in all the
history of the Church.”[1149]

There is no need to go so far, nor is it really necessary to put
the words evangelical “Church” or “Churches” in inverted commas, as
Protestants sometimes do in order to mark the quite unusual meaning of
the word Church according to Luther’s view. It is obvious that logic
had no place in Luther’s ideas and aims in respect of the Church, and
his subjectivism imposed on him in this matter the utmost vagueness.

Frequently we find in Catholic works on dogma extracts from Luther’s
writings dating from 1519 and 1520, which, it is alleged, show his
positive conviction at that time that a Church—i.e. one in the olden
Catholic sense—was to be recognised. But this is a mistake. The documents
containing such utterances were of a diplomatic character, and we have no
right to build upon them. They do not in any way invalidate what has been
said above.

One of these is Luther’s “Unterricht auff etlich Artikell,” dating
from the end of Feb., 1519, i.e. from a time when he had already
discovered the Roman Antichrist;[1150] the other, his “_Oblatio sive
Protestatio_,” dating from the summer of 1520, is a tract unmistakably
intended to forestall the publication of the Roman Bull.[1151] In the
first work, composed at the instance of Miltitz, it is true he says in
praise of the Roman Church that, in her, “St. Peter and St. Paul, 46
Popes and many hundred thousand martyrs had shed their blood,” that
she was honoured by God above all others, and that, for the sake of
Christian charity and unity, it was not lawful to separate from her
for all her present blemishes; he will not, however, express himself
regarding the “authority and supremacy of the Roman Church,” “seeing
that this does not concern the salvation of souls”; Christ, on the
contrary, had founded His Church on charity, meekness and oneness,
and, for the sake of this oneness, the Papal commands ought to be
obeyed. By this he fancies that he has proved that he “does not wish
to detract from the Roman Church.”[1152]

What he says in the other writing referred to above is even less
acceptable, though here too he wishes to appear “as a submissive and
obedient son of the Holy Christian Churches.”[1153] The circumstance
that many shortsighted persons doubtless took him at his word at this
critical time of his excommunication must have served powerfully to
promote the apostasy.

As to the changes to which Luther’s mode of thought was liable, we
may perhaps be permitted to make a general observation before passing
from the consideration of the invisible Church to that of the Church
visible.

The charge brought against him of having formerly taught differently
on many points from what he did at a later date, Luther lightly swept
aside with the assurance that he had gone on gradually advancing
in the knowledge of the truth. His defenders seek to escape the
difficulty in a like way. His changeableness and inconstancy must
undoubtedly weigh heavily in the balance. We must not, however,
be unfair to him or argue that the fact of his having at first
defended elements of Catholic doctrine which he afterwards abandoned
constituted a grave self-contradiction.

Luther openly admits that it was only gradually that he came to attack
the Church so bitterly.

When King Henry VIII reproached him with the contradictions apparent
between his earlier and later teaching on the Papacy and the Church,
Luther boldly appealed in 1522 in his “_Contra Henricum regem Angliæ_”
to his having only gradually learnt the whole truth: “I did not
yet know that the Papacy was contrary to Scripture.… God had then
given me a cheerful spirit that suffered itself to be despised [by
his opponents].… By dint of so doing they forced me on, so that the
further I went the more lies I discovered … until it became plain
from Scripture, thanks to God’s Grace, that the Papacy, episcopacy,
foundations, cloisters, universities, together with all the monkery,
nunnery, Masses, services were nothing but damnable sects of the
devil.… Hence it came about that I had to write other books in
condemnation and retractation of my earlier ones.”[1154] He will also,
so he adds ironically, retract what he had previously said in his
“_De captivitate Babylonica_,” viz. that the Papacy was the prey of a
strong Nimrod, as this had scandalised the lying King of England, who
was himself the robber of his country. This, in his own style, he now
proposes to amend as follows: “I should have said: The Papacy is the
arch-devil’s most poisonous abomination hitherto seen on earth.”[1155]

If it was a difficult matter to give an account of Luther’s invisible
Church, owing to the changes which took place in his own views, even more
difficult is the task of tracing the further growth of his teaching. His
invisible Church becomes more and more clearly a visible Church; yet all
the while it protests, that, in its nature, it is invisible.

4. The Church becomes visible. Its organisation

What was Luther’s view of the Church’s character when the time came to
set up new congregations within the circle of the “Evangel”?

Theologically the question is answered in the authentic publicly accepted
explanations he gave of his doctrine on the Church. Of these the oldest
is comprised in the Schwabach Articles of 1529,[1156] where we read in
Article XII:

There is “no doubt that there is and ever will be on earth a holy
Christian Church until the end of the world, as Christ says in Matt,
xxviii. 20.… This Church is nothing else than the believers in Christ,
who hold, believe and teach the above-mentioned articles and provisions
[of the Schwabach Confession], and who, on this account, are persecuted
and tormented in the world. For where the Gospel is preached and the
sacraments rightly used, there is the holy Christian Church, bound by no
laws and outward pomp to place or time, persons or ceremonies.”—“Thus
did the Evangelical idea of the Church,” so we read in Köstlin-Kawerau,
“find expression once and for all in the fundamental confessions of
Protestantism, faith in Christ being identified with faith in the said
‘articles and provisions.’”[1157]

In the “Augsburg Confession” of 1530—“which Confession,” according
to Luther, “was to last till the end of the world and the Last
Judgment”[1158]—we read: “The Church is the mateship of the saints
(‘_congregatio sanctorum_’) in which the Evangel is rightly taught
and the sacraments rightly dispensed.”[1159] The “Apologia” to this
Confession contains the following: “The Church is not merely a
commonwealth of outward things and rites like other institutions,
but it is rather a society of hearts in faith and the Holy Ghost.
She has, however, outward signs by which she may be known, viz.
the pure doctrine of the Gospel and a dispensing of the sacraments
in accordance with Christ’s Gospel.”[1160] Of “Church government”
the Confession of Augsburg states: “Concerning the government of
the Church we hold that no one may teach publicly or dispense the
sacraments without being duly called”; this is further explained
in the “Apologia”: “The Church has the command of God to appoint
preachers.”[1161]

Regarding the same matter the Schmalkalden Articles of 1537-1538,
which also form a part of the “Symbolic Books,” have the following:
“The Churches must have power to call, choose and ordain the ministers
of the Church, and such power is in fact bestowed on the Church by God
… just as, in case of necessity, even a layman can absolve another and
become his pastor.… The words of Peter: ‘You are a kingly priesthood’
refer only to the true Church, which, since she alone has the
priesthood, must also have the power to choose and ordain ministers.
To this the general usage of the Churches also bears witness.”[1162]

When the above was penned, indeed, even when Melanchthon wrote the
“_Confessio Augustana_,” the new Church, though theoretically invisible,
had long since received an established outward form. Yet its invisibility
is emphasised in the Schwabach Articles which reject such outward laws as
are inconsistent with the Church’s character; the Confession and Apologia
also refer to the (ghostly) union of hearts in the faith, and to the
assembly of the (unknown) saints.

Nevertheless the visibility, so strongly insisted on in the Schmalkalden
Articles, was practically indispensable, and was also a logical result of
the whole work undertaken by Luther.

First of all it was called for by the very nature of this “ministry”
of those who were to preach and to dispense the sacraments in the name
of the congregation; according to Luther’s teaching, the dispensing of
the sacraments went hand in hand with preaching, the sacraments being
efficacious only through the faith of the recipient, and the dispenser’s
duty being confined to making the recipient more worthy of the inpouring
of grace through the word of faith which accompanies the visible sign of
the sacrament. The ministerial “office” was not conferred by a sacrament
as was the case in the priestly ordination of the olden Church, but,
as Luther teaches, “ordination, if understood aright, is no more than
being called or ‘ordered’ to the office of parson or preacher.” Among
the Papists “Baptism and Christ had been weakened and darkened” by the
ordinations. “We are born priests and as such we want to be known.” “By
Holy Baptism we have become the true priests of Christendom as St. Peter
says: ‘You are a royal priesthood.’”[1163] Ministers (i.e. servants) of
the Word was the proper title for those who performed all their functions
in the name of the common priesthood of the whole people.

As soon, however, as it became a question of appointing preachers a
visible Church at once appeared on the scene, though one without either
Pope or hierarchy.

It may be recalled that Luther’s plan was originally to leave it to
each congregation to appoint a preacher either from its own body or an
outsider, who was then to act in their name and with their authority.
There seemed no better way of securing control over the preacher’s
doctrine. As for the ecclesiastical penalties, Luther, even in his
“Deudsche Messe,” left their use to the congregation as a whole.[1164]
At a later date he still clung to the idea of the ecclesiastical
jurisdiction of the congregation. Even to absolve from sin belonged,
in his opinion,—and to this he adhered to the end,—to all believers,
and such absolution was as valid as had it been pronounced by God
Himself (always assuming that faith had already been awakened in the
penitent).[1165] On the authority of the congregation was to rest, not
only the lower ministry, but also the quasi-episcopate. The scheme he
sketched in 1523 in the Latin work he addressed to the Bohemians, “_De
instituendis ministris ecclesiæ_,” has already been described.[1166]

The many abuses which arose, and indeed were bound to arise, from the
independence of the congregations soon compelled him to cast about for a
more reliable framework. The phantom of a community of believers united
in spirit, of a “brotherhood” minus any social or constitutional cohesion
and devoid of any vigorous direction, proved incapable of realisation.

Help was to be looked for only from the State.

By clinging to its solid structure the religious innovations would
have a chance of avoiding the conventicle system and the danger of
its congregations falling asunder. The tendency to drift towards the
State was also promoted by the opposition of the fanatical Anabaptists,
for this sect was a menace to order in the congregations owing to its
excesses and also to the pertinacity with which, following out Luther’s
own teaching, it insisted on individualism and repudiated the “office”
of the ministry. Not only did Luther, after the rise of the Anabaptists,
emphasise the outward rather than the inward Word, but, for the same
reason, he also laid much greater stress than formerly on the “office”
and on the external representation of the Church’s members—invisibly
united by the faith—by duly called officials.

Thus, the Church, whose invisibility and spirituality Luther had been so
fond of emphasising, became, in course of time, more and more a visible
and concrete body, though remaining closely bound up with the State. Yet,
even in Luther’s earlier views on the Church, certain indications pointed
to the visible Church yet to come; indeed the ideas he retained from
Catholic days were to prove stronger than he then anticipated.

Of a statement contained in “_De servo arbitrio_” (1525), a book written
after the rise of the Anabaptist subjectivism, Möhler justly remarks:
“This passage views the clergy as the representatives of the Church which
is thus quite visible; professing the faith of the invisible Church and
expressing its mind, this Church has a definite doctrinal standpoint
which she advocates through her clergy, and, which, as the dictum of the
Saints, she regards as true and infallible. Hence the visible Church
appears as the expression and facsimile of the invisible Church.”[1167]

Already in his books against Alveld and Catharinus Luther was at pains
to insist that the Church which he taught was a real community living
on earth in the flesh, though not tied down to any definite place or
persons.[1168] Wavering and confusion, here as elsewhere, characterise
Luther’s teaching.

We can understand how his Catholic opponents, for instance Staphylus,
make much of the change from the visible to the invisible Church.
Staphylus dubs those who persisted in advocating her invisibility, the
“_Invisibiles_,” such being the followers of Flacius, Schwenckfeld and
Osiander, and also the Anabaptists.[1169]

It is a fact that Melanchthon, particularly in his later years, insists
on the Church as an institution and on her visible nature more than
Luther does. The centuriators defined the Church as “_cœtus visibilis_”
and, after Chemnitz’s day (†1586), the Church of the Lutheran theologians
is something quite visible, and is spoken of as an institution for the
preservation and promotion of pure doctrine and of the means of grace
which work by faith.[1170]

Nor can the Wittenberg view of the Church be taken otherwise when we
see how the theologians of that town in Luther’s own time proceeded in
appointing ministers and controlling and supervising their office. The
preachers and pastors, after their doctrine had been found consonant with
that of Wittenberg,[1171] were “entrusted with the ministry” though it
is not apparent whether the authorisation came from the congregations
who applied for them, or from the theological examiners, or from the
sovereign and his mixed consistory. The formulas used are by no means
clear, save on one point, viz. that they expressly claim for the
Wittenbergers the character of a true “Catholic Church,” or at least
their harmony with such a Church.

In the ordination-certificate of Heinrich Bock (above, p. 265), who
received a call as pastor and Superintendent to Reval, the quondam
city of the Teutonic Order in Esthland, and who had been “ordained”
on April 25, 1540, by Bugenhagen, the pastor of Wittenberg, we find
it stated: “His doctrine tallies with the consensus of the Catholic
Church which our Church also holds, and he is free from every kind
of fanaticism condemned by the Catholic Church of Christ.”[1172]
Hence they claimed to be one with the universal Church throughout the
world and not to form an isolated community apart; this, as we know,
was Melanchthon’s favourite view. The olden hierarchy was, however,
replaced by that of Wittenberg, as we read in the same certificate:
“We”—the signatories, Luther, Bugenhagen, Jonas and Melanchthon—“have
entrusted him with the ministry of the Church, that he may teach the
Gospel and dispense the sacraments instituted by Christ,” “_iuxta
vocationem_,” i.e. in accordance with the call of the authorities
at Reval who had summoned the ordinand to govern their Church (“_ad
gubernationem ecclesiæ suæ_”). The testimonial was the work of
Melanchthon.

Other testimonials of this kind are similarly worded.

The certificate of Johann Fischer who went from Wittenberg to
Rudolstadt in 1540 (above, p. 265) sets forth that “he had been called
to the ministry of the Gospel by the people there, who had also borne
witness to his good moral character”; they had asked that “his call
might be reinforced by public ordination”; this had been conferred on
him when it had been shown that he held “the pure, Catholic doctrine
of the Gospel which our Church also teaches and professes,” and that
he rejected all the fanatical opinions which the Catholic Church of
Christ rejects.[1173] The statement embodied in the testimonial,
giving the grounds on which the signatories, the pastor of Wittenberg
and other “ministers of the Gospel,” undertook such an ordination is
noteworthy: “We may not refuse to do our duty to the neighbouring
Churches for the Nicene Council made the godly rule that ordination
should be requested of the neighbouring Churches.” Of the objections
that theology and Canon Law might have raised those who drafted the
document seem to have no inkling.

In this case the Wittenbergers claim to be no more than a
“neighbouring Church”; elsewhere they are more ambitious.

The fact is, Wittenberg was anxious to stand at the head of the visible
Church.

It was at Wittenberg that Luther, as the leader of the young Church,
had first preached the truth of the Gospel urged thereto “by Divine
command”; on the strength of such a command he was compelled to defend
himself against the Elector’s lawyers who wanted to play havoc with “his
Church.”[1174]

“By divine authority we have begun to ameliorate the world.”[1175]

Foes at home twitted him with setting up an “office of the Word” by
which an end was made of all freedom; they urged, that, at Wittenberg,
people were trying to “breathe new life into despotism, to seat
themselves in the chair and to exercise compulsion just as the Pope
had done heretofore.”[1176] Luther proclaims loudly: “We, who preach
the Evangel, have full powers to ordain; the Pope and the bishops can
ordain no one.”[1177]—“You are a bishop,” said Luther once jokingly to
a Superintendent, “just as I am Pope.”[1178] Beneath the jest there lay
bitter earnest, for the authority of the “Wittenberg school” in Luther’s
estimation stood high indeed; whoever “despises it, so long as the Church
and school remain as they are, is a heretic and a bad man,” seeing that,
in this school, God has “revealed His Word.”[1179]—Nevertheless, the
Wittenberg theologians complained that this authority was not recognised,
that the Church was a “spectacle of woe,” without “oneness either in
doctrine or in worship”; “our princes and cities” ought to bring about
unity. Moreover things are bound to grow worse, seeing that “each one
wants to be his own Rabbi.”[1180] Outside Wittenberg, and even within
the city walls, and that even in Luther’s time, the prediction of Duke
George about the 72 sects of the Protestant Babel seemed about to be
fulfilled.[1181]

Yet Luther, in setting up the Wittenberg Primacy, retained his
former principles which were altogether at variance with unity and
subordination. “Who holds the public office of preacher,” so he declared
in 1531, is not “forbidden to judge of doctrine” (before this, as the
reader may remember, every “miller’s maid” had been free to do this); but
whoever has no such office may not do so, because he would be acting “of
his own doctrine and spirit.”[1182]

Where is your office? Such was his question in 1525 to his opponent
Carlstadt. The latter appealed to the call he had received from the
congregation of Orlamünde. But of this Luther even then refuses to
hear. He required from Carlstadt, in addition, the ratification of the
sovereign, viz. of the Saxon Elector.

Even in those days he was most anxious to see Church discipline
established and excommunication resorted to, even though this involved
making the Church something visible; the disruption and confusion
everywhere rampant cried aloud for regulations, laws and penalties.[1183]
“Such punishment and discipline through the Ban,” so he says, “is
utterly odious to the world and causes the faithful ministers much work
and danger; for vice has already grown into a habit; it is no longer
a sin; the ungodly have power, riches and position on their side. The
greater the rascal the better his luck.”[1184] Yet, according to him it
was impossible for the Church to make laws, otherwise we would again be
putting up “snares for consciences” as in Popery.[1185] Laws must be
made only by the sovereigns—whatever discipline was enforced against the
unruly was enforced by the secular authorities. “The most the parsons
did for discipline was in following out the Electoral instructions to
the Visitors and denouncing offenders to the secular officials and
judges.”[1186] Of the “blasphemers,” viz. those who were obstinate or
opposed the New Evangel, Luther wrote in 1529 to Thomas Löscher, parson
of Milau: “They must be forced to attend the preaching,” needless to say
by temporal penalties; in this way they will be taught the obedience they
owe as citizens and also their duty to the State, “whether they believe
in the Evangel or not.… If they wish to live among the people, then they
must learn the laws of the people, even though unwillingly.”[1187] Hence
here and in other instructions it is no longer a question of the Church
but only of the sovereigns; these, so he urged, were to be backed by the
preachers. He praised the Bohemian Brethren and the Swiss for having
better discipline in their Churches, he also admitted that the action of
the authorities would not of itself alone be sufficient to correct grave
moral disorders.[1188]

“Unless the Court gives its support to our regulations,” Melanchthon once
said, the result will be mere “platonic laws.”[1189]

References such as these to the State, which was now seen to be necessary
for the support of the Church when once it had become a visible
body,[1190] are to be met with repeatedly by anyone who follows the
history of Lutheranism in its beginnings, more particularly in the years
1525-1528. It was during this period that the union of the new Church
with the State, which has been described above, was accomplished. The
sovereign arrogated to himself those powers which gradually made him the
supreme head of the Church and permanent “emergency-bishop.”[1191] The
visibility of the Church, or rather Churches—as all claim to catholicity
was abandoned save in the credal formularies—rested on the enactments of
the rulers, who, not without Luther’s connivance, soon introduced the
compulsory element into religion. To make use of the invisible power of
the Gospel and to give advice to consciences as to moral conduct, was
indeed left to the ministers of the Word. But it was the State that had
to establish “the right form of worship and the right ecclesiastical
organisation.”[1192]

All heretical communities from the commencement of the Church had looked
to the State for help. But no heresiarch ever put himself so completely
in the hands of the State in all outward matters as Luther and his
fellows did where princes of their own party were concerned. “The common
Christian Church” was, according to him, to retain for herself only the
true faith and the sacraments which worked by faith.

When, in the State Church thus called into being, the authorities
proceeded too vigorously against the preachers and treated Luther
without due consideration, the latter had himself a taste of the state
of servitude into which he had brought the Church. Döllinger says truly
that this restriction must have been “doubly irksome to a man who had
known the old episcopal, ecclesiastical rule and who now had to admit to
himself that it was he who had brought about the destruction of a system
which, in spite of all its defects, had dealt with Church matters in an
ecclesiastical spirit, and that it was he who had paved the way for the
new and quite unecclesiastical order of things.”[1193]

Not seldom do we hear Luther reproaching himself bitterly for the changes.

Among the thoughts that chiefly disturbed his conscience was, as he
himself repeatedly admits, that of having rent asunder the great
Church. How can you justify your revolt against the one great Church
of antiquity, the heir to the promises, so the inner voices said to
him as he himself relates: “The words ‘_sancta ecclesia_’ affright a
man. They rise up and say: ‘Preach and act as you like and can, the
‘_ecclesia christiana_’ is still here. Here is the bark of Peter, it
may be tossed about on the waves, but perish it will not!…’ What was I
to do? And how was I to comfort myself?… And yet I had to do it [i.e.
preach against this Church] as here [John viii. 28] the Lord Christ also
does and preaches against those who in name are God’s Kingdom and God’s
priesthood.”[1194]

Elsewhere he admits: “What am I doing in preaching against such
[representatives of the olden Church], like a pupil against his masters?
Thoughts such as these storm in upon me: Now I see that I am in the
wrong; oh, that I had never begun, never preached a single word! For
who is allowed to set himself up against the Church?… It is hard to
persist and to preach against such a Ban.”[1195]—And yet, in his defiant
spirit, he does persist: “This hits one smartly in the face, as has
often happened to me … yet the One Man, my Beloved Lord and Healer Jesus
Christ, is more to me than all the holiest people on earth.” Since he
thinks it is His Evangel he is defending, he is able, though only at
great costs, “to rise above the cry of ‘Church, Church,’” though he has
to admit that, “this troubles me greatly,” and “it is truly a hard thing
… to leave the Church herself and not to believe or trust her doctrine
any more.”[1196]

It was no real parallel when Luther, in order to justify the State
Church, appealed to the conditions in the Middle Ages where the rulers
had a share in Church matters,[1197] for if then the princes had
intervened in Church matters their action, at least in principle, was
always subordinate to the ecclesiastical authority which kept the power
in its own hands, and concerned moreover only those outward things in
which the Church was thankful for their assistance: The two co-ordinate
powers, the secular and the spiritual, helped one another mutually—such
at least was the ideal of world-government in those days,—acting in
Christian agreement in the service of God and for the general welfare of
mankind. Now, however, that the olden spiritual authority had been either
completely paralysed or reduced to the shadow of its former self, Luther
undertook to replace it by the State, and thus the Church ceased to be
any longer a co-ordinate power.

Though the Wittenberg theologians insisted that to them belonged the
care of souls and this alone, still the limits between this domain and
that of the State became everywhere confused when once the new system
had begun to work. Owing to the friction this caused, Luther, in the
course of time, came to emphasise merely the duty of the authorities to
arrange by law for the establishment of “schools and pulpits,” and to
“allow us divergency in preaching or morals.”[1198] Otherwise he left
those in power, the high-handed nobles and officials, to do as they
pleased, or, else, he lashed them ineffectually with violent and abusive
language. In 1586 he declared, speaking of the marriage questions:
“The peasants and the rude people who seek nothing but the freedom of
the flesh, and likewise the lawyers who are always bent on thwarting
our decisions, have wearied me so greatly that I have thrown aside the
marriage cases and written to some that they may do as they please in
the name of all the devils; let the dead bury their dead.”[1199] It
was chiefly in the matter of these matrimonial cases that he came into
conflict with the Court lawyers, e.g. as to the validity of the secret
marriage contracts. It was in this connection that he declared that, “in
his Church,” which was God’s own institution, he would retain in his
own hands the decision on such matters by virtue of his ecclesiastical
office. In other strong remonstrances wrung from him by the arbitrary
interference of the State officials and the nobles in Church matters,
he sometimes spoke so strongly of the inalienable rights of the Church
that one might well think that he regarded the Church as essentially an
independent institution with an organisation and spiritual authority of
its own.[1200] More usually, however, he simply sighs. When the Court
of Dresden interfered with his plans for the improvement of Church
discipline he wrote resignedly: “Satan is still Satan. Under the Pope he
pushed the Church into the world’s sphere and now, in our day, he seeks
to bring the State system into the Church.”[1201]

* * * * *

Without reverting to the subject of the State and Established Church
already dealt with (vol. v., 568 ff.) we may refer to the close
connection between Luther’s theology on the Church and the development
which was its outcome. His theology, from the outset, had aimed at
undermining the authority of the Church, while at the same time enlarging
the sphere of the secular power.

As early as 1520 in his work addressed to the German nobility he had
praised the secular lords as “priests like us, equal in all things”;
“they were to give free scope to the office and work which they have
from God, wherever it is needed or useful.” Of the clergy, without
considering their authority in ecclesiastical matters, he writes:
“The priests, bishops or popes must deal with the Word of God and the
sacraments, this is their work and office.”[1202]

“The direction of the outward business of the Church, i.e. what we
now term Church government,” so Sehling, the Protestant Professor
of Canon Law, says, “Luther in his writing to the German nobility,
and ever after, attributes directly to the worldly authorities.… Nor,
above all, does he claim for the Church any power of legislating. The
Reformed Canon Law, so far as it was reorganised legislatively, was
based entirely on the code of the State.”[1203]

Luther, in fact, recognised no other authority throughout the whole of
the social order than that of the State; nowhere excepting amongst the
secular authorities was there, according to him, any real power; there
is on earth only one power, viz. the secular. “Worldly superiors, by
virtue of their calling, maintain order and rule according to law and
equity; as for the Church she has, by God’s ordinance, her common
ministry of Word and Sacrament.”[1204] “The power of the Churches,”
says the Schwabach Visitation Convention of 1528, “only extends to the
choosing of ministers and the enforcing of the Christian Ban”; besides
this they may also provide for the care of the poor; “all other power
belongs either to Christ in heaven or to the secular authorities on
earth.”[1205]

Nor could he well recognise any apostolic teaching authority in the
“higher orders of the Church,” seeing that a “little maid of seven
years” on the side of the New Faith “knows more than the Apostles,
Evangelists and Prophets” on the other side; the latter are but the
“devil’s apostles, evangelists and prophets.”[1206]

How he casts aside all the authority of the Church is perhaps shown
most plainly in the short Theses of 1530 in his writing “Ettlich
Artickelstück, so M. L. erhalten wil wider die gantze Satans Schüle
uñ alle Pforten der Hellen”: “The Christian Church has no power to
issue the least order concerning good works, never has done so and
never will.” “The parson or bishop [i.e. the Evangelical ministers]
has not the right to assert his authority everywhere for he is not
the Christian Church. Such parson or bishop may exhort his Church
to sanction certain fasts, prayers, holidays, etc., on account of
the present needs, to be observed for a time and then be allowed to
drop.”[1207]—But what the Evangelical ministers cannot do, that the
secular authorities may do, for, in another passage, Luther points out
expressly the binding character of the rules which the authorities
might draw up, for instance regarding fasts; should the sovereign
order fast-days, everyone must obey. In the same way if the German
Prince-Bishops gave such an order it was to be obeyed, but only
because they were Princes, not because they were bishops.[1208] During
the Diet of Augsburg he refused to admit that, in future, there
should be bishops having at the same time princely powers. On the
other hand, however, he himself made the princes to all intents and
purposes bishops.

The contradiction in which he here involves himself has been brought
out very strongly by a recent historian and theologian who as a rule
is on Luther’s side: “To our mind there is a glaring contradiction
between Luther’s theses on the spirituality of faith and the rights of
the Christian authorities. Luther never noticed this contradiction,
and, all his life, stood for both simultaneously. … From the religious
standpoint he advocates the principle of unlimited freedom as inherent
in the nature of faith; in the secular sphere, i.e. in the domain of
the State, he is unwilling to overthrow the principle shared by all
[?] in his day, viz. that the authorities have a right to assist in
deciding on public worship and doctrine; in the rightful domain of
the worldly authorities his controversies have no right to intervene.
Hence the contradiction.”[1209] “Luther, who, where the peasants are
concerned, plays the part of Evangelist, refuses to tamper anywhere
with the existing [?] laws of the State where it is a question of
their lords.”[1210]

Here Luther’s fundamental idea of the separation between Church and
world also comes into play.

The Church of his theology must necessarily be absorbed by the State,
because, being a stranger to the world, it was not conversant with the
conditions and, even with the best will in the world, was unable to
hold its own against the visible powers. The spiritual rule, according
to him, was to be as widely sundered from the secular “as the heavens
are from the earth.”[1211] Thus the Church fled into a spirit realm
and left the world to the tender mercies of the secular power. She
thus became herself the cause of her “alienation and isolation from
real life.”[1212] It naturally, indeed necessarily, followed that
the sovereign set up government departments, which called themselves
spiritual, but which in reality were secular and derived all their
jurisdiction from him alone. Such were the consistories.

The relations between State and Church in Lutheranism may be regarded
as an indirect justification of the Catholic doctrine of the Church’s
nature. According to the Catholic view Christ founded the sublime
structure of the Church as a free spiritual society. He willed that the
saving grace he had won by His Death should be applied to the souls of
men by means of a visible and independent institution, which, inspired by
Him with His own ideal and holy aims and equipped with her own peculiar
rights, should work for the salvation of mankind until the end of the
world. Hence, the advocates of the olden Church not only set the idea of
the Church in the foreground of the struggle, but they also explored,
enlarged on and illumined this idea with the help of Holy Scripture and
the teaching of the Fathers. Such was the work of men like Eck, Cochlæus,
Johann Fabri, Bishop of Vienna, and Catharinus, and, in the same century,
of Melchior Canus, Peter Canisius, Bellarmine and Stapleton. They indeed
allowed the inward side of the Church—its soul as it has been called—to
come into its rights, but, at the same time, they maintained with equal
firmness its thoroughly visible character, above all they insisted on the
hierarchy with the successor of St. Peter at its head as the holder of
the threefold spiritual power—which Luther denied—of shepherd, teacher
and priest. On this point there could be no yielding.

To those adherents of Luther’s who fancied they could reach union without
the Church’s help and without an entire acceptance of the Catholic
doctrine, Eck addressed the following: “There is no middle course and
words are of no avail; whoever wishes to make himself one in faith with
the Catholic Church must submit to the Pope and the Councils and believe
what the Roman Church teaches; all else is wind and vapour, though one
should go on disputing for a hundred years.”[1213]

What the above Catholic polemics said may be summed up as follows:—

Because the Church, according to Christ’s plan, was to be an
independent and living institution, His future “kingdom” and “heavenly
vineyard,” it replaced the Jewish synagogue by an even better
institution. This Church was to be indestructible and the gates of
hell were not to prevail against her (Matt. xvi. 18).

As a real institution the Church was marked out by the gifts bestowed
on it at the outset by the Divine Founder; out of the plenitude of
the power He possessed “in heaven and on earth” He created in her a
real, and no mere phantom office, comprising ghostly superiors, viz.
the “_ministerium ecclesiasticum_”; hence a twofold society arose
consisting of those whose duty it is to guide and those who are
guided. The latter receive from the former, i.e. from the hierarchy
of priests, bishops and Pope, viz. the successor of Peter, the
doctrine handed down by Christ, and preserved intact and infallible,
together with Holy Scripture and its true reading. Those who have the
oversight over the rest admit the faithful into the sacred company by
means of visible rites, and, thanks to the obedience they receive as
God’s representatives, there results “a body” of faithful united with
Christ, the One True Head.

It was to this hierarchy that, according to the Catholic theologians,
the solemn words of Christ were spoken: “He that heareth you heareth
Me, and he that despiseth you despiseth Me” (Luke x. 16). “Go ye and
teach all nations baptising them in the name of the Father and of the
Son and of the Holy Ghost … and lo I am with you all days even to the
consummation of the world” (Matt. xxviii. 19 f.). The “Keys of the
Kingdom of Heaven” are entrusted to them and they are told: “Amen I
say unto you, whatsoever you shall bind on earth, shall be bound also
in heaven; and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth, shall be loosed
also in heaven” (Matt. xviii. 18). They may “command” as Paul did, who
journeyed from place to place and “commanded them to keep the precepts
of the apostles and the ancients” (Acts xv. 41). Peter, moreover, and
his successors, received the right and duty to feed “the sheep” as
well as the “lambs” (John xxi. 16), besides the especial custody of
the keys (Matt. xvi. 19); on him and on his God-given constancy the
Church of Christ was built (Matt. xvi. 18).

The Holy Ghost “placed” the bishops “to rule the Church of God” (Acts
xx. 28). Whoever “will not hear the Church” is shut out from salvation
and is to be regarded “as the heathen and publican” (Matt. xviii. 17).

Nowhere in these passages, so it was pointed out, is there ever a word
about the secular power having any hand in the growth of the great
society of God upon earth. Nor could Christ, in view of the object to
which He had founded His Church, without proving untrue to Himself,
have left behind Him a helpless and unfinished work, dependent for its
very life on the discretion of the secular authorities and taking its
laws from the State. The Church’s four marks (above, p. 295) point to
something higher.

Even did Luther wish to disregard the words of institution, he should
at least, so it was urged, not shut his eyes to history; now, from
the earliest historical times, the Church had always existed under
the form of a society, i.e. divided into the two categories of the
teachers and the taught. Even according to Protestant writers this
form may be traced back at least as far as the 2nd century, and, to
an unprejudiced eye, its traces will be discernible even earlier in
the authentic sources, i.e. the Bible and history. None, however,
was better fitted to bear witness to the earliest organisation of
the Church than the Church herself, for she could do so out of the
unbroken and untarnished consciousness of her existence; her testimony
confirms her Divine appointment to be an independent society and a
hierarchically governed institution.

Lutheranism, however, took scant notice of these Biblical and historical
proofs.[1214] Its founder, at the end of his life, left it as his
legacy a church, or rather churches, of a different structure. In the
evening of his days, in spite of the hopeless and imperilled state of
his congregations, he refused to admit any gleam of light that might
have brought him back to the unwavering authority of the ancient Church
which once, in the days of his crisis, he had extolled. By heavenly
signs and wonders, so he had pointed out in his Commentary on Romans
(1516), this Church was introduced into the world; she is the mother of
those who teach; to her decision every doctrine must bow if it is not
to become a heresy, “robbed of the witness of God and of that divinely
authenticated authority” which “down to the present day supports the
Roman Church.”[1215]

Since he had descended into the arena of controversy his attitude
towards the dogma of the Church had become not so much a matter of
doctrine (for the essential question was, as Köstlin aptly remarks, “very
insufficiently grasped and explained by him”[1216]) as one of policy.

5. Luther’s Tactics in Questions concerning the Church

Both for Luther’s views on doctrine and for his psychology his tactics
in his controversy about the nature of the Church offer matter for
consideration.

Controversy, as we know, tended to accentuate his peculiarities. His
talents, his gift of swift perception, his skill for vivid description,
his art of exploiting every advantage to the delight of the masses
were all of value to him. What he wrote when not under the stress of
controversy lacked these advantages, advantages, moreover, which, for the
most part, were merely superficial, and sometimes, when he was in the
wrong, display a very unpleasing side.

_The Erfurt Preachers in a Tight Place_

In 1536 Luther took a hand in a controversy which had arisen at Erfurt
as to whether the “true Church was there,” and whether his preachers,
who represented the Church and were being persecuted by some of the Town
Council, should leave the town.[1217]

As early as 1527 he had had occasion to complain of the Erfurt
Councillors; they had not the courage “to go to the root of the
matter”; they tolerated the “dissensions” in the town arising from
the divergent preaching of the “Evangelicals” and the “Papists,”
instead of “making all the preachers dispute together and silencing
those who could not make good their cause.”[1218] Since the Convention
of Hamelburg in 1530[1219] both forms of worship had been tolerated
in the town. To the great vexation of Johann Lang and the other
preachers the quick-witted Franciscan, Conrad Kling, an Erfurt Doctor
of Theology (above, vol. v., p. 341), delivered in the Spitalkirche
sermons which were so well attended that the audience overflowed
even into the churchyard. Catholic citizens of standing in the town
and possessed of influence over the Council, spread the report that
the Lutheran preachers were intruders who had no legitimate mission
or call, and had not even been validly appointed by the Council. In
consequence of this, Luther, with Melanchthon and Jonas, addressed
a circular letter in 1533 to his old friend Lang and the latter’s
colleagues, in which he encourages them to stand firm and not to quit
the town; he points out that their call, in spite of all that was
alleged, had been “with the knowledge of the magistracy,” and not the
result of “intrigue.”[1220] It is plain from this letter that the
tables had to some extent been turned on Lang and his followers who
had once behaved in so high-handed a manner at Erfurt,[1221] and that
they were now tasting “want and misery” as well as contempt. In vain
did the preachers attempt to shake off the authority of the Council by
claiming to hold their commission from God.

Some while after, owing to the further efforts of Kling and his
friends, the situation of the Lutherans became even worse; it was then
that Frederick Myconius, Superintendent at Gotha, took their side and
persuaded Luther to write the above memorandum of Aug. 22(?), 1536, on
the True Church of Christ at Erfurt. This was signed by Melanchthon,
Bugenhagen, Jonas and Myconius, and may have been the latter’s
work. The document is highly characteristic of Luther’s tactics in
the shifty character of the proofs adduced to prove the call of
the Erfurt pastors. It did not succeed in inducing the Council to
grant the preachers independence or to abrogate the restrictions of
which they complained, although, as Enders remarks, “it exalted the
spiritual power as supreme over the secular.”[1222]

There can be no doubt, so Luther argues, that, among his followers in
the town of Erfurt, there was indeed the true “Holy Catholic Church,
the Bride of Christ,” for they possessed the true Word and the true
Sacraments. God had indeed “sent down on the people of Erfurt the Holy
Ghost, Who worked in some of them a knowledge of tongues, discernment
of spirits,” etc. (1 Cor. xii. 10), in the same way He had given them
Evangelists, teachers, interpreters and everything necessary for the
upbringing of His Body (Eph. iv. 11 f.). He urges that the ministers
of the Word were rightly appointed, though here he does not appeal
as much as usual, to the supposed validity of the call by the Town
Council, as the whole trouble had its source in the town magistracy.
The appointment of the preachers, so he now says, was the duty of the
Church rather than of the magistrates; the Town Council had given them
the call only in its capacity as a “member of the Church,” for which
reason their dismissal or persecution was quite unjustifiable. He
also brings forward other personal, mystic grounds for the validity
of their call: they were “very learned men and full of all grace”;
the appointment, which they had received not only from the “people
and the Church, but also from the supreme authority,” had taken place
under the breath of the Spirit (“_impetu quodam spiritus_”) Who had
sent them as reapers into the harvest; they are recognised by all
the Churches abroad, even the most important, and no less do their
sheep hear their voice. Hence, if some of the magistrates now refuse
to recognise them, they must simply appeal to their calling “by the
Holy Ghost and the Church”; the efficient cause here is, and remains,
Christ, Who gives the Church her authority. Hence at all costs they
must stick to their post.

The whole of the extremely involved explanation points to the reaction
now taking place in his mind owing to his bitter experiences with the
authorities in the question of Church government.

In this frame of mind he often makes the call depend solely on the
Church, nay, on Christ Himself. If the Courts are to rule as they
please, so he wrote in the midst of one of these conflicts with the
authorities, the last state of things will be worse than the first.
They ought to leave the Churches to the care of those to whom they
have been committed and who will have to render an account to God.
Hence Luther urges that the two callings be kept separate.[1223]

What is also noteworthy in the memorandum for the people of Erfurt
is that, in order to defend the legal standing of the preachers,
he insists on the fact of their having been recognised by their
congregation, who are willing to listen to them as their shepherds.
Here we have the revival of an old idea of his, viz. that the
soul-herd was really appointed by the people and in their name.
In his later years he tended to revert to this view, though, in
reality, the people never had a say in the matter. After having, in
1542, consecrated Amsdorf as “Bishop” of Naumburg, in the ensuing
controversies he referred to the will of the “Church,” i.e. of the
Naumburg Lutherans. “All depends,” so he wrote, “whether the Church
and the Bishop are at one, and whether the Church will listen to the
Bishop and the Bishop will teach the Church. This is exemplified
here.”[1224]

_Controversies with the Catholics on the Question of the Church_

In what Luther wrote against the Catholics we occasionally meet some fine
sayings on the unfettered authority of the Church in its relations to the
secular rulers,[1225] so greatly was his versatile mind governed by the
spirit of opportunism.

It was from motives of expediency that, in 1529, in his “Vom
Kriege widder die Türcken” he makes out Emperors and kings to be
no protectors of the Church; these worldly powers are “as a rule
the worst foes of Christendom and the faith.” “The Emperor’s sword
has nothing to do with the faith, but only with bodily and worldly
affairs.”[1226] It must be remembered that he wrote this just before
the dreaded Diet of Augsburg.—Again, in 1545, in the Theses against
the “Theologists of Louvain” who had requested the State to protect
the Catholic faith as heretofore, Luther says: “It is not the duty of
Kings and Princes to confirm right doctrine; they have themselves to
bow to it and obey it as the Word of God and God Himself.”[1227]—If
the “Emperor’s sword” and the “Kings and Princes” had been on his
side, then his language would have been quite different. As it was,
however, whenever he thought it might prove useful, he was not
unwilling to come back even later to the standpoint of his writing
“Von welltlicher Uberkeytt.”[1228]

When the Catholics, for instance at the Diet of Augsburg, reproached
his party with having completely secularised the Church and with
prohibiting Catholic worship with the help of the Princes who favoured
him, his replies were eminently characteristic both of his temper and
his mode of controversy.

He knew very well, so he wrote in 1530, “that the Prince’s office
and the preacher’s are not one and the same, and that the Prince as
such ought not to do this [i.e. prohibit the Mass].” But in this the
Prince was acting, not as a Prince, but as a Christian. It is also
“a different thing whether a Prince ought to preach or whether he
ought to consent to the preaching. It is not the Prince, but rather
Scripture, that prohibits ‘winkle-masses’”; if a Prince chose to take
the side of Scripture that was his own business.[1229]

Another answer of Luther’s was to the effect that the abominations of
Catholic worship which were being abolished by the secular authorities
were, after all, outward things, and that the power of the sovereign
without a doubt stretched over “_res externæ_.”[1230]

Of these attempts at justification and of his doctrine of the Church
in general, Köstlin’s observations hold good: “We cannot escape the
fact that, here, there is much vacillation and that Luther stands
in danger of contradicting himself.” “We must admit that he had not
studied deeply enough the questions arising out of the relations of
the authorities to matters ecclesiastical.”[1231] “The decision [of
the sovereigns] as to what constituted right doctrine was final as
regards the substance of the preaching in their lands.” “A nobleman
who had received orders from his sovereign, the Duke of Saxony, to
expel the Evangelical preachers, was told by Luther—though what
he said was undeniably at variance with other utterances—that the
sovereign had no right to do this because God’s command obliged him to
rule only in secular and not in spiritual concerns.” “In fact the only
answer he could give to the Popish persecutors when they alleged they
were forced by _their_ office and conscience to act as they did was:
‘What is that to me?’ for it was clear enough that they were using
their authority wantonly.”[1232]

But how are we to explain his apparent readiness at the time of the
Diet of Augsburg in 1530 to recognise the olden Church, and the power
of the bishops, and even himself to submit to them if only they
would allow him and his followers freedom to preach the Evangel? The
statements to this effect in his “Vermanug” of this year have been
widely misunderstood through being taken apart from their setting. He
does not for a moment imagine, as he has been falsely credited with
doing, that it was not “his vocation to found a new Church separate
from Catholicism”; neither has he any desire to remain united with his
foes “in one communion under the Catholic bishops.”

Luther, as he here says, is only willing, “for the sake of peace, to
allow the bishops to be princes and lords,” and this only on condition
that “they help to administer the Evangel”—i.e. take his part; in
that case they “would be free to appoint clerics to the parishes
and pulpits.” His offer is, “that we and the preachers should teach
the Evangel in your stead,” and “that you should back us by means
of your episcopal powers; only your personal mode of life and your
princely state would we leave to your conscience and to the judgment
of God.”[1233] In the meantime, on account of the Catholic faith
to which they clung, he calls them “foes of God,” speaks of their
“anti-Christian bishopry,” and, because of the infringements of the
law of celibacy, scourges them as the “greatest whoremongers and
panders upon earth.”[1234]

In his controversies with the Catholics he often enough found himself
faced by the objection, that the true Church could not be with him,
because on his side all the fruits of holiness were wanting; the Church
being essentially holy should needs be able to point to her good
influence on morals.

Thus, for instance, a Dominican adversary had written: According to
Luther the Gospel had been under the bench for the last four hundred
years; but, now, surely enough, “it is under the bench even more than
heretofore, for the Gospel and the whole of Scripture have never been
so despised as at present owing to Luther’s teaching, who excludes all
love of God and man, all concord between lords and serfs, priests and
laity, men and women, rejects all good works and discipline, obscures
the truth and replaces it by nothing but lies and introduces hatred
and envy, unchastity, blasphemy and disobedience.”[1235]

In his replies to such arguments against the truth of his Church
Luther was loath to attempt the difficult task of proving the
existence of holiness in the domain of the Evangel. On the contrary,
with surprising candour, he usually meets his opponents half-way as
regards the facts. Thus, in his “Wider Hans Worst,” in 1541, he admits
that things are just as bad as they had been in Jerusalem in the days
of the prophets, “with us too there is flesh and blood, nay, the
devil among the sons of Job. The peasants are savage, the burghers
avaricious and the nobles grasping. We shout and storm our best,
helped by the Word of God, and resist as far as we can.… Willingly we
confess and frankly that we are not as holy as we should be.”[1236]

Such admissions are followed by astonishing attempts to evade the
force of the objection and by coarse attacks on the immorality of the
Papacy which he exaggerates beyond all measure.

The few, he declares, who are good and virtuous suffice to prove the
Church’s holiness. “Some do more than their part; that they are few
in number does not matter. God can help a whole nation for the sake
of one man as he did by Naaman, the Syrian (4 Kings v.). In short,
one’s life cannot be made a subject of debate.”—On another occasion
he replies shrewdly that the mark of holiness was not nearly so
safe as other marks, for distinguishing the true Church; for pious
works were also practised at times by the heathen.… As regards its
importance as a mark, holiness must be subordinated to the true
preaching of the Word and to pure doctrine, which in the end will
always bring amendment of life; whereas corrupt doctrine poisoned the
whole mass, a scandalous life was damaging chiefly to the man who
lived it; but corruption of doctrine had penetrated Popery through and
through.[1237] “We do not laugh when wickedness is committed amongst
us as they [the Papists] do in their Churches; as Solomon says (Prov.
ii. 14): ‘Who are glad when they have done evil and rejoice in most
wicked things,’ and also seek to defend them by fire and sword.”[1238]

We have here an instance of the tactics by which he turns on his
adversaries and abuses them. In his anxiety to turn the reproach of
his foes against themselves he selects by preference the celibacy
of the clergy and the religious vows; nor does he attack merely the
blemishes which the Church herself bewailed and countered, but the
very institution itself.

In his “Von den Conciliis und Kirchen” he exclaims: “The Pope condemns
the married life of the bishops and priests, this is plain enough
now”; “if a man has been married twice he is declared by the Papists
incapable of being promoted to the higher Orders.[1239] But if he has
soiled himself by abominable behaviour he is nevertheless tolerated in
these offices.”[1240] “Why,” he asks, most unjustly misrepresenting
the Catholic view of the sacrament of marriage, “why do they look upon
it as the lowest of the sacraments, nay, as an impure thing and a sin
in which it is impossible to serve God?”[1241]

To what monstrous and repulsive images he can have recourse when
painting the “whore Church” of the Papacy, the following from “Wider
Hans Worst” will serve to show: You are, so he there writes in 1541 of
the Catholics, “the runaway, apostate, strumpet-Church as the prophets
term it”; “you whoremongers preach in your own brothels and devil’s
Churches”; it is with you as though the bride of a loving bridegroom
“were to allow every man to abuse her at his will. This whore—once a
pure virgin and beloved bride—is now an apostate, vagrant whore, a
house-whore,” etc. “You become the diligent pupils and whorelings of
the Lenæ, the arch-whores, as the comedies say, till you old whores
bear in your turn young whores, and so increase and multiply the
Pope’s Church, which is the devil’s own, and make many of Christ’s
chaste virgins who were born by baptism, arch-whores like yourselves.
This, I take it, is to talk plain German, understandable to you and
everybody else.”[1242]

Without following him through all he says we shall merely draw the
reader’s attention to a proverb and a picture Luther here uses. The
proverb runs: “The sow has been washed in the pond and now wallows
again in the filth. Such are you, and such was I once.”[1243] In
the picture “the Pope’s Church,” i.e. hell, is represented as a
“great dragon’s head” with gaping jaws, as it is depicted in the old
paintings of the Last Judgment; “there, in the midst of the flames,
are the Pope, cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, emperors, kings,
princes and men and women of all sorts (but no children). Verily I
know not how one could better paint and describe the Church of the
Pope,”[1244] etc.

After such rude abuse he comes back in the same writing to his usual
apology. There was, he says, no object in alluding to the moral evils
in the Lutheran Churches because of the Church being of its very
nature invisible.[1245] Everything depends on the doctrine “which
must be pure and undefiled, i.e. the one, dear, saving, holy Word of
God without anything thrown in. But the life that ought to be ruled,
cleansed and hallowed daily by such teaching is not yet altogether
pure and holy because our carrion of flesh and blood still lives.”
Yet “for the sake of the Word whereby he is healed and cleansed all
this is overlooked, pardoned and forgiven him, and he must be termed
clean.”[1246]

The Papists have a beam in their own eye, i.e. their false doctrine,
but they see the mote in the eye of others “as regards the
life.”[1247] If it is a question with whom the true Church is to be
found he assures us: “We who teach God’s Word with such certainty are
indeed weak, and, by reason of our great humility, so foolish that we
do not like to boast of being God’s Churches, witnesses, ministers
and preachers or that God speaks through us, though this we certainly
are because without a doubt we have His Word and teach it”; it is
only the Papists “who venture boldly to proclaim out of their great
holiness: Here is God and we are God’s Church.”[1248]

It was not, however, bold presumption and lack of humility that led
Luther’s literary opponents among the Catholics to appeal to the promises
Christ had made to His Church; rather it was their conviction that these
solemn assurances excluded the possibility of the Church’s having ever
erred in the way Luther maintained that she had done.

_The Indefectibility of the Church and Her Thousand-Year-Long Error_

When the question arose, how the Church, in spite of Christ’s protection,
could nevertheless have fallen into such monstrous errors,[1249] Luther
was disposed to admit in his polemics that the true Church, i.e. the
community of real believers, could not go astray. “The Church cannot
teach lies and errors, not even in details.… How could it then be
otherwise when God’s mouth is the mouth of the Church. As God cannot lie
neither therefore can the Church.”[1250]

Such an immutable and reliable guide to erring men for their perfect
peace of mind and sure salvation, the Catholics retorted, did Christ
intend to leave in His visible Church, ruled by the successors of St.
Peter.

An able Catholic work of 1528, already referred to above, emphasises
the Church’s immutability in her dogma: “That preacher who does
not preach in accordance with the Holy Catholic Church and the
holy Fathers sins against the truth.… With due reverence we firmly
believe all that is written in the approved Books of the Old and
New Testament. We must not, however, so confine ourselves to this
as to look upon what the Holy Church teaches apart from Scripture
as human dross, seeing that Scripture itself commands us to keep
the doctrine of the Church and the Fathers.” The author goes on to
show his opponent Luther what services are rendered by the Church’s
authority, how she preserves intact and vouches for the Canon of
Scripture. It is only from the lips of the Church that we learn which
books were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. “For
where is it written that we must believe the Gospels of Matthew, John
and the rest? But, if it is nowhere written, how is it you believe
in these Gospels? How much at variance is your practice with your
teaching?”[1251]

As to the infallibility of the Church Luther retorted: The invisible
Church cannot err, but “that Church which we usually mean when we use
the word, can and does err; the congregation of true believers cannot
be assembled in one particular spot and is often to be found where
least expected. Moreover, even this Church, i.e. the true believers
and the saints, can sometimes go astray by allowing themselves to be
drawn away from the Word.… Hence we must always regard the Church and
the saints from two points of view, first according to the Spirit,
and, then, according to the flesh, lest their piety and their Word
savours of the flesh.”[1252] The Church teaches according to the
Spirit when her “belief tallies with the Word of God and the belief
of Christ Himself in heaven. To speak in this manner and meaning is
right.”[1253] But “we must not build on her opinion or belief where
she holds or believes anything outside of and beyond the Word of
God.”[1254] It was according to the flesh that all those abominations
of errors were taught which were termed “opinions of the Churches,
though they were nothing of the kind but merely human conceits,
invented outside of scripture and parading under the Church’s
name.”[1255]

With this Luther’s reader is flung back once more into the most
subjective of systems, for who is to decide whether this or that
doctrine “savours of the flesh.” Each one for himself, solely
according to the standard of Holy Scripture or, rather, each one as
Luther dictates. But Luther’s decisions touched only the doctrines
known to him; who is to decide on the questions yet to arise after his
death?

He condemns the errors of the Middle Ages. Yet he is occasionally
ready to praise the Mediæval Church. As we know he acknowledged
that she had preserved Baptism. When the Church says that “Baptism
washes away sin,” this, to Luther, does not savour of the flesh.
“She also holds and believes that in [?] the bread and wine the Body
and Blood of Christ are given.… Summa, in these beliefs the Church
cannot err.”[1256] These, however, merely happened to be Luther’s
own opinions. Infant-Baptism Luther defended against the Anabaptists
without seeking help in the Bible; as for the presence of Christ in
the Sacrament against the Zwinglians he indeed had the words of the
Bible, yet here, too, he was only too glad to reinforce what he said
by the traditions and infallible teaching office of the Church,
though in so doing he was contradicting his own theory.[1257]

Luther, with characteristic disregard of logic, calls the earlier
Church a “Holy place of abominations.” She was a “holy place,” for
“there, even under the Pope, God maintained with might and by wonders
first Holy Baptism; secondly, in the pulpits, the text of the Holy
Gospel in the language of each country; thirdly, the Forgiveness of
Sins and Absolution both in Confession and publicly; fourthly, the
Blessed Sacrament of the Altar; … fifthly, the calling or ordination
to the preaching office.… Many retained the custom of holding up
the crucifix before the eyes of the dying and reminding them of the
sufferings of Christ on which they must rely; finally, prayer, the
Psalter, the Our Father, the Creed and the Ten Commandments, item
many good hymns and canticles both in Latin and in German. Where
such things survived there must undoubtedly have been a Church, and
also Saints. Hence Christ was assuredly there with His Holy Spirit,
upholding in them the Christian faith though everything was in a bad
way, even as in the time of Elias, when the 7000 left were so weak
that Elias fancied himself the only Christian still living.”[1258]

Nevertheless, this was the selfsame Church, which not only connived
at the teaching of heretical abominations but actually herself taught
all the depravities which Luther describes in the same writing, such
as her peculiar doctrine of priestly ordination, of the validity
of the secret Canon of the Mass, of the spiritual authority of the
bishops, of justification, good works and satisfaction, of purgatory,
saint-worship, etc.

That here he does not condemn the olden Church off-hand and fling
her to the jaws of the dragon as he was wont to do is a casual
inconsistency; his moderation here is to be explained by the necessity
he was under then (after the Diet of Augsburg), of showing that he
could claim a certain continuity with the Church of the past, and also
by his desire to influence those Catholics who were still sitting on
the fence and whom he would gladly have drawn over to his own side by
seeming concessions, in accordance with his tactics at Augsburg.

Yet, in spite of the above concessions, the Mediæval Church remains
in his eyes a “place of abominations”; her members, though validly
baptised, are not members of the Church; they might indeed sit in the
Church, but only as Antichrist sits in the Temple of God (2 Thess. ii.
4); her children would be saved if they died before coming to a full
knowledge of the Popish Church, but if they grew up and followed her
lying preaching then they would become devil’s whores;[1259] even as I
myself “was stuck fast in the behind of the devil’s whore, i.e. of the
Pope’s new Churches, so that it is a grief to us to have spent so much
time and pains in that shameful hole. But praise and thanks be to God Who
has delivered us from the Scarlet Woman!”[1260]

So low is his esteem for the authority of the tradition of the “Holy
Place of abominations,” that he includes among the doubtful and fallible
statements of that Doctor of the Church the famous saying of St.
Augustine, that he would not believe the Gospel were it not for the
Church.[1261] He urges that Augustine himself had declared, that his
doctrines were to be examined, and only those to be accepted which were
found correct. He prefers to harp on another passage where St. Augustine
says: “The Church is begotten, fed, brought up and strengthened by the
Word of God,”[1262] as though St. Augustine in speaking thus of the
soul of the Church was denying her external organisation, her spiritual
supremacy, and her teaching office. Luther, however, treated tradition
just as he pleased; theologians had always distinguished between those
traditions of the olden Doctors that had been guaranteed by the Church
and those views which were merely personal to them; the latter no
theologian regarded as binding, whereas the former were accepted by
them with the respect befitting the witnesses. Here, once more, we see
Luther’s subjective principle at work, which excludes all authoritative
doctrine that comes to man from without, leaves him exposed to doubt
and negation, and quite overlooks the fact that all revelation in last
resort comes to the individual from without with an irresistible and
authoritative claim to respect. Just as the Divine revelation vindicates
its claim to acceptance by the faithful by means of proofs, so too, the
teaching authority of the Church—as Luther’s Catholic opponents were
not slow to point out—could show proofs that what was presented to the
faithful as an article of belief might reasonably be accepted without
any need of previously testing it to see whether it agreed with Holy
Scripture—an examination, which, as a matter of fact, most people were
not capable of undertaking.

As the polemic we quoted above argues, Protestants held Holy Scripture to
be so clear that everyone could understand it without outside help. “But,
if the heretics think Scripture to be so plain and clear, why do they
write so many books in order to explain it? If Scripture is so clear,
plain and easy to understand how is it that they are so much at variance
concerning that one text: ‘This is My Body?’”[1263]

* * * * *

Luther now fell back on the Holy Spirit. “Without the Holy Ghost,” he
says, “it is impossible to discern the abominations from the Holy Place.”
But, so he was justly asked, who is to vouch for it that a man has truly
the Holy Spirit? And, if, as Luther opines, the Holy Ghost points to
the fruits as the means whereby He may be recognised, everything again
depends on the fruits being judged according to Luther’s own moral
standard. In short, in these controversies, Luther revolves in a vicious
circle.

In his Table-Talk Luther’s habit of shielding himself from objections
behind the strangest misrepresentations is again apparent. Such
misrepresentations, occurring in his most intimate conversations,
show that he was very far from merely using them in public or from
motives of policy; rather they influence his whole mode of thought and
feeling and were a second nature with him. We have only to turn to his
conversations on the subject of the “Church,” collected in 1538 by his
friend and companion Anton Lauterbach.[1264]

Here we meet with the revolting assertion that, in the Papistical
Church, the Pope claimed to be the only one who had a right to
interpret Scripture, and that he did this “out of his own brain”; this
Church, so Luther goes on, had set up a mass of human regulations and
vain observances which stifled all freedom and true religion; “the
name Church was a pretext for the most abominable errors.” Further,
“the true Church [i.e. mine] teaches the free forgiveness of sins,
secondly, she teaches us to believe firmly, and, thirdly, to bear
the cross with patience. But the false Church [the Pope’s] ascribes
the forgiveness of sins to our own merits, teaches men to waver,
and, finally does not carry the cross but rather persecutes others.”
Besides, how can the Papists have the true Church, seeing that they
are “some of them Epicureans, some of them idolaters?”—Fancy talking
about the authority of the Church! Is it with this that the fanatical
Anabaptists are to be vanquished? “Moreover, we know that: The true
Church never at any time bore the name or title that the godless so
boldly claim; she was ever nameless and is therefore believed rather
than seen; for the most part she lies downtrodden and neglected;
weakness, crosses and scandals are her portion. Only look at the
Church under the tyranny of the Pope; the Papal Decretals are the _ne
plus ultra_ of ungodliness.”

“I am astonished,” so he ends, speaking of the Roman Primacy, “at the
great blindness with which men worshipped the Pope’s lies and his
boundless and utterly shameless audacity, as though Holy Scripture
depended on the authority of the Roman Church whose head he claimed to
be, basing his claim on the words of Christ (Matt. xvi. 18) ‘Thou art
Peter and on this rock I will build My Church.’”

_Luther’s Tactics in the Interpretation of the Bible_

The text just quoted leads us to glance at his Biblical arguments; to
conclude this chapter we shall therefore give as a sample of his exegesis
on the Church a more detailed account of his exposition of the chief
argument for the papal primacy, viz. Christ’s promise to Peter, using for
this purpose his last book against Popery.[1265]

He would fain, so he says, “point out the Christian sense of this
text” as against that read into it by the hierarchical Church;
nevertheless, at his first effort he cannot rise above a coarse
witticism. “For very fear,” on approaching this text “Thou art Peter,”
etc., something “might easily have happened had I not had my breeches
on; and I might have done something that people do not like to smell,
so anxious and affrighted was I.” Why did not the Pope appeal rather
to the text: “In the beginning Cod created the heavens—that is the
Pope—and the earth, that is the Christian Church,” etc. This is the
first answer.

The second is a perversion of the Catholic view; he accuses the Pope
of deducing from the text under discussion, that he has “all power
in heaven as well as on earth” and authority “over all the Churches
and the Emperor to boot.” This parody of the truth Luther proceeds
triumphantly to demolish as “blasphemous idolatry.”—There follows
thirdly an appeal to the “Emperor, Kings, Princes and nobles” to seize
upon the Papal States which the Pope has stolen by dint of “lying and
trickery” and to slay as blasphemers him and his Cardinals.

He goes on to explain the Bible passage in question by proving,
fourthly, against the “wicked, shameless, stiff-necked” Papists from
Eph. iv. 15, and from Augustine and Cyprian, “that the whole of
Christendom throughout the world has no other head set over it save
only Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The true sense of Eph. iv. 15 and
the real teaching of both the Fathers in question are too well known
for us to need to waste words on them here.—Fifthly, he brings forward
John vi. 63: “My words are Spirit and life” and argues: “According
to this the words Matt. xvi. 18 [concerning Peter and the rock] must
also be Spirit and life.… The upbuilding must here mean a spiritual
and living upbuilding; the rock must be a living and spiritual rock;
the Church a living and spiritual assembly, nay, something that lives
for all eternity.”—These facts, however, had always been admitted by
Catholic commentators without causing them any apprehension as to
the primacy or the visible Church.—Sixthly, he seeks to demonstrate
that the Church can only be built on the rock indicated by Christ “by
faith”; this, however, excludes the primacy of Peter, for “whoever
believes is built upon this rock.”—Seventhly: “It is thus that St.
Peter himself interprets it, 1 Peter ii. 3 ff.,”—though this is a fact
only credible to one who is already of Luther’s opinion.—Eighthly, he
will have it that, in the famous passage, Christ meant to say no more
than: “Thou art Peter, that is a rock, for thou hast perceived and
named the Right Man, viz. Christ, Who is the true Rock, as Scripture
terms Him. On this rock, i.e. on Me, Christ, I will build the whole of
My Christendom.”

This reading would certainly cut away the ground from under the
argument of the Catholics.[1266] Nevertheless Protestant scholars
have repeatedly shown themselves willing to apply Christ’s promise
to the person of Peter, as ecclesiastical tradition has ever done,
and to defend this as the true sense of the words. Thus the Berlin
exegetist, Bernhard Weiss, writes: “By using ταύτῃ for the name
(Peter), signifying a rock, any application of the words either to
Jesus or to the faith or confession of Peter is shut out.… It can only
be understood of his person,” etc.[1267] By Holtzmann, the Strasburg
exegetist, the opposite interpretation was uncharitably described as a
fruit of the “school of Protestant _ex parte_ exegesis.”[1268]

We must, however, allow that, both here and in his treatment of the
promise of the keys (Matt. xvi. 19), Luther shows himself an adept
in the use of language. “To speak plain German we may say this,”
so he begins one of his commentaries, and indeed he knows how to
speak well and in a manner calculated to impress his hearers. Of the
matter, however, we may judge from the following: “To thee I will give
the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” this means that, should anyone
refuse to believe the apostles, on him they should pass sentence and
condemn him; their “office” still remains in the Church, there always
being “retaining of sins for the impenitent and unbelieving, and
forgiveness for the penitent and the believing”; but, quite apart from
this “office,” believers have absolute power “where two or three are
gathered together in the name of Christ (Matt. xviii. 20).”[1269] Here
again we have Christ’s promise misconstrued, which does not refer to
spiritual authority but solely to the effect of the prayer in common
of two or more of the faithful.[1270]

“Hence, let the Pope and his Peter be gone,” so he concludes … even
though there were a hundred thousand St. Peters, even though all the
world were nothing but Popes, and even though an angel from heaven
stood beside him; for we have here [Matt. xviii. 18, where the power
of binding and loosing is bestowed on _all_ the apostles] the Lord
Himself, above all angels and creatures, Who says they are _all_
to have equal power, keys and office, even where only two simple
Christians are gathered together in His name. This Lord we shall
not allow the Pope and all the devils to make into a fool, liar or
drunkard; but we will tread the Pope under foot and tell him that he
is a desperate blasphemer and idolatrous devil, who, in St. Peter’s
name, has snatched the keys for himself alone which Christ gave to
them all in common. “It is the Lord Himself Who says this [John xx. 21
ff.]; therefore we care nothing for the ravings of the Pope-Ass in his
filthy decretals.”[1271]

CHAPTER XXXIX

END OF LUTHER’S LIFE

1. The Flight from Wittenberg

“Old age is here,” so wrote Luther in a fit of depression to his Elector
on March 30, 1544, in his sixty-first year; “old age which in itself is
cold and ungainly, weak and sickly. The pitcher goes to the well until
one fine day it breaks; I have lived long enough, may God grant me a
happy deathbed.… Methinks, too, I have already seen the best I am like
to see on earth, for it looks as though evil days were coming. May God
help His own! Amen.” He recommends his sovereign to seek comfort in the
“Dear Word of God” and in prayer, assuring him: “These two unspeakable
treasures shall never be the portion of the devil, the Turk, or of the
Pope and his followers.”[1272]

About this time he had to complain of palpitations, dizziness and
calculus. His will he had already drawn up on Jan. 6, 1542.[1273] In it
he refused to make use of the usual legal forms, being determined to have
nothing to do with the lawyers, with whom he was always at variance.
He was quite aware that lawyers still insisted on the objections to
the validity of the marriages of clerics and monks and the rights of
inheritance of their children, as they indeed were bound to do not only
by Canon Law but also by the law of the Empire.

How cheerfully he was inclined to look forward to death even the year
before is apparent from a letter to Myconius, “the bishop of the Churches
of Gotha and Thuringia,” who was then lying seriously ill; here he says:
“I pray our Lord Jesus not to call to everlasting rest you and our
followers and leave me here among the devils to be still longer tormented
by them. Truly I have been long enough plagued by them and really I
deserve that my turn should come before yours. Hence my prayer is: May
the Lord lay your illness upon me and rid me of my earthly habitation
which is so useless, worn-out and exhausted. I see right well that I am
no longer good for anything.”[1274]

After his above farewell-letter to the Elector Luther’s thoughts reverted
to death more frequently than before. He cast up the books he had still
to write and took stock of his powers to see whether he would have time
to finish them. For his energy and spirit of enterprise were by no means
yet dead, though at times they seem to be paralysed. Often enough he
pulls himself together in his letters sufficiently to make jokes with his
friends, the better both to banish his own gloomy thoughts and to inspire
the addressees with greater courage and confidence. Nevertheless, through
it all, we can detect his disquiet and suffering.

“You often importune me,” so he wrote to his pupil Anton Lauterbach
about the end of 1544, “for a work on ecclesiastical discipline,
but you do not tell me where I am to find the leisure and health,
seeing that I am a worn-out and idle old man. I am ceaselessly snowed
under with letters. I have promised the young princes a sermon on
drunkenness, others and myself I have promised a book on secret
marriages, others again, one against the Sacramentarians; some now
want me to set all else aside and write a ‘Summa’ and running gloss
on the whole Bible. Thus one thing stands in the way of the other and
I get through nothing. And yet I had imagined that, as one who had
already done his work, I had earned the right to some leisure, and
to live quietly and in peace and so pass away. But I am compelled to
pursue my restless way of life. Well, I shall do what I can, and, what
I can’t, I shall leave undone.… Pray for us as we do for you.”[1275]

In Jan., 1545, when he had almost completed his long and arduous
work on Genesis, he sighed: “May God put an end to this moribund and
sinful life as soon as this book is finished, or even before should
it please Him; do you ask God this for me.… Yes, truly, pray for my
happy dissolution and that I may die a good death.”[1276] “Pray for
me,” he wrote to Amsdorf in May of the same year, “that I may be set
free as soon as may be from my fetters and be united to Christ, but
that, if my life, or rather my sickness, is to last still longer, God
may bestow on me strength of body and force of soul.” He praises God
that he himself and his friends, “though unworthy sinners, had been
chosen for this blessed and glorious office, viz. to hear the voice of
God’s Majesty in the Word of the Evangel; on this the angels and all
creation wish us luck, but the Pope is dismayed and all the gates of
hell shake.”[1277]

Luther’s extant letters covering the period from May to December, 1545,
afford us an insight into the emotions through which he passed.

From the month of May onwards he sank deeper and deeper into a dreary
state of annoyance and sadness, and, at last, at the end of July, he
shook the dust of Wittenberg from his feet. In the latter half of August,
after he had allowed himself to be persuaded to return, his spirits
rapidly revived, and such was the reaction that his new mystical ardour
knew no bounds while his exertions seem almost incredible.

To take the period in question in its chronological order: The
month of May commenced with a bitter attack on Agricola, and, on
the latter’s arrival at Wittenberg, he refused even to see him. “Of
this monster,” he wrote on May 2, “I will hear nothing but words of
condemnation; of him and his friends may I be rid for all eternity.…
Satan may rage and boast as he pleases!”[1278] His annoyance, as is
usual with him, is speedily transferred to Satan. That same day,
plagued with a tiresome matrimonial dispute, he asked: “Is then the
devil master of the world?”[1279] Shortly after he declared the Pope
to be the “monster of Satan, the end of whose days was at hand.”[1280]
His joy at the approaching end (“_gaudeamus omnes in Domino_”) is,
however, not unmixed. The thought depresses him that the devil should
still be active even at Halle which had recently been won over to the
Evangel, and that he had there “just blessed, or rather cursed, two
nuns, thereby proving how much more he fain would do.”[1281]

Annoyance at the bad treatment of his preachers also lets loose a
flood of complaints. “In many places,” so he laments, “they are
treated very ill so that they are minded to depart and are even
compelled to take flight.”[1282] The hostility of the politicians at
Court and the lawyers, was also a cause of profound grief to him.[1283]

With greater apprehension than usual he saw at the beginning of June
terrifying natural portents and prayed with passionate longing for the
“overthrow of all things” which he was confidently awaiting.[1284]

Already in spirit he saw the sparks of the coming conflagration which
was to consume Germany for her chastisement, “before the outbreak of
which may God deliver us and ours from this misery!”[1285]

In July anger at the “contempt of the Word on our side and the
blasphemy of our foes,”[1286] the sad sight of the want of unity and
growing number of sects in his own camp, where “each one insists
on following his own ideas,”[1287] the “decline of learning”
amongst his followers, where “many bellies are set only on feeding
themselves,”[1288] all this combined with other experiences tended to
make his depression unendurable. To be obliged to set in order the
public worship spelt a positive torture to him.[1289] Even in his
own household he had cause for bitter disappointment in his niece
Magdalene who had insisted on making love to a man (whom she was
ultimately to marry) of whom Luther did not approve, thus giving Satan
an opportunity for “maliciously attacking” Luther’s good name.[1290]

Yes indeed, “Satan rules,” he said to Amsdorf, in a letter of July 9,
“and all have lost their wits.”[1291] Here the cause of his vexation
was the Emperor, who, so he had been told, was insisting that the
Protestants should attend the Council of Trent and submit to it. It is
true Luther does not give up all hope of God again making a mockery
of Satan,[1292] but, in the meantime, he execrates and curses the
Council.[1293] He also vents his wrath on the Emperor, Ferdinand the
German King, the King of France and the Pope. And why? Because he was
only too ready to give credence to a report which had reached him that
they had despatched ambassadors to the Grand Turk with gifts and an
offer of peace, and that, clothed in long Turkish garments, they were
humbling themselves before the infidel.[1294] “Are these Christians?
They are hellish idols of the devil. Yet I hope they are at the same
time a glad token of the coming of the end of all things. Let them
worship the Turk, but let us call upon the true God, Who will humble
both them and the Turk in the Day of His Coming.”[1295]

He is still suffering from the after-effects of the excitement in
which he had, as he says, penned his “book brimful of bitter wrath,
against the Papal monster,” viz. his “Against the Popedom founded by
the Devil.” He has not the strength left to write a sequel to it, but
he tells his friend Ratzeberger: “I have not yet done justice either
to myself or to the greatness of my anger; I know too that I can never
do full justice to it, so great and boundless is the enormity of the
Papistic monster.” In such a frame of mind he feels keenly that he is
the “trump heralding the Last Judgment.”[1296]

He is conscious, however, that his trump cannot peal loud enough in
the world (“_parum sonamus_”) owing to his state, borne down as he is
by pains of body and soul. He was unable to summon up the force to
write either the continuation of his work against the Pope, or even
the short reply to the Swiss which he had promised Amsdorf.[1297]

The above false report of the Christian embassy to Turkey current at
Wittenberg he was at once ready to accept because it was in keeping
with his pessimistic outlook. The evil spirits of suspicion, distrust
and the mania of persecution made his unhappy mind willing to credit
everything that was unfavourable, and even embittered the life of
those about him. Melanchthon in particular suffered under this mood
owing to his disposition to find a _modus vivendi_ with the Swiss,
whilst all the while concealing his leanings under a prudent and timid
silence.[1298]

“The wild and immoral life at Wittenberg, a town so greatly favoured
by God,”[1299] and the danger this spelt to the good name of the whole
of Luther’s work stung him now more keenly than ever before. Of his
own remorse of conscience we hear nothing at this time; his letters
even to his intimates, usually so communicative, are silent as to any
temptations or inward conflicts with the devil. There is no doubt that
public affairs were then weighing more heavily on him, for instance
the troubles arising from the Hessian bigamy. He was now again
suffering from calculus. “I would dearly like to die,” he writes, “a
plague on these excruciating pains! If, however, it is the Will of God
that I succumb to them, He will give me grace to endure them and to
die, if not sweetly, at least bravely!”[1300]

When his physical sufferings diminished there came to his mind the
recollection of how, more than a year before, early in 1544, he had
determined to leave Wittenberg, of which he had sickened, in order to
seek a more peaceful life elsewhere. It was only the extraordinary
exertions of his friends that had then succeeded in keeping him back.
Bugenhagen and the other preachers, the University and the magistrates,
had besought him with tears and entreaties. On that occasion he
was “incensed,” so Cruciger, his friend and pupil, says, “at some
trivial matter, or rather he was full of suspicion about us all, as I
believe.”[1301] Already in 1530, and again in 1539, he had declared that,
owing to the annoyance given him, he would never again mount the pulpit
at Wittenberg.[1302] Now, however, his chagrin was even deeper and he
resolved to carry out his plan prudently and quit the town for ever.

Without acquainting even Catherine Bora of the length of his absence from
the town he left Wittenberg at the end of July accompanied by his son
Hans, his guest Ferdinand von Maupis, travelling with Cruciger, who was
to decide a quarrel between Medler and Mohr, the two Naumburg preachers
at Zeitz, on July 27. Luther also repaired to Zeitz and took part in the
negotiations, but instead of returning with Cruciger to Wittenberg, he
wrote a letter to Katey from Zeitz on the 28th,[1303] stating that he
had no intention of returning to Wittenberg. “My heart has grown cold so
that I no longer like being there; I advise you to sell the garden and
courtyard, the house and stabling; then I would make over the big house
[the old monastery in which Luther used to live] to my gracious Lord,
and it would be best for you to settle down at Zulsdorf [i.e. on her own
little property] while I am yet alive.”[1304] He hoped, he goes on, that
the Elector would continue to pay him his stipend as professor, “at least
during the last year of his life.”

From the letter it is plain that it was annoyance at the decline of
morals in the town rather than any strained relations with his friends at
Wittenberg that drove him to this sudden decision. “Let us begone out of
this Sodom!” he writes and hints that, in addition to the disorders with
which he was already acquainted fresh scandals had reached his ears on
this journey; the “government,” i.e. the authorities, aroused his deepest
indignation. “There is no one to punish or restrain, and besides this the
Word of God is derided”; maybe the town “will catch the Beelzebub-dance,
now that they have begun to uncover the women and girls [an allusion to
the low-cut dresses] in front and behind.” “So I will wander about and
rather eat the bread of charity than allow my last days to be tortured
and upset by the disorderly life at Wittenberg and see all my hard work
brought to nought. You may tell Dr. Pommer and Master Philip of this if
you please,” he concludes, “and see whether Dr. Pommer will bid farewell
to Wittenberg for me, for I can no longer contain my anger and annoyance.”

The Wittenberg notabilities were filled with consternation on hearing of
what Luther had done; they could not regard it as a mere passing whim,
for they knew Luther’s determination. The University made representations
in writing to the Elector, begging him to intervene to prevent such a
misfortune; the foes of the Evangel would rejoice at the departure of
the great teacher, other professors would leave, and the result would
be new dissensions.[1305] As we know, Melanchthon, by his own account,
was ready “to slink away.” Luther, so the University stated, like a new
Elias, was the chariot and horseman of Israel and quite indispensable; if
he wished any changes made and order established this would be done even
should he find “fault with the teaching of some.” The University also
sent Bugenhagen and Melanchthon to talk the matter over with Luther; the
town despatched its burgomaster and the Elector sent him his own medical
attendant, Ratzeberger, with a friendly letter.[1306]

In the meantime Luther had left Zeitz and gone on to Merseburg, whither
he had been invited by George of Anhalt, formerly canon of the chapter
there. The latter had gone over to Protestantism, and, when the bishopric
was sequestrated in 1541 by a secular prince—August, the brother of Duke
Maurice of Saxony—was appointed “spiritual administrator” of the see. He
now wanted to be formally “consecrated” by Luther as bishop of Merseburg.
To this the latter readily agreed. On Aug. 2, with the assistance of
Jonas, Pfeffinger and others he reiterated the ceremonial which he had
once before performed on Amsdorf at Naumburg (above, vol. v., p. 194).

The festivities at Merseburg, the kindness and hospitality of which he
was the recipient at Lobnitz and Leipzig, and, lastly, the change of air
and surroundings brought Luther to a much better frame of mind.

The messengers from Wittenberg found him at Merseburg. After they had
seen him and listened to his stern admonitions, they were delighted to
receive his assurance that, after all, he would return to Wittenberg. His
resolve had, in fact, been merely the result of strong excitement. Now,
moreover, not only had the depression ceased of which he had so long been
the victim but a notable change of mood had supervened and his confidence
and courage had been restored. Such sudden changes are not without their
parallel in Luther’s earlier life, as has been sufficiently shown above.

He now returned in a better temper to Leipzig, where he preached a
vigorous sermon on Aug. 12, and was there entertained by Camerarius,
Melanchthon’s confidant; he also “associated with his circle of friends
in the best of humours.”[1307]

After his return to Wittenberg on the 16th we hear no more of his
vexation, though he did not put much faith in the disciplinary measures
that had been drawn up for the town, notwithstanding that they were
backed by the Elector; the Court itself, so he wrote, read nothing and
only scoffed at everything.[1308]

* * * * *

He now threw himself once more into the struggle with his theological
foes. A glance at these labours and at his lectures shows him working
at high pressure, while, as his letters show, he retained his sense of
humour.

He set to work immediately on the 32 articles which the Louvain
Faculty of Theology had published with the object of enlightening
Catholics on the nature of the Protestant doctrines.

Already in Aug. he had set up his 76 theses “Against the Articles of
the Theologists of Louvain.”[1309] Here he does not take his opponents
seriously, but, for the most part, simply pours forth his annoyance on
them and their theses, sneering at them and scourging them with coarse
invective. He calls them arch-idolaters, a school of blockheads, lazy
bellies and rude asses, the accursed, hellish brew of Louvain; speaks
of their mad, raving conceit; they are bloodthirsty incendiaries
and fratricides, a stinking cesspool, a school of obscenity and
muck, are these great, gross epicurean swine of Louvain. “They come
straight from hell and teach what they have seen in the Mirror of
Marcolfus,[1310] i.e. the ordure of man-made laws.” “For, instead
of giving the people Holy Scripture, they do nothing else but cack,
spew, belch forth and fling human filth amongst them.… And thus Holy
Church is to be looked upon as no better than a latrine for the scamps
of Louvain wherein they, playing the lord, may void their belly when
over-full, and where, moreover, they slay and lay waste. This indeed
may be termed foolery and raving!”[1311] The strange elation in which
Luther penned so odd-sounding a “reply” is, again, not to be explained
by any ordinary psychology.

In Sep. Luther commenced a work on a larger scale against the
Louvain theologians and their Paris colleagues, which, however, he
was not able to finish. The fragment “Against the Donkeys in Paris
and Louvain,” which exists in two drafts, shows plainly enough what
sort of book it would have been had death not interrupted his work.
He urges that, whoever wishes to teach theology whilst refusing to
acknowledge the truths taught by him concerning the Law, sin and
Grace, is as well fitted to do so as an ass is to play upon the harp,
as the Papacy is to govern the Church, or as the Louvain scholars
to promote the cause of learning.[1312] In this work he fancied he
had recovered his olden stormy vigour. To his friend Jacob Probst he
candidly admitted: “I am more angry with these Louvain quadrupeds than
beseems me, an old man and so great a theologian; but I want it to be
said of me that I took the field against these monsters of Satan, even
though it should cost me my last breath.”[1313]

He was busy at the same time on a revised edition of his Latin
“Chronology of the World,” of which the aim was to show the near
advent of Christ.[1314] On Oct. 16 he finished his Latin Commentary
on the Prophet Osee, and sent a copy as a gift to Mohr, the dismissed
pastor of Zeitz, with a kindly letter of religious consolation and
encouragement.[1315] He also despatched a lengthy circular to the
printers on the capture of Duke Henry of Brunswick, the enemy of the
Evangel; this letter is a monument to his aggressiveness so nearly
verging on the fanatical;[1316] in this he had been strengthened by
the supposed intervention of heaven on his behalf against Henry and
against the Pope and the Mass.[1317]

His intimate correspondence was also steeped in the new enthusiasm
which had laid hold on him. “What a joyful victory has God, Who
hearkens to our prayer, given us,” so he wrote on Oct. 26 to Jonas.
“Let us believe and let us pray! He is faithful to His promises!… O
God, do Thou maintain our joy, or, rather, Thine Own Glory!”[1318]

The jokes we had missed for a while now once more made their
appearance in his letters. In the first epistle written after
his return he hastens to tell Amsdorf of Mutian’s reading of the
inscription “_Soli Deo gloria_” (viz. “To the Sun-God be glory”) on
a tower belonging to the Archbishop of Mayence; after all the “Satan
of Mayence” was perhaps right, so he says, in having the inscription
taken down.[1319] In another letter he cheerfully relates the old
tale of the peasant who, with hands devoutly folded, said to Satan:
“Thou art my Gracious Master the Devil.”[1320] He is also delighted
to be able to tell the story of a Popish preacher, who, before the
war, exhorting the people to pray for the Duke of Brunswick, had said:
“If he is worsted then 14 parsons will be had for the price of a
penny.”[1321]

His last lecture was delivered just before Christmas, 1545, when he
ended his exposition of Genesis. At its close he said: “Here you
have our dear Genesis; God grant that, after me, someone may do it
better; I am weak and can go on no longer; pray that God may grant
me a happy deathbed.”[1322] But his “weakness” was merely temporary.
A little after he wrote: “Whoever must fall let him fall if he
refuses to listen to the Son of God. We pray and look for the day
of our deliverance and destruction of the world with its pomps and
wickedness. Would that it come speedily. Amen. I have taken the field
against the donkeys of Louvain and Paris, but, nevertheless, feel
pretty well, considering my advanced years.”[1323]

Impelled by the ardent desire to do something for the furtherance of
peace within his camp, in spite of his bodily weakness and his distaste
for worldly business, he undertook at the request of Count Albert of
Mansfeld to act as arbiter in the dispute between the latter and his
brother and nephew concerning the royalties from the mines and certain
other legal claims.

“My time is entirely taken up,” so he says, “with affairs which do not
in the least interest me; I must serve the belly and the table.”[1324]
Already at the beginning of October these matters had induced him, with
Melanchthon and Jonas, to proceed to Mansfeld. As soon as his course of
lectures was finished, viz. at Christmas, he again repaired thither, in
spite of the severity of the weather, again accompanied by Melanchthon,
who was inclined to grumble at being called upon to listen to the
squabbles of quarrelsome people. Luther, however, as he wrote to Count
Albert, wished to see the “beloved lords of his native land reconciled
and on good terms” before “laying himself to rest in his coffin.”[1325]
He returned to Wittenberg shortly after Christmas, owing to Melanchthon’s
falling ill.

These two journeys to Mansfeld, afterwards to be followed by a third and
last, have, by controversialists, wrongly been made out to have been due
to Luther’s desire to escape from Wittenberg on account of his bitter
experiences there.

2. Last Troubles and Cares

_Theological Disruption_

“The sad controversies of the last few years had made Luther recognise
that a race of theological fighting-cocks, gamesters and idle rioters
had arisen, and that dissensions of the worst sort might be anticipated
in the future. The nation in which each one obstinately followed his
own way was beyond help.… The Swiss refused to have anything to do with
the German Reformation; the Bucerites held themselves aloof from both
Lutherans and Swiss, the Brandenburgers wanted to belong neither to
the Church of Rome nor to that of Wittenberg; at Wittenberg itself the
Martinians and the Philippists (so-called after Luther and Melanchthon)
were hostile to each other, and finally the Princes and magistrates all
went their own way. ‘Things will fare badly when I am dead,’ such was
Luther’s repeated prediction. Whether he looked at this Prince of the
Church, at that Landgrave, or that other Duke Maurice, there was not one
in whom he could entirely trust. More than one Mene Tekel was written on
the wall, yet none perceived it save the old man at Wittenberg at whom
they all shrugged their shoulders.”[1326]

Such is the description by Luther’s latest Protestant biographer of the
“sad decline of the Evangelical party.”

The Zwinglians had received a severe blow from Luther in his “Kurtz
Bekentnis” of Sep., 1544;[1327] but the Swiss, who were hardy and
independent fellows, soon prepared a furious counter-reply.[1328]
The “old man at Wittenberg” was not deceived as to the profound and
irremediable breach, yet he succeeded, at least outwardly, in driving
away his annoyance and cares by the use of ridicule. Early in 1546, to
one of his confidants who had bewailed the new step taken by the Swiss,
he wrote the following, which forms his last utterance against the
Zwinglians: “If they condemn me, it is a joy to me. For by my writing
I wished to do nothing else than force them to declare themselves my
open foes. I have succeeded in this, hence so much the better. To adapt
the words of the Psalmist: ‘Blessed is the man who hath not sat in the
council of the Sacramentarians, nor stood in the way of the Zwinglians,
nor sat in the chair of the men of Zürich.’”[1329] To another intimate,
Amsdorf, the “Bishop” of Naumburg, who was allowed a deeper insight
into his soul than others, Luther confided that one of the principal
reasons of his hatred of his competitors in Switzerland and South-West
Germany was that “they are proud, fanatical men, and also idlers. At the
beginning of our enterprise, when I was fighting all alone in fear and
dread against the fury of the Pope, they were bravely silent and waited
to see how things would go. Later on they suddenly posed as victors, and
as though, forsooth, they alone had done it all. So it ever is: one does
the work and another seeks to enjoy his labour. Now they even go so far
as to attack me, who won their freedom for them.… But they will find
their judge. If I answer them at all it will be nothing more than a brief
recapitulation of the sentence of condemnation irrevocably passed upon
them.”[1330]—No such answer was, however, to be forthcoming.

Against Melanchthon Luther’s ardent followers, the Martinians, were,
as we know, highly incensed for attempting to modify the doctrines of
the Master. Melanchthon’s sufferings on this account have already been
described (vol. v., p. 252 ff.). With a grudging silence Luther bore
with his friend’s Zwinglian leanings on the doctrine of the Supper, and
with their other differences.

Both, moreover, were surrounded by an atmosphere of theological
bickerings, “where individuals, who, had it not been for these squabbles,
would never have achieved notoriety, gave themselves great airs.”[1331]

We may recall how Melanchthon had even thought of leaving Saxony, where,
as he wrote to Camerarius, he was bound down by undignified fetters; such
was his weakness, however, that he could not bring himself to do even
this. Luther’s coarseness, lack of consideration and dictatorial bearing
it was that led Melanchthon to say that he who ruled at Wittenberg was
not a Pericles, but a new Cleon and an unsufferable tyrant.[1332]

On the question of the veneration of the Sacrament differences at last
sprung up even between Bugenhagen and Luther; the former, usually his
pliant instrument, took upon himself during Luther’s absence to abolish
at Wittenberg the elevation of the elements during the celebration.
Apparently this was in the second half of Jan., 1542. Luther expressed
his disapproval of this action and declared he would revive the
rite.[1333] In 1544, when the three Princes of Anhalt were at Wittenberg
and asked him whether it would be right to abolish the Elevation, he
replied: “On no account; such abrogation detracts from the dignity of
the Sacrament.” There is no doubt that it was his antagonism to the
Zwinglians that was here the determining factor; moreover, as he admitted
Christ to be present in the Sacrament during reception in the wider
sense, i.e. during the liturgical action, he had no theological grounds
for doing away with the elevation and adoration of the elements. In his
own justification he went so far as to say: “Christ is in the bread,
why then should He not be treated with the greatest respect and also be
adored?”[1334]

The Lutheran preacher Wolferinus of Eisleben was in the habit of pouring
back into the barrel what remained of the consecrated Wine after
communion. Luther called him sharply to account, as he found that his
conduct was tainted with Zwinglianism; in order to evade the difficulty
he ordered that, in future, preachers and communicants should see that
nothing was left over after communion.[1335]

Luther, towards the end of his life, had to taste a good deal of that
“theological ire” of which Melanchthon frequently speaks, and not only
from the Swiss. We need only call to mind Johann Agricola, and his
“antinomian sow-theology,” as Melanchthon termed it. His inferences from
Luther’s doctrine of the inability of man to fulfil the Law he never
really withdrew even when he had betaken himself to Brandenburg. In
the Table-Talk dating from the latest period and published by Kroker,
Luther’s frequent bitter references to Agricola show the speaker was well
aware that his Berlin opponent still hated and distrusted him as much as
ever. After Luther’s death it became evident that Agricola “was capable
of everything,” and that Luther was not so far wrong, when, on another
occasion, he declared that he was not a man to be taken seriously.[1336]
Agricola finally died, loaded with worldly honours, in 1566.

A more serious critic of Luther, at any rate on the question of the
Sacrament, was Martin Bucer. The latter’s friendship with the Swiss
and the too independent spirit in which he planned the reformation of
Cologne, caused Luther great anxiety towards the end of his life. In his
plan Luther, so he says, was unable to find any clear confession of faith
in the Sacrament, but merely “much idle talk of its profit, fruit and
dignity,” all carefully “wrapped up that no one might know what he really
thought of it, just as is the way with the fanatics.” In all this talk he
could “readily discern the chatterbox Bucer.”[1337] Bucer, on his side,
was dissatisfied with the progress of Luther’s work in Germany. Owing to
the Interim he was no longer able to remain at Strasburg and accordingly
accepted a post at the English University of Cambridge and died in
England in 1551.

_The Controversy on Clandestine Marriages_

It was, however, annoyances and disagreements of a different sort that
kept Luther to the end of his days in a state of extreme indignation
against the lawyers and politicians of the Court.

A letter of Luther’s to the Elector Johann Frederick dated Jan.
18, 1545, on the controversy with the Saxon lawyers about Luther’s
denunciation of clandestine marriages (those entered upon without the
knowledge of the parents) as illegal, carries us into the thick of
these disagreements.[1338] His sovereign, he says, had ordered him to
confer with the lawyers and come to an arrangement with them; Luther,
however, after summoning them before him, had declared categorically
that, “I had no intention of holding a disputation with them; I had a
divine command to preach the 4th commandment[1339] in these matters.”
Thus, in the questions under discussion, he is determined not to
submit either to the secular or the canon law but only to the Divine.
“Otherwise I should have to give up the Gospel and creep back into the
cowl [become a monk again] in the devil’s name, by the strength and
virtue of both the spiritual and the imperial law. And, besides this,
your Electoral Highness would have to cut off my head, doing likewise
with all those who have wedded nuns, as the Emperor Jovian commanded
more than a thousand years back.” As a result of his arguments, “the
lawyers of the Consistory and Courts agreed to give up and reject
altogether the clandestine espousals [i.e. marriages ‘_sponsalia de
præsenti_’].” In these words he announces his final apparent victory
in this long-drawn controversy.

In the same letter he touches on the deeper side of the quarrel.

The lawyers at the High Court have always stuck to many points of
“the Pope’s laws” which “we of the clergy” don’t want. “Some, too,
made out [in accordance with Canon Law then still in force] that,
on our death, our wives and children could not inherit our goods
and wished to adjudicate them to our friends, etc.” They had paid
no attention to the writings of the new theologians; and yet the
latter, “few in number and insignificant maybe, have done more good
in the Churches than all the Popes and jurists in a lump.” Hence the
preachers had simply disregarded the lawyers, viz. in respect of the
clandestine marriages; this had brought about peace. When, however,
the “Consistory had been set up” (1539), the whole business had begun
anew. “The jurists fancied they had found a loophole through which
to raise a disturbance in my Churches with their damnable procedure,
which, to-day and to all eternity, I want to have condemned and
execrated in my Churches.” “Spoon-fed jurists” thrust themselves
forward; but these “merry customers” are not going to make “of my
Churches, for which I have to answer before God,” “such dens of
murderers.”

In order to understand the victory over the lawyers of which he speaks it
will be necessary to cast a glance back on the whole struggle.

As we have already pointed out in the words of a Protestant biographer
of Luther the legal status of Lutheranism threatened to give rise to
dire complications, while any downright abrogation of Canon Law, such
as Luther wished for, was out of the question.[1340] The sober view of
the situation taken by the lawyers did not deserve Luther’s offensive
treatment. Moreover, under the leadership of Schurf, the lay professors
of jurisprudence at the Wittenberg University had many objections
to raise against Luther’s demands. They not only upheld clandestine
marriages as valid, but, at the same time, defended the indissolubility
of marriage, even in the case of adultery, in accordance with the laws
of the olden Church; they also held that second marriages were not
lawful to the clergy. Schurf likewise wanted the “Evangelical bishops”
to be consecrated by papal bishops. A further cause of constant friction
lay in the fact that the professors of law were obliged to base their
lectures on the books of Canon Law in the absence of any others; whence
it came that Luther had to listen to many disagreeable references to the
questions of Church property, of the right of inheriting of the children
of former monks, of the marriage of nuns, of the legal status of the
monasteries, etc. Schurf was otherwise a good Lutheran and had assisted
Luther with advice at the Diet of Worms. Melchior Kling, his pupil and
colleague at Wittenberg, agreed with him in following the Canon Law
on the question of clandestine marriages, according to which (before
the Council of Trent had required for the validity of marriage, that
it should be performed publicly in the presence of the parish-priest),
they were regarded as valid, albeit wrong and forbidden, so that no new
marriage could be entered into so long as the parties lived.

Luther hoped, by opposing such marriages, to bring about some improvement
in the sad state of morals which the Visitations of 1528 and 1529 had
disclosed in the Saxon Electorate. The facility with which such marriages
were contracted by the Wittenberg students, and the bad effect they
had on the peace of the burghers seemed to him a real blot on the New
Evangel. He insisted very strongly that the consent of the parents was
required as a condition for marriage; without the parents’ consent
the marriages were in his eyes neither public nor valid; it was only
where the parents refused their consent on insufficient grounds that he
would admit that the bride had any right to enter into a real marriage
contract. The decision as to whether the parents’ objections held good
was, however, one on which opinions were bound to differ.

Shortly after the Visitations referred to above, in 1529, he wrote his
“Von Ehesachen,” published early in 1530; in it he declared: “A secret
betrothal simply constitutes no marriage whatsoever,” whilst, as a secret
betrothal (i.e. invalid marriage) he regards “any betrothal which takes
place without the knowledge and consent of those in authority, and who
have the right and power to settle the marriage, viz. the father, mother
or whoever stands in their stead.”[1341]

In 1532 he also proclaimed his views against the lawyers from the pulpit
without, however, being able to alter thereby either their practice or
their teaching. He lamented in 1538 the blindness of Schurf, who paid
more attention to man-made laws than to God’s Word and authority.[1342]

After some new disputes he delivered a sermon on Feb. 23, 1539, in
which he threatened to put on his horns. In it he called his opponents
blockheads; they ought “to reverence our doctrine as the Word of God,
coming from the mouth of the Holy Ghost.”[1343] He was not going to
worship the Pope’s ordure for the sake of the jurists; “let them let
our Church be”; but “now the lawyers are seeking to corrupt our young
students of theology with their Papal filth.”[1344]

Schurf seems to have yielded so far as no longer to attempt to make his
opinions public or official.

The greatest tussle, however, ensued on the establishment of the
Consistories in 1539, as the lawyers who were entrusted with the
matrimonial cases, treated the clandestine marriages as valid, and, in
other ways, also took Schurf’s side.

Luther asserted that by countenancing the “espousals,” which were “an
institution of the devil and the Pope,” the good name and the morals of
Wittenberg were being undermined. “Many of the parents say that, when
they send their boys to us to study, we hang wives round their necks
and rob them of their children.” Not only the burghers and students but
even the girls themselves “who have waxed bold” use their freedom most
wantonly.[1345] In Jan., 1544, in the pulpit, he poured out his wrath
in most unmeasured language, particularly on the second Sunday after
the Epiphany; in his tragic delivery he said, for instance: “I, Martin
Luther, preacher in this Church of Christ, take thee, secret promise and
the paternal consent that follows, together with the Pope and the devil
who instituted thee, I bind you all together and fling you into the abyss
of hell, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.”[1346]

His anger and annoyance had been aroused by certain concrete cases.

One of Melanchthon’s sons had contracted such a marriage as he was
denouncing. In his own family circle the same thing happened, probably in
the case of his nephew, Fabian Kaufmann. A student, Caspar Beier, who was
on intimate terms with Luther’s household, wished to marry at Wittenberg,
but was prevented by the lawyers of the Consistory on account of a
previous clandestine marriage which, however, he denied; he appealed
from the Consistory to the sovereign, and was supported by a letter from
Luther. This quarrel kindled a conflagration at Luther’s home. Cruciger,
a friend of the house, was against Beier and described his cause as “none
of the best”; Catherine Bora, on the other hand, the “_fax domestica_” as
Cruciger called her,[1347] seems to have fanned the flames of Luther’s
wrath, in the interests of Beier who was a relative of hers.

To a friend Luther admitted in Jan. that he “was so indignant with the
lawyers as he had never before been in all his life during all the
struggle on behalf of the Evangel.”[1348]

When the controversy was at its height, viz. in Jan., 1544, the Elector
arranged for an interview between Luther and the Consistory. Later, in
Dec., those negotiations were followed by others, in which the members
of the Wittenberg High Court took part; at last Luther’s obstinacy and
violence won the day: All marriages without the knowledge or approval
of the parents were to be invalid until the latter consented, or the
Consistory had pronounced their opposition groundless. To the Elector,
who from the first had agreed with Luther’s view, the latter then
addressed the letter referred to above (p. 355) where, appealing to his
“Divine mission” to preach the 4th commandment, he announces his final
triumph over the lawyers and their edicts.

His triumph he owed to his strong will and, also, possibly, to the fact
that the Elector was on his side. The victory also affected the case of
Beier, whom Luther hastened to acquaint of his freedom;[1349] it further
decided to some extent, the yet more important question whether or not
the lawyers were to yield to Luther in ecclesiastical matters. They
accepted their humiliation with the best grace possible, but we shall not
be far wrong in assuming that they were not over-pleased with Luther’s
irregular and illogical handling of questions of law.

_Difficulties with the State Church_

The far-reaching encroachments of the secular authorities in his Church
became for Luther in his later years a source of keen vexation.

Much of his Table-Talk, which turns on the lawyers, voices nothing
more than his indignation at the unwarranted interference of the State
in his new Church which he was powerless to prevent. Thus, according
to notes made at this time by Hieronymus Besold of Nuremberg who was a
guest at Luther’s table in 1545, the Master on one occasion gave free
rein to his anger with the lawyers in the matter of the sequestration
of Church lands: “The lawyers shriek, ‘They are Church lands.’ Give
them back ‘their monasteries that they may become monks and nuns and
celebrate Mass, and then they too will allow you to preach.’ [In
other words their proposal was that the new faith should make its way
peacefully. To this Luther’s answer is]: ‘Yes, but then where are we
to get our bread and butter?’ ‘We leave that to you,’ they say. Yes,
and take the devil’s thanks! We theologians have no worse enemies than
the lawyers. If they are asked, ‘What is the Church?’ they reply,
‘The assembly of the Bishops, Abbots, etc. And these lands are the
lands of the Church, hence they belong to the bishops.’ That is their
dialectics. But we have another dialectics at the right hand of the
Father and it tells us, ‘They are tyrants, wolves and robbers’ [and
must accordingly be deprived of the lands]. Therefore we here condemn
all lawyers, even the pious ones, for they know not what the Church
is. If they search through all their books they will not discover what
the Church is. Hence we are not going to take any reforms from them.
Every lawyer is either a miscreant or an ignoramus (”_Omnis iurista
est nequista aut ignorista_“).… They shall not teach us what ‘Church’
is. There is an old proverb, ‘A good lawyer makes a bad Christian,’
and it is a true one.”[1350]

It is somewhat astonishing to hear Luther in his “Table-Talk on the
lawyers”[1351] declaring that it was he who had whitewashed these
“bad Christians” and made them to be respected, and that consequently
he also could bring them again into disrepute, in other words, that
his tongue was powerful enough to do and to undo. “Do not tempt me.
If you are too well off I can soon make things warm for you. If you
don’t like being whitewashed, well and good, I can soon paint you
black again. May the devil make you blush!”[1352]—In one of his very
last letters (Feb., 1546), owing to new friction with the lawyers
about the Mansfeld revenues, he overwhelms them all with the following
general charges: “The lawyers have taught the whole world such a
mass of artifices, deceptions and calumnies that their very language
has become an utter Babel. At Babel no one _could_ understand his
neighbour, but here nobody _wants_ to understand what the other means.
Out upon you, you sycophants, sophists and plague-boils of the human
race! I write in anger, whether, were I calm, I should give a better
report I know not. But the wrath of God is upon our sins. The Lord
will judge His people; may He be gracious to His servants. Amen. If
this is all the wisdom that the jurists can show then there is really
no need for them to be so proud as they all are.”[1353]

Luther’s attitude towards the lawyers is of special importance from
two points of view. It shows afresh the high opinion he entertained of
himself, and, at the same time, it reveals his jealousy of any outside
influence.

“Before my time there was not a lawyer,” he says for instance in
an earlier outburst, “who knew what it meant to be righteous. They
learnt it from me. In the Gospel there is nothing about the duty of
worshipping jurists. Yes, before the world I will allow them to be in
the right, but, before God, they shall be beneath me. If I can judge
of Moses and bring him into subjection [i.e. criticise the Law in the
light of the Gospel] what then of the lawyers?… If of the two one must
perish, then let the law go and let Christ remain.”[1354] He was not
learned in the law, but, as the proclaimer of the Evangel, he was “the
supreme law in the field of conscience (‘_ego sum ius iurium in re
conscientiarum_’).”[1355]

“When I give an opinion and have to break my head over it and a
lawyer comes along and tries to dispute it, I say: ‘Do you look after
the Government and leave us in peace. You men of the law seek to
oppress us, but it is written: Thou art a priest for ever’” (Ps. cx.
4).[1356]—“The justice of the jurists is heathen justice,” he says;
but, after all, even the justice [righteousness] of his own school of
theology fell short of the mark. “Our justice is a relative justice;
but if I am not pious yet Christ is pious; we are at least able to
expound the commandments of God, and do so in the course of our
calling. But, even if you distil a jurist five times over, he still
cannot interpret even one of the Commandments.”[1357]

The other trait that comes out in his dealings with the lawyers
is his distaste for any outside interference with his Church. He
looked askance at the attempts of secular authorities, statesmen and
Court-lawyers to have a say in Church matters, which, strictly, should
have been submitted to him alone and his preachers. Yet it was he
himself who had put the Church under State control; he had invited
the sovereigns and magistrates to decide on the most vital questions,
doing so partly owing to the needs of the time, partly as a logical
result of the new system. He himself had legalised the sequestration
of the Church’s lands and had helped to set up the State Consistories.
So long as the secular authorities were of his way of thinking he left
them a free hand, more or less. He was, however, forced to realise
more and more, particularly in the evening of his days, that their
arbitrary behaviour was ruining his influence and only making worse
the evils that his work had laid bare to the world.

In his last utterances he is fond of calling “Centaurs” the officials
and Court personages who, according to him, were stifling the Church
in her growth by their wantonness, ambition and avarice. He bewails
his inability to vanquish them; they are a necessary evil. “Make a
Visitation of your Churches all the same,” he told his friend Amsdorf,
early in January in the last year of his life; “the Lord will be with
you, and even should one or other of the Centaurs forbid you, you are
excused. Let them answer for it.”[1358]

We have also other utterances which testify to his deep distrust of the
secular authorities, on account of their real or imaginary encroachments.

“The Princes seize upon all the lands of the Church and leave the
poor students to starve, and thus the parishes become desolate, as is
already the case.”[1359]—“The Princes and the towns do little for the
support of our holy religion, leave everything in the lurch and do not
punish wickedness. Highly dangerous times are to come.”[1360]—“The
magistrates misuse their power against the Evangel; for this they will
pay dearly.”[1361]—“The politicians show that they regard our words
as those of men”; in this case we had better quit “Babylon” and leave
them to themselves.[1362]

“I see what is coming,” he wrote in 1541, “unless the tyranny of the
Turk assists us by frightening our [lower] nobles and humbling them,
they will illtreat us worse than do the Turks. Their only thought is
to put the sovereigns in leading-strings and to lay the burghers and
peasants in irons. The slavery of the Pope will be followed by a new
enslaving of the people under the nobles.”[1363]—In the same year he
says: “If the nobles go on in this way,” i.e. neglecting their duty
of “protecting the pious and punishing the wicked,” there will be “an
end of Germany and we shall soon be worse than even the Spaniards and
Turks; but they will catch it soon.”[1364]—In 1543 he indignantly
told a councillor who opposed him and his followers: “You are not
lords over the parishes and the preaching office; it was not you
who founded it but the Son of God, nor have you ever given anything
towards it, so that you have far less right to it than the devil has
to the kingdom of heaven; it is not for you to find fault with it,
or to teach, nor yet to forbid the administration of punishment.…
There is no shepherd-lad so humble that he will take a harsh word
from a strange master; it is the minister alone who must be the butt
of everyone, and put up with everything from all, while they will
suffer nothing from him, not even God’s own Word.”[1365]—In 1544 he
even said of his own Elector: “After all, the Court is of no use, its
rule is like that of the crab and snail. It either cannot get on or
else is always wanting to go back. Christ did well by His Church in
not confiding its government to the Courts. Otherwise the devil would
have nothing to do but to devour the souls of Christians.”[1366]—“The
rulers shut their eyes,” he had written shortly before, “they leave
great wantonness unpunished, and now have nothing better to do than
impose one tax after another on their poor underlings. Therefore will
the Lord destroy them in His wrath.”[1367]

“What then is to become of the Church if the world does not shortly
come to an end? I have lived my allotted span,” so he sighed in 1542,
“the devil is sick of my life and I am sick of the devil’s hate.”[1368]

He often gives vent to his wounded feelings in unseemly words. A strange
mixture of glowing fanaticism and coarse jocularity flows forth like a
stream of molten lava from the furnace within him.

Thus we have the famous utterances recorded above (vol. iii., p. 233
and vol. v., p. 229) called forth by the decline of his Church, the
carelessness of the rulers and the remissness of the preachers.

“Our Lord God sees,” he declares, “how the dogs [the princes who were
against him] soil the pavements, wet every corner and smash the basins
and platters; but when He begins to visit them, His anger will be
terrible.”[1369]

“To these swine,” so he wrote to Anton Lauterbach of the politicians
in the Duchy of Saxony, “we will leave their muck and hell-fire to
boot, if they wish. But they shall leave us our Lord, the Son of God,
and the kingdom of heaven as well!… With a good conscience we regard
them as reprobate servants of the devil; … be brave and cheerfully
despise the devil in these devil’s sons, and devil’s progeny until
they drive you away. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof’
(Ps xxiii. 1).… By your joy you will crucify them and, with them,
Satan, who seeks to destroy us. To speak plain German, we shall s⸺
into his mouth. Whether he likes it or not he must submit to having
his head trodden under foot, however much he may seek to snap at us
with his dreadful fangs. The seed of the woman is with us, whom also
we teach and confess and Whom we shall help to the mastery. Fare you
well in Him and pray for me.”[1370]

The minor State-officials he also handled roughly enough. These
“Junkers” take it upon them “to sing the praises of the papal filth.”
“They stick to the Pope’s behind like clotted manure.” “I know better
what ‘_Ius canonicum_’ is than you all will ever know or understand.
It is donkey’s dung, and, if you want it, I will readily give you it
to eat!” “If donkey’s dung be so much to your taste, go and eat it
elsewhere and do not make a stench in our churches.”[1371]

_The Present and the To-come_

On his last birthday, which he kept on Martinmas-Eve, 1545, Luther
assembled about him Melanchthon, Bugenhagen, Cruciger, George Major and
other guests, and to them opened his mind. According to the account left
by his friend Ratzeberger he spoke of the coming dissensions: “As soon
as he was gone the best of our men would fall away. I do not fear the
Papists, he remarked; they are for the most part rude, ignorant asses and
Epicureans; but our own brethren will injure the Evangel because they
have gone forth from us but were not of us. This will do more harm to the
Evangel than the Papists can.” The sad political outlook of Germany led
him to add: “Our children will have to take up the spear, for things will
fare ill in Germany.” Of the Catholics he said: “The Council of Trent is
very angry and means mischief; hence be careful to pray diligently, for
there will be great need of prayer when I am gone.” All, he exhorted “to
stand fast by the Evangel.”[1372]

“For it is the command of our stern Lord [the Elector],” he says
elsewhere, “that we should maintain undefiled the government of
the Church, dispense aright the Word, the Absolution and the
Sacraments according to the institution of Christ, and also comfort
consciences.”[1373]

Towards his end, according to Ratzeberger, he frequently told the
faithful at Wittenberg that, in order to fight shy of false doctrines,
they must hate reason as their greatest foe. “As soon as he was
dead they would preach and teach at Wittenberg a very different
doctrine”; hence they must “pray diligently and learn to prove the
spirits aright”; they were to keep their eyes open to see whether
what was preached agreed with Holy Scripture (here again the right of
judging falling on the simple faithful). But if it was “outside of
and apart from God’s Word, sweet and agreeable to reason and easy of
comprehension, then they were to avoid such doctrine and say: No, thou
hateful reason, thou art a whore, thee I will not follow.”[1374]

In a sermon on the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany, 1546, published
three years later after Luther’s death by Stephen Tucher under the
title “The last Sermon of Dr. Martin Luther of blessed memory,”[1375]
Luther again speaks at length of the “heresiarchs” who had already
arisen and whom more would follow; what the devil had been unable to
do by means of the Kaiser and Pope, that he “would do through those
who are still at one with us in doctrine”; “there will be a dreadful
time. Ah, the lawyers and the wise men at Court will say: ‘You are
proud, a revolt will ensue, etc., hence let us give way.’” But, in
matters of faith, there must be no talk of giving way, “pride may well
please us if it be not against the faith.”[1376]

The picture of reason as a mere prostitute was now once more vividly
before him. He hoped to dispose of the variant doctrines of others,
who, like himself, interpreted the Bible in their own fashion, simply
by urging contempt for reason. The faith in his own teaching, so he
declared, “in the doctrine which I have, not from them but from the
Grace of God,”[1377] must be preserved by means of a deadly warfare
against “reason, the devil’s bride and beautiful prostitute”; “for
she is the greatest seductress the devil has. The other gross sins
can be seen, but reason no one is able to judge; it goes its way and
leads to fanaticism.” The evil that is inherent in the flesh had not
yet been completely driven out; “I am speaking of concupiscence which
is a gross sin and of which everyone is sensible.” “But what I say
of concupiscence, which is a gross sin, is also to be understood of
reason, for the latter dishonours and insults God in His spiritual
gifts and indeed is far more whorish a sin than whoredom.”[1378]
When a Christian hears a Sacramentarian fanatic putting forward his
reasonable grounds he ought to say to that reason, which is speaking:
“Dear me, has the devil such a learned bride?—Away to the privy with
you and your bride; cease, accursed whore,” etc.[1379] Hence some
restriction was to be placed on private judgment; it was to be used
in moderation and only in so far as it tallied with faith (“_secundum
analogiam fidei_”).[1380] This “faith,” however, was in many instances
simply Luther’s own.

As Luther’s personality could not replace the outward rule of faith,
viz. the authoritative voice of the teaching Church, his dreary
prognostications were only too soon to be fulfilled. Hence in the
appendix to another Wittenberg edition of Luther’s last sermon these
words, as early as 1558, are represented as “the late Dr. Martin
Luther’s excellent _prophecies_ about the impending corruption and
falling away of the chief teachers in our churches, particularly at
Wittenberg.”[1381]

It is curious that, towards the close of his life, the Wittenberg
Professor should have come again to insist so strongly on those points
in his teaching for which he had fought at the outset, in spite of all
the difficulties and contradictions they had been shown to involve,
with the Bible, tradition and reason. He could at least claim that
he had not abandoned his olden theses of the blindness of reason, of
the unfreedom of the will, of the sinfulness of that concupiscence,
from which none can get away, of the saving power of faith alone and
the worthlessness of good works for the gaining of a heavenly reward,
of the Bible as the sole source of faith and each man’s right of
interpreting it, and, last, but not least, that of his own mission and
call received from God Himself.

The decline of morals, now so obvious, was another phantom that haunted
the evening of his days.

In the beginning of 1546 he confided to Amsdorf his anxiety regarding
Meissen, Leipzig and other places where licence prevailed, together
with contempt of the Gospel and its ministers. “This much is certain:
Satan and his whole kingdom is terribly wroth with our Elector. To
this kingdom your men of Meissen belong; they are the most dissolute
folk on earth. Leipzig is pride and avarice personified, worse than
any Sodom could be.… A new evil that Satan is hatching for us may be
seen in the spread of the spirit of the Münster Dippers. After laying
hold of the common people this spirit of revolt against all authority
has also infected the great, and many Counts and Princes. May God
prevent and overreach it!”[1382]

He tells “Bishop” George of Merseburg, in Feb., 1546, that “steps must
be taken against the scandals into which the people are plunging head
over heels, as though all law were at an end.” It seems to him that a
new Deluge is coming. “Let us beware lest what Moses wrote of the days
before the flood repeats itself, how ‘they took to wife whomsoever
they pleased, even their own sisters and mothers and those they had
carried off from their husbands.’ Instances of the sort have reached
my ear privately. May God prevent such doings from becoming public as
in the case of Herod and the kings of Egypt!”[1383] “The world is full
of Satan and Satanic men,” so he groans even in an otherwise cheerful
letter.[1384]

Up to the day of his death he was concerned for the welfare of the
students at Wittenberg University. Among the 2000 young men at the
University (for such was their number in Luther’s last years) there
were many who were in bitter want. Luther sought to alleviate this by
attacking, even in his sermons, those who were bent on fleecing the
young; he not only gave readily out of his own slender means but also
wrote to others asking them to be mindful of the students; of this we
have an instance in a note he wrote in his later years, in which he asks
certain “dear gentlemen” (possibly of the University or the magistracy)
for help for a “pious and learned fellow” who would have to leave
Wittenberg “for very hunger”; he declares that he himself was ready to
contribute a share, though he was no longer able to afford the gifts he
was daily called upon to bestow.[1385]

We know how grieved he was at the downfall of the schools and how loud
his complaints were of the lawlessness of youth; how it distressed him
to see the schools looked down upon though their contribution to the
maintenance of the Churches was “entirely out of question.”[1386]

For his University of Wittenberg he requests the prayers of others
against those who were undermining its reputation. He sees the
small effect of his earnest exhortations to the students against
immorality.[1387] The excellent statutes he had laid down for the town
and the University were nullified by the bad example of men in high
places. “Ah, how bitterly hostile the devil is to our Churches and
schools.… Tyranny and sects are everywhere gaining the upper hand by
dint of violence.… I believe there are many wicked knaves and spies here
on the watch for us, who rejoice when scandals and dissensions arise.
Hence we must watch and pray diligently. Unless God preserves us all is
up. And so it looks. Pray, therefore, pray! This school [of Wittenberg]
is as it were the foundation and stronghold of pure religion.”[1388]
He once declared sadly that, among all the students in the town there
were scarcely two from whom something might be hoped as future pastors
of souls. “If out of all the young men present here two or three
honest theologians grow up then we should have reason to thank God!
Good theologians are indeed rare birds on this earth. Among a thousand
you will seldom find two, or even one. And indeed the world no longer
deserves such good teachers, nor does it want them; things will go ill
when I, and you and some few others are gone.”[1389]

“The world was like this before the flood, before the destruction of
Sodom, before the Babylonian captivity, before the destruction of
Jerusalem—and so again it is before the fall of Germany.… Should you,
however, ask what good has come of our teaching, answer me first, what
good came of Lot’s preaching in Sodom?”[1390]

To divert his thoughts from these saddening cares he often turned to
Æsop. It is of interest to note how highly he always prized Æsop’s
Fables, not merely as a means of education for the young in the
elementary schools, but even as furnishing a stimulating topic for
conversation with his friends.

He is very fond of adducing morals from these fables both in his
Table-Talk and in his writings.

Æsop’s tale of the fight between the wounded snake and the crab he
dictated to his son Hans as a Latin exercise,[1391] and, in 1540, when
a Mandate of the Kaiser aroused his suspicions owing to its kindly
wording, the old man at once related to his guests the fable of the
wolf who seeks to lead the sheep to a good pasture, and declared that
he could easily see through this “Lycophilia.”[1392]

For a long time he had a work on hand which he was destined never
to complete; he was anxious to provide a new and better edition
of Æsop for the schools, which, so he hoped, should replace the,
in some respects unseemly, fables of Steinhöwel’s edition then in
use which had been corrupted by additions from Poggio’s Facetiæ. A
series of amusing and at the same time instructive fables which he
translated with this object in view is still extant. That he found
time for such a work in the midst of all his other pressing labours
is sufficient evidence that he had it much at heart. The Preface to
his unfinished little work, which he read aloud to a friend in 1538,
pointed out, that writings of this kind were intended for “children
and the simple,” whose mental development he wished to keep in view,
carefully excluding anything that was offensive. The collection of
Fables then in circulation, “though written professedly for the
young,” unfortunately contained tales with narratives of “shameful and
unchaste knavery such as no chaste or pious man, let alone any youth,
could hear or read without injury to himself; it was as though the
book had been written in a common house of ill fame or among dissolute
scamps.”[1393]

He was very determined in putting down scandals when they occurred in
his own home. A young relative, who was addicted to drunkenness, he
took severely to task, pointing out the good example, which in the
interests of the Evangel his household was strictly bound to give; when
the maidservant, Rosina, whom he had taken into his house, turned out a
person of bad life, he could not sufficiently express his indignation and
dismissed her from the family. A similar case also occurred at the time
of his flight from Wittenberg in July, 1545; he writes to Catherine in
the letter in which he tells her of his intention of not returning: “If
Leck’s ‘Bachscheisse,’ our second Rosina and deceiver, has not yet been
laid by the heels, do what you can that the miscreant may feel ashamed of
herself.”[1394]

Catherine Bora was a good helper in matters of this sort. In fact she
performed with zeal and assiduity the duties that fell to her lot in
tending the aged and infirm man, and looking after the house and the
small property. Amidst his many and great difficulties he often confessed
that she was a comfort to him, and gratefully acknowledges her work.
In his letters to her during his later years he writes in so religious
a strain, and in such heartfelt language, that the reader might be
forgiven for thinking that Luther had entirely succeeded in forgetting
the irreligious nature of the union between a monk and a nun. “Grace
and peace in the Lord,” he writes in a letter from Eisleben of Feb. 7,
1546, to his “housewife.” “Read, you dear Katey, John and the Smaller
Catechism, of which you once said: All that is told in this book applies
to me. For you try to care for your God just as though He were not
Almighty and could not make ten Dr. Martins should the old one be drowned
in the Saale, etc. Leave me in peace with your cares, I have a better
guardian than even you and all the angels.”[1395]

3. Luther’s Death at Eisleben (1546)

In March, 1545, there was sent to Luther by Philip of Hesse an Italian
broadside purporting to have been printed in Rome, and containing a
fearsome account of Luther’s supposed death. In it “the ambassador of
the King of France” announces that Luther had wished his body set up
on the altar for adoration; also that before he died he had received
the Body of Christ, but that the Host had hovered untouched over the
grave after the funeral; a diabolical din had been heard coming from the
grave, but, on opening it, it was found to be empty though it emitted a
murderous stench of brimstone. Luther at once published the narrative
with an half-ironical, half-indignant commentary. He sought to persuade
the people that the Pope had actually wished for his death and damnation.
In a poem which he prefixed to the pamphlet he tells the Pope in his
usual style that: his life was indeed the Pope’s plague, but that his
death would be the Pope’s death too; the Pope might choose which he liked
best, the plague or death.—About the real origin of this alleged Italian
production nothing is known.[1396]

In his bodily sufferings and anxiety of mind concerning the present and
the future of his life’s work Luther frequently spoke of his desire for a
speedy release by death. His words on this subject throw a strong light
on his frame of mind.

As things are “ever growing worse,” he says, “let our Lord God take
away His own. He will remove the pious and then make an end of
Germany.” “I am very weary of life,” he declared, “may Our Lord come
right speedily and take me away, and, above all, may He come with His
Judgment Day! I will reach out my neck to Him that He may strike me
down with His thunderbolt where I am. Amen.”[1397]—As early as June
11, 1539 (?), when he was wished another forty years of life, he said
that, even were he offered a Paradise on earth for forty years, “I
would not accept it. I would rather hire an executioner to chop off
my head. So wicked is the world now! And the people are becoming real
devils, so that one could wish him nothing better than a good death
and then away!”[1398]

Do you know, he said on one occasion, who it is that holds back God’s
arm? “I am the block that stops God’s way. When I die He will strike.
No doubt we are despised; but let them gather up the leavings when
they are most despised; that is my advice.”[1399]

That, “even in our own lifetime, the world should thus repay us,”
seemed to him intolerable.[1400] “I hold that, for a thousand years,
the world has never been so unfriendly to anyone as to me. I am also
unfriendly to it, and know of nothing in life that I take pleasure
in.”[1401]

Of the sudden death that confronted him he had, however, no idea. On
the contrary, in 1543, when he was suffering from severe trouble in
the head, he said to Catherine Bora, that he would summon his son
Hans from Torgau to Wittenberg to be present at his death, which now
seemed near at hand; but, he added: “I shall not die so suddenly, I
shall first take to my bed and be ill; but I shall not lie there long.
I have had enough of the world and it has had enough of me.… I give
thanks to Thee My God that Thou hast numbered me in Thy little flock
which endures persecution for the sake of Thy Word.”[1402]

Incidentally he declared: “If I die in my bed it will be to defy the
Papists and put them to shame.” Why? Because they will not have been
able to do me the harm “they wished, and, in fact, were in duty bound
to have done me.”[1403]

The thought of death often made his hatred of the Catholics to flame
up more luridly. “Only after my death will they feel what Luther
really was”; should he fall a prey to his adversaries before his
time, he would carry with him to the grave “a long train of bishops,
priestlings and monks, for my life shall be their hangman, my death
their devil.” He announces angrily, “They shall not be able to resist
me,” and that, “in God’s name, he will tread the lion and the dragon
under foot,” but of all this, according to him, they were to have only
a taste during his lifetime; only after his death would matters be
carried out in earnest.[1404]

Brooding over his own death he says of the death of the believing
Christian, viz. of the man who puts his trust in the Evangel: “If a
man seriously meditates in his heart on God’s Word, believes it and
falls asleep and dies in it, he will pass away before he realises that
death has come, and is assuredly saved by the Word in which he has
thus believed and died.”[1405] These words he wrote on Feb. 7, 1546,
to an Eisleben gentleman in a copy of his Home-Postils. He prefaced
them with a passage from Scripture in which he himself doubtless had
often sought comfort: “He that keepeth my Word shall not taste of
death for ever” (John viii. 51). In one of his last lengthy notes
he also seeks to make his own this believing confidence: “Christ
commands us to believe in Him. Although we are not able to believe
as firmly as we should yet God has patience with us.” “I hide myself
under the shelter of the Son of God; Him I hold and honour as my Lord
to Whom I must fly when the devil, sin or any other ill assails me.
For He is my shield, extending beyond the heavens and the earth and
the foster-hen under whose wings I creep from the wrath of God.” Thus
he was so steeped in the delusion of faith alone that he could thus
wish to die in sole reliance on the “Word of God,” thanks to which he
is to escape “the devil, death, hell and sin.”[1406] We may remember
that, in one of his earliest controversial sermons, where a glimpse
of his new doctrine is already to be detected, he had used the simile
of the foster-hen. Now, in his old age, he returns to it, the richer
by the experience of a long lifetime, albeit he now sees that it is
difficult, nay impossible, “to believe as firmly as we should.”

In Jan., 1546, Luther set out for the third time for Mansfeld, in order
to settle the business of Count Albert of Mansfeld; only as a corpse was
he to return home.

The Elector did not look with approval on Luther’s arduous labours as
peacemaker, while Chancellor Brück even went so far as to characterise
the Counts’ interminable lawsuits about the mines and the rest as a
“pig-market.” Luther, nevertheless, set out again on Jan. 23, regardless
of his already impaired health, betaking himself this time to Eisleben.
He was accompanied by his three sons, their tutor and his famulus
Aurifaber, the editor of the German Table-Talk. At Halle they were
detained three days in the house of Jonas on account of the floating ice
and the flooded state of the Saale. “We did not wish to take to the water
and tempt God,” so he wrote to Catherine on Jan. 25, “for the devil bears
us a grudge and also dwells in the water; and, moreover, ‘discretion is
the best part of valour’; nor is there any need for us to give the Pope
and his myrmidons such cause for delight.”[1407]

On the 26th Luther preached a sermon in which, with all the strength
at his command, he poured forth his anger against Popery, “which had
cheated and befooled the whole world.” “The Pope, the Cardinals and the
lousy, scurvy, mangy monks have hoaxed and deluded us.” He proceeded to
storm against the unfortunate monks who had dared to remain in a town
now almost entirely won over to the innovations: “I am above measure
astonished that you gentlemen of Halle can still tolerate amongst you
these knaves, the crawling, lousy monks.… These wanton, verminous
miscreants take pleasure only in folly.… You gentlemen ought to drive
the imbecile, sorry creatures out of the town.… What we teach and preach
we do not teach as our own words, discovered or invented by us, like
the visions of the monks which they preach; their lies are like bulging
hop-pockets or sacks of wool.”[1408]

On the 28th, after having been joined by Jonas, Luther and his companions
crossed the swollen Saale. On this occasion he said to Jonas: “Dear Dr.
Jonas, wouldn’t it be a fine thing were I, Dr. Martin, my three sons and
you to be all drowned!” Not far from Eisleben they were overtaken by a
cold wind which brought the traveller in the carriage to such a state of
weakness and breathlessness that he nearly fainted. “The devil always
plays me this trick,” so he consoled himself, “when I have something
great on hand.”[1409]

At Eisleben he took up his abode with the town-clerk, and soon got well
enough to take part in the negotiations; he visited the several families
of the Counts and amused himself in his hours of leisure by looking at
the young nobles and their ladies tobogganing.[1410] To Catherine he
wrote jestingly on Feb. 1, that his fit near Eisleben was the work of the
Jews, numbers of whom lived there (at Rissdorf); they had raised up a
bitter wind against him, which “penetrated the back of the carriage and
passed right through my cap into my head, and tried to turn my brain to
ice. This may have brought on the fainting; now, however, thank God, I
am quite well, were it not for the pretty women, etc.” (cp. above, vol.
iii., p. 281). He extols the Naumburg beer, which suits him well, says
that his three sons have gone on to Jena and alludes to the blow he was
planning against the Mansfeld Jews, on whom Count Albert frowned and whom
he was determined to abandon.[1411]

When Catherine again expressed fears about his health he replied in a
joking vein on Feb. 10, giving her an account of all that her anxious
thoughts had brought upon him: The fire that broke out just in front of
his door had almost burnt him up, the plaster that fell from the ceiling
of his room had almost killed him, “having a mind to verify your pious
fears if the dear and holy angels had not been watching over me. I fear,
if you don’t put your fears to rest, the earth will finally open and
swallow us up.… We are, thank God, well and sound.“[1412]

In the interval, while the negotiations were still proceeding, he had
dealt very rudely with the Jews in a sermon on Feb. 7, in spite of the
fact that the Countess of Mansfeld, Solms’s widow, was said to be in
their favour. He was displeased to see them left unmolested. “No one
lifts a finger against them.” In a manuscript “exhortation against the
Jews,” written at that time,[1413] he briefly sums up his wishes: “You
Lords ought not to tolerate them, but rather drive them out,” at least if
they refuse to become Christians. Not long before he had declared that,
with his own hands, he could put a Jew to death who dared to blaspheme
Christ; when writing to Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg he also praised
one of his partisans, a certain provost, simply and solely for his hatred
of the Jews: “The provost pleases me beyond measure because he is so
strong against the Jews.”[1414]

Altogether, Luther preached four sermons at Eisleben. Twice he went
to the Supper, so we are told, after having previously received
“Absolution.” On the second occasion “he ordained” two priests,[1415]
his friend’s account narrates, “in the apostolic way.” Every evening
he assembled his friends about him, the chief being Justus Jonas and
the Eisleben preacher, Michael Cœlius. In their company he showed a
good temper, much as the long-drawn, tedious negotiations annoyed him.
He put it down to the devil that the scheme of settlement drawn up by
expert lawyers, encountered so much opposition on both sides; indeed he
fancied that all the devils had gathered together at Eisleben to mock at
his efforts in this dreary business. He would fain have himself played
the poltergeist among the combatants, to “grease the wheels of the
lazy coach” and “bring them back at last to some sense of the duty of
Christian charity.”[1416] The reader will remember the apparition that
Luther thought he saw in those days.[1417] At last, on Feb. 14, he was
able to write to his “dear, kind housewife”: “God has shown us great
mercy here, for, through their solicitors, the Lords have settled almost
everything save two or three points.”[1418] These outstanding matters
were satisfactorily adjusted shortly afterwards.

In the same letter Luther said: “We hope, please God, to return home
this week.” Thus he scarcely expected to die yet, but still hoped to be
able to get back to Wittenberg before the end came. “Here we eat and
drink like lords,” so he assures his Catherine, “and are very well looked
after.”[1419] On Feb. 16, at table, when the talk turned on sickness
and death, Luther said: “When I get home to Wittenberg I shall at once
lay myself in my coffin and give the grubs a nice fat doctor to feed
on.”[1420] For all his weakness his cheerfulness had not left him.

New cares were now troubling his mind. He had learnt how the Kaiser was
insisting on submission to the Council, how the religious conference at
Ratisbon had been a failure, and had merely given the Imperial forces
time to arm themselves for an attack on the Schmalkalden Leaguers. The
coming defeat of the League at Mühlberg was already casting its shadow.
“May God help His Highness our Master” (the Elector), remarked Luther;
“he is in for a bad time.”[1421] His annoyance with Kaiser Charles led
him to say: The “Emperor is dead against us, and now he is showing the
hand he so long had concealed.”[1422]

Luther, however, was not to live to see the blow delivered which the
flouted Imperial power had so long been threatening.

“During those three weeks” Luther frequently left the supper-table with
the admonition to “pray for our Lord God [i.e. for His cause][1423] that
it may go well with His Churches; the Council of Trent is highly wroth.”

Holy Scripture, to which he had always devoted himself with so much
energy, even now engrossed him. He felt keenly its obscurity and depth.
The last short note he made was on the Book of Books and the difficulty
of reaching its innermost meaning. After instancing the difficulty of
rightly understanding even Virgil or Cicero, it proceeds: “Let no one
think he has sufficiently tasted Holy Scripture, unless, for a hundred
years, he has ruled the Churches with prophets such as Elias, Eliseus,
John the Baptist, Christ and the Apostles.”[1424] By this significant
admission he had of course no intention of repudiating the principle,
whereby in the stead of the teaching authority of the Church he had put
the written Word of God as the clear and final rule for each individual.
At this time, just before his death, he was less inclined than ever to
retract one jot of his doctrine. Nevertheless the fact that he himself
was compelled to admit in such terms the depth and the difficulty of the
Bible seems scarcely to bear out his usual contention, viz. that Holy
Scripture is the one and all-sufficient guide and master for all.

On Feb. 17, the first symptoms showed themselves of the attack which was
to carry him off before the next dawn.[1425] During the day he was very
restless; once he said: “Here at Eisleben I was baptised, how if I were
to remain here?” In the evening he felt the oppression on the chest of
which he had had to complain in previous illnesses; he therefore had
himself rubbed down with hot flannels and, as soon as he felt better,
went off to supper. During the meal he was, as usual, talkative and in
good humour; he told some humorous anecdotes and also spoke of more
serious things, and ate and drank heartily. He casually said that,
were he to die as a man of sixty-three, he would have attained a quite
respectable age, “for people do not now live to be very old. Well, we old
men must live so long in order to be able to look behind the devil [i.e.
learn his wickedness] and experience so much malice, faithlessness and
misery in the world that we may bear witness what a wicked spirit the
devil is.” With the pessimism peculiar to him he concludes: “The human
race is like the sheep being led to the slaughter.”

According to Ratzeberger, the Elector’s medical adviser, who collected
the latest particulars concerning Luther, the latter, on the evening of
the 17th, “when about to lie down to sleep after supper,” wrote “with
a piece of chalk on the wall the verse: In life, O Pope, I was thy
plague, in dying I shall be thy death” (cp. above, vol. iii., p. 435).
If we may trust this account, then, on this occasion Luther again used
the words which had once before served him under similar circumstances
at Schmalkalden. Those actually present at Eisleben make, however, no
mention of this, and, in his funeral address, Jonas merely says, that
these verses were Luther’s fitting “epitaph” which he had once written
for himself. Cœlius also, in his panegyric on Luther, says that though
dead he still survives in his books; “he will also after his death,
please God, be the death of the Pope, thanks to his writings, just as he
was his plague during life.” As no mention of the writing on the wall is
made by either of these two, nor yet in the account of his death given
by his three friends, though there was no reason for their omitting it,
Ratzeberger’s account stands alone and must be taken for what it is
worth.[1426]

The following is based principally on the narratives of Jonas, Cœlius and
Aurifaber, though the fact that it emanates from enthusiastic friends of
Luther’s has not been overlooked. Even though, as is highly probable, the
three writers in question made the most of the edifying traits they were
able to mention, yet this is no sufficient ground for rejecting their
account as a whole. Even the short prayers which they put on Luther’s
lips may not be pure inventions.

After supper Luther betook himself rather early to his sitting-room
and, as his custom was, said his prayers at the open window. Another
severe attack of heart oppression then came on; his friends hurried to
his assistance and again tried to mend matters by rubbing him with hot
cloths; he was, however, only able to get an hour’s sleep on a sofa in
the room. He refused to have the doctors called in as he did not think
there was any danger. For the next two or three hours, viz. till 1 a.m.
he slept in his own bed in the adjoining bedroom, after telling his
anxious friends and his two sons, Martin and Paul, to go to rest. Jonas,
the principal witness at his death, had a couch in the same room as
Luther.

About one o’clock Luther suddenly felt very unwell. “Oh, my God, how ill
I feel,” he said to Jonas, and, getting out of bed, he dragged himself
into the sitting-room, saying he would probably die at Eisleben after
all, and repeating the prayer: “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.”
He complained of an intolerable burden on his chest. Two physicians,
one a doctor and the other a master of medicine, were now summoned in
haste. Before they arrived the patient seems to have suddenly collapsed;
they found him on the sofa, unconscious and with no perceptible pulse.
Recovering consciousness he said, all bathed in the cold sweat of death:
“My God, I feel so ill and anxious, I am going,” and then, according to
Jonas, he said a short prayer of thanks to God for having revealed to him
His Son Jesus Christ in Whom he believed and Whom he had preached and
confessed, whilst the hateful Pope and all the ungodly had blasphemed
this same Christ; thereupon, all trustfully, he commended his soul to the
Lord. No less than three times, according to this witness, did he repeat
in Latin the familiar Bible text: “God so loved the world that He gave
His Only Begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish
but have everlasting life.” This text (John iii. 16) he had, indeed,
always esteemed highly, and seen in it the seal of his doctrine. He is
also said to have repeated other Bible texts while medicines were being
given him. Count Albert and his relatives, who had come in, also offered
him various remedies. Soon after he seemed again to lose consciousness.
In spite of the confessions just mentioned Jonas and Cœlius shouted once
more in his ear the question, whether he remained steadfast in the faith
in Christ and His doctrine which he had preached; to which they caught
the reply “Yes.” That was his last word.—To all appearance his death was
due to an apoplectic seizure.

All things considered, it is very odd that Luther apparently never gave
a thought to his life’s partner, whom he had left at Wittenberg, and
that, at least as it seems, his sons were not with him at his death. The
argument from the silence of his friends on this point is not devoid of
force, for it would have been so easy for them to supply what we here
miss. Their silence might even be adduced in support of the substantial
reliability of their narrative. The best explanation of Luther’s apparent
oblivion is probably to be sought in the result of the stroke which
stupefied him and blotted out the memory of those dear to him.[1427]

Towards 3 a.m., after drawing a last deep breath. Luther yielded up his
soul into the hands of the Judge. This was on Feb. the 18th.

At the demand of both the physicians the apothecary of Eisleben was sent
for, either immediately after death had taken place, or possibly just
before, to administer a stimulant by means of a clysteral injection. The
apothecary, Johann Landau by name, was a Catholic and a convert, a nephew
of the convert polemic Wicel. He drew up a report of his visit which has
become famous in the discussion of the question stupidly broached anew of
recent years as to whether Luther committed suicide.[1428] We here give
the principal passages of his very realistic narrative. He speaks of
himself in the third person.

“The apothecary was awakened at the third hour after midnight.… When
he arrived he said to the doctors: ‘He is quite dead, of what use can
an injection be?’ Count Albert and some scholars were present. The
physicians, however, replied: ‘At any rate have a try with the instrument
that he may come again to himself if there be any life yet in him.’ When
the apothecary inserted the nozzle he noticed some flatulency given
off into the ball of the syringe.”[1429] The apothecary persevered in
his efforts until the physicians saw that all was useless. “The two
physicians disputed together as to the cause of death. The doctor said
it was a fit of apoplexy, for the mouth was drawn down and the whole of
the right side discoloured.”[1430] The master, on the other hand, thought
it incredible that so holy a man could have been thus stricken down by
the hand of God, and thought it was rather the result of a suffocating
catarrh and that death was due to choking. After this all the other
Counts arrived. Jonas, however, who was seated at the head of the bed,
wept aloud and wrung his hands. When asked whether Luther had complained
of any pain the evening before he replied: “Dear me, no, he was more
cheerful yesterday than he had been for many a day. Oh, God Almighty,
God Almighty, etc.”—by this Jonas did not mean to deny the fit of heart
oppression that had occurred the previous day, since he himself reports
it to the Elector; distracted by grief as he was he probably only thought
of the good spirits Luther had been in that evening, and of the contrast
with the dead body he now saw lying before him. Or it may be that he did
not regard the heart oppression as actual “pain.”

Landau’s report continues: “In the meantime the Counts brought costly
scents to be applied to the body of the deceased, for on several
occasions before this he had been thought to be dead when he lay for a
long time motionless and giving no sign of life, as happened to him, for
instance, at Schmalkalden when he was tormented with the stone.… The
apothecary vigorously rubbed his nose, mouth, forehead and left side for
some time with the oils. Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt came and bent over the
corpse and asked the apothecary whether any sign of life remained. The
latter, however, replied that there was not the least life in him seeing
that the hands, nose, forehead, cheeks and ears were already stiff and
cold in death.… Jonas said: It will be best now for us to send a swift
rider to the Elector and for one of us to sit down and write and tell him
all that has happened.”

Jonas himself wrote this first still extant account to his sovereign
“about four o’clock in the morning.”

On Feb. 20 Luther’s body was taken to Halle, and early on the 22nd to
Wittenberg, where it was received at the Elster Gate—the scene of the
famous burning of the Bull—by the University, the Town Council and the
burghers. He was buried in the Schlosskirche. There his bones still rest
in the grave as was proved by an examination made on Feb. 14, 1892.[1431]

4. In the World of Legend

Barely twenty years later a report that Luther had committed suicide went
the rounds among certain of his opponents, the report being subsequently
grounded on the alleged statement of a servant.

The first writer who mentions the servant is the Italian Oratorian,
Thomas Bozius, in a book on the marks of the Church printed in Rome in
1591. “Luther after having supped heartily that evening and gone to bed
quite content,” so he writes, “died that same night by suffocation. I
hear that it has recently been discovered through the confession of a
witness who was then his servant and who came over to us in late years,
that Luther brought himself to a miserable end by hanging; but that
all the inmates of the house who knew of the incident were bound under
oath not to divulge the matter, for the honour of the Evangel as it was
said.”[1432]

It was not till the beginning of the 17th century that the text of the
supposed letter of Luther’s servant began to be circulated, according
to which, when the latter went one morning to awaken Luther “as usual”
(i.e. about 7 a.m.) he found he had committed suicide; this, however,
is quite at variance with the definite accounts we have of the time of
death. The supposed servant claims to have been alone when he found “our
Master Martin hanging from the bedpost, miserably strangled,” whereas the
notes made at the time speak of the presence of witnesses both before and
after the death which, moreover, was quite a natural one. The apocryphal
letter bears no writer’s name nor do we know anything of its source; it
seems to have made its first public appearance at Antwerp in 1606 in the
work of the Franciscan Sedulius, who probably took it in good faith. It
is remarkable, that, down to 1650, as Paulus has proved, only one German
writer mentions this fictitious letter, though foreign polemics were busy
with it. Outside of Germany such inventions found more ready credence,
particularly among the zealous and more imaginative Catholics of the
Latin race, who were only too willing to seize on any tale which was to
the discredit of the lives of the German foes of Catholicism.[1433]

The falsehood of the legend of Luther’s suicide was most convincingly
proved by N. Paulus in his special work on the subject (1898). This
scholar submitted the fable to the sharp knife of criticism with a
broadminded love of truth that honours his Catholicism as much as his
acumen does honour to him as a critic.

It is barely credible to us to-day what inventions grew up in the 16th
century, both on the Catholic and the Protestant side, about the deaths
of well-known public men who happened to be the object of animosity to
one party or the other. Suicide, or murder at the hands of friend or
foe, or, more frequently, dreadful maladies or sudden death under the
most horrible shapes were the ordinary penalties assigned to opponents,
not only by the populace but even by the more credulous type of learned
writers. We must not forget that Luther himself had at hand a list of the
persecutors of the Evangel, who, in his own day, had been snatched away
by sudden death, and that it served him on occasion in his sermons and
writings.[1434]

It is an undeniable fact that Luther did much to pave the way for such
stories. His printed Table-Talk could well be taken as a model. Among
the fearsome tales of death he himself related was e.g. that of Mutian
the humanist, who, refusing to become a Lutheran, fell from poverty into
despair and poisoned himself;[1435] of the Archbishop of Treves, Richard
of Greiffenklau, who was “bodily carried off to hell by the devil”;[1436]
of the Catholic preacher, Urban of Kunewalde, who, “having fallen away
from the Evangel,” was “struck by a thunderbolt” in the church, and then
again by a flash of lightning that passed through his body from head to
foot, because he had asked heaven for a sign to prove that he was in the
right,[1437] etc.[1438] “All these perished miserably,” he says, “like
senseless swine. And so too it will happen with the others.”[1439]

In those days, partly owing to Luther’s influence, people were very ready
to admit the devil’s intervention in the horrible death that befell their
foes; the Catholic champions would all seem to have had a shocking end,
could we but trust the writers in the Protestant camp.[1440]

Eck they depicted entirely possessed by the devil and “dying like a
brute beast, quite out of his mind.” Of Emser (when still living) Luther
himself says, that he had been killed suddenly by the “fiery darts and
arrows of the devil.”[1441] Cochlæus, according to other writers, was
removed from the world in an awful way. Johann Fabri it was said had
died in despair, saying to those who exhorted him to have confidence:
“Too late, too late.” Pighius was made out to have died by his own hand.
Latomus was represented as crying out on his death-bed that he was a
devil incarnate and had claws on his fingers and toes. Hofmeister, the
learned Augustinian, according to the Protestant version, repeatedly said
before dying: “I belong to the devil body and soul.” Of the Jesuits,
even their founder, Ignatius of Loyola, had a bad death. Canisius was
struck dumb in the pulpit at Worms and was carried off by the judgment
of God; some were not wanting, however, who declared that he had been
converted to Luther’s doctrine. Seven years before his death, it was
reported of Bellarmine, the great controversialist of that day, that “he
had died miserably and in despair,” carried off on the back of a fiery
he-goat from hell; and “even to this very day,” so it was told during
his lifetime, “Bellarmine may be heard gruesomely howling in the wind,
astride his flaming, winged steed.”

Needless to say, many of the converts who turned their back on Luther and
took the part of the Catholic Church “perished miserably”! “Many of these
devil’s henchmen,” writes a “simple minister of the Word,” “who knowingly
and of malice aforethought, as they themselves admit, deny the known
truth of the Evangel, have been carried off alive by the devil, or have
howled before their death like wolves and tigers, as notoriously happened
in the case of that firebrand Staphylus.”[1442]

If similar tales, representing in an unfavourable light Luther’s life
and death, were equally rife among the Catholics, this can be no matter
for surprise if we bear in mind how greatly they were vexed by the
exaggerated eulogies passed on him and his life’s work, and how much
they had been stung by his polemics and furious onslaught on the Church.
Whoever loved the olden Church held Luther’s very name in execration.

One such tale early current at Halle was that, when the funeral
procession arrived at Wittenberg, the coffin was found empty, Luther’s
corpse having vanished on the road. A number of rooks having described
circles in the air about the corpse at Halle, a later tale made them out
to have been devils “streaming to the funeral of their prophet.”[1443]
Proof of this general foregathering of the devils was even found in
the comparative calmness of those possessed, who, it was argued, had
evidently been forsaken for a while by their diabolical tenants, the
latter’s presence at the burial explaining their temporary departure from
their usual habitats.[1444] The corpse, it was also said, gave out so
evil a smell that the bearers had to leave it on the road to Wittenberg.

Other versions of these tales deserve to be mentioned. According to
Johann Oldecop, the Hildesheim Dominican (†1574), who, however, is not
reliable in what he had at second hand, Luther was simply found dead in
his bed. According to Simon Fontaine (1558), a French writer, who also
speaks of his sudden death, he had “his nun” with him that night; this
is also affirmed in the works of Jérôme Bolsec and James Laing, printed
in Paris, as well as in a work published at Ingolstadt. According to
William Reginald, Professor at the English College of Douay (1597),
Luther had been strangled in the night by Catherine Bora. The same tale
was afterwards told at Münster in Westphalia by Johann Münch (1617).

Even more common were the reports, quite in accordance with the manners
which Luther had fostered, that the devil had murdered him. The Polish
scholar, Stanislaus Hosius, asserted this in 1558, and, later, it is
mentioned, though only tentatively, by the Dutch theologian, William
Lindanus and the Paris theologian Prateolus. In 1615, Robert Bellarmine,
speaking in general terms, says that Luther, after an illness lasting
only a few hours, “yielded up his soul to the devil”;[1445] but the
“_Compendium fidei_” 1607 of Franz Coster (already published in Dutch
in 1595) had been beforehand in particulars of Luther’s death at the
devil’s hands. He tells how, according to the statement of a noble
lady of Eichsfeld, Luther’s body had been found with the “neck red and
out of joint,” hence it was plain that “he had been strangled by the
devil.” Peter Pázmány a Magyar writer (1613) had heard that the devil had
appeared in the shape of a great sheep-dog to the guests at table on the
evening previous to Luther’s death, and that Luther had exclaimed: “What,
so soon?” Claude de Sainctes (1575) a French theologian, finds nothing
extraordinary in Luther’s horrible death, since most of the Church’s
foes had been brought to a violent end by the devil as the examples of
Zwingli, Carlstadt, Œcolampadius and others showed!

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:

“What, full of God’s spirit, Luther once taught
That doth his godly flock now hold fast.”[1455]

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 mine own sweet Fatherland
I did die a death so grand.
At Wittenberg in peace I lie;
To God be praise and thanks on high.”

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

“Before the trump of doom unmask that devil’s child
The Antichrist, with fiendish sin defiled.”

For ever and for ever it would remain true that

“Pope and Antichrist have sprung
From the wicked devil’s dung.”[1462]

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.

Cochlæus is likewise unable to refrain from remarking that, in
Luther’s writings, side by side with what is worthless there is much
that is good, in his exposition of Holy Scripture, in his exhortations
and also in his censures. For many men, and among them some of high
standing, believed [at first] that he was guided by the Spirit of God
and by zeal for virtue to remove the abuses of the hypocrites, to
amend morals to improve the education of the clergy, and to promote in
people’s hearts the love and worship of God.“[1579] Cochlæus points
out how Luther had taught his followers to steep themselves in the
Bible, so that they gained “so much skill and experience” that they
had “no scruples in disputing about the faith and the Gospel even with
magisters and doctors of Holy Scripture”; they had been much more
diligent than the Catholics in learning by heart the Bible in its
German dress; they were in the habit “of quoting Scripture more than
the priests and monks did, for which reason they accused Catholics
of being ignorant of it or not understanding it however learned they
might be as theologians”; their teachers “quoted the Greek and Hebrew
texts, and the variant readings, scoffed at our theologians when
they were ignorant of these things and all agreed in representing
Luther as the best theologian in the world.” Cochlæus also admits,
that, in the field of historical criticism Luther and his party were
ahead of many Catholic preachers, who, albeit in good faith, were
fond of adducing “fables and tales invented by men.” He describes
the zeal of the Protestant printers, which far exceeded that of the
Catholics, the “diligence, care and money” lavished on the writings
of their party, and “how carefully and accurately they printed their
books”; apostates and escaped monks travelled far and wide through
Germany, peddling Lutheran writings “like booksellers.”[1580]—It is
notorious, on the other hand, that the Catholic writers were hardly
able to find publishers. At Ingolstadt Cochlæus managed to preserve
a Catholic printing press, which was in danger of being shut down,
and established a second at Mayence whence a large number of good
works issued. “Stress must be laid on the self-sacrifice with which
Cochlæus, after having by dint of many privations amassed a sum of
money for the publication of his own writings, devoted it to the
printing of the works of one of his colleagues, being convinced that
they would prove of greater benefit to the common cause than his own
productions.”[1581]

In all these particulars, in the study of Holy Scripture, in the
cultivation of historical and critical research among the clergy, in the
use of the vernacular and of the art of printing for the instruction of
the faithful, a real, though rather slow, change for the better took
place. Had it not been for the misgivings felt even in the highest
circles, and for a certain amount of prejudice against anything new, due
to the fear of heresy, the gains doubtless would have been even greater
and more quickly secured. In all this the Church owed much to Protestant
example, for it was the innovators who involuntarily pointed out better
methods of satisfying the spiritual needs of the new age, and a more
effectual way of exerting a religious influence over the people.

Further examples of this are to be found in the sermons and in the
catechism.

Clear-sighted Catholic contemporaries, like the worthy Dominican preacher
and writer Johann Mensing, comparing the Bible preaching used and
advocated by Luther with the empty, vapid sermons in vogue among many of
the Catholic preachers were keenly conscious of what was lacking. At the
close of a book written in 1532 Mensing exhorts the Catholic clergy to
study Holy Writ and to make more use of it in the pulpit: “There are some
now who say that Luther has driven the learned to Scripture. Would to God
it were true that our well-beloved masters and brothers, the theologians,
would turn their hearts wholly to Holy Scripture and leave out those
other questions which serve no useful purpose. Some of them preach the
laws and canons of heathen doctors and poets which are of small help
to salvation, or they air their own opinions, and, where Scripture and
Holy Church or the witness of the olden Doctors is not enough, reinforce
them by incredible miracles, whereas, with the aid of Holy Scripture,
they ought to endeavour to establish in men’s hearts the fear of God,
faith, hope and charity, mildness and pity and such like.” If they learn
something from the Lutherans in this then “we may hope that God has
permitted Luther’s heresy for our good, it being to our profit that such
heresy has arisen, and, as some declare, driven us to the Scriptures.”
Mensing wonders, however, whether the dispersal of the monks, the
plundering of the convents and lack of stipends for learned theologians
and preachers will not make study of any kind a difficult matter for a
long while to come.[1582]

In the field of catechetical instruction it was clear that Luther and
his followers had given their attention very skilfully to the young, the
better to imbue the rising generation with their doctrines. At the time
of Luther’s first appearance, as recent research has established, in many
parts of Germany there was no regular, systematic religious instruction
of the young by the clergy or in the schools, but the children were left
to pick up what they could in the home or from the public sermons.[1583]
There were indeed regulations in force for the priests and the schools,
but they were not acted upon. About the very elementary home instruction,
Cochlæus had words of commendation in 1533. As they were taken to the
services and the sermons, the children had, he says, “sucked in” their
religion “as it were with their mothers’ milk, and this is still the case
to-day amongst Catholics.”[1584] In his sermons published in 1510 Gabriel
Biel asks for no more than that the parents should impart to their
children a knowledge of the things essential and prepare them for their
first communion.[1585]

Luther, however, as our readers know, insisted that his preachers must
concern themselves directly with the children.

He enjoined on them to preach from the pulpit at set times, even daily if
necessary, on the most elementary points of doctrine, and again at home
in the house to the children and servants in the mornings and evenings;
if they wished to make Christians of them these points would have to be
recited or read to them, “and this, not merely in such a way that they
learn to say the words by heart, but that they be questioned on them
one by one and made to say what each means and how they understand
it.”[1586] “Let no one think himself above giving such instruction to
the children or look down upon it,” he wrote; “Christ, when He wished to
train up men, had to become a man, hence, if we are to train up children,
we must become children with them.” At Wittenberg and elsewhere from 1528
onwards four sermons a week for two weeks on end were preached on the
Catechism four times a year. When, seeing the importance of the matter,
Luther himself took the Catechism in hand he was so anxious to make it
popular and practical, that he first published his “Smaller Catechism”
(1529) in the form of sheets to hang upon the wall (this method had been
used even before his day), and thus to act on the memory through the eye.

It would, however, be historically incorrect to describe Luther as the
originator of the Catechism. Catholic Catechisms, even illustrated
ones, had existed before Luther’s time, having been printed not only
in Germany but also elsewhere. But, after the success attained by
Luther’s Catechism, writers of Catholic Catechisms tried to profit by
his example. The best of these Catholic works was the famous Catechism
of Peter Canisius. It was first printed in Vienna in 1555 under the
title “_Summa doctrinæ christianæ_”; eighteen years later it had already
been translated into twelve different tongues.[1587] It is a work rich
in thought and positive matter where almost every word is based on Holy
Scripture or some utterance of the Fathers and other ecclesiastical
authority. Abbreviated editions, the “_Parvus Catechismus_” (Viennæ,
1559), the “_Institutiones_” (1561), and particularly the short
German one: “The Catechism or Sum of Christian Doctrine arranged in
question and answer for the simple,” rendered it of greater use for the
common people.[1588] “Canisius’s book,” writes a Protestant expert in
pedagogics, “is a masterpiece of brevity, precision and erudition; in it
one sees from beginning to end an endeavour to excel in style even the
great Protestant prototype” (viz. Luther’s Catechism).[1589]

Among the secular no less than among the regular clergy work for the
souls of the children continued to win new friends. St. Ignatius of
Loyola esteemed the teaching of the Catechism so highly that he expressly
made it a duty incumbent on all members of his Order previous to their
making their profession. Lainez, his companion and successor, when
staying at Trent during the Council, instructed the people and the small
folk in the Catechism. The Council itself impressed on the bishops
in 1563 the duty of seeing that the children in each parish received
religious instruction from the priest on Sundays and holidays.[1590]

The spread of the new religion had at first been followed by a lamentable
decline in the educational system by no means confined to those regions
torn away from the old faith.[1591] The Protestants were the first
to recover their balance, partly owing to Luther’s vigorous appeals
on behalf of the schools, partly thanks to the active co-operation
of Melanchthon, who had great experience in this sphere and on whom
his co-religionists in consequence bestowed the title of “_Præceptor
Germaniæ_.” The methods followed by the Lutherans were borrowed
principally, as indeed was only to be expected, from the treasure-house
of the humanists. Protestant effort was largely crowned with success,
especially since the old Catholic endowments of the Grammar Schools,
and some part of the income of the sequestrated Church properties, were
applied by the sovereigns and townships to the erection and maintenance
of these new educational institutions.[1592]

The Catholics indeed were angry to see that these flourishing schools
were at the same time hotbeds of the New Faith. They also lamented
that, owing to the sad conditions of the times, they themselves had
fallen astern of the other party in the matter of education. Their best
leaders exhorted them to take a lesson from their opponents and thus
reconquer the position the Catholic schools had lost. “With the spread
and development of the Jesuit schools a change came over the face of
affairs.”[1593] Before this Archbishop Albert of Mayence had declared in
1541 that the Protestants were far ahead of Catholics in the matter of
education and were drawing all the youth of Germany into their schools.
In 1550 Julius Pflug, bishop of Naumburg-Zeitz, wrote to Julius III:
“The Protestant schools public as well as private are in a flourishing
condition; ours are crumbling into ruin; the Protestants attract men by
large salaries, we do not do this.” Already in 1538 George Wicel had
expressed his regret to Julius Pflug that so little was done for the
schools among the Catholics as compared with the Protestants, and that
already the want of men of learning was being felt.[1594]

To mention two other spheres in which Catholics received a stimulus from
Luther’s example and work, we may call to mind the German translation of
the Bible and the German hymns.

What was good in Luther’s translation of the Bible was very soon turned
to account in Catholic circles. If Catholic writers made use of Luther’s
translation in their own editions, they probably excused themselves by
arguing that Luther himself was undoubtedly indebted to the Catholic
translations of the past. In the same way Luther had made use of some of
the old hymns of the Church, amended and popularised them and published
them as his own. Catholic hymns in the German language there were already
in plenty. But, after 1524, when the first Protestant hymn-books made
their appearance, Catholics copied these efforts to collect and improve
on the originals, and the first Catholic hymn-book brought out by Michael
Vehe, Provost at Leipzig as early as 1537, contained fifty-two hymns
with forty-seven tunes—though, strange to say, the old Catholic hymns
were given in the new Protestant version.[1595] A much bigger hymn-book
was that of Johann Leisentritt, a Dean (1567); it contained in the
first edition 250 hymns and 147 tunes. In the following century hymns
well known to be Protestant but of which the words were orthodox were
incorporated without demur in the Catholic collections.

The Middle Ages had been too neglectful of positive studies, particularly
of history and languages, both of which are of such vast importance to
theology. Since the dawn of humanism, however, a good beginning had been
made, and the need of meeting the demands of the new age was recognised,
as, in the domain of Biblical languages, the example of Faber Stapulensis
and Jodocus Clichtoveus shows.[1596] The methods of the Protestants made
further progress in this field imperative.

In criticism and church-history, where much good work had been done by
the Protestants, Peter Canisius was one of the first to suggest that it
would be advisable to devote more pains to the study and examination of
the history of the Papacy, since, as he wrote, our “people seem to be
still quite asleep” and unaware of all that had been done in the opposite
camp. He was anxious for books that should be in no way inferior to those
of the other side, and of which “the style must be in keeping with the
present method and trend of scholarship.”[1597] It is not as yet enough
known generally what great success crowned the labours of Onuphrius
Panvinius (1529-1568) the Augustinian Roman antiquarian and historian,
who was spurred on by the labours of the Protestants, though even more
by the humanist traditions of his native country. Better known is the
Oratorian, Cardinal Baronius (1538-1607), whose “Ecclesiastical Annals”
unquestionably laid the foundation of a new era in the writing of Church
history.[1598]

Good and useful work was done by some of the Protestant scholars who
edited the writings of the Fathers.

Thus Luther, for instance, encouraged Bugenhagen to edit certain works of
St. Athanasius on the Trinity and himself wrote (1532) a Preface to them
which is well worth reading.[1599] The Patristic labours subsequently
undertaken by Catholics, even the great work of Marguérin de la
Bigne,[1600] that forerunner of the French Maurists of the 17th century,
had their _raison d’être_ in the very ideas which Luther had set forth in
his above-mentioned Preface to Bugenhagen’s work.

The worksomeness of the Catholic Church showed that people were beginning
to understand the new era and to mould themselves to its requirements.
“How can one deny,” asks Adolf Harnack, “that Catholicism, as soon as
it pulled itself together for the counter-reformation … was for over a
century in far closer touch with the new era than Luther’s Protestantism?
Hence the many converts from Protestantism to Catholicism, particularly
among learned Protestants, down to the days of Queen Christina of Sweden
and even after.”[1601]

* * * * *

As for the ideas, however, which constituted the essence of the religious
innovations the Catholic Church could not accept them short of being
untrue to herself and betraying what had been committed to her custody.
Whereas she gradually found a way to comply with all just demands for
betterment and progress, she was nevertheless obliged relentlessly to
close her ears to proposals for the subversion of her dogma and the
alteration of her constitution.

She steadfastly refused to make her own the new and mistaken conception
of the Church, of Bible interpretation, of faith, justification and
good works. In spite of the heart-rending sight of the growing apostasy
around her, she kept her eyes fixed on the promises of her Founder and
remained true to her olden conception of the Church as a visible society
controlled by Chief Pastors who are the vicars of Christ.

Ulrich Zasius of Freiburg in Baden, one of the greatest lawyers and
humanists of the 16th century, who had for a while dallied with some of
the demands of the innovators, afterwards repudiated as follows any idea
of going over to their side:

“I shall remain true to the doctrines and decisions of the Church even
should all the host of heaven command me otherwise.” “Such an insult
I will on no account offer to the Lord of Truth as to believe He had
deceived us for so many hundreds of years”—by permitting the Church to
fall into error in spite of the promise that the Spirit of truth would
always remain with her.

“For more than a thousand years the Church has taught us by the
voice of her Doctors who all take their stand on Holy Scripture. But
you twist the Gospel about as you please. Is Luther then to be set
above all the Doctors of the past? Our forefathers, who also were
authorities and all the wise men, would have called such a demand
sheer madness.” “You, however, argue that the Spirit leads and guides
you. But what sort of Spirit is it that teaches you to scold and
calumniate as you do? In the Epistle of James I have read on the
contrary that wisdom is peaceable and modest.”

“Give me a man who renounces all earthly things, keeps all the
precepts of Christ, loves his enemies from his heart and does them
good, abuses none and is cheerful in adversity. Such a man I will
call worthy of the Evangel. But among the ranks of such men you can
scarcely reckon Luther.”

“You are free to censure abuses, but is it right on their account to
throw the whole Church into confusion? You blame the whole for the
misdeeds of some of its parts; pleading the defects you attack what is
good and thus unsettle everything.” He too, so he tells his opponents,
was at pains to go to the sources of Faith, but he preferred the
interpretation of Jerome, Augustine and Chrysostom to theirs;
and, again, unable to control his indignation, he exclaims: “What
incredible arrogance is this that one man should require his reading
to be accounted better than that of all the Fathers of the Church,
nay, of the Church herself and the whole of Christendom?”[1602]

When passions were at their height voices such as these failed to secure
a hearing. The deep chasm torn open by the wanton act of one man could no
longer be bridged over; the bond of religion that had hitherto united the
German nation had been rudely severed.

5. Luther as described by the Olden “Orthodox” Lutherans

It is a study that will well repay us to follow through the history
of Protestantism the changes that Luther’s description underwent. The
awakened historical sense of the present day has already led more
than one critic to undertake this task, with a crop of interesting
results.[1603]

It would be a mistake to think that Luther’s memory survived anywhere
among the orthodox Protestants with that freshness and distinctness which
the statements of some of his old friends might lead us to expect. Of
the actual personality of the man no clear picture had been transmitted.
His words and deeds were commented on according to the outlook of the
different schools, needless to say, always with a certain affection and
admiration, but no one troubled to leave to posterity a living picture of
his unique character as a whole.

Tracing the history of the Protestant representation of Luther down
to the present day three periods may be distinguished, the so-called
Orthodox one, the Pietistic and Freethinking one that followed, and
the last hundred years. Orthodoxy, with its rigid attachment to the
formularies of Faith, with the assistance of the State was for a long
while able to suppress all contrary tendencies; towards the middle of
the 18th century, however, the Pietists and, at the other extreme, a
free-thinking party also made their appearance on the field.

Pietism was a reaction against the hard-and-fast doctrinal system of an
earlier age, which, clinging desperately to Luther’s doctrine of works,
tended to be neglectful of the Christian life and of the revival of
morals. If Pietism rather exaggerated the moral side of religion, the
so-called “Enlightenment” erred in another direction, setting out as it
did to vindicate the rights of reason and, in so doing, making scant
account of subordination to the truths of Divine revelation.

On the whole, Orthodoxy retained a supernaturalist view of Luther,
though it was apt to assume different colours according to the leanings
of the several schools.

Pietism, in its conception of his person, frankly throws over the real
Luther and seeks to “vindicate his spirit against the claims of his more
orthodox adherents.”

The period of the enlightenment also presents a “sadly distorted”
picture of Luther; it had “not the least comprehension of his fiery
spirit” and, as was its wont, was “anxious to wipe out everything too
distinctive.”[1604]

“Misunderstood and disfigured ‘beyond recognition,’ Luther steps over
the threshold of the new era. But here again misfortune awaits him:
‘Sectarians, Anabaptists, Pietists, Democrats, Rationalists, Orthodox’
… all these set to work to improve upon the hero until they can stamp
him as their own.”[1605] Finally, “the latest phase of theological
development spells a revision of the whole idea and appreciation of
Luther.” In the consciousness of having far outrun Luther on the road
to a purely natural religion minus any faith, people are beginning to
“emphasise more strongly the fact, that he was held captive in the bonds
of mediæval feelings and ideas.”[1606]

“Who really knows him?” asked Adolf Harnack in 1883, “and who can be
expected to know him? People are willing enough to worship him as
what they wish him to be, as the upholder of their own ideals; but in
their heart of hearts, they feel that, after all, he was really quite
different. His character impresses all, but his convictions are left
in the background, or else are worked up into new and more serviceable
coin.”[1607]

Yet all these Protestant impressions of Luther, to be examined more in
detail below, however they may differ have at least this much in common,
that Luther must be acclaimed as the great opponent of the authority of
the olden Church.

Maybe we shall come nearest to a correct picture of Luther if we combine
the modern view of his being a “mediævalist” with the olden orthodox
claim that he was a Prophet of God. Luther stood partly for the old
supernaturalist Christianity, partly for a new pseudo-supernaturalism;
so far those who speak of his “mediævalism” are in the right. He himself,
however, summed up his own character in that of the God-sent “Prophet of
Germany,” and divinely appointed conqueror of Antichrist and the devil—a
point which was rightly emphasised by his orthodox followers.

To go back now to the various descriptions of Luther. The Orthodox
derived their idea of Luther from the oldest traditions. In these there
was a breath of the supernaturalism in which Luther’s own view of himself
was decked out, of the inbreathing of the Spirit, of his mysterious
struggles with a power unseen, and of his divinely assured victory over
the Roman Babylon.

At the present day one marvels to see how cheerfully and naïvely members
of the old “orthodox” school were wont to magnify the founder of their
denomination on the lines sketched out by Luther himself. All that
interested them was the teacher, Luther the theologian; to them he
appeared a sort of “professor of divinity of heroic dimensions.” In the
century which followed his death it was the custom to exalt him “into
the region of the marvellous and more-than-human.” So fond were they of
“depicting his divine halo” that it became quite the usual thing to “set
Luther side by side with the olden Prophets and Apostles.”

After Elias and John the Baptist, he is “the third Elias, who makes
ready the way against the return of Christ to Judgment.” He is the
second Noe, the second Abraham, the second Samson, the second Samuel,
the second Jeremias, above all, he is the second Moses who frees the
people from their bondage; the Egyptian bondage, so some one computed
had come to an end in B.C. 1517 just as the Papal bondage reached its
end in 1517 A.D.[1608]

Holy Scripture, so the orthodox declared, points to Luther not only
where it speaks of the revelation and overthrow of Antichrist (2
Thes. ii. 8), not merely where it proclaims that living waters shall
go out from Jerusalem (Zach. xiv. 8), but also in the Apocalypse of
John where we are told of the angel having the eternal Gospel—flying
through the midst of heaven to the mount on which is seated the
Lamb with 144,000 who bear His name—“in order to preach it to them
that sit upon the earth, to every nation and tribe, and tongue and
people” (Rev. xiv. 6). That this angel was Luther is also plain from
the fact that, if the letters of the verse quoted are reckoned by
their position in the alphabet and then added together the number
will be exactly the same as that of the words (in German): Martin
Luther, Doctor of Holy Scripture, born at Eisleben, baptised on
Martinmas-Day, viz. 819![1609] In a sermon in 1676 the flight of the
angel through the midst of heaven is taken to signify the marvellously
rapid spread of Luther’s Evangel, and the Gospel he preaches is termed
“eternal,” because Luther’s doctrine is found even in the Fathers of
the Church.[1610]

The story of Hus, the “swan,” as prophetic of the coming of Luther,
was an integral part of the panegyrics even of Mathesius and
Bugenhagen; it served much the same purpose as the statue of a monk
with the inscription L.V.T.E.R.V.S., said to have been erected by
Kaiser Frederick Barbarossa.[1611]

The recovery of Melanchthon and Myconius for whom Luther had prayed
so ardently became evident miracles. The preservation of his picture
in great fires was another miracle of frequent recurrence. Splinters
from a beam in his house, according to Gottfried Arnold, the Pietist,
in his Church-History, were deemed an efficacious cure for toothache
and other ills. Arnold calls this a subtle form of idolatry. Leonard
Hutter, who became professor at Wittenberg in 1596, learnedly set
forth the proofs of Luther’s “being endowed with a ‘_spiritus
vatidicus_’ enabling him to foresee many things of importance,” though
his prophetic insight is chiefly confined by Hutter and others to his
peculiar divine gift for the interpretation of Holy Writ, or to his
proclamation of the destruction of contemners of the Evangel.[1612]
Johannes Klai (or Claius), the German grammarian and a zealous
Lutheran, expressed it as his opinion in 1578 that the German used by
Luther was so pure and beautiful that he could have learnt it only by
the special help of the Holy Ghost.[1613] Johannes Albertus Fabricius
collected, chiefly in the interests of the orthodox party, the titles
of the works dealing with Luther; the bare lists of the books setting
forth the services he had rendered, the honourable epithets bestowed
on him, his eminent qualities, his miracles and his own prophecies
and those of others, occupy many pages.[1614]

Even as late as 1872 Carl Frederick Kahnis, the Lutheran theologian
and professor at Leipzig, depicted Luther in his “Deutsche
Reformation” with all the olden traits. Luther’s doctrines he regarded
as the true norm, though it was necessary to understand and develop
them. According to Kahnis the young monk’s experience with the devil
in the refectory at night and again at the Wartburg, were real
assaults of the Evil One on the chosen prophet of God, visible and
audible marks of the hostility of Satan to the saviour of mankind,
for Luther “was no slave to fancy or excited feelings.” “Maybe,” so
he says rather incautiously, “no Father of the Church since the days
of the Apostles ever had to feel so keenly the power of Satan.” The
prophecy of the “bare-foot monk” and the auguries of the Eisenach
Franciscan become matters of history, for had not Luther himself
appealed to them? Even the tale of the Elector’s dream who saw the
monk’s pen stretching even to Rome and blotting out everything there,
rested, according to him, on “history.” As for the fallen Church of
pre-Lutheran days, against which his wonderful pen worked, it sinks
into the abyss of its own errors before the rising sun of Luther’s new
doctrine.[1615]

6. Luther as seen by the Pietists and Rationalists

Luther, as pictured to themselves by the Pietists, differed widely from
the Luther of the orthodox. To Pietists like Spener, Luther’s actual
doctrine—regarded by them as contradictory and wavering—appealed far less
than certain personal mystic traits of his. To them the inward struggles
of soul to which Luther ascribes his transition from despair into the
peace of the Gospel, his remarks on piety and the interior life, his
realisation of the universal priesthood, and the breathing of the Spirit
were very dear. They were less enamoured of Luther’s views on faith,
the outward Word, or the State-Government of the Church. At any rate,
the Pietists wove from the material at their disposal a new Luther who
was practically a counterpart of themselves. They preferred to dwell on
his earlier years, when Luther, as Gottfried Arnold said in 1699 in his
“Kirchenhistorie,” yet lived “in the Spirit,” and before he had ended “in
the flesh” as he did later. They either said nothing of his worldlier
side or else openly censured it as the fruit of his backsliding and later
errors.

Arnold complains bitterly that things had gone so far after Luther’s
death that he was called a “Saint” and a divine man, and that he
was made out to be the Angel foretold in the Apocalypse. Still he
recognises in him “in a usual way,” an “apostolic mission” in so far
as he had been the recipient of “a direct inspiration, stimulus or
divine gift.” “At the first” he had “indeed been mightily directed,
and utilised as a divine tool”; at any rate up to the time of his
breach with Carlstadt he could boast of enjoying “the strength and
illumination of the Spirit which gave him on particular points and in
difficult cases a rule and true certainty.” Only with such limitations
will the historian of Pietism accept Luther’s epitaph at Wittenberg
where mention is made of the inbreathing of God’s spirit.[1616]

Whereas the orthodox Lutherans, owing to the abiding influence of
Melanchthon’s humanism, allowed the study of philosophy and of the
wisdom of the ancients, the Pietists at Leipzig, Giessen, Stargard
and elsewhere rejected all philosophy, appealing to Luther who had
spurned it as the offspring of that fool reason which ought to be done
away with; Melanchthon, they urged, had corrupted the faith by the
admixture of Plato and Aristotle, and, hence, had never been regarded
by Luther “as a true, staunch theologian, but rather as a cunning
Aristotelian dialectician.”[1617]

When other Lutherans taunted them with their separatist tendencies so
much at variance with Luther’s view of the outward government of the
Church by the State, the Pietists retorted by appealing in defence
of their conventicle system and so-called “_collegia pietatis_,”
to Luther’s Church-Apart of the True Believers. They quoted those
passages of the “Deudsche Messe und Ordnung Gottis Diensts” (1526),
where Luther lays stress on the ideal kinship of those who earnestly
desire to be Christians, and characterises the services in the Church
as worthless for those who “are already Christians.”[1618]

“Thus quite a struggle raged around Luther’s person.”[1619]

Books appeared on the one side with such titles as “_Lutherus
Antipietista_” and on the other: “Luther the precursor of Spener who
faithfully followed in the footsteps of the former.” Count L. von
Zinzendorf, with his Pietistic leanings, claimed to be a perfect
counterpart of Luther; he wished, as he said in 1749, to be “what Luther
had been in part, and what, according to the logical sequence from given
premises, he should and ought to have been.” “The Luther who still lives
and teaches in Count von Zinzendorf,” was the title of a work by one of
the latter’s followers. Things went so far that, in the controversies,
it became necessary to ask: Which Luther do you mean, the earlier or the
later? Nor was even this sufficient, for Consistorialrat J. A. Bengel of
Württemberg (†1752) actually distinguished three Luthers: “the first and
the last,” he said, “were all right, but the middle one, owing to the
heat of controversy, was sometimes rather spoiled.”[1620]

Among the Protestant writers of the so-called “Enlightenment” we again
find Luther under a different guise.

They disagreed with the Pietists’ renunciation both of the conclusions
arrived at by reason and of worldly pleasures; in the latter respect
they found in Luther a welcome advocate of enjoyment of the good things
of the world. His advocacy of a cheerful addiction to earthly pleasures
was summed up by them in the saying attributed to him: Who loves not
women, wine and song, etc.[1621] On the other hand, by setting Luther on
a rationalist plane, they blotted out his essential characteristics; they
showed no comprehension for his faith though they were not disposed to
minimise his labours for the amendment of religion and for the bringing
of light out of darkness.

Gottfried Herder extols him, now as a church founder, now as a writer,
and yet again as a great German. Luther’s doctrines seem to him of
comparatively small account, but he is willing enough to depict
him as a model of cheerful, “strong, free, wholesome and exalted
sensibility.”[1622] He is unsparing in his criticism of Luther’s attacks
on the Epistle of James and adds: “The sphere of the Spirit of God is
wider than Luther’s field of vision.”[1623] In these circles critics
were disposed to be bolder and more outspoken than among the orthodox
and the Pietists; they also found other things to censure in Luther.
Lessing condemns in the severest language his vanity and irascibility:
“O God, what a terrible lesson to our pride,” he exclaims, “and how much
do anger and revenge degrade even the best and holiest of men.”[1624] He
nevertheless opines that Luther’s faults had been of service to him in
his great task.

Those few who really perused Luther’s writings marvelled at his
extravagant ideas about his divine mission and struggles with the devil,
about the end of the world and Antichrist. As a general rule, however,
they conveniently skipped all that Luther said against human reason and
had no eye for his energetic supernaturalism and his insistence on the
bare letter of Scripture.[1625]

Among those infected with the rationalism of the age, antagonism to
Catholicism undoubtedly helped to shape their view of Luther. They felt
their whole outlook to be at variance with that of Catholicism. Under
these circumstances it was natural that Luther should be depicted first
and foremost as the liberator from the Papacy; in Luther they recognised,
not without some show of reason, “the opponent of all outward authority,
of everything Catholic in every domain of the life of the mind”[1626]—an
argument, moreover, which occasionally they turned against the Lutheran
“Church” itself.

Thus was the dictator of Wittenberg, such as the Orthodox knew him,
transformed into a “champion of freedom”; the rationalists made his
pen the vehicle of their own ideas. Luther became the “herald of
the Enlightenment.” He began what others were to carry on later. “A
little longer,” so one wrote in 1797, “and the heavenly light which
Luther only saw dimly as in a dream will stream in upon us in all its
brightness.”[1627]

The Berlin leader of this movement, A. F. Büsching, as early as
1748, said of himself that he had seen “Luther in his true greatness
and as known only to the few; how, in matters of religion, he had
absolutely refused to depend on any man, but had relied simply on his
own insight and convictions and what had been borne in upon him by
diligent reading of the Bible.”[1628] The Halle editor of Luther’s
Works, J. G. Walch, vaunted among the other services rendered by
Luther that of having established freedom of conscience; in the eyes
of Julius Wegscheider he was the “_libertatis cogitandi assertor_”; it
was this which inclined even Frederick II of Prussia to respect him,
though otherwise he considered him a “furious monk” and a “barbarous
writer.”—Those who thus credited Luther with tolerance “had no inkling
of the antithesis between this idea and the true Luther.”[1629] His
wanton way of dealing with the Canon of Scripture was urged against
the Orthodox in defence of a more critical treatment of Holy Writ.
Lessing, referring to Luther’s whole system of Bible interpretation,
wrote to J. M. Goeze, the chief pastor of St. Catherine’s church at
Hamburg: “What greater authority had Luther than any other Doctor of
Divinity?”[1630]

Less dangerous to Lutheranism, and in itself harmless enough, though
quite characteristic of the age, was the discovery then made, that
Luther was the very personification of a public benefactor and great
servant of the State. The Leipzig Professor, C. H. Wieland, described
him as a “scholar to whom all were indebted”; Luther, he says,
“unmasked obsolete prejudices and opened up to his contemporaries in
more than one direction fresh prospects of a coming enlargement of the
circle of human knowledge. And this great man _was a German_.”[1631]
From the good bourgeois point of view the fact that Luther had, as
it was thought, cultivated respect for the secular authorities was a
great feather in his cap. Such people readily shut their eyes to the
severity with which Luther had been wont to lash the rulers, even the
highest in the land, and to the fact that he had undermined the very
foundations of authority. The patriotic thought that “this great man
was a German” was made to cover all his failings.

This sort of patriotism gradually produced a new pattern of Luther,
differing in many respects from the others. Particularly after the
outbreak of the great German wars of deliverance and the burning
enthusiasm for the Fatherland which they called forth many felt that
they could not sufficiently extol Luther as the great German, and a
typical child of his beloved country.

Gœthe repeatedly called Luther a “great man.” But what, above all,
prepossessed him in his favour was, first, his “Struggle against
priestcraft and the hierarchy,” and, then, his translation of the
Bible. “By him we have been freed from the fetters of intellectual
narrowness … and have once more the courage to stand upright on God’s
earth and to realise our own divinely endowed nature.”[1632] The poet,
himself a true child of his age, had no eye for the truths defended by
Catholicism against Lutheranism. In a letter to Knebel dated August
22, 1817, when the centenary of Luther’s promulgation of his Theses
was being celebrated far and wide, he said: “Between ourselves, the
only interesting thing in the whole business [the Reformation] is
Luther’s character; it is also the only thing that really impresses
the masses. All the rest is worthless trumpery of which we still feel
the burden to-day.” As for the usual view of Luther he characterises
it as mythological.

7. The Modern Picture of Luther

In the so-called Romantic School the picture of Luther tends to become as
shifty as the character of the age.

The Romanticists, like the poets they were, were anxious, as in other
fields so also in respect of Luther, to make a stand against the
shallowness of the “Enlightenment.”

Zacharias Werner, while still a Protestant, wrote in Luther’s honour
his drama “Die Weihe der Kraft,” and, then, as a Catholic, the drama
entitled “Die Weihe der Unkraft.”

Novalis, who was deeply read in Luther’s works, was of opinion that
he, like Protestantism itself, was something democratic; to him Luther
appeared a “hothead.” Disgusted with Lutheranism and vaguely conscious
of the beauty of the past he was anxious to see the scattered faithful
once more united in a new Christianity. “Luther,” so he wrote,
“treated Christianity as he liked, failed to recognise its spirit
and introduced another letter and another religion, viz. the sacred
principle of the Bible over all.” A “fire from heaven” had indeed
presided over the commencement of his career; later on, however, the
source of “holy inspiration had run dry” and worldliness gained the
upper hand in Luther.[1633]

The religious spirit which had animated the Romanticists and had led them
to cast yearning eyes at the Middle Ages was soon extinguished by the new
criticism, historical and Biblical, and by the spread of infidelity.

_The latest efforts to portray Luther_

Luther had now to submit to being criticised by scholars who prided
themselves on being dispassionate and were not slow to pass judgment on
the characteristics, whether actual or imaginary, which they seemed to
discover in him. What the Göttingen Church-historian, Gottlieb Jakob
Planck, representing the so-called “Pragmatic” writers had begun—much to
the disgust of the then Luther devotees[1634]—was pushed forward by many
other Protestants. The lengths to which independent criticism has gone of
recent years is emphasised in the Göttingen theologian, Paul de Lagarde.
Typical of his remarks is the following: “That great scold Luther, who
could see no further than the tips of his toes, by his demagogy threw
Germany into barbarism and dissension.”[1635] It was particularly with
Luther’s “coarseness” and tendency to indulge in vulgar abuse that the
critics were disposed to find fault. Some indeed were inclined to excuse
him. Hardly any other writer, however, in seeking to exculpate Luther
has used language so startling as that of Adolf Hausrath the Heidelberg
scholar who, in his Life of Luther (1904), “thanks God for the barbarism
of these polemics,” and goes so far as to say that, “since Luther’s road
led to the goal it must have been the right one.”[1636]

Of the three comprehensive and most widely known biographies of Luther,
that of Hausrath depicts Luther from the standpoint of a liberal
divine. Here Luther almost ceases to be a theologian, or at any rate
the theological problems amidst which Luther lived are scarcely even
mentioned. On the other hand, in the biography by Theodore Kolde of
Erlangen (2nd ed., 1893), the Wittenberg professor again figures as
a teacher; his scholarly two-volume work is positive in tendency and
regards Luther as a preacher of truth against the darkness of the Middle
Ages—which, however, the author has misunderstood and fails to treat
fairly. The third large modern work on Luther, also in two volumes, is by
the late Julius Köstlin of Halle and Breslau; a new edition was published
in 1903 with the collaboration of G. Kawerau; here the picture of Luther
is a product of the so-called theology of compromise.[1637]

Wilhelm Maurenbrecher, professor of History at Bonn and Leipzig,
said truly in his “Studien” (1874), that the traditional Luther
“myth” the “stuff and rubbish” which the past had looked upon as true
history, deserved to be cleared away. He traces back to Sleidanus the
“current ‘_fable convenue_’” about Luther; this writer, in the work
he published in 1555, which became a classic, had begun the process
of “moderating and toning down the theological colours” of Luther’s
picture, in such a way as to make Luther the living expression
of the “already finished programme of the Protestant princes and
theologians.” He lifted the author of the religious upheaval “out of
his democratic, revolutionary setting” and stamped him as a “model”
for theologians. Maurenbrecher, as a layman, is very frank in his
opinion as to the central question of Bible-interpretation: “It is
undoubtedly the right of every man at the present day to appeal
to Luther’s own example, in favour of the unfettered freedom of
Bible-research.”[1638]

By an objective portrayal of his characteristics, Protestant
non-theologians such as Maurenbrecher have done good service,
particularly as regards the more secular side of Luther’s picture.
The historian Onno Klopp was still a Protestant when, in 1857, in his
“Katholizismus, Protestantismus und Gewissensfreiheit in Deutschland,”
albeit recognising Luther’s merits, he censured his “boundless
confidence in the infallibility of his own judgment”; the “unstable
character of the new Church, so dependent on the favour of princes”;
also the blind, idolatrous veneration of his followers for him,
especially the attitude of the “narrow-minded Elector and his advisers
who were ready to take all the morbid drivel of a quarrelsome old
man for the Word of God.” And these same authorities, so Onno Klopp
declares, set up a new “Protestant Cæsarean Popedom” which year by
year became more burdensome and oppressive.[1639] On the whole his
portrait of Luther is the reverse of flattering.

Had the writings of Leopold von Ranke and Carl Adolf Menzel been as
independent as Maurenbrecher’s or as broad-minded as Klopp’s, their
picture of Luther would have been more true. Even to-day, in spite
of the abundance of works on the Reformation period, an independent
historian at home in all the profound and detailed studies which have
recently appeared, is still lacking in Protestant circles; hence a
living picture of Luther’s person has not yet been painted.

As for the Protestant theologians they have, as a rule, not
contributed much to the portrait of Luther; what they have given us
has been rather a sort of kaleidoscope of Luther’s dogma; they busy
themselves more with crumbs from his history than with it as a whole.
Dealing with some particular doctrine, writing or action of his
they have sketched, so to speak, only one facet of his personality;
with the help of this they have, nevertheless, built up a picture
of the founder of Protestantism as he seemed to them. Hence even
the fundamental conception of Luther’s message, i.e. that whereby
it differs essentially from Catholicism has been very variously
estimated.[1640]

Protestant theologians of more “positive” leanings have protested against
the Rationalist views of those other theologians who hold that Luther
banished dogma from his Christianity, and rediscovered Christianity “as
a religion.”[1641] They declare that, not only did he not abrogate dogma
but that he actually “revived and preserved” it. A religion without dogma
was unthinkable to him.[1642]

It is true that these positive theologians who believe in the existence
of Lutheran “dogmas” are at variance when it comes to stating clearly
the actual dogmas which Luther “revived,” or in what his essential
message consisted. Some insist above all on the ethical side; thanks to
Luther there came a “deeper understanding for the idiosyncracies of the
individual” than was the rule in mediæval Christianity.

Where such inveterate differences of opinion prevailed even the
theology of conciliation was bound to fail. Reinhold Seeberg, the
Berlin theologian, tried to promote some sort of settlement in his
“Grundwahrheiten der christlichen Religion,” a work “framed on the lines
of the olden Gospel and in the spirit of Paul and Luther which seeks
to make the Christian standpoint understood in wider circles.” But
his scheme met with a poor reception; the more orthodox looked at it
“askance, and, on the other hand, the progressive party were only the
more confirmed in their antagonism.”[1643]

Several Protestant theologians of late years have compared Luther to St.
Paul. This, for instance, was also done by Walter Köhler of Zürich, a
liberal theologian, who does not hesitate to reprehend in Luther whatever
he finds amiss, and who also shows considerably more broad-mindedness
than many others in his appreciation of the works of Catholics.

_The Janus-Picture of the Mediæval and Modern Luther_

Thanks to Denifle’s work Luther’s relation to the Middle Ages is now more
clearly seen. The need for bestowing more attention than has hitherto
been done on that side of Luther’s picture which belongs to the Middle
Ages has been strongly insisted on by another liberal theologian,
viz. Ernst Troeltsch of Heidelberg. In Troeltsch’s writings Luther’s
features become to a great extent mediæval. His views on grace and
faith, his ethics, his Churches, the stress he lays on the Word—all
this, in reality, is an echo of Catholic times. All that forms the very
being of Luther is mediæval and the Protestant traits are merely the
wrapping.[1644] With the belief in revelation, which he still retained,
he had been unable to rise above the hedge of the mediæval way of thought.

Troeltsch thus comes to the conclusion that the new era in which we
live did not commence with Luther but only some two centuries ago,
i.e. with the dawn of the Enlightenment. The older Protestantism,
no less than Luther himself, belongs to the Middle Ages. Luther
stuck fast in the Middle Ages chiefly because he clung to the
belief in the “supranatural,” whereas the modern world, thanks to a
mathematico-mechanical natural science, has done away with all that
stands above nature.

Troeltsch also points out that Luther traces his conception of the
Evangel back to Paul, and not to Jesus as the New Theology does; also
that he, like the earlier Protestantism, had not completely shaken
himself free of the mediæval asceticism, and that he held fast to the
traditional doctrine of an original sin.

A Catholic writer has expressed himself more correctly on Luther’s
false “supranaturalism,” according to which God does everything and
man nothing: “The innermost kernel of his doctrinal system was more
ultra-mediæval than the Middle Ages themselves.” “So far was he from
desiring to make religion less unworldly or less Christian, that,
according to what he was incessantly hammering into his hearers, man
was to live himself ever more and more into conscience and faith, into
Christ and the Gospel.”[1645]

Nevertheless the objection brought forward repeatedly of recent years
against the theory of Luther’s mediævalism is also worthy of note;
it is urged that, particularly in the early years of his tempestuous
struggle, he threw off ideas which stamp him as thoroughly modern.

F. Loofs, for instance, says: “His leading ideas include in them a
whole series of inferences which, however, he never followed up to
their logical conclusion.… I may mention Luther’s dislike for all
bare historical and dogmatic belief, the tendency he had caught from
Erasmus to criticise even the Canon, the distinction he adumbrated
between the message of salvation or ‘Word of God’ and the actual
written word of Scripture.… Semler, who has been styled the father of
Rationalism, in his ‘Abhandlung vom freien Gebrauch des Kanons’ has
not unjustly claimed Luther as a forerunner … moreover, the services
rendered by Luther to the [liberal Protestant] theology of the 19th
century in many of its varied schools of thought cannot easily be
overlooked.”[1646]

In these remarks there is doubtless much truth, and there are facts
which go to bear out the theory that Luther indeed stands in close
relations to the modern spirit. There can be no doubt that, in Luther,
we find mediæval and modern features combined. What is wanting is an
organic connection between the two; as explained in the foregoing
volumes it was only at the expense of flagrant contradictions that
he took over certain elements from the past while rejecting others;
that he took one step forward towards modern infidelity and another
backwards. The ancient figure of Janus with one face looking forward
into the future and the other back upon the past was harmonious, at
least inasmuch as the two faces were depicted as separate. In Luther,
however, the two faces are one, a fact which scarcely improves his
physiognomy.

From the recent studies on Luther we can now see more clearly than
before that a “revision of the whole conception and appreciation of
Luther” is imperative in his own household. But, in view of all the
work already done, “is it not high time for us to expect an estimate
of the Reformation as a whole which shall also be just to the whole
Luther?” Stephan, who asks this question, answers it as follows: “We are
still to-day in the midst of a new development that started more than a
century since from the contrast presented by the different schools of
thought.”[1647]

_The “Religious” Reformer and the Hero of “Kultur”_

Two other conceptions are in vogue at the present day, which are in part
a reaction against the rather over-bold assertions sometimes made about
Luther’s mediævalism. Some have insisted that Luther is to be taken as a
“religious” teacher, without examining his actual doctrines too narrowly.
To others he appears in the light of the founder of modern “Kultur,” i.e.
of civilisation in its widest sense. Neither of these ideas can boast of
being very clear, nor have they met with any great success.

Those who regard Luther merely as a religious teacher practically
confine themselves to imputing to him the “religiousness” of modern
Protestantism as the inward force which moved him; albeit, maybe, in
his teaching, he did not quite come up to the modern standard. This
was to all intents and purposes the view of Albert Ritschl and his
school. Luther, they declared, taught first and foremost that both
“piety and theology should rest on the consciousness of having in
Christ a Gracious God, thanks to which consciousness we rise superior
to the world with all its goods and all its duties.” With him “it was
not a question of denominations but simply one of religion.” Ritschl,
as another Protestant not unjustly observed, “undoubtedly fell a
victim to the temptation” of “modernising” Luther.[1648] Moreover,
whereas, according to Ritschl, one of Luther’s main achievements was
his introduction of a new view of the Church as an institution devoid
of legal jurisdiction, according to other Protestant scholars, it was
“chiefly in his views regarding the Church that Luther remained under
the spell of mediæval thought.”[1649] On the other hand, some few
have sought to make out Luther’s religiousness to have been simply
ethical. Thus Wilhelm Wundt, the philosopher, declared that Luther had
taught mankind no new religion but only a new ethical system, which,
however, was merely an offshoot of the Renaissance. As against this we
may set the affirmation of Paul Wernle, viz. that neither Luther nor
Lutheranism had a system of ethics at all.[1650]

Recently, it is true, Luther’s “religiousness” has been described
by a skilful pen as consisting in an interior union with God, as
something altogether “spiritual,” “personal,” as “a sentiment bringing
comfort to man’s conscience.”[1651] The truth is, however, that the
greatest minds, in mediæval and still more in patristic times, were
also in favour of greater inwardness and were against that sort of
righteousness which consists merely of words and works. This is a
result borne in upon one by all the research now being conducted with
so much vigour into the views prevalent in the Middle Ages and earlier.

Hence those who look upon Luther as a new preacher of religion are
compelled to paint the pre-Lutheran world as absolutely heathen.
Luther, “with his peasant’s pick, relentlessly attacked the vulgar
polytheism of the people, the sublime polytheism of public worship
and dogma, and likewise the pantheism of mysticism.” But, even if
we suppose that all these dreadful things prevailed before Luther’s
coming, what did he set up in their place? He induced people, so it
is said, to “seek God and find Him in Jesus Christ the image of the
fatherly heart of God, to fear, love and hope in God above all things,
to fix our heart on God alone and there let it rest.”[1652]—But this
was precisely what the olden mediæval Church had sought to do, hence,
where is Luther’s peculiarity?

The state of the question to-day would almost seem to justify
the words of the famous Ernst Moritz Arndt in his “Ansichten und
Aussichten der teutschen Geschichte.” He wrote in 1814: “What
Luther really taught and wished has hitherto been understood only
by the few; his contemporaries failed to understand him, nor did
he understand himself”; but “he foresaw that fiery, disembodied,
formless Christianity that was to consist of nothing more than fire
and spirit.” Arndt concludes with the solemn words: “But peace be
with thine ashes, thou great German man, and may the earth hide thy
shortcomings and Christian charity thy faults.”[1653]

The aim of other modern thinkers is to breathe new life into Luther
by depicting him as the founder and the hero of modern “Kultur.” The
conception of the author of Protestantism as the fount and origin of all
present-day civilisation is certainly new and different from the earlier
portraitures we have thus far considered. In this picture the “cultural”
traits are put in so strong a light that his “religiousness” tends to
vanish.

Modern civilisation is non-religious. It is perfectly true that Luther
materially contributed to the expulsion of religious influences from
the secular government and from public life in general; also that he
intervened with a powerful hand to promote the secularisation—that had
already begun—and to loosen the existing bond between the Church and
the world. On the other hand, it is quite wrong to shut one’s eyes
to the other powerful factors at work both before him and in his day
which were also tending towards the civilisation of to-day with its
estrangement from the Church and preponderance of material interests.
Such a factor was the later Humanism. The whole background of the time
in which he lived and the seething ferment that preceded the birth
of the new world has been misunderstood. His friends indeed point to
the after-effects of his undertaking as seen in the subsequent growth
of education and scholarship; also to his attitude towards public
morality; to the services he rendered to the German tongue; even to
the benefit which, indirectly, accrued to agriculture, to the arts,
to music, poetry, etc. But, even if we are disposed to allow that
an improvement has taken place, it would be utterly unjust to blink
the fact that many other spiritual and material influences were at
work in all these spheres and were far more potent than Lutheranism.
The Lutheran territories were still in a state of servitude and
general backwardness when there passed over Germany a great wave of
civilisation that was partly of German partly of foreign and even
of Catholic growth. For the good that undoubtedly exists in modern
civilisation we have to thank partly the natural sciences, which on
their revival found a fertile soil even in Italy and France, partly
commerce in which, however, the South of Europe was as active as any
other region of the world, partly the arts, the best work being,
however, cisalpine, partly the development of the State and the army,
which again is certainly no indigenous product of Protestantism;
hence what we now know is the result of a rivalry between varied
influences and many countries. Then again all those qualities which
to-day give Germany so high a place among the nations had existed in
his countrymen long before Luther’s day; such were their readiness
to appreciate the good in others, their openness to outside ideas,
their ability to exploit foreign progress, their industry, their
domesticity, their tenacity in overcoming all obstacles, and their
sober outlook.

Those who make Luther the hero of “Kultur” are also apt to forget the
sad ethical, social and political consequences of the schism. To these
Adolf Harnack referred plainly enough in a lecture delivered in 1883:
“We are well aware of what the Reformation cost us Germans and still
costs us. For ages it delayed our political unity; it brought on us
the Thirty Years’ War; it made it difficult for us to be just to the
Church of the Middle Ages, nay, even to the Church of Antiquity—we
cannot break with history without obscuring it—it brought upon us a
religious schism which still hinders our growth.”[1654]

If, however, we examine those elements of the new “Kultur” which from the
religious or moral standpoint are somewhat questionable (though, amongst
Protestant unbelievers, writers are not wanting who are ready to justify
them) we meet with many indications which lead us back to Luther. Yet,
here again, on the other hand, there were other great and far-reaching
causes at work which account for them, which have but little to do with
Lutheranism. Such were, for instance, the English Deism which reached
Germany by way of France and which helped to produce the infidelity of
the Enlightenment; also the revolutionary ideas of 1789 on liberty, the
Rights of Man and the lawfulness of rising in revolt, ideas to which
the masses are still addicted; then again the luxury that was imported
from abroad; above all the inclination of the human heart everywhere to
sensuality, to egotism and to promote one’s own standing and temporal
welfare even at the expense of one’s neighbour. These maladies to which
human nature is prone have, by various causes, been sadly aggravated in
modern times. How far Luther was responsible for some of these causes
should not be difficult to determine after all that has been said
above. At any rate his repudiation of authority in religious matters,
his new ideas on faith and good works, and, again his whole system of
subjectivism, were poor barriers against the inrush of those elements
hostile to faith in God, to Christianity and to ethics, which, in modern
civilisation, have a place side by side with much that is good.

Nietzsche laid it down that Luther was the first to free the German
people from Christianity by teaching them to be un-Roman and to say:
Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.[1655] He was anxious to make Luther
the patron of his newest brand of “Kultur.” But this new, antichristian
and atheistic “Kultur” is largely repudiated in Protestant circles.
Many, like Walter Köhler, refuse to admit that Luther was in any sense
the father of modern freethought; how could he have been, asks Köhler,
since he would not sanction any freedom of conscience, and did not even
understand what such a thing was?[1656]

Hence Luther makes a rather unsatisfactory “Hero of Kultur.” To depict
him in this light his relations with the more favourable side of “Kultur”
have to be so much exaggerated and distorted that one almost expects
him, the sworn opponent of “fool reason” and champion of the “enslaved
will,” to leap from his grave in protest; on the other hand, it is quite
impossible to claim Luther as an advocate of that side of modern “Kultur”
which is antagonistic to religion and morality. Protestant authorities
have also protested against any claim being made on his behalf that he
at least abolished that “Kultur which was directed by the Church”; on
the contrary, so they declare, the “Kultur” for which he stood was in
many respects “still tied up to the one and only Church” and was quite
“mediæval in its character.”[1657] Thus, here again, a sort of dual
picture, painted partly in the gay colours of the present day, partly in
the sombre tints of the past.

_A “Political” Luther?—Conclusion_

Over and above all the previous presentations of Luther another
strange portrait has recently appeared, which finds admirers among lay
historians and students of political history. Here Luther’s political
traits are emphasised. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, in his much-read
work “Grundlagen des 19 Jahrhunderts,” insists on this view of Luther,
starting from the assumption which is beyond question “that the
separation from Rome for which Luther fought with such passion all his
life was in itself the greatest political upheaval that could possibly
occur.… However pitiful the later history of the Reformation may have
been, still Luther’s deed was an undying one for this reason, that it
rested on a firm political groundwork.” Chamberlain quite rightly makes
much of Luther’s attempt to link his cause with that of the princes and
with the German national sentiment.

“Without the princes,” says Chamberlain, “nothing could have been
done. Who seriously believes that the princes who patronised the
Reformation were inspired by or acted from religious enthusiasm? The
fingers of one hand would be more than enough on which to reckon
up those of whom such a thing holds good. Political interest and
political ambition backed by the awakening of national sentiment were
the determining factors.” “Even in the later wars of religion the
political question was paramount.” It was his desire to win over the
German statesmen that made Luther “speak so highly of the ‘German
nation’ and so disrespectfully of the Papists.” That was why he wrote,
for instance: “For my Germans was I born, them will I serve.” He
is “more a politician than a theologian.” “Luther is, above all, a
political hero.”

This portrait of the “political hero” is not one whit less one-sided
than the others; above all, the author, who has no understanding
for Christianity and the Church, fails also to see the so-called
“religious” side in Luther. It is true that political motives often
loomed so large in Luther’s case and in that of the princes who
lent him their support as actually to obscure the religious side
of the struggle. Luther himself, however, was anything rather than
a great politician on the world’s stage. He had, in fact, to quote
a Protestant historian, woefully distorted and imperfect views of
the actual trend of human events, particularly of the determining
personalities and active factors in the politics of that day. Never
perhaps has a more childish diagnosis been given than that contained
in the advice of the Wittenberg theologian to his sovereigns about
their attitude towards Charles V.[1658] The circumstance that he was
deficient in political sense may explain to some extent his mistakes
and want of logic in this sphere, but cannot excuse the masterful tone
in which he so often expresses himself on the public questions of
the day. Then again there was his changeableness. Resistance to the
Kaiser, which at one time he had declared unlawful, was advised by
him later. After he had handed over the rights of the Church to the
lawyers he turns on them and denounces them as his worst foes, who
must be fought with every weapon for the sake of the independence
of the preachers. In the same way, in spite of the religious freedom
which he seemed at first to proclaim as a lasting principle for all
future government of Church and State, we find him making his own that
repellant intolerance, which, at last subsequent to 1530, led him to
advocate the death-penalty for those who held “sectarian” doctrines,
or any that differed from his own.

Discouraged by the failure of all these attempts to portray Luther
others, at present, are inclined to deny him any mark of distinction and,
in particular, any creative power, and depict him simply as the sum,
or “product, of existing historical forces.” They emphasise strongly
the pre-existing factors and regard him less as a mover than as one
moved. This view, however, has also been stigmatised by Protestants as
“Mythological.” They object that even “the masses also have a certain
share in the achievements of genius,” and that genius itself is but “a
child of its time.”[1659]

“The literary portraits of Luther,” says the Protestant author of “Luther
im Lichte der neueren Forschung,” “are all more or less unlike the
original. They are not in the strict sense of the word portraits at all
but rather represent a type.… Every age has to some degree altered the
traditional picture of the Reformer to make it fit its own ideals.” “The
naïve way of idealising which credits the hero of history with our own
ideals … is still at work even at the present day. If we cannot claim the
whole Luther for ourselves, we can at least claim a bit of Luther.”

“In most of the popular Luther biographies of recent times,” the same
author says, “all that is harsh and rude, violent and demagogic, rough
and crude in the physiognomy of the Reformer has been obliterated.”[1660]

Adolf Harnack, also, seeks to discourage the practice of “hero painting”;
he speaks unkindly of the common, “emotional pictures” of Luther as the
reformer of civilisation which are fabricated somehow or other with the
help of a select collection of artificial strokes. He adds: “The reformer
himself would not recognise such a picture as his.” “Such a thing would
be to him,” to quote an expression of Luther’s own, simply “a painted
Luther.”[1661]

To get as close as possible to the real Luther and not to present a
painted or fictitious one has been our constant endeavour in the present
work. We venture to hope that the claims of objective history may be
recognised even in a field which trenches so closely on religious
convictions. There is so much that is purely historical and may be judged
quite apart from denominational considerations, so much neutral ground
where it is merely a question of facts. To construct an opinion of one’s
own based on the incontrovertible facts is open to everyone. We trust
that the new discussions that seem called for for a further sifting of
facts will be undertaken in all calm and in the dispassionate temper
befitting the historian. Should these volumes serve as a stimulus in this
direction, the author will feel that, by this alone, he has achieved
something great.

APPENDICES

XLI—APPENDIX I

LUTHER’S WRITINGS AND THE EVENTS OF THE DAY ARRANGED IN CHRONOLOGICAL
ORDER

[The list in the original was compiled by Peter Sinthern, S.J. We have
retained it intact, save that here, as in the body of the work, we give
the title of each of Luther’s German writings in the quaint spelling
of the earliest “Urdruck” to which we had access. _Note of the English
Editor._]

As the plan of the present work, as explained in the Introduction
(vol. i., pp. xxvii., xxxi.), did not allow of a strict chronological
order being followed, and as, moreover, many of Luther’s writings and
not a few events of the day had to be passed over in silence, the
following list may be found both interesting and useful.

Reference is made in it to all Luther’s publications, even the smaller
ones, and the reader is told where they may be found, either in the
older Erlangen edition, or in the more recent Weimar edition, so
far as the latter goes. Such a catalogue forms the best skeleton
for Luther’s history. The list is based on that given by Köstlin
(“Luther,”⁵ 2, p. 718 ff.), slightly enlarged, for instance by
references to Luther’s correspondence (in Enders, De Wette and the
Erlangen ed.), to his Disputations (as in Drews), and to his sermons.
Works which do not figure in the actual list for each year but in the
paragraph inset at the end, are those which, though published during
the year in question, were written earlier. Some works apparently
omitted in the list will be found either in the Sermons or in the
Correspondence of Luther.

The bringing into conjunction of Luther’s writings with the principal
events of the years in which they saw the light will be found of
advantage, in that the two often mutually complete and explain each
other.

Till =1516=. Accession of Pope Leo X, 1513; of Kaiser Maximilian I,
1493; of Frederick, Elector of Saxony, 1486; of George, Duke of Saxony,
1500; of William IV, Duke of Bavaria, 1508; of Joachim I, Elector of
Brandenburg, 1499; of Albert Archbishop of Mayence, 1514; of Scultetus,
Bishop of Brandenburg, 1507.—In 1502 foundation of the University of
Wittenberg. In 1503 death of Andreas Proles. Johann Lang, professor
(since 1511) at Wittenberg goes (1515-16) back to Erfurt. In 1510 Eck
is appointed professor at Ingolstadt; Carlstadt wins his doctorate.
In 1511, Amsdorf becomes a licentiate in theology. In 1513, Spalatin
is appointed Court-chaplain and secretary to the Elector Frederick. In
1513-1514, the attitude of the peasants becomes threatening. In 1515,
publication of the “Epistolæ obscurorum virorum” of Crotus Rubeanus,
etc.—1483, Nov. 10, Birth of Martin Luther. In 1497, he is sent to
Magdeburg to the Brothers of the Common Life. In 1498, he goes to
Eisenach and, in 1501, to Erfurt. 1502, he becomes a Baccalaureus. In
1505, he is made a Master and enters the cloister (July 17). In 1506, he
makes his vows; his first Mass (May 2?). He begins to study theology.
In 1508, he goes to Wittenberg to study; his lectures on dialectics and
ethics. In 1509, he becomes a Baccalaureus biblicus (March 9); late in
the year he returns to Erfurt and becomes Sententiarius. At the end of
1510 he goes to Rome and early in 1511 returns to Germany; “deserts to
Staupitz” and removes again to Wittenberg. In 1512, the Cologne Chapter;
beginning of his friendship with Lang and Eberbach; his doctorate (Oct.
18); he succeeds Staupitz as professor of Holy Scripture. In 1514 he
takes Reuchlin’s side. In 1515 is made District-Vicar at the Chapter of
Gotha; his discourse “Against the Little Saints.” His opinions become
fixed whilst engaged on his Exposition of Romans (1515-1516); echoes of
the new doctrine in his sermons at Christmas.

1. 1510-1511. Marginal notes to the Sentences (Bks. i.-iii.) and
certain works of St. Augustine (publ. 1893). Weim. ed., 9, pp. 2 ff.,
28 ff.

2. 1513-1515. First lectures on the Psalms: “Dictata super psalterium”
(publ. 1743 and 1876, complete 1885). Weim. ed., 3, pp. 1(11)-652 (ps.
i.-lxxxiv.); 4, pp. 1-462 (ps. lxxxv.-cl.); 9, pp. 116-121 (ps. xli.).

3. 1514-1517. Sermons on the Lessons (in Latin) preached at the
monastery (publ. 1720). Weim. ed., 1, pp. 18(20)-141; “Opp. lat.
var.,” 1, pp. 41-214.

4. 1514-1520. Sermons (ed. Roth, 1886). Weim. ed., 4, pp.
587(590)-717; 9, pp. 203(204); cp. “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, pp. 25-232.

5. 1515-1516. Lectures on Romans (ed. Joh. Ficker, 1908).

6. 1515? “Sermo præscriptus præposito in Litzka” (publ. 1708). Weim.
ed., 1, pp. 8(10)-17; “Opp. lat var.,” 1, pp. 29-41.

Sermons, cp. Nos. 3, 4, 6. Letters, Enders, 1, pp. 4-27. Erl. ed., 53,
p. 1.

=1516.= Hermann von Wied becomes Archbishop of Cologne; Erasmus’s
“Colloquia”; his first edition of the Greek New Testament with a new
Latin translation; Lang as Prior of Erfurt.—Luther’s first mention of
Tauler, in his “Commentary on Romans”; his mystical letters to Spenlein
and Leiffer (April 8, 15); his quarrel with the Erfurt monks (June
16); his Catholic sermon on Indulgences (July 27); his sermons against
the “holy-by-works” (July-Aug.); Opposition to his new theology at
Wittenberg and Erfurt (Sept.); back to Augustine! (Oct. 19); Carlstadt’s
Theses; Luther busy on Galatians and Titus, 1516-1517.

7. 1516-1517. “Decem præcepta Wittembergensi prædicata populo” (publ.
1518). Weim. ed., 1, pp. 394(398)-521; “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 1, pp. 1-218.

8. (Sept.). “Quæstio de viribus et voluntate hominis sine gratia”
(Theses for Barth. Bernhardi: “Initium negocii evangelici”). Weim.
ed., 1, pp. 142(145)-151; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, pp. 232(235)-255.

9. (Oct. 27, 1516-1517). “In Epistolam Pauli ad Galatas” (Lectures,
publ. 1519). Weim. ed., 2, pp. 436(451)-618. Irmischer, 3, pp. 141-485.

10. 1st ed. of “Eyn geystlich edles Buchleynn” (the “Theologia
Deutsch”), with “Vor Rede.” Weim. ed., 1, pp. 152(153); Erl. ed., 63,
p. 238.

Sermons, cp. Nos. 3, 4, 7. Letters, Enders, 1, pp. 28-78.

=1517.= Creation of 31 new Cardinals (July 1); ridicule of the German
Humanists; Hutten settles in Germany; his edition of the “Donatio
Constantini”; “our” Erasmus (March 1) publishes his paraphrases on
the Epistles, and, later, on the Gospels; the old exegesis fares
badly; “De planctu ecclesiæ” reprinted at Lyons; Tetzel visits
Magdeburg, Halberstadt and (in Oct.) Berlin; Luther nails up his Latin
Indulgence-Theses (Oct. 31).

11. “Die sieben Puszpsalm mit deutscher Auszlegung nach dem
schrifftlichen Synne” (first personal work published by Luther). Weim.
ed., 1, pp. 154(158)-220; Erl. ed., 37, pp. 345-442.

12. “Auslegung deutsch des Vater Unnser fuer dye einfeltigen Leyen”
(publ. by Agricola, and by Luther himself in 1518, No. 31).

13. Lectures on Hebrews (still unpublished).

14. “Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam” (Theses for Franz
Günther). Weim. ed., 1, pp. 221(224)-228; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, pp.
315-321.

15. “Die zehen Gepot Gottes … mit einer kurtzen Ausslegung” (publ.
1518). Weim. ed., 1, pp. 247(250)-256; Erl. ed., 36, pp. 146-154.

16. The 95 Indulgence-Theses: “Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis
indulgentiarum.” Weim. ed., 1, pp. 229(233)-238; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1,
pp. 285-293.

Sermons, cp. Nos. 3, 4, 7. Letters, Enders, 1, pp. 79-137; Erl. ed.,
53, p. 1 f.

=1518.= Philip II Landgrave of Hesse (March 31); Sickingen and his
men desert the French for the Kaiser (May 16); Melanchthon goes to
Wittenberg (Aug. 25).—Early in 1518 Archbishop Albert sends his report to
Rome; Tetzel’s counter-theses (Jan. 18); Leo X directs the Augustinian
superiors to take steps; the Heidelberg Chapter and the Disputation
in Luther’s favour; Lang displaces Luther as District-Vicar; charges
formulated at Rome against Luther as a spreader of heretical opinions
(middle of June); he is summoned to Rome (Aug. 7); the Augsburg trial
(Oct.); Papal Bull to defend the doctrine of Indulgences (Nov. 9); Luther
appeals to a General Council (Nov. 28); he discovers the secret of the
certainty of salvation.

17. “Eyn Sermon von dem Ablass und Gnade.” Weim. ed., 1, pp.
239(243)-246; Erl. ed., 27, pp. 4-8; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, pp. 326-331.

18. “Resolutiones disputationum de indulgentiarum virtute.” Weim. ed.,
1, pp. 522(525)-628; 9, pp. 171-175; “Opp. lat. var.,” 2, pp. 126-293.

19. “Sermo de pœnitentia.” Weim. ed., 1, pp. 317(319)-324; “Opp. lat.
var.,” 1, pp. 331-340.

20. Theses for the Heidelberg Disputation (Leonard Beyer’s). Weim.
ed., 1, pp. 350(353)-355; 9, pp. 160(161)-170; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1,
pp. 387-390.

21. “Asterisci Lutheri adv. Obeliscos Eckii” (publ. 1545). Weim. ed.,
1, pp. 278(281)-314; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, pp. 410-456.

22. Preface to the complete ed. of “Eyn Deutsch Theologia.” Weim. ed.,
1, pp. 374(378)-379; Erl. ed., 63, pp. 238-240; cp. No. 10.

23. “Eyn Freiheyt dess Sermons Bepstlichen Ablass und Gnad belangend.”
Weim. ed., 1, pp. 380(383)-393; Erl. ed., 27, pp. 10-25.

24. “Ausslegung des 109 Psalmen.” Weim. ed., 1, pp. 687(689)-710; 9,
pp. 176-202; Erl. ed., 40, pp. 3-38.

25. “Ad dialogum Silvestri Prieriatis de potestate Papæ responsio.”
Weim. ed., 1, pp. 644(647)-686; “Opp. lat. var.,” 2, pp. 6-67.

26. “Sermo de virtute excommunicationis.” Weim. ed., 1, pp.
634(638)-643; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, 2, pp. 306-313.

27. “Sermo in festo S. Michaelis in arce Wimariensi” (publ. 1556).
“Opp. lat. var.,” 1, pp. 226-232.

28. “Acta Augustana.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 1(6)-26; 9, p. 205; “Opp. lat.
var.,” 2, pp. 354-361, 367-392.

29. “Appellatio a Caietano ad Papam.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 27(28)-33;
“Opp. lat var.,” 2, pp. 398-404.

30. “Appellatio ad futurum concilium universale.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
34(36)-40; “Opp. lat. var.,” 2, pp. 438-445.

31. “Auslegung deutsch des Vater Unnser fuer dye einfeltigen Leyen.”
(Cp. No. 12.) Weim. ed., 2, pp. 74(80)-130; 9, pp. 122(123)-159; Erl.
ed., 21, pp. 159-227; 45, pp. 204-207.

32. “Sermo de triplici iustitia.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 41(43)-47; “Opp.
lat. var.,” 2, pp. 322-329.

“Decem præcepta,” cp. No. 7. Brief explanation of the Ten
Commandments, cp. No. 15. Sermons, Erl. ed., 16², pp. 3-33; cp. No. 4.
Letters, Enders, 1, pp. 138-337; 5, p. 1; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 3-5.

=1519.= Death of Maximilian I, Charles V succeeds him (June 28); Ulrich
becomes Duke of Würtemberg; the “Onus ecclesiæ” of B. Pirstinger of
Chiemsee; death of Tetzel (Aug. 11); Capito becomes cathedral-preacher at
Mayence; Zwingli at Zürich (Jan. 1); Oldecop visits Rome; Miltitz calls
on Luther (Jan.); the Leipzig Disputations (June-July).

33. Preface to Prierias’s “Replica.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 48(50)-56;
“Opp. lat. var.,” 2, pp. 68-78.

34. “Kurtz Unterweysung wie man beichten sol.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
57(59)-65; Erl. ed., 21, pp. 245-253 (cp. No. 66).

35. “Unterricht auff etlich Artikell.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 66(69)-73;
Erl. ed., 24, pp. 3-9; 24², pp. 5-11.

36. “Eyn Sermon von der Betrachtung des heyligen Leydens Christi.”
Weim. ed., 2, pp. 131(136)-142; Erl. ed., 11, pp. 144-152; 11², pp.
154-163.

37. Commentary on Galatians, cp. No. 9.

38. 1519-1521. Second course of Lectures on the Psalms. “Operationes
in psalmos” (Ps. i.-xxii.). Weim. ed., 5, pp. 1(19)-673; “Opp. lat.
exeg.,” 14-16.

39. “Sermo de duplici iustitia.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 143(145)-152; “Opp.
lat. var.,” 2, pp. 329-339.

40. “Disputatio et excusatio adv. criminationes Eccii.” Weim. ed., 2,
pp. 153(158)-161; 9, pp. 206(207)-212; “Opp. lat. var.,” 3, pp. 12-17.

41. “Eyn Sermon von dem Elichen Standt.” Original text, Weim. ed., 9,
pp. 213-220; Erl. ed., 16, pp. 150-158; 16², pp. 50-57. Revised text,
Weim. ed., 2, pp. 162(166)-171; Erl. ed., 16, pp. 158-165; 16², pp.
60-67.

42. “Eyn kurtze Form des Pater Noster zu versteen unnd zu betten.”
Weim. ed., 6, pp. 9(11)-19; Erl. ed., 22, pp. 21-32.

43. “Kurtze nützliche ausslegung des Vatter Unsers fürsich und
hindersich.” Weim. ed., 6, pp. 20(21)-22; Erl. ed., 45, p. 208-211.

44. “Eyn Sermon von dem Gepeet unnd Procession yn der Creutz Wochen.”
Weim. ed., 2, pp. 172(175)-179; Erl. ed., 20, pp. 290-296; 16², pp.
69-76.

45. “Eyn Sermon von dem Wucher.” Weim. ed., 6, pp. 1(3)-8; Erl. ed.,
20, pp. 122-127; 16², pp. 113-117.

46. “Resolutio super propositione sua (Lipsiensi) XIII de potestate
Papæ.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 180(183)-240; “Opp. lat. var.,” 3, pp.
296-384.

47. “Scheda adv. Hochstraten,” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 384(386)-387; “Opp.
lat var.,” 2, pp. 295-297.

48. “Resolutiones super propositionibus Lipsiæ disputatis.” Weim. ed.,
2, pp. 388(391)-435; “Opp. lat. var.,” 3, pp. 228-292.

49. “Tessaradecas consolatoria pro laborantibus et oneratis.” (publ.
1520). Weim. ed., 6, pp. 99(104)-134; “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 88-135.

50. “Contra malignum Ioh. Eccii iudicium.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
621(625)-654; “Opp. lat. var.,” pp. 472-514.

51. “Ad ægocerotem Emserianum additio.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
655(658)-679; “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 13-45.

52. “Sermon von dem Sacrament der Puss.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
709(713)-723; Erl. ed., 53, p. 30 f.; 20, pp. 179-193; 16², pp. 35-48.

53. “Eyn Sermon von der Bereytung zum Sterben.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
680(684)-697; Erl. ed., 21, pp. 258-274; “Opp. lat. var.,” 3, pp.
453-473.

54. “Ad Eccium super expurgatione Ecciana.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
698(700)-708; “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 47-58.

55. “Eyn Sermon von dem heyligen hochwirdigen Sacrament der Tauffe.”
Weim. ed., 2, pp. 724(727)-737; Erl. ed., 21, pp. 229-244; “Opp. lat.
var.,” 3, pp. 398-410.

56. “Eyn Sermon von dem hochwirdigen Sacrament des heyligen waren
Leychnams Christi.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 738(742)-758; Erl. ed., 27, pp.
28-50.

57. “Scholia in librum Genesios” (publ. 1893). Weim. ed., 9, pp.
329-415.

58. “Enarrationes epistolarum et evangeliorum quas postillas vocant”
(publ. 1893). Weim. ed., 9, pp. 415-676.

59. Latin Advent-postils (publ. 1521). Weim. ed., 7, pp. 458(463)-637.

Sermons, cp. No. 36, 41, 44, 52, 55-59. Letters, Enders, 1, p. 338—2,
p. 289; 5, pp. 4-8; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 5-34; 56, pp. i.-vii.

=1520.= Suleiman II begins his career. The war in Hungary. Coronation
of Charles V at Aachen (Oct. 23). Hutten offers Luther his own and
Sickingen’s protection; his “Vadiscus” and “Inspicientes” (April). Münzer
at Zwickau (May 17); Urban Rhegius cathedral-preacher at Augsburg; Link
succeeds Staupitz as General Vicar (Aug. 28). Eck goes to Rome; the first
Consistory against Luther (Jan. 9). The Stolpen decree of the Bishop of
Meissen (Jan. 24). Luther’s letter to Charles V (Aug. 30); his third
and last epistle to Leo X (after Oct. 13). The Bull “Exsurge” and its
condemnation of 41 theses (June 15), published in Germany by Eck (in
Sept.) and burnt by Luther (Dec. 10). Luther’s open attack on the freedom
of the will.

60. “Eyn Sermon von dem Bann.” Weim. ed., 6, pp. 61(63)-75; Erl. ed.,
27, pp. 51-70.

61. “Eyn Sermon von dem Wucher.” Weim. ed., 6, pp. 33(36)-60; Erl.
ed., 20, pp. 89-120; 16², pp. 79-110.

62. “Erklerung … etlicher Artickel yn seynem Sermon von dem heyligen
Sacrament.” Weim. ed., 6, pp. 76(78)-83; Erl. ed., 27, pp. 71-77.

63. “Antwort auff die Tzedel sso unter des Officials tzu Stolpen
Sigel ist aussgangen”; “Ad Schedulam inhibitionis.” Weim. ed., 6, pp.
135(136)-141, 142(144)-153; Erl. ed., 27, pp. 78-84; “Opp. lat. var.,”
4, pp. 138-151.

64. “Sermon von den guten Wercken.” Weim. ed., 6, pp. 196(202)-276; 9,
pp. 226(229)-301; Erl. ed., 20, pp. 193-290; 16², pp. 121-220.

65. “Responsio ad condemnationem doctrinalen per Lovanienses et
Colonienses.” Weim. ed., 6, pp. 170(174)-195; “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp.
176-205.

66. “Confitendi ratio.” Weim. ed., 6, 154(157)-169; “Opp. lat. var.,”
4, pp. 154-171 (cp. No. 34).

67. “Eyn kurcz Form der czehen Gepott. Eyn kurcz Form dess Glaubens.
Eyn kurcz Form dess Vatter Unssers.” Weim. ed., 7, pp. 194(204)-229;
Erl. ed., 22, pp. 3-32.

68. “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome wider dem hochberumpten Romanisten tzu
Leiptzk” (i.e. Alveld). Weim. ed., 6, pp. 277(285)-324; Erl. ed., 27,
pp. 86-139.

69. “Epitoma responsionis Silv. Prieratis” with preface and postface.
Weim. ed., 6, pp. 325(328)-348; “Opp. lat. var.,” 2, pp. 79-108.

70. “An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation.” Weim. ed., 6, pp.
381(404)-469; Erl. ed., 21, pp. 277-360.

71. “Eyn Sermon von dem newen Testament das ist von der heyligen
Messe.” Weim. ed., 6, pp. 349(353)-378; Erl. ed., 27, pp. 141-173.

72. “De captivitate babylonica ecclesiæ præludium.” Weim. ed., 6, pp.
484(497)-573; “Opp. lat. var.,” 5, pp. 16-118.

73. “Erbieten” (“Oblatio sive Protestatio”). Weim. ed., 6, pp.
478(480)-481, 482-483; Erl. ed., 24, pp. 9-11; 24², pp. 12-14; “Opp.
lat. var.,” 5, pp. 4-6; early draft of same, Weim. ed., 6, pp.
476-478; 9, pp. 302-304; Erl. ed., 24, pp. 12-14; 24², pp. 14-16.

74. Preface to “Adv. constitutionem de cleri cœlibatu.” Cp. Weim. ed.,
7, p. 677.

75. “Von den newen Eckischenn Bullen und Lugen.” Weim. ed., 6, pp.
576(579)-594; Erl. ed., 24, pp. 15-28; 24², pp. 18-31.

76. “Von der Freyheyt eynes Christen Menschen.” Weim. ed., 7, pp.
12(20)-38; Erl. ed., 27, pp. 175-199.

77. “Eyn Sendbrieff an den Bapst Leo. den czehenden.” Weim. ed., 7,
pp. 1(3)-11; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 41-52.

78. “Epistola Lutheriana ad Leonem decimum.” “Tractatus de libertate
christiana.” Weim. ed., 7, pp. 39(42)-73; “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp.
219-255.

79. “Adv. execrabilem Antichristi bullam.” Weim. ed., 6, pp.
595(597)-612; “Opp. lat. var.,” 5, pp. 134-153.

80. “Widder die Bullen des Endchrists.” Weim. ed., 6, pp.
613(614)-629; Erl. ed., 24, pp. 36-52; 24², pp. 39-55.

81. “Appellatio ad Concilium repetita.” Weim. ed., 7, pp. 74(75)-82;
“Opp. lat. var.,” 5, pp. 121-131.

82. “Appellation odder Beruffung … repetirt.” Weim. ed., 7, pp.
83(85)-90; Erl. ed., 24, pp. 30-35; 24², pp. 32-37.

83. “Das Magnificat verteuschet und ausgelegt” (publ. 1521). Weim.
ed., 7, pp. 538-604; Erl. ed., 45, pp. 212-290.

84. “Warumb des Bapsts und seyner Jungern Bucher … vorbrant seyn.”
Weim. ed., 7, pp. 152-186; Erl. ed., 24, pp. 152-164; 24², pp.
154-166; “Opp. lat. var.,” 5, pp. 257-270.

85. “Assertio omnium articulorum per bullam damnatorum.” (publ. 1521).
Weim. ed., 7, pp. 91-151; “Opp. lat. var.,” 5, pp. 156-237.

Tessaradecas (cp. No. 49). Sermons (cp. No. 58). Letters, Enders 2, p.
290-3, p. 37; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 34-53.

=1521.= First war between Charles V and François I (lasting till 1526).
Henry VIII publishes his “Assertio.” Death of Leo X (Dec. 1). Fall of
Belgrad. Bugenhagen comes to Wittenberg and Eberlin of Günzburg goes to
Ulm. The Bull “Decet Rom. Pontif.” is issued (Jan. 3). The Diet of Worms;
the “Gravanima”; Aleander’s discourse (Feb. 13). Luther is summoned to
the Diet (March 6), his sermon at Erfurt (April 7), his condemnation by
the Sorbonne (April 15), his arrival at Worms (April 16); he refuses
to recant (April 18); his stay at the Wartburg (May 4, 1521-March 1,
1522); the sentence of outlawry, May 8 (May 26). Carlstadt assails
clerical celibacy; the turmoil at Erfurt (July); the Mass is abolished
among the Wittenberg Augustinians (Oct.). Luther busies himself with the
translation of the Bible (Dec. 1521-1534); Melanchthon’s Commonplace-Book
(Dec.). Luther’s secret visit to Wittenberg (Dec. 3-11). Carlstadt
introduces a new rite for the Supper (Dec. 25). The Zwickau “prophets”
come to Wittenberg.

86. “Grund vnd Vrsach aller Artickel … so … verdampt seindt.” Weim.
ed., 7, pp. 299(308)-457; Erl. ed., 24, pp. 53-150; 24², pp. 56-150.

87. “An den Bock zu Leyptzck.” Weim. ed., 7, pp. 259(262)-265; Erl.
ed., 27, pp. 201-205.

88. “Auff des Bocks zu Leypczick Antwort.” Weim. ed., 7, pp.
266(271)-283; Erl. ed., 27, pp. 205-220.

89. “Unterricht der Beychtkinder ubir die vorpotten Bucher.” Weim.
ed., 7, pp. 284(290)-298; Erl. ed., 24, pp. 203-209; 24², pp. 206-213.

90. “Auff das ubirchristlich, ubirgeystlich und ubirkunstlich Buch
Bocks Emssers.” Weim. ed. 7, pp. 614(621)-688; Erl. ed., 27, pp.
221-308.

91. “Ad librum Ambrosii Catharini responsio,” Weim. ed. 7, pp.
698(704)-778; “Opp. lat. var.,” 5, pp. 289-394.

92. “Responsio extemporaria ad articulos ex Babylonica et
Assertionibus excerptos.” Weim. ed., 7, pp. 605(608)-613; “Opp. lat.
var.,” 6, pp. 24-30.

93. “Eyn Sermon … am Gründornstag.” Weim. ed., 7, pp. 689(692)-697;
Erl. ed., 17, pp. 65-72; 16², pp. 242-249.

94. “Deutsch Auszlegũg des sieben uñ seditzigstẽ Psalmẽ.” Weim. ed.,
8, pp. 1(14)-35; Erl. ed., 39, pp. 179-220.

95. “Von der Beicht ob der Bapst Macht habe zu gepieten.” Weim. ed.,
8, pp. 129(138)-204; Erl. ed., 27, pp. 319-379.

96. Church-postils, Advent to Epiphany (publ. 1522). Weim. ed., 10, 1,
1, pp. 1-728; Erl. ed., 7, 10; 7², 10².

97. “Eyn Kleyn Unterricht was man ynn den Euangeliis suchen und
gewartten soll.” Weim. ed., 10, 1, 1, pp. 8-18; Erl. ed., 7, pp. 5-12;
7², pp. 6-13.

98. “Rationis Latomianæ confutatio.” Weim. ed., 8, pp. 36(43)-128;
“Opp. lat. var.,” 5, pp. 395-521.

99. “Der sechs uñ dreyssigist Psalm.” Weim. ed., 8, pp. 205 (210)-240;
Erl. ed., 38, pp. 373-396; 39, pp. 124-136.

100. “Eyn Urteyl der Theologen tzu Paris uber die Lere Dr. Luthers.
Eyn gegen Urteyl Dr. Luthers.” Weim. ed., 8, pp. 255(267)-312; 9, pp.
716(717)-761; Erl. ed., 27, pp. 380-410.

101. “Evangelium von den tzehen Aussetzigen.” Weim. ed., 8, pp.
336(340)-397; Erl. ed., 17, pp. 146-176; 14², pp. 42-87; 16², pp.
259-291.

102. “Themata de votis.” Weim. ed., 8, pp. 313(323)-335; “Opp. lat.
var.,” 4, pp. 344-360; 6, p. 235.

103. “Eyn Widderspruch seynis yrthũss erczwungen durch den … Herrn H.
Emser.” Weim. ed., 8, pp. 241(247)-254; Erl. ed., 27, pp. 308-318.

104. “De votis monasticis” (publ. 1522). Weim. ed., 8, pp.
564(573)-669; “Opp. lat. var.,” 6, pp. 238-376.

105. “De abroganda missa privata” (publ. 1522). Weim. ed., 8, pp.
398(411)-476; “Opp. lat. var.,” 6, pp. 115-212.

106. “Vom Missbrauch der Messen” (publ. 1522). Weim. ed., 8, pp.
477(482)-563; Erl. ed., 28, pp. 28-141.

107. “Eyn trew Vormanung … sich zu vorhuten fur Auffruhr und
Emporung.” Weim. ed., 8, pp. 670(676)-688; Erl. ed., 22, pp. 43-59;
22², pp. 43-58.

108. Translation of the New Testament (publ. 1522).

The Magnificat, cp. No. 83. Latin Postils, cp. No. 59. “Assertio
omnium articulorum,” cp. No. 85. Sermons, cp. Nos. 58, 96 and Weim.
ed., 7, pp. 792(795)-802; 9, pp. 501-516; Erl. ed., 16², pp. 221-301.
Letters, Enders, 3, pp. 38-268; 53, pp. 55-103.

=1522.= Hadrian VI (Pope from Jan. 9, 1522, to Sept. 14, 1523). Charles V
goes to Spain, remaining there till 1529; the Diet of Nuremberg (Dec.);
the Turkish question, the “Centum gravamina,” the fall of Rhodes (Dec.
25). Iconoclastic riot at Wittenberg (Jan.); the Wittenberg Augustinians
abolish their rule about begging (Jan. 6); relics no longer to be exposed
at the Collegiate Church (April 16). Jonas (Feb. 22) and Bugenhagen
(Oct. 13) take wives. Luther returns from the Wartburg (March 1); his
sermons against Carlstadt (March 9-16). Hartmuth von Cronberg’s missive;
Luther returns to Erfurt (Oct.). The innovations forcibly introduced into
Altenburg, Schwarzburg, Eilenburg, etc.

109. “Bulla Cœnæ Domini.” Weim. ed., 8, pp. 688(691)-720; Erl. ed.,
24, pp. 165-202; 24², pp. 168-204.

110. “Acht Sermon” (Against Carlstadt). Weim. ed., 10, 3, pp. 1-64;
Erl. ed., 28, pp. 203-285.

111. “Von beider Gestallt des Sacramentes zu nehmen.” Weim. ed., 10,
2, pp. 1(11)-41; Erl. ed., 28, pp. 286-318.

112. “Eyn Missive an den ereñvestenn Harttmutt vonn Cronberg.” Weim.
ed., 10, 2, pp. 42(53)-60; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 120-128.

113. “Von Menschen leren tzu meyden.” Weim. ed., 10, 2, pp. 61(72)-92;
Erl. ed., 28, pp. 330-343.

114. “Die erst Epistel Sanct Petri gepredigt und ausgelegt” (publ.
1523). Weim. ed., 12, pp. 249(259)-399; Erl. ed., 51, pp. 325-494.

115. “Wyder den falsch genantten geystlichen Standt des Bapst und der
Bischoffen.” Weim. ed., 10, 2, pp. 93(105)-158; Erl. ed., 28, pp.
142-202.

116. “Bulle des Ecclesiasten tzu Wittenbergk.” Weim. ed., 10, 2, pp.
140-144; Erl. ed., 24, pp. 380-387; 24², pp. 214-220.

117. “Epistel odder Unterricht von den Heyligen an die Kirch tzu
Erffurdt.” Weim. ed., 10, 2, pp. 159(164)-168; Erl. ed., 53, pp.
139-144.

118. “Contra Henricum regem Angliæ.” Weim. ed., 10, 2, pp.
175(180)-222; “Opp. lat. var.,” 6, pp. 385-448.

119. “Antwort deutsch … auff König Henrichs von Engelland Buch. Lügen
thun myr nicht, Warheyt schew ich nicht.” Weim, ed., 10, 2, pp.
223(227)-262; Erl. ed., 28, pp. 344-387.

120. Latin letter to the Bohemian Estates. Weim. ed., 10, 2, pp.
169(172)-174; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 144-148.

121. 1522-1523. Translation of the Old Testament (Pentateuch, publ.
1523).

122. Preface to “Wesselii epistolæ.” Weim. ed., 10, 2, pp.
310(316)-317; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp. 495-497.

123. Preface to “Gochii fragmenta.” Weim. ed., 10, 2, pp. 327(329)-330.

124. “Vom Eelichen Leben.” Weim. ed., 10, 2, pp. 267(275)-304; Erl.
ed., 20, pp. 57-87; 16², pp. 510-541.

125. “Ain Betbüchlin.” Weim. ed., 10, 2, pp. 331(375)-482.

The German New Testament, cp. No. 108. Church-Postils, cp. No. 96. “De
votis monasticis,” cp. No. 104. “De abroganda missa privata,” cp. No.
105. Sermons, Weim. ed., 10, 3, pp. 1-435; Erl. ed., 64, pp. 263-265;
16², pp. 304-543. Letters, Enders, 3, p. 269—4, p. 52; Erl. ed., 53,
pp. 103-157.

=1523.= Clement VII (Pope from Nov. 19, 1523, to Sept. 25, 1534). In
Sweden, Gustavus Vasa (†1560). In Denmark, Frederick I (†1533). Edict
of the Diet of Nuremberg (Feb. 8). The Lutherans begin to form parishes
apart. The innovations introduced into Prussia. Luther has the Mass done
away with at Wittenberg. Two Augustinians of Lutheran sympathies are
burnt at Antwerp. Flight of Bora and the other Nimbschen nuns; Lang’s
marriage. End of the German Augustinians. Luther’s illness. His interview
with Carlstadt at Jena (Aug. 22). Link goes to Altenburg. The attempt to
establish a new order of things at Leisnig. Luther drafts a constitution
for the Churches of Bohemia.

126. “Die ander Epistel S. Petri und eyne S. Judas gepredigt und
ausgelegt” (1523-1524). Weim. ed., 14, pp. 1(13)-91; Erl. ed., 52, pp.
213-287.

127. “Von Anbeten des Sacramẽts des heyligen Leychnams Christi.” Weim.
ed., 11, pp. 417(431)-456; Erl. ed., 28, pp. 389-421.

128. “Deuttung der czwo grewlichen Figuren, Bapstesels czu Rom und
Munchkalbs zu Freyberg ynn Meysszen funden Philippus Melanchthon D.
Martinus Luther.” Weim. ed., 11, pp. 357(368)-385; Erl. ed., 29, pp.
2-16.

129. “Adversus armatum virum Cokleum.” Weim. ed., 11, pp.
292(295)-306; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp. 44-60.

130. Various Sermons, etc. Weim. ed., 11, pp. 36-62.

131. “Von welltlicher Uberkeytt wie weytt man yhr Gehorsam schuldig
sey.” Weim. ed., 11, pp. 229(245)-281; Erl. ed., 22, pp. 60-105.

132. “Eyn Bepstlich Breve widder den Luther.” Weim. ed., 11, pp.
337(342)-356; Erl. ed., 64, pp. 411-420; “Opp. lat. var.,” 6, pp.
466-477.

133. “In Genesim Declamationes” (publ. 1527). Weim. ed., 24; 14, pp.
94(97)-488; Erl. ed., 33, 34.

134. “Von Ordenung Gottes Dienst ynn der Gemeyne.” Weim. ed., 12, pp.
31(35)-37; Erl. ed., 22, pp. 153-156.

135. “Ursach und Anttwortt das Jungkfrawen Kloster gottlich verlassen
mugen.” Weim. ed., 11, pp. 387(394)-400; Erl. ed., 29, pp. 34-42.

136. “Das eyn Christliche Versamlung odder Gemeyne … Macht habe alle
Lere zu urteylen.” Weim. ed., 11, pp. 401(408)-416; Erl. ed., 22, pp.
141-151.

137. “Das Jhesus Christus eyn geborner Jude sey.” Weim. ed., 11, pp.
307(314)-336; Erl. ed., 29, pp. 46-74.

138. “Das Tauff Buchlin Verdeutscht.” Weim. ed., 12, pp. 38(42)-48;
Erl. ed., 22, pp. 158-166.

139. “Ordenũg eyns gemeynen Kastens.” Weim. ed., 12, pp. 1(11)-30;
Erl. ed., 22, pp. 106-130.

140. “Widder die Verkerer und Felscher Keyserlichs Mandats.” Weim.
ed., 12, pp. 58(62)-67; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 182-190.

141. “Das siebẽdt Capitel S. Pauli zu den Corinthern aussgelegt.”
Weim. ed., 12, pp. 88(92)-142; Erl. ed., 51, pp. 3-69.

142. 1523-1529. Latin translation of the Bible (publ. 1529).

143. Epistolary Recommendation of Johann Apel’s “Defensio pro suo
coniugio.” Weim. ed., 12, pp. 68(71)-72; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p. 500
ff.

144. Preface to the German translation of Lamprecht’s (Lambert of
Avignon) “In regulam Minoritarum … Commentarii.” Weim. ed., 11, pp.
457(461); “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p. 498 _sq._

145. Introduction to Savonarola’s “Meditatio pia.” Weim. ed., 12, pp.
245(248); “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p. 497 _sq._

146. “Eyn Brieff an die Christen ym Nidder Land.” Weim. ed., 12, pp.
73(77)-80; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 180-182.

147. “Allen Christen zu Righe, Revell und Tarbthe [Dorpat].” Weim.
ed., 12, pp. 143(147)-150; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 190-194.

148 Hymns: “Nu freut euch liebe Christen gmein,” “Ein newes Lied wir
heben an.” Erl. ed., 56, pp. 309 f., 340 ff.

149. “De instituendis ministris ecclesiæ.” Weim. ed., 12, pp.
160(169)-196; “Opp. lat. var.,” 6, pp. 494-535.

150. “Eyn Sendtbrieff … an ein Christl. Gemain der Stat Essling.”
Weim. ed., 12, pp. 151(154)-159; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 213-217.

151. “Eyn trost Brieff an die Christen zu Augspurg.” Weim. ed., 12,
pp. 221(224)-227; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 223-227.

152. “An die Herrn Deutschs Ordens das sie falsche Keuscheyt meyden
und zur rechten ehlichen Keuscheyt greyffen.” Weim. ed., 12, pp.
228(232)-244; Erl. ed., 29, pp. 17-33.

153. “Formula missæ et communionis.” Weim. ed., 12, pp. 197(205)-220;
“Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp. 1-20.

German Old Testament (1st part), cp. No. 121. Sermons on the 1st
Epistle of Peter, cp. No. 114. Other sermons, Weim. ed., 11, 12; Erl.
ed., 17², pp. 1-72. Letters, Enders, 4, pp. 53-272; 5, p. 8; Erl. ed.,
53, pp. 158-230; 56, pp. 166 f., vii. f.

=1524.= Diet of Nuremberg for the execution of the Edict of Worms.
Amsdorf introduces the Reformation into Magdeburg. Münzer sacks the
chapel at Malderbach near Eisleben. The Peasant War (beginning in June
and lasting till the following year). League of the South-German Catholic
Estates entered into at Ratisbon (July 6). Joh. Walther’s “Spiritual
Song-book.” Münzer’s “Well-grounded plea” in his own defence (Sept.).
Erasmus’s “Diatribe” (Sept.). Catholic worship is forbidden at Altenburg.
Luther throws off the Augustinian habit (Dec.).

154. “An die Radherrn aller Stedte deutsches Lands das sie christl.
Schulen auffrichten und halten sollen.” Weim. ed., 15, pp. 9(27)-53;
Erl. ed., 22, pp. 170-199.

155. Translation of the Old Testament (2nd part, from Josue to Esther).

156. “Duæ episcopales bullæ super doctrina Lutherana et Romana.” Weim.
ed., 15, pp. 141(146)-154; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp. 63-73.

157. “Eyn Christlicher Trostbrieff an die Miltenberger.” Weim. ed.,
15, pp. 54(69)-78; Erl. ed., 41, pp. 117-128.

158. Preface to Bugenhagen’s “In librum psalmorum Interpretatio.”
Weim. ed., 15, p. 1(8); “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p. 502 _sq._

159. “Eyn Geschicht wie Got eyner Erbarn Kloster Jungfrawẽ ausgelffen
hat.” Weim. ed., 15, pp. 79(86)-94; Erl. ed., 29, pp. 103-113.

160. 1524-1526. “Prælectiones in Prophetas minores” (publ. 1526-1545).
Weim. ed., 13, pp. 1-703; “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 24-28.

161. “Deuteronomium Mosi cum annotationibus” (publ. 1525). Weim. ed.,
14, pp. 489(497)-744; “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 13, pp. 5-351.

162. “Widder das blind und toll Verdamnis.” Weim. ed., 15, pp.
95(110)-140; Erl. ed., 29, pp. 76-92.

163. “Dass Elltern die Kinder zur Ehe nicht zwingen noch hyndern.”
Weim. ed., 15, pp. 155(163)-169; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 236-244.

164. “Zwey keyserliche uneynige und wydderwertige Gepott.” Weim. ed.,
15, pp. 241(254)-278; Erl. ed., 24, pp. 210-237; 24², pp. 221-247.

165. “Der Psalter deutsch.” Erl. ed., 37, pp. 107-249.

166. “Von Kauffshandlung und Wucher.” Weim. ed., 15, pp. 279(293)-322;
Erl. ed., 22, pp. 200-226.

167. “Eyn Sermon von dem Wucher” (2nd edition, cp. No. 61).

168. “Widder den newen Abgott und allten Teuffel der zu Meyssen sol
erhaben werden.” Weim. ed., 15, pp. 170(183)-198; Erl. ed., 24, pp.
239-257; 24², pp. 250-268.

169. “Zwue Sermon auff das xv. und xvi. Capitel ynn der Apostel
Geschichte” (publ. 1526). Weim. ed., 15, p. 571-622; Erl. ed., 17, pp.
223-253.

170. “Eyn Brieff an die Fürsten zu Sachsen von dem auffrurischen
Geyst.” Weim. ed., 15, pp. 199(210)-221; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 256-268.

171. “Sendbrieff an die … Burgermeyster, Rhatt und gantze Gemeyn der
Stadt Mülhausen.” Weim. ed., 15, pp. 230(238)-240; Erl. ed., 53, pp.
253-255.

172. “Ain Senndbrief an den Wolgeb. Herren, Herren Barth von
Staremberg.” Weim. ed., 18, pp. 1(5)-7; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 202-204.

173. “Geistliches Gesangbüchlein” (with 24 hymns by Luther) Cp. Erl.
ed., 56, p. 306 ff.

174. Sermons on Exodus (publ. in 1526, 1528, 1564, and, in full, in
1899). Weim. ed., 16, pp. 1-646; Erl. ed., 33, pp. 3-21 (“Opp. lat.
var.,” 7, pp. 75-112); 35, pp. 1-392; 36, pp. 1-144.

175. German Old Testament (3rd and final part, without the
“Apocrypha”).

176. “Von dem Grewel der Stillmesse so man den Canon nennet.” Weim.
ed., 18, pp. 8(22)-36; Erl. ed., 29, pp. 114-133.

177. “Der 127. Psalm ausgelegt an die Christen zu Rigen ynn Liffland.”
Weim. ed., 15, pp. 348(360)-379; Erl. ed., 41, pp. 130-150; 53, p. 281.

178. “Eyn Brieff an die Christen zu Straspurg widder den Schwermer
Geyst.” Weim. ed., 15, pp. 380(391)-397; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 270-277.

Sermons on the 2nd Epistle of Peter and on the Epistle of Jude, cp.
No. 126. Other Sermons, Weim. ed., 15, pp. 398(409)-803; Erl. ed.,
17², pp. 73-115. Letters, Enders, 4, p. 273 to 5, p. 99; Erl. ed., 53,
pp. 230-281.

=1525.= Charles V is victorious near Pavia (Feb. 24). Prussia becomes a
secular principality (April 10). Luther opposes the so-called fanatics,
Carlstadt and the rest. The massacre at Weinsberg (April 16). Death
of the Elector Frederick (May 5). Johann succeeds him on the Saxon
throne and reigns till 1532. Münzer is vanquished near Frankenhausen
(May 15). The Erfurt Articles. League of the North German Catholic
princes, meeting at Dessau (July 19). Link becomes preacher at Nuremberg
(Aug.). The Mayence assembly (Nov.). Eck’s “Enchiridion.” Carlstadt’s
humiliation. Luther’s marriage (June 13). He calls for the entire
suppression of “idolatry” at Altenburg (July 20). The Reformation is
violently carried through in the Saxon Electorate (Oct. 1). Interview
with Schwenckfeld (Dec. 1). Nuremberg openly comes over to Luther’s side.

179. “Widder die hymelischen Propheten.” Weim. ed., 18, pp.
37(62)-214; Erl. ed., 29, pp. 136-297.

180. “Von Bruder Henrico ynn Diedmar verbrand sampt dem zehenden
Psalmen ausgelegt.” Weim. ed., 18, pp. 215(224)-250; Erl. ed., 53, pp.
347-354; 27², pp. 400-426.

181. “Vorrede an den Leser von der Jubil Jars Bullen.” Weim. ed., 18,
pp. 251(255)-269; Erl. ed., 29, pp. 298-318.

182. Sermons on 1 Timothy. Weim. ed., 17, 1, pp. 102-167; Erl. ed.,
51, pp. 276-324.

183. “Eyn christl. Schrift an Herrn Wolfgang Reissenbusch sich ynn den
Ehelichen Stand zubegeben.” Weim. ed., 18, pp. 270(275)-278; Erl. ed.,
33, pp. 286-290.

184. “Ermanunge zum Fride auff die zwelff Artikel der Bawrschafft ynn
Schwaben.” Weim. ed., 18, pp. 279(291)-334; Erl. ed., 24, pp. 259-286;
24², pp. 271-299.

185. “Vertrag zwischen dem löblichen Bund zu Schwaben und den
zweyen Hauffen der Bawrn am Bodensee und Algew.” Weim. ed., 18, pp.
335(336)-343; Erl. ed., 65, pp. 2-12.

186. “Wider die mordischen und reubischen Rotten der Bawren.” Weim.
ed., 18, pp. 344(357)-361; Erl. ed., 24, pp. 288-294; 24², pp. 303-309.

187. “Eyn schrecklich Geschicht unnd Gericht Gottes uber Thomas
Müntzer.” Weim. ed., 18, pp. 362(367)-374; Erl. ed., 65, pp. 13-22.

188. “Eyn Sendebrieff von dem harten Buchlin widder die Bauren.” Weim.
ed., 18, pp. 375(384)-401; Erl. ed., 24, pp. 295-319; 24², pp. 310-334.

189. “Eyne Christliche Vormanung von eusserlichem Gottis Dienste unde
Eyntracht an die yn Lieffland.” Weim. ed., 18, pp. 412(417)-421; Erl.
ed., 53, pp. 315-321.

190. Preface to Bodenstein’s “Entschuldigung D. Andres Carlstats des
falschen Namens der Auffrůr.” Weim. ed., 18, pp. 431(436)-438; Erl.
ed., 64, pp. 404-408.

191. Preface to Carlstadt’s “Erklerung.” Weim. ed., 18, pp.
446(453)-466; Erl. ed., 64, pp. 408-410.

192. “Die sieben Buss Psalmen” (revised). Weim. ed., 18, pp.
467(479)-550; Erl. ed., 37, pp. 344-442.

193. Notes to the 28 Articles of the Erfurt Council. Weim. ed., 18,
pp. 531(534)-540; Erl. ed., 56, pp. xii.-xviii.; 65, pp. 239-247.

194. “Radtschlag wie in der Christlichen Gemaine ain … bestendigen
Ordnung solle fürgenommen und auffgericht werden” (publ. 1526). Weim.
ed., 19, pp. 436(440)-446; Erl. ed., 26², pp. 2-8.

195. “De servo arbitrio.” Weim. ed., 18, pp. 551(600)-787; “Opp. lat.
var.,” 7, pp. 113(116)-368.

196. Church-Postils (2nd part), Epiphany to Easter. Erl. ed., 8-11;
8²-11².

197. “Deudsche Messe und Ordnung Gottis Diensts” (publ. 1526). Weim.
ed., 19, pp. 44(70)-113; Erl. ed., 22, pp. 227-244.

198. Hymn, “Jesaia dem Propheten das geschach.” Erl. ed., 56, p. 343.

199. “Epistel des Propheten Jesaia so man ynn der Christmesse lieset”
(publ. 1526). Weim. ed., 19, pp. 126(131)-168; Erl. ed., 15, pp.
65-110; 15², pp. 70-116.

“Annotationes in Deuteronomiam,” cp. No. 161. Other sermons, Weim.
ed., 17, 1, pp. 1-507; Erl. ed., 17², pp. 116-253. Letters, Enders, 5,
pp. 100-297; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 281-357; 56, pp. 168-170, viii.-xviii.

=1526.= The Diet of Augsburg demands (Jan. 9) an Œcumenical Council.
Luther lays it down (Feb. 9) that, in each locality there must be but
one doctrine. The new worship in the Saxon Electorate. The Electorate
and Hesse enter into a league (at Gotha, and, later, at Torgau, May 2).
Lambert of Avignon helps Philip of Hesse to introduce the innovations.
The Kaiser threatened by the League of Cognac (May 22). The Diet of
Spires (Aug. 27) tempers the Edict of Worms. The Battle of Mohacs (Aug.
29). Charles V politically estranged from the Pope. The “Hyperaspistes”
of Erasmus.

200. “Das Bapstum mit seinen Gliedern gemalet und beschrieben.” Weim.
ed., 19, pp. 1(6)-43; Erl. ed., 29, pp. 360-378.

201. Sermons (publ. in full in 1898). Weim. ed., 20, pp. 204(212)-591;
Erl. ed., 17², pp. 254-267.

202. “Widder den … Radschlag der gantzen Meintzischen Pfafferey.”
Weim. ed., 19, pp. 252(260)-282; Erl. ed., 65, pp. 23-46.

203. “Der Prophet Jona aussgelegt.” Weim. ed., 19, pp. 169(185)-251;
Erl. ed., 41, pp. 325-414.

204. “Sermon von dem Sacrament des Leibs und Bluts Christi widder die
Schwarmgeister.” Weim. ed., 19, pp. 474(482)-523; Erl. ed., 29, pp.
329-359.

205. Two Prefaces to the Swabian “Syngramma.” Weim. ed., 19, pp.
447(457)-461, 524(529)-530; Erl. ed., 65, pp. 108-185.

206. “Antwort auff ettliche Fragen Closter Gelübd belangend.” Weim.
ed., 19, pp. 283(287)-293; Erl. ed., 29, pp. 318-327.

207. “Der Prophet Habacuc ausgelegt.” Weim. ed., 19, pp. 336(345)-435;
Erl. ed., 42, pp. 3-108.

208. “Das Tauffbuchlin verdeudscht auffs new zugericht.” Weim. ed.,
19, pp. 531(537)-541; Erl. ed., 22, pp. 291-294.

209. “Annotationes in Ecclesiasten” (publ. 1532). Weim. ed., 20, pp.
1(7)-203; “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 21, pp. 1-266.

210. “Der 112. Psalm Davids … gepredigt.” Weim. ed., 19, pp.
294(297)-336; Erl. ed., 40, pp. 241-280.

211. “Vier trostliche Psalmen.… An die Königyn zu Hungern ausgelegt.”
Weim. ed., 19, pp. 542(552)-615; Erl. ed., 38, pp. 370-453.

212. “Der Prophet Sacharja ausgelegt” (publ. 1528). Weim. ed., 23, pp.
477(485)-664; Erl. ed., 42, pp. 109-362.

213. “Epistel aus dem Propheten Jeremia von Christus Reich” (publ.
1527). Weim. ed., 20, pp. 549-561; Erl. ed., 41, pp. 187-219.

214. “Ob Kriegsleutte auch ynn seligen Stande seyn künden.” Weim. ed.,
19, pp. 618(623)-662; Erl. ed., 22, pp. 264-290.

“Deudsche Messe,” cp. No. 197. Two sermons on Acts xv., xvi., cp.
No. 171. Sermon on Is. ix., cp. No. 199. Lecture on Osee, cp. No.
160. Instruction on Moses, Weim. ed., 16, pp. 363-394; Erl. ed.,
33, pp. 3-21. Various memoranda, cp. No. 194. Summer part of the
Church-Postils (Erl. ed., 8, 9, 11-14; 9², 11²-14²). Sermons, cp. Nos.
201, 204, 210, 213. Letters, Enders, 5, p. 298 ff.; Erl. ed., 53, pp.
357-394.

=1527.= Second war between Charles V and François I (lasting till 1529).
Henry the Eighth’s plans for a divorce. Ferdinand I is crowned at Prague
as King of Bohemia (Feb. 24). Sack of Rome (May 6-14). Peace between
Charles V and Clement VII (Nov.). Gustavus Vasa takes Luther’s side. The
Visitation of the Saxon Electorate (lasting till 1529) and introduction
of the office of Superintendent. Emser’s translation of the New Testament
(Dec.). Melanchthon in his “Commonplace Book” modifies his teaching on
Predestination. Luther falls ill; beginning of his worst “struggles of
conscience.” Commencement of the controversy with Zwingli, etc., on the
Supper. Wittenberg is invaded by the Plague.

215. “Das diese Wort Christi (Das ist mein Leib etce.) noch fest
stehen widder die Schwermgeister.” Weim. ed., 23, pp. 38(64)-320; Erl.
ed., 30, pp. 16-150.

216. Translation of Isaias.

217. “Auff des Königs zu Engelland Lesterschrift.” Weim. ed., 23, pp.
17(26)-37; Erl. ed., 30, pp. 2-14.

218. Sermons on Leviticus and Numbers (publ. 1902). Weim. ed., 25, pp.
403(411)-522.

219. Preface to “Commentarius in Apocalypsim ante centum annos
editus.” Weim. ed., 26, pp. 121(123)-124; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp.
506-508.

220. Preface to “Die Weissagungẽ Johannis Lichtenberger.” Weim. ed.,
23, pp. 1(7)-12; Erl. ed., 63, pp. 250-258.

221. “In Esaiam scholia ex D.M.L. prælectionibus collecta” (publ.
1532-1534). Weim. ed., 25, pp. 79(87)-401; “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 22, pp.
1-296.

222. “Ob man fur dem Sterben fliehen muge.” Weim. ed., 23, pp.
323(338)-386; Erl. ed., 22, pp. 318-341.

223. Lecture on the 1st Epistle of John (publ. 1708 and 1799). Weim.
ed., 20, pp. 592(599)-801.

224. “Trostunge un die Christen zu Halle uber Er Georgen yhres
Predigers Tod.” Weim. ed., 23, pp. 390(401)-434; Erl. ed., 22, pp.
295-316.

225. “Octonarius David” (Ps. xix.). Weim. ed., 23, pp. 435(437)-442;
Erl. ed., 41, pp. 93-115.

226. “Von Er Lenhard Keiser ynn Beyern umb des Evangelii Willen
verbrandt.” Weim. ed., 23, pp. 443(445)-476.

227. “Ain feste Burg” (1528?). Erl. ed., 56, p. 343 f., see above,
vol. v., p. 549.

228. Lecture on Titus and Philemon (publ. 1902). Weim. ed., 25, pp.
1(6)-78.

Church-Postils, Summer part and conclusion, ed. Roth, cp. Erl. ed.,
15, 16; 15². Sermon on Jer. xxiii. 5-8, cp. No. 213. Sermons on
Genesis, cp. No. 133. Other Sermons, Weim. ed., 23, pp. 665(682)-757;
Erl. ed., 17², pp. 268-322. Letters, Enders, 1, pp. 1-172; Erl. ed.,
53, pp. 395-416; 56, pp. 170-176.

=1528.= The Pack negotiations. Anabaptists are threatened with the
death-penalty. Death of Albert Dürer (April 6) and Emser (Nov. 8).
Cochlæus, Court-chaplain to Duke George. Cruciger and other friends come
to Wittenberg. Letters of Hasenberg and von der Heyden. Bugenhagen’s work
in Brunswick. Progress of the Visitation of the Saxon Electorate. The
“catechetical sermons” at Wittenberg. Philip of Hesse’s breach of the
peace and hostilities against Bamberg, Würzburg and Mayence. The Turks
threaten new inroads.

229. “Unterricht der Visitatorn an die Pharhern ym Kurfurstenthum zu
Sachssen,” etc. Weim. ed., 26, pp. 175(195)-240; Erl. ed., 23, pp.
3-70.

230. “Vom Abendmal Christi Bekentnis.” Weim. ed., 26, pp.
241(261)-509; Erl. ed., 30, pp. 152-373.

231. “Ein Gesichte Bruder Clausen ynn Schweytz und seine Deutunge.”
Weim. ed., 26, pp. 125(130)-136; Erl. ed., 63, pp. 260-268.

232. Lecture on 1 Timothy (partly publ. 1797). Weim. ed., 26, pp.
1(4)-120.

233. “Von der Widdertauffe an zween Pfarherrn.” Weim. ed., 26, pp.
137(144)-174; Erl. ed., 26, pp. 255-294; 26², pp. 282-321.

234. “De digamia episcoporum propositiones.” Weim. ed., 26, pp.
510(517)-527; “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 360-373.

235. New edition of the German Psalter; cp. No. 165, 289.

236. Three series of sermons on the Catechism (publ. 1899). Weim. ed.,
30, 1, pp. 2-122.

237. “Vom Kriege widder die Türcken” (publ. 1529). Weim. ed. 30, 2,
pp. 81(107)-148; Erl. ed., 31, pp. 32-80.

238. “New-Zeittung von Leyptzig.” “Ein newe Fabel Esopi newlich
verdeudscht gefunden.” Weim. ed., 26, pp. 534(539)-554; Erl. ed., 64,
pp. 326-337.

239. “Von beider Gestalt des Sacraments.” Weim. ed., 26, pp.
555(560)-618; Erl. ed., 30, pp. 374-426.

240. Week-day sermons on John xvi.-xx. (in part publ. 1530, 1557).
Weim. ed., 28, pp. 31(42)-502; Erl. ed., 50, pp. 1-441.

241. Week-day sermons on Mt. xi.-xv. Weim. ed., 28, pp. 1(4)-30.

242. “Nachwort zu der Durchleuchtigen hochgebornen F. Ursulen
Hertzogin zu Mönsterberg. Christliche Ursach des verlassen Klosters zu
Freyberg.” Weim. ed., 26, pp. 623(628)-633; Erl. ed., 65, pp. 132-169.

Exposition of the Ten Commandments, Weim. ed., 16, pp. 394-528; Erl.
ed., 36, pp. 1-144. Commentary on Zacharias, cp. No. 212. Other
Sermons, Weim. ed., 27, 28, pp. 503-763. Letters, Enders, 6, p. 173-7,
p. 38; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 416-452; 54, pp. 1-60; 56, pp. 176-180, xix.

=1529.= Peace of Barcelona (June 29). Peace of the Ladies (Cambrai,
Aug. 5). Retreat of the Turks from Vienna (Oct. 14). Diet of Spires.
“Protest” of the Lutheran Estates (April 19). They promise each other
mutual support (April 22). Philip of Hesse and Melanchthon seek a union
with the Zwinglians; the Marburg Conference (Oct. 1-4). Luther submits
to the Upper German townships his so-called Schwabach Articles which are
rejected by Strasburg and Ulm at the Schwabach Conference (Oct. 16). The
same thing happens again at the Schmalkalden Conference (Nov. 29) and
spoils all prospect of an arrangement with the South-Germans. Nuremberg
alone stands true to the union.

243. “Von heimlichẽ und gestolen Brieffen.” Weim. ed., 30, 2, pp.
1(25)-48; Erl. ed., 31, pp. 2-30.

244. “Deudsch Catechismus.” Weim. ed., 30, 1, pp. 123-238; Erl. ed.,
21, pp. 26-155.

245. “Der Kleine Catechismus für die gemeine Pfarher und Prediger.”
Weim. ed., 30, 1, pp. 239-425; Erl. ed., 21, pp. 5-25.

246. “Ein Trawbüchlin für die einfeltigen Pfarherr.” Weim. ed., 30, 3,
pp. 43(74)-80; Erl. ed., 23, pp. 208-213.

247. “Teütsche Letaney” and “Latina Litania correcta.” Weim. ed., 30,
3, pp. 1(29)-42; Erl. ed., 56, pp. 360-366.

248. Preface to the “Œconomia christiana” of Justus Menius. Weim. ed.,
30, 2, pp. 49(60)-63; Erl. ed., 54, pp. 117-121; 63, pp. 277-282.

249. Translation of the Book of Wisdom.

250. Sermons on Deuteronomy (publ. 1564). Weim. ed., 28, pp.
501(509)-763; Erl. ed., 36, pp. 164-411.

251. Preface to Melanchthon’s Exposition of Colossians. Weim. ed., 30,
2, pp. 64(68)-69; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p. 492 _sq._

252. Preface to Brentz’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes. Weim. ed., 26,
pp. 619(621)-622; Erl. ed., 54, p. 59 f.

253. Preface to Venatorius’ “Ein kurtz Underricht den sterbenden
Menschen.” Weim. ed., 30, 2, pp. 70(79)-80; Erl. ed., 63, pp. 285-287.

254. The “Wittenberg Song-book” with new hymns and a preface.

255. “Von Ehesachen” (publ. 1530). Weim. ed., 30, 3, pp. 198(205)-248;
Erl. ed., 23, pp. 93-154.

256. Marburg Conference and Articles. Weim. ed., 30, 3, pp.
92(110)-171; Erl. ed., 65, pp. 88-91.

257. Articles of the Schwabach Convention. Weim. ed., 30, 3, pp.
81(86)-91.

258. “Eine Heer-Predigt widder den Türcken.” Weim. ed., 30, 2, pp.
149(160)-197; Erl. ed., 31, pp. 81-121.

259. Scholia to Ps. cxviii. (to Eobanus Hessus).

Latin translation of the Bible, cp. No. 142. “Vom Kriege widder
die Türcken,” cp. No. 237. Sermons, cp. No. 240 and Weim. ed., 29.
Letters, Enders, 7, pp. 39-212; Erl. ed., 54, pp. 60-121; 56, pp. 181,
xix.-xxvii.

=1530.= Charles V is crowned Emperor at Bologna (Feb. 24). Death of
Willibald Pirkheimer and of Luther’s father, Hans (Feb.). The “Confessio
tetrapolitana” of Strasburg, Constance, Lindau and Memmingen (drawn up
by Bucer and Capito). The Torgau Articles (March). Diet of Augsburg
(June 20-Nov. 19). Luther at the Coburg (April 23-Oct. 4). At Torgau
he begins to favour the use of armed resistance to the Emperor (Oct.).
The “Confessio Augustana” (June 25), the “Confutatio” and Melanchthon’s
“Apologia” (Sept.). Bucer at the Coburg (Sept. 25). The warlike league
planned by the Protesting Estates at the Schmalkalden Assembly (Dec. 22).
Spread of the innovations in Hungary.

260. Preface to Spengler’s “Kurczer Auszuge aus den Bebstlichen
Rechten.” Weim. ed., 30, 2, pp. 215(219); Erl. ed., 63, pp. 288-290.

261. Preface to “Libellus de ritu et moribus Turcarum.” Weim. ed., 30,
2, pp. 198(205)-208; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp. 514-519; Erl. ed., 65,
pp. 248-254.

262. New ed. of the New Testament.

263. Translation of Daniel.

264. Preface to “Der Widdertauffer Lere” of Justus Menius. Weim. ed.,
30, 2, pp. 209(211)-214; Erl. ed., 63, pp. 290-296.

265. Lecture on the Song of Songs (publ. 1538). “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 21,
pp. 273-368.

266. “Vermanũg an die geistlichen versamlet auff dem Reichstag zu
Augsburg.” Weim. ed., 30, 2, pp. 237(268)-356; Erl. ed., 24, pp.
330-379; 24², pp. 358-407.

267. (1530-1532). Translation of Jeremias, Ezechiel and the Lesser
Prophets.

268. “Das xxxviii. und xxxix. Capitel Hesechiel vom Gog.” Weim. ed.,
30, 2, pp. 220(223)-236; Erl. ed., 41, pp. 220-231.

269. Twenty-one Sermons (publ. 1702). Weim. ed., 32, pp. 1-298; Erl.
ed., 17², pp. 323-472.

270. “Auff das Schreien etlicher Papisten uber die siebentzehen
Artickel.” Weim. ed., 30, 3, pp. 183(186)-197; Erl. ed., 24, pp.
321-329; 24², pp. 337-344.

271. “Das schöne Confitemini” (Ps. cxviii.). Erl. ed., 41, pp. 2-19.

272. Short exposition of the first 25 Psalms (publ. 1548, and, in
full, 1559). Erl. ed., 38, pp. 1-275; “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 17.

273. (1530?). German version of Æsop’s Fables. Erl. ed., 64, pp.
350-361.

274. “Etliche tröstliche Vermanungen … Mit diesen Sprüchen hat sich
der heilige Man … getröstet.” Weim. ed., 30, 2, pp. 697(700)-710; Erl.
ed., 23, pp. 155-162.

275. Reflections of the Holy Fathers, on how a Christian must bear his
cross with patience. Erl. ed., 64, pp. 298-300.

276. Glosses on the Decalogue. Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 357(358).

277. “Widderruff vom Fegefeur.” Weim. ed., 30, 2, pp. 360(367)-390;
Erl. ed., 31, pp. 185-215.

278. “Ettlich Artickelstück so M.L. erhalten wil, wider die gantze
Satans Schüle uñ alle Pforten der Hellen.” Weim. ed., 30, 2, pp.
413(420)-427; “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 373-377; Erl. ed., 31, pp.
122-125.

279. “Predigt das man Kinder zur Schulen halten solle.” Weim. ed., 30,
2, pp. 508(517)-588; Erl. ed., 20, pp. 1-45; 17², pp. 376-422.

280. “Brieff an den Cardinal Ertzbisschoff zu Mentz.” Weim. ed., 30,
2, pp. 391(397)-412; Erl. ed., 54, pp. 159-168.

281. “Der lxxxii. Psalm ausgelegt.” Erl. ed., 39, pp. 225-264.

282. “Von den Schlüsseln.” Weim. ed., 30, 2, pp. 428(435)-507; 30, 3,
pp. 584-588; Erl. ed., 31, pp. 126-184.

283. “Der hundert und siebenzehende Psalm ausgelegt.” Erl. ed., 40,
pp. 281-328.

284. “Vermanung zum Sacrament des Leibs und Bluts unsers Herrn.” Weim.
ed., 30, 2, pp. 589(595)-626; Erl. ed., 23, pp. 163-207.

285. “Sendbrieff D.M.L. von Dolmetzscheñ.” Weim. ed., 30, 2, pp.
627(632)-646; Erl. ed., 65, pp. 103-123.

286. “Der hundert und eilffte Psalm ausgelegt.” Erl. ed., 40, pp.
193-240.

287. Week-day sermons on Mt. v.-vii. (publ. 1532). Weim. ed., 32, pp.
299-555; Erl. ed., 43, pp. 2-368.

288. Sermons on John vi. 26-viii. 38 (publ. 1564). Weim. ed., 33; Erl.
ed., 47, pp. 227-394; 48, pp. 1-410.

“Von Ehesachen,” cp. No, 255. “Heer-Predigt widder den Türcken,” cp.
No. 258. Sermons on John xvii., cp. No. 240. Letters, Enders, 7, p.
213—8, p. 334; Erl. ed., 54, pp. 122-209; 56, pp. 181-183, xxvii.-xxix.

=1531.= Ferdinand becomes the German King (Jan. 5). League of
Schmalkalden (Feb. 27). Bavaria takes the field against Ferdinand (24
Oct.). Archbishop Albert stays at Halle (till 1540). Melanchthon prepares
for the press his “Confessio Aug.” and its “Apologia.” Luther suggests to
Henry VIII that bigamy would be preferable to divorce (Sept. 3). England
(1531-1545) is carried into schism by Henry VIII. Zwinglian iconoclastic
riots in Swabia. Zwingli slain in Battle (Oct. 11) is succeeded by
Bullinger. Luther’s revision of his translation of the Psalms; his
memoranda on the means of stamping out the Anabaptist movement (end of
Oct.).

289. New edition of the Psalms, cp. Nos. 165, 235.

290. “Auff das vermeint Keiserlich Edict ausgangen jm 1531 Jare.”
Weim. ed., 30, 3, pp. 321(331)-388, 583; Erl. ed., 25, pp. 51-88; 25²,
pp. 50-88.

291. “Warnunge an seine lieben Deudschen.” Weim. ed., 30, 3, pp.
252(276)-320, 392-399; Erl. ed., 25, pp. 2-50; 25², pp. 3-49; 65, p.
259 f.

292. “Widder den Meuchler zu Dresen gedrückt.” Weim. ed., 30, 3, pp.
413(446)-471; Erl. ed., 25, pp. 89-109; 25², pp. 109-128.

293. “Commentarius (maior) in Epistolam ad Galatas” (publ. 1535).
Weim. ed., 40, 1 (cap. i.-iv.); Irmischer, 1; 2; 3, pp. 1-120.

294. “Exemplum theologiæ et doctrinæ papisticæ.” Weim. ed., 30, 3, pp.
494(496)-509; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp. 21-43.

295. Psalm cxlvii. (publ. 1532). Erl. ed., pp. 152-181.

296. “Enarratio psalmi xlii.” “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 17, pp. 234-238.

Sermons, Weim. ed., 34, 1, 2; Erl. ed., 18², pp. 1-135. Letters,
Enders, 8, pp. 335-9, p. 135; Erl. ed., 54, pp. 209-265; 56, p. 183.

=1532.= The Turkish invasion of Hungary and Austria (June); Suleiman II
does not venture to attack Vienna. Elector Johann dies and is succeeded
by Johann Frederick (till 1547). Calvin stays for a while in Geneva. The
Nuremberg proposals for a religious truce (June 23) are rejected by the
Catholic Estates at Ratisbon (July 2). Melanchthon thinks of leaving
Wittenberg.

297. “Brieff von den Schleichern und Winckelpredigern.” Weim. ed., 30,
3, pp. 510(518)-527; Erl. ed., 31, pp. 214-226.

298. “An den Durchleuchtigen Hochgebornen Fürsten und Herrn Herrn
Albrechten Marggraffen zu Brandenburg.” Weim. ed., 30, 3, pp.
541(547)-553; Erl. ed., 54, pp. 281-289.

299. “Enarratio psalmorum ii. et xlv.” (publ. 1533 and 1546). “Opp.
lat. exeg.” 18, pp. 1-127, 129-264.

300. “Enarratio psalmi li.” (publ. 1538). “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 19, pp.
1-154.

301. Preface to Bugenhagen’s ed. of “Athanasii libri contra
idolatriam.” Weim ed., 30, 3, pp. 528(530)-532; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7,
pp. 523-525.

302.“Summarien uber die Psalmen und Ursachen des Dolmetschens” (publ.
1533). Erl. ed., 37, pp. 254-339.

303. Sermon on Charity (1 Jo. iv. 16-21; publ. 1533). Weim. ed., 36,
pp. 416-477; Erl. ed., 19, pp. 358-412; 18², pp. 304-311.

304. Translation of the Old-Testament “Apocrypha” (publ. 1533 f.).

305. Sermon on the sum total of the Christian life (1 Tim. 1, 5 ff.
publ. 1533). Weim. ed., 36, pp. 352-375; Erl. ed., 19, pp. 296-328;
18², pp. 370-304.

306. (1532-1533). “Enarratio in psalmos graduales” (publ. 1540). “Opp.
lat. exeg.,” 19, pp. 157-289; 20, pp. 1-306.

307. “Brieff an die zu Franckfort am Meyn.” Weim. ed., 30, 3, pp.
554(558)-571; Erl. ed., 26, pp. 295-313; 26², pp. 372-389.

308. (1532-1534). Home-sermons (Home-postils, ed. Veit Dietrich, 1544;
ed. Rörer, 1559). Weim. ed., 36, 37; Erl. ed., 1-6; 1²-3² (after
Dietrich); 4²-6² (after Rörer).

Exposition of Ps. cxlvii., cp. No. 295. Translation of the Prophets,
cp. No. 267. Sermons on Mt. v.-vii., cp. No. 287. “In Esaiam prophetam
scholia,” cp. No. 221. “Annotationes in Ecclesiasten,” cp. No. 209.
Sermon on Numbers, vi. 22-27, cp. No. 218. Other Sermons, Weim. ed.,
36; Erl. ed., 18², pp. 136-384. Letters, Enders, 9, pp. 136-258; Erl.
ed., 54, pp. 266-348; 56, pp. 184 f.-187.

=1533.= Clement VII takes steps for the assembling of an Œcumenical
Council (Jan.). The Schmalkaldeners refuse to hear of a Council (June).
Henry VIII weds Anne Boleyn (Jan). Progress of Protestantism in the Duchy
of Jülich-Cleves, in Anhalt-Köthen and Mecklenburg.

309. Sermons on 1 Cor. xv. (publ. 1534). Weim. ed., 36, pp. 649-697;
Erl. ed., 51, pp. 71-275.

310. “Verantwortung der auffgelegten Auffrur.” Erl. ed., 31, pp.
228-269.

311. “Die kleine Anwort auff H. Georgen nehestes Buch.” Weim. ed., 31,
pp. 270-307.

312. “Von der Winckelmesse und Pfaffen Weihe.” Erl. ed., 31, pp.
308-377.

313. Preface to the “Rechẽschafft des Glaubens” (of the Bohemian
Brethren). Erl. ed., 63, pp. 320-323.

314. Preface to Balth. Rhaida’s reply to Wicel. Erl. ed., 63, pp.
317-319.

“Summarien,” cp. No. 302. “Brieff,” etc., cp. No. 307. Exposition of
Ps. xlv., cp. 299. Sermon on 1 John iv. 16-21, cp. No. 303. Sermon
on 1 Tim. i. 5 ff., cp. No. 305. Translation of Sirach, cp. No. 304.
Other Sermons, Weim. ed., 37, pp. 1-248; Erl. ed., 19², pp. 1-102.
Letters, Enders, 9, pp. 259-370; Erl. ed., 55, pp. 1-35; 56, pp.
185-191, xxix.-xxxv.

=1534.= Death of Clement VII (Sept. 25). Paul III (from Oct. 13,
1534-Nov. 10, 1549). Bull against Henry VIII (March 23). Act of Supremacy
is passed by the English Parliament (Nov. 3). Ulrich of Würtemberg is
reinstated by Philip of Hesse; his treaty with King Ferdinand signed at
Baden (June 29). Reformation of Anhalt (March) of Würtemberg (May) of
Augsburg (July) of Pomerania (Dec.). Carlstadt at Basle. Luther again
attacks Erasmus, the latter’s “Purgatio adv. epistolam non sobriam
Lutheri.” Death of Cardinal Cajetan (Aug. 9). Strasburg the centre of the
Anabaptist movement. The Anabaptists’ orgies at Münster (Feb., 1534, to
June 25, 1535). First edition of Calvin’s “Institutio.”

315. “Ein Brieff D. Mart. Luth. von seinem Buch der Winckelmessen.”
Erl. ed., 31, pp. 378-391.

316. “Der lxv. Psalm durch D.M.L. zu Dessaw … gepredigt.” Weim. ed.,
37, pp. 425-451; Erl. ed., 39, pp. 137-177.

317. “Biblia das ist die gantze Heilige Schrift.”

318. “Convocatio concilii liberi christiani” (of doubtful
authenticity). Erl. ed., 31, pp. 411-416; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp.
370-372.

319. “Præfatio in Antonii Corvini librum de Erasmi concordia.” “Opp.
lat. var.,” 7, pp. 526-531.

320. Preface to Urban Rhegius, “Widderlegung der Münsterischen newen …
Bekentnus.” Erl. ed., 63, pp. 332-336.

321. Preface to the “Newe Zeittung von Münster.” Erl. ed., 63, pp.
336-341.

322. “Enarratio psalmi xc.” “Opp. lat exeg.,” 18, pp. 264-334.

323. Exposition of Psalm ci. Erl. ed., 39, pp. 266-364.

324. “Einfeltige Weise zu beten.” Erl. ed., 23, pp. 215-238.

325. “Klagschrift der Vögel an D.M. Luther über seinem Diener Wolfgang
Sieberger.” Erl. ed., 64, p. 347 f.

“Scholia in Esaiam,” cp. No. 221. Sermons on 1 Cor. xv., cp. No. 309.
Further Sermons, Weim. ed., 37, pp. 249-672. Letters, Enders, 9, pp.
371—10, p. 117; Erl. ed., 55, pp. 36-81; 56, pp. 191-196.

=1535.= Growth of the Schmalkalden League after the accession of
Würtemberg. Death of Joachim I of Brandenburg (July 11). Joachim II
his successor (†1571) a friend of Luther’s. Execution of Sir Thomas
More. Vergerio’s interview with Luther (Nov. 7). Amended edition of
Melanchthon’s Commonplace-Book. The ordination-oath introduced at
Wittenberg. The Schmalkalden League is prolonged for ten years (Dec.).
King Ferdinand to the Emperor on Germany’s downfall (Dec.).

326. Sermon on Infant-Baptism. Weim. ed., 37, pp. 258-293; Erl. ed.,
16, pp. 43-105; 19², pp. 103-167.

327. “Etliche Spruche Doc. Martini Luther wider das Concilium
Obstantiense (wolt sagen Constantiense).” Erl. ed., 31, pp. 391-411.

328. (1535-1545). “Enarrationes in Genesim” (publ. 1544). “Opp. lat.
exeg.,” 1-11.

329. Prefaces to Anton Corvinus’s “Kurtze Ausslegung der Euangelien …
der Episteln.” Erl. ed., 63, pp. 348-353.

330. Letter to the preachers of Soest. Erl. ed., 65, pp. 95-102.

331. (1535-1536). Sermons. Weim. ed., 41; Erl. ed., 19², pp. 103-242.

332. Disputations, “de concilio Constantiensi” and for the promotion
of Hier. Weller, and Nic. Medler. “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 402-410,
377-389; Drews, pp. 1-3, 9-32.

333. Hymns: “Von Himel hoch”; “Sie ist mir lieb”; “All Ehr und Lob
soll Gottes seyn.” Erl. ed., 56, pp. 348 f., 350 f.

“Comment, in epist. ad Galatas,” cp. No. 293. Sermons, cp. No. 331.
Letters, Enders, 10, pp. 118-282; Erl. ed., 55, pp. 81-117; 56, pp.
196-198, xxxv. f.

=1536.= Third war between Charles V and François I (lasting till 1538).
The Turkish peril. Denmark converted to Protestantism (Aug.). The
“Consilium de emendanda ecclesia” drafted by Cardinals Pole, Contarini,
Sadoleto and Caraffa. A General Council is summoned (June 2) to meet at
Mantua in 1537. Death of Erasmus (July 12). Luther makes advances to
Henry VIII and admits the lawfulness of his divorce. Articles are drafted
to the object of inducing the King of England to make common cause
with the German Reformers. The Articles are thrown over by Henry. The
Wittenberg Concord (May). Luther endeavours to win over Augsburg, Ulm and
the Swiss. Bucer labours for a union. Synods held by the Swiss at Basle
and Bern (Sept., Nov.). Memoranda of the Wittenberg theologians regarding
the Council (Aug.). Bull for the bettering of the City of Rome and the
Papal Court (Sept. 23). Calvin begins his work at Geneva.

334. Disputations: “De iustificatione,” “De muliere peccatrice” and
“Contra missam privatam” (Jan. 14, 21, 29). “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp.
389-394, 398-402, 413; Drews, pp. 55-66, 66, 69-89.

335. Preface to Robert Barnes (Chaplain to Henry VIII), “De vitis
pontificum.” “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp. 533-536.

336. “Præfatio in tres epistolas Hussii.” “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p. 536
_sq._

337. “Der xxiii. Psalm Auff ein Abend uber Tisch nach dem Gratias
ausgelegt.” Erl. ed., 39, pp. 62-122.

338. Preface and Postscript to “Joan. Nannii Viterbensis, De monarchia
Papæ.” “Opp. lat. var.,” 2, pp. 110-121.

339. Disputations for the promotion of Jakob Schenk and Philip Moth.
“Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 417-419; Drews, pp. 100-109.

340. “Artickel so da hetten sollen auffs Concilion zu Mantua,” etc.
(publ. 1538). Erl. ed., 25, pp. 110-146; 25², pp. 169-205.

341. Disputation “De homine.” “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 413-416; Drews,
pp. 90-96.

“Enarratio” on Joel, Amos, Obedias, cp. No. 160. Sermons. Weim. ed.,
41, pp. 493-763; Erl. ed., 19², pp. 243-259. Letters, Enders, 10, p.
283—11, p. 151; Erl. ed., 55, pp. 117-167; 56, pp. 199-206, xxxvii. f.

=1537.= Ferdinand’s defeat in Slavonia. Paul the Third’s Bull on the
Turkish question (July 14). Bugenhagen helps in the conversion of Denmark
to Protestantism. Luther’s so-called Schmalkalden Articles sent by him to
the Elector (Jan. 3). The Schmalkalden Meeting (Feb.). Luther is taken
ill and returns home. The Princes decide to have nothing to do with
the Council. They accept the Augsburg Confession and the “Apologia.”
The Schmalkaldeners call on the King of France for help (March 5).
Melanchthon’s “De potestate papæ.” Luther returns sound to Wittenberg
(March 14). Cordatus opposes Melanchthon. The cleavage between Luther and
Melanchthon is carefully veiled. On Oct. 8 the Council is summoned to
meet at Vicenza on May 1, 1538. Efforts of Bucer and others to promote a
Protestant Council. Luther’s spiritual indisposition.

342. Sermon on Mt. iv. 1 ff. Erl. ed., 17, pp. 7-34; 19², pp. 260-292.

343. “Die drey Symbola oder Bekentniss des Glaubens Christi jnn der
Kirchen einträchtiglich gebraucht.” Erl. ed., 23, pp. 252-281.

344. (1537-1538). Exposition of John xiv.-xvi. (publ. 1538). Weim.
ed., 46, pp. 1-112; Erl. ed., 49, pp. 2-391; 50, pp. 1-154.

345. Disputations of Peter Palladius and Tilemann Schnabel. “Opp. lat.
var.,” 4, pp. 394-397; Drews, pp. 115-160.

346. Discourse at the promotion of Peter Palladius. “Opp. lat. var.,”
4, pp. 315-322.

347. “Disputatio de cœna magna (i.e. de veste nuptiali).” “Opp. lat.
var.,” 4, p. 419; Drews, pp. 163-245.

348. (1537-1539). Exposition of John i.-iv. (publ. 1565 and 1847).
Weim. ed., 46, p. 538 ff.; Erl. ed., 45, pp. 291-422; 46, pp. 1-378;
47, pp. 1-226.

349. (1537-1539). Sermons on Mt. xviii. 24-xxiii. 23. Erl. ed., 44;
45, pp. 1-203.

350. “Eines aus den hohen Artikeln des Bepstlichen Glaubens genant
Donatio Constantini.” Erl. ed., 25, pp. 176-201; 25², pp. 207-232.

351. “Bulla papæ Pauli” (publ. in “Zeitschr. für luth. Theol.,” 1876,
p. 362 ff.).

352 Exposition of Ps. viii. (publ. 1572). Erl. ed., 39, pp. 2-60.

353. Preface to “Ein alt Christlich Concilium … zu Gangra.” Erl. ed.,
64, p. 57 f.

354. “Die Lügend von S. Johanne Chrysostomo an die Heiligen Veter inn
dem vermeinten Concilio zu Mantua.” Erl. ed., 25, pp. 202-218; 25²,
pp. 232-249.

355. Postscript to “Tres epistolæ I. Hussii.” “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p.
536 _sq._

356. “Præfatio in epistolas quasdam Hussii.” Erl. ed., 65, pp. 59-83;
“Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp. 538-540.

357. First disputation against the Antinomians (Dec. 18). “Opp. lat.
var.,” 4, pp. 420-427; Drews, pp. 249-333.

358. Hymns “Erhalt uns Herr bey deinem Wort,” “Vater unser im
Himelreich.” Erl. ed., 56, pp. 354, 351 f.

359. “Conciunculæ cuidam amico præscriptæ.” “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp.
374-433.

Further Sermons, Erl. ed., 19², pp. 260-466. Letters, Enders, 11, pp.
152-320; Erl. ed., 55, pp. 167-195; 56, pp. 206-208, xxxix. f.

=1538.= The Truce of Nice between the Kaiser and François I (June 15).
Luther in conflict with the Antinomianism of Agricola (1537-1540). His
quarrels with Lemnius, Schenk and Joh. von Metzsch. His antagonism to
Albert of Mayence. The assembly of the Protestants at Brunswick (April
8). The Schmalkaldeners enter into a league with Christian III of Denmark
(April 9). They send missions to the Kings of France and England (Aug.,
Oct.). The strength of the League in Germany increases the danger of a
religious war. The Kaiser (aided by his vice-chancellor Held) succeeds
in inducing the Catholic princes to form the so-called Holy Alliance at
Nuremberg (June 10). Calvin is banished from Geneva.

360. Revised edition of the “Unterricht,” cp. No. 229.

361. “Ratschlag eins ausschus etlicher Cardinel,” etc. Erl. ed., 25,
pp. 146-174; 25², pp. 251-278.

362. “Præfatio in librum S. Hieronymi ad Evagrium de potestate papæ.”
“Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp. 541-544.

363. “Brieff … wider die Sabbather.” Erl. ed., 31, pp. 417-449.

364. “Der cx. Psalm Dixit Dominus gepredigt und ausgelegt.” Erl. ed.,
40, pp. 39-192.

365. First answer to the “Epigrammata” of Simon Lemnius. Erl. ed., 64,
p. 323 f.

366. Second disputation against the Antinomians (Jan. 12). “Opp. lat.
var.,” 4, pp. 427-430; Drews, pp. 336-418.

367. Third disputation against the Antinomians (Sept. 13). “Opp. lat.
var.,” 4, pp. 436-441; Drews, pp. 423-484.

368. “Præfatio in Confessionem Bohemorum.” “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp.
548-551.

369. “Wider den Bischoff zu Magdeburg Albrecht Cardinal.” Erl. ed.,
32, pp. 15-59.

370. Preface to Rhau’s “Symphoniæ.” “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, pp. 551-554.

371. “Frau Musica,” to Joh. Walther’s “Lob und Preis der Himlischen
Kunst Musica.” Erl. ed., 56, p. 295 f.

372. Sermons. Weim. ed., 46, pp. 113-537; Erl. ed., 20², 1, pp. 1-171.

The Schmalkalden Articles, cp. No. 340. Æsop’s Fables, cp. No. 273.
The Three Creeds, cp. No. 343. Exposition of Ps. li., cp. No. 300.
Lecture on the Song of Songs, cp. No. 265. Sermons on John xiv.-xvi.,
cp. No. 344. Further Sermons, cp. Nos. 344, 348 f., 372. Letters,
Enders, 11, pp. 321—12, p. 61; Erl. ed., 55, pp. 195-216; 56, pp.
208-220, xl.-xlv.

=1539.= Death of Duke George (April 17). Apostasy of Joachim II. The
Duchy of Saxony, the Electorate of Brandenburg, and Livonia become
Protestant. Memorandum of Luther and Melanchthon to Elector Johann
Frederick, in favour of armed resistance. The Frankfurt meeting of the
Protestants (April 19); their decision not to appeal as yet to force
and to promote a simple conference rather than a Council; a new mission
dispatched to England (April 29). The Protestant Visitation of the Duchy
of Saxony. Luther and his friends again at work (1539-1541) revising the
German Bible. The Consistories established in the Saxon Electorate. The
Hessian “Order of Church-Discipline.” In England, dissolution of the
Monasteries. Luther’s disputation on the “Papal Werewolf” (May 9). He
sanctions the Bigamy of Philip II (Nov. 10).

373. “Wider die Antinomer.” Erl. ed., 32, pp. 2-14.

374. “Von den Conciliis und Kirchen.” Erl. ed., 25, pp. 219-388; 25²,
pp. 281-448.

375. Sermon at Leipzig on Jo. xiv. 23 ff. (publ. 1618). Erl. ed., 20²,
1, pp. 242-253.

376. Disputation on Mt. xix. 21 (Vade, vende, etc.). “Opp. lat. var.,”
4, pp. 442-449; Drews, pp. 536-584.

377. Preface to Myconius’s “Wie man die einfeltigen … im Christenthumb
unterrichten sol.” Erl. ed., 63, p. 364 f.

378. Preface to a work of Moibanus, on Ps. xxix. Erl. ed., 63, pp.
342-344.

379. Preface to German version of Galeatius Capella’s “De bello
Mediolanensi seu rebus in Italia gestis.” Erl. ed., 63, pp. 354-357.

380. Disputation on “Verbum caro factum est” (Jo. i. 14). “Opp. lat.
var.,” 4, pp. 458-461; Drews, pp. 487-531.

381. Revision of the German Bible.

382. “An die Pfarherrn wider den Wucher zu predigen.” Erl. ed., 23,
pp. 282-338.

383. Preface to the 1st part of his Collected German Works. Erl. ed.,
63, pp. 401-406.

384. Sermons. Erl. ed., 20², 1, pp. 172-264.

“Wider den Bischoff,” cp. No. 369. Further Sermons, cp. Nos. 348 f.,
384. Letters, Enders, 12, pp. 62-334; Erl. ed., 55, pp. 217-269; 56,
pp. 221 ff., xlvi.-l.

=1540.= Death of Duke William IV of Bavaria. The Jesuits approved by the
Pope (Sept. 27); Pierre Favre in Germany. Philip II of Hesse weds his
second wife in Melanchthon’s presence (March 4). Luther at the Conference
of Eisenach (July 10). Melanchthon’s “miraculous” cure at Weimar; the
“Confessio variata.” Meeting at Schmalkalden (March); Catholic worship
not to be tolerated. Persecution of Schwenckfeld by the Lutherans.
Religious conferences at Hagenau (June) and Worms (Nov. 25-Jan.).
Agricola goes to Berlin to the Elector of Brandenburg (Sept.). Morone
the Papal Legate complains of the apathy of the German Bishops.

385. Disputation “De divinitate et humanitate Christi” (Feb. 28).
“Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 461-466; Drews, pp. 586-610.

386. Preface to Robert Barnes’s “Bekantnus des Glaubens …
verdeudscht.” Erl. ed., 63, pp. 396-400.

387. New edition of the Winter part of the Church-Postils.

388. Disputation for the promotion of Joach. Mörlin. “Opp. lat. var.,”
4, p. 411 _sq._; Drews, pp. 613-636.

“An die Pfarherrn,” cp. No. 382. On the “psalmi graduales,” cp. No.
306. Sermons, Erl. ed., 20², 1, pp. 265-512. Letters, Enders-Kawerau,
12, pp. 335-400; 13, pp. 1-240; Erl. ed., 55, pp. 269-293; 56, pp.
223-227.

=1541.= The Turks secure their footing in Hungary. Naumburg given over
to the Protestants; the Bishop-Elect, Julius von Pflug shut out from
his See by the Saxon Elector (Jan.). The Archbishop of Cologne, Hermann
von Wied is won over to Protestantism. Accession of Maurice of Saxony
(†1553). Philip of Hesse comes to an understanding with Charles V.
Jonas goes to Halle to convert it to Protestantism; Schenk at Leipzig.
Death of Carlstadt (Dec. 24). Religious conferences of Worms (Jan.) and
Ratisbon (April 27-May 22); Diet of Ratisbon and Ratisbon Interim. The
Catholic spokesmen: Eck, Julius von Pflug and J. Gropper; the Protestant:
Melanchthon, Bucer and Frederick Pistorius. Calvin in supreme power at
Geneva (till 1564).

389. “Wider Hans Worst.” Erl. ed., 26, pp. 2-75; 26², pp. 21-93.

390. Preface to Ezechiel, explanation of the figure of the Temple.
Erl. ed., 63, pp. 64-74.

391. Exposition of Dan. xii. Erl. ed., 41, pp. 294-324.

392. “Vermanunge zum Gebet wider den Türcken.” Erl. ed., 32, pp. 75-99.

393. Preface to Urban Rhegius’s “Wider die gottlosen blutdurstigen
Sauliten und Doegeten,” etc. Erl. ed., 63, pp. 366-368.

394. Hymns: “Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam,” “Was furchstu, Feind
Herodes, seer.” Erl. ed., 56, p. 353 ff.

Revised edition of the German Bible, cp. No. 385. “Enarratio in Ps.
xc.,” cp. No. 322. Letters (Enders), Kawerau, 13, pp. 241-395; De
Wette, 5, pp. 326-420; 6, pp. 279-294; Erl. ed., 55, pp. 294-343; 56,
pp. 227-232.

=1542.= Fourth War of Charles V with François I (lasting till 1544); Diet
of Spires meets on Feb. 9 to vote supplies for the war against the Turks.
The Elector and Duke of Saxony fall out over Wurzen (March); Luther’s
mediation; his last will (Jan. 6). Amsdorf is “consecrated” Bishop of
Naumburg (Jan. 20). A Bull dated May 22 summons the Council to assemble
on Nov. 1 at Trent. The Schmalkaldeners are successful in their attack
on the Duchy of Brunswick (July). Bucer goes to Bonn to the Elector
Hermann von Wied (Dec.).

395. Tract against Bigamy (publ. 1749). Erl. ed., 65, pp. 206-213.

396. Disputation for the promotion of Joh. Macchabæus Scotus (Theses
by Melanchthon). Drews, pp. 639-683.

397. “Exempel einen rechten Christlichen Bischoff zu weihen.” Erl.
ed., 26, pp. 77-107; 26², pp. 94-128.

398. Disputation for the promotion of H. Schmedenstede. “Opp. lat.
var.,” 4, pp. 452-455; Drews, pp. 686-698.

399. “Von den Jüden und jren Lügen.” Erl. ed., 32, pp. 100-274.

400. Preface to “Verlegung des Alcoran Bruder Richardi Prediger Ordens
anno 1300.” Erl. ed., 65, pp. 190-205.

401. Preface to “Barfuser Münche Eulenspiegel und Alcoran.” Erl. ed.,
63, pp. 373-376.

402. “Trost fur die Weibern welchen es ungerat gegangen ist mit Kinder
geberen.” Erl. ed., 23, pp. 339-343.

403. Preface to the Hymn Book. Erl. ed., 56, pp. 299-306.

Comment. on Micheas, cp. No. 160. No sermons. Letters, De Wette, 5,
pp. 421-525; 6, pp. 294-343; Erl. ed., 56, pp. 1-43, 232-238, li.-lvii.

=1543.= Diet of Nuremberg (Feb.). The Protestants refuse to vote supplies
for the Turkish War. The Emperor is victorious in his campaign against
the Duke of Cleves though the latter is supported by the Elector of
Saxony and by France (Aug., Sept.). The Bishop of Münster and Osnabrück
connives at the introduction of Lutheranism into his diocese. Canisius
the first German Jesuit (May 8). Death of Eck (Feb. 10). Schenk in
Brandenburg; The Cologne Book of Reform drafted by Melanchthon and Bucer
is severely handled by Luther.

404. “Vom Schem Hamphoras.” Erl. ed., 32, pp. 275-358.

405. “Von den Letzten Worten Dauids.” Erl. ed., 37, pp. 2-103.

406. Disputation for the promotion of Joh. Marbach (Feb. 16). Drews,
pp. 701-707.

407. Disputation for the promotion of Fr. Bachofen and Hier. Noppus.
“Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 466-470; Drews, pp. 730-748.

408. Disputation for the promotion of Erasmus Alber. “Opp. lat. var.,”
4, pp. 473-476; Drews, pp. 750-752.

409. Lecture on Is. ix. (publ. 1546). “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 23, pp.
303-438.

410. Hymns: “Von Himel kam der Engel Schar,” “Der du bist drey in
Einigkeit.” Erl. ed., 56, pp. 357-558.

New edition of the German Bible, cp. No. 381. Church-Postils, Summer
part. Sermon, Erl. ed., 20², 1, pp. 513-523. Letters, De Wette, 5, pp.
526-614, 6, pp. 343-559; Erl. ed., 56, pp. 43-72, 238-242, lvii.-lxi.

=1544.= Peace of Crespy between the Kaiser and France (Sept. 18). Diet at
Spires (beginning in Feb.). Concessions to the Protestants. The Abschied
of June 10 postpones the religious controversy to a later Diet and “A
free Christian Council within the German Nation.” The Pope’s protest to
the Kaiser (Aug. 24). Luther again at daggers drawn with the lawyers (on
the question of secret espousals). The people of Cologne denounce their
Archbishop to the Pope (Oct. 9). The theses of the Louvain theologians
against Luther (Nov. 6). The Council is yet again summoned (Nov. 19, to
meet on March 15, 1545) to avert the schism and the inroads of the Turks.

411. Lecture on Is. liii. (publ. 1550). “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 23, pp.
443-536.

412. Disputation for the promotion of Theod. Fabricius and Stanislaus
Rapagelanus (Melanchthon’s Theses). Drews, pp. 756-781.

413. “Kurtz Bekentnis vom heiligen Sacrament.” Erl. ed., 32, pp.
397-425.

414. Sermon at the Dedication of the Castle-church at Torgau. Erl.
ed., 17, pp. 239-262; 20², 2, pp. 215-243.

415. Disputation for the promotion of George Major and Joh. Faber.
“Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 470-473; Drews, pp. 784-830.

Home-Postils, cp. No. 308. “Enarratio in I. librum Mosis,” cp. No.
328. Sermons, Erl. ed., 20², 2, pp. 1-266. Letters, De Wette, 5, pp.
615-709; 6, pp. 359-367; Erl. ed., 56, pp. 72-122, 242-244.

=1545.= Diet of Worms. The Abschied hints at a religious conference
and the imminent danger of a War of Religion. George, the Protestant
Prince of Anhalt, is “consecrated as Evangelical Bishop” of Merseburg
(Aug. 2). The “Wittenberg Reformation” (Jan.). The final edition of the
German Bible. “Popery Pictured.” Luther goes in disgust to Leipzig (July,
Aug.). Goes as arbiter to Mansfeld (Oct.). Duke Henry of Brunswick is
taken prisoner by the Schmalkaldeners (Oct. 20). A final Bull of Dec.
4 convokes the Council to Trent for Dec. 13, where it is opened in the
presence of 34 Fathers qualified to vote. The Schmalkaldeners’ meeting
(Dec. 15) at Frankfurt to devise a counterblast. Death of Spalatin (Jan.
16) and of Albert of Mayence (Sept. 24).

416. “Wider das Bapstum zu Rom vom Teuffel gestifft.” Erl. ed., 26,
pp. 110-228; 26², pp. 131, 251.

417. Verses to Cranach’s cuts in the “Abbildung des Bapstum.”

418. “Wellische Lügenschrifft von Doctoris Martini Luthers Todt zu Rom
ausgangen.” Erl. ed., 32, pp. 426-430.

419. “Bapst Trew Hadriani iiii und Alexanders iii gegen Keyser
Friderichen Barbarossa geübt.” Erl. ed., 32, pp. 359-396.

420. Disputation for the promotion of Peter Hegemon (July 3). “Opp.
lat. var.,” 4, pp. 476-480; Drews, pp. 833-903.

421. “Wider die xxxii Artikel der Teologisten von Löven.” Erl. ed.,
65, pp. 170-178.

422. “Articuli a magistris nostris Lovaniensibus editi.” “Opp. lat.
var.,” 4, pp. 480-492.

423. “An Kurfursten zu Sachsen und Landgraven zu Hesse von dem
gefangenen H. von Brunswig.” Erl. ed., 26, pp. 229-253; 26², pp.
254-281.

424. Preface to the new edition of the “Unterricht” (No. 360).

425. Preface to the first vol. of his “Opera Latina.” “Opp. lat.
var.,” 1, pp. 15-24.

German Bible, new ed., cp. No. 381. “Enarratio in Hoseam prophetam,”
cp. No. 160. Sermons, Erl. ed., 20², 2, pp. 267-454. Letters, De
Wette, 5, pp. 710-772; 6, pp. 368-413; Erl. ed., 56, pp. 122-147, 244,
xli.-lxv.

=1546.= The Diet opens at Ratisbon (March 29) without the Schmalkalden
Leaguers. Luther’s last journey to Mansfeld (Jan. 23). His death at
Eisleben (Feb. 18) and burial at Wittenberg (Feb. 22).—Treaty between
the Kaiser and King Ferdinand, and Duke William of Bavaria in view of
the eventual war (June 7). The Kaiser also makes an alliance with the
Pope (June 7) and comes to an agreement with Maurice of Saxony (June 19).
Schärtlin as commander of the South German townships begins hostilities
at Füssen (July 9). Outlawry of Elector Johann Frederick of Saxony and of
Landgrave Philip of Hesse (July 20). The Schmalkalden War (ending in the
Kaiser’s victory at Mühlberg, April 24, 1547).

426. Sermons. Erl. ed., 20², 2, pp. 455-574.

Letters, De Wette, 5, pp. 773-801; 6, p. 413 f.; Erl. ed., 56, pp.
147-165.

XLII—APPENDIX II

ADDITIONS AND EMENDATIONS

[In the following Appendix we have ruthlessly excised all that seemed to
us merely personal and to have no direct bearing on Luther. Many of the
smaller emendations have already been incorporated in their proper place
in the body of this translation. _Note of the English Editor._]

1-2. Luther’s Visit to Rome

_The Scala Santa_: According to Paul Luther, when his father “was about
to say the usual _preces graduales in scala Lateranensi_, there suddenly
came into his mind the text of Habacuc ‘the just shall live by his
faith,’ whereupon he refrained from his prayer.” As we pointed out in
vol. i., p. 33, it is most unlikely that Luther should, at this time,
have seen this text in such a light. Moreover, as it now turns out,
Luther actually did perform the usual devotions at the Scala Santa. It is
to G. Buchwald (“Zeitschr. f. Kirchengesch.,” 1911, p. 606 ff.) that we
are indebted for a quotation from a yet unpublished sermon of Luther’s
own, which shows that he conformed to the common usage and ascended the
famous steps on his knees: “I climbed the stairs of Pilate, _orabam
quolibet gradu pater noster_. _Erat enim persuasio, qui sic oraret
redimeret animam. Sed in fastigium veniens cogitabam: quis scit an sit
verum? Non valet ista oratio, etc._”

As for the doubt expressed in the latter portion of the text, it seems
at variance with Luther’s general credulity in those early days. On
the other hand, it is by no means unlikely that the scepticism of the
Renaissance suggested a doubt to Luther’s mind regarding this supposed
trophy of Christ’s Passion.

_The projected General Confession_: In “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil (3, p.
169, n. 33), Luther says: “_Causa profectionis meæ erat confessio, quam
volebam a pueritia usque texere, et pietatem exercere. Erphordiæ talem
confessionem bis habui. Sed homines indoctissimos Romæ inveni, qui me
plus offendebant quam ædificabant_” (cp. Mathesius, “Tischreden,” ed.
Kroker, p. 414). In this text it is to be noted that Luther falsely makes
out the main object of his journey to Rome to have been his proposed
general confession, and his progress in piety. The truth is that he went
there first and foremost for the business of his Order. That the general
confession was probably never made may be inferred from Luther’s use of
the word “_sed_” in the above text (cp. vol. i., pp. 30-31).

_Oldecop’s account of Luther’s petition to be secularised_: (Against
Kawerau, “Schriften d. Vereins f. Reformationsgesch.,” 1912). Though but
little notice has hitherto been taken of Oldecop’s narrative, yet there
is no solid ground for distrusting it. As we were careful to point out
(vol. i., p. 36, n. 1), he was indeed wrong in saying that Luther had
gone to Rome without his superiors’ authorisation, for the journey was
at least authorised by the seven priories whose representative Luther
was. Luther had, however, no authorisation to seek secularisation, nor
was his mission countenanced by the minister-general of the Augustinians.
This may have led Oldecop to suppose that his whole undertaking was
unauthorised. Regarding Jacob, the Jew mentioned in Oldecop’s account,
Kawerau (_ib._, p. 36) makes out a likely case for distinguishing him
from his German homonym with whom (vol. i., p. 37, n. 1) we tentatively
identified him.

_The outcome for the Order of Luther’s visit to Rome_: Under the
title “Aus den Actis generalatus Ægidii Viterbiensis,” G. Kawerau has
published in the “Zeitschr. f. Kirchengesch.” (1911, p. 603 ff.) a few
short extracts from a MS. in the Royal Berlin Library. One of these
seems to bear on Luther’s mission from the seven priories opposed to
Staupitz: “_MDXI. Jan. Appellare ex legibus Germani prohibentur. Ut
res germanæ ad amorem et integram obedientiam redigerentur, Fr. Joh.
Germanus ad vicarium missus est._” Hence Luther’s appeal was prohibited,
nor had his mission the slightest support from Ægidius of Viterbo the
minister-general. That, on the contrary, he was opposed to the movement
then afoot against Staupitz, is also clear from the expression he uses on
March 18, 1511, viz. that “obedience to the Order and its head” must be
reintroduced into the German Congregation. At any earlier date (May 1,
1510) we are told that Staupitz himself had come to Rome “_[Germanicæ]
congregationis colla religionis iugo subiecturus._” His visit, however,
had nothing to do with the matter of the seven priories, but concerned
the general discipline of the Congregation.

3. Luther’s conception of “Observance” and his conflict with his brother
friars

What we said of Luther’s early antagonism to the Observantines in his
Order has been very diversely appreciated by Protestant experts. Kawerau
and Scheel, for instance, are of opinion that no proof is forthcoming of
the continuance of the conflict between Observantines and Conventuals.
On the other hand, A. Harnack, K. A. Meissinger and W. Braun hold
that the persistence of the conflict has been made out and that it
really formed one of the starting-points of Luther’s new conception of
faith. Modesty, however, dictates a protest on our part against being
considered the inventor of this explanation, for it had, even previously,
been suggested by Protestant scholars (cp. vol. i., p. 200, n. 3), though
they may not have used it to such purpose. Again, a word of warning
must be uttered against the supposition that, for instance as late as
1515-1516, there was still in Luther’s Congregation a clear-cut division
between those devoted to the “observance” and the others who inclined
to “Conventualism.” Of such a schism we hear no more after the Cologne
Chapter of 1512. Nevertheless, that the partisan spirit that had once
led to the appeal of the seven priories still smouldered, so much at
least seems obvious from those addresses and writings of Luther in which
he trounces the Pharisaism of certain members of his Congregation and
their attachment to their statutes, privileges and exemptions. It must
not be lost to sight that the Congregation to which Luther belonged was
in name and fact an “observantine” one, having been founded to promote
the stricter observance of the Augustinian Rule; for this reason it was
exempted from the jurisdiction of the German Provincial of the Order and
placed directly under the Roman minister-general, whose representative in
Germany was the Vicar.

Regarding the mediæval cleavage of several of the Orders into
Observantines and Conventuals we must be on our guard against flying
to the conclusion that all mere Conventuals were necessarily slack in
the performance of their duties. This was by no means the case; in
many localities the Franciscan Observantines, e.g. were scarcely more
zealous than the Franciscan Conventuals, though the latter had at an
early date mitigated their rule of poverty; much the same held good
among the Dominicans, Servites and Carmelites. In the event, so far as
the Augustinians are concerned, the Saxon Observantines, for all their
“observance,” were among the first to fall before the storm let loose
from Wittenberg, whereas the German Conventuals, under such worthy
provincials as Träger and Hoffmeister, showed themselves better able to
cope with the innovations. The Dominican Conventuals under a Vicar like
Johann Faber also furnished several protagonists of the faith.

* * * * *

In view of the doubts raised in certain quarters we shall now submit to a
closer scrutiny Luther’s utterances on the question of the “observance.”

On one occasion Luther complains of those who made so small account of
obedience, though this virtue was the very soul of good works:

“Tales hodie esse timendum est omnes observantes et exemptos sive
privilegiatos; qui quid noceant ecclesiæ nondum apparuit, licet factum
sit; apparebit autem tempore suo. Quærimus autem, cur sic eximi sibi
et dispensari in obedientia velint. Dicunt propter vitam regularem.
Sed hæc est lux angeli Satanæ.”

Obedience is something which cannot be dispensed (_non eximibilis_,
“Werke,” Weim. ed., 3, p. 155; O. Scheel, “Dokumente zu Luthers
Entwicklung,” 1911, p. 74 f.; above, vol. i., p. 68 f.). Truth, so Luther
argues, hides its face from the unwise and the particularist:

“Sic etiam omnibus superbis contingit et pertinacibus, superstitiosis,
rebellibus et inobedientibus, atque ut timeo et observantibus
nostris, qui sub specie regularis vitæ incurrunt inobedientiarn et
rebellionem.” (Weim. ed., 4, p. 83; above, vol. i., p. 69.)

In the former text he was speaking of “all Observantines,” here he
speaks of “ours,” presumably, of the more zealous Augustinians. These
“_observantes_” are the same opponents whom he goes on to describe as
“_superbi in sanctitate et observantia, qui destruunt humilitatem et
obedientiam_.” The real meaning here of the words “_observantia_” and
“_observare_” can scarcely escape the reader, particularly when Luther
couples this “observance” with disobedience to superiors. Thus he says:

“Nostris temporibus est pugna cum hypocritis et falsis fratribus, qui
de bonitate fidei pugnant, quam sibi arrogant, per observantias suas
iactantes suam sanctitatem.” (_Ib._, 4, p. 312.)

“_Observantia_” means of course outward practices, but there can be
little doubt that the word is here used in the more exclusive sense
defined in the text first quoted. Thus he denounces those who defend
their own “_traditiones et leges_,” which “_usque hodie statuere
conantur_”; those who busy themselves about ceremonies and the “_vanitas
observantiæ exterioris_”; he several times repeats the “_usque hodie_,”
as though to show that the practices he had in view were present ones.
(Cp. Weim. ed., 3, p. 61.)

It must be borne in mind that Luther delivered his Lectures on the
Psalms (in which most of the texts in question are found) to an audience
composed in the main of young Augustinians sent by the various priories
to prosecute their studies at Wittenberg. Some of these may well
have brought with them some of those stricter ideas which the seven
“Observantine” priories had once championed against Staupitz. To one,
who, as Luther now was, was against such ideas, it was an easy matter,
even though in itself wrong, to make the question one of obedience,
by urging either that their exemption from the jurisdiction of the
Provincial was irregular, or that Staupitz had now abandoned his one-time
projects.

Luther charges the other faction, not only with disobedience, but also
with pigheadedness, e.g. in refusing to conform to the usages of the
other priories, and in laying such stress on their own customs and
institutions.

“Nunc quam multi sunt, qui sibi spiritualissimi videntur et tamen sunt
sanguinicissimi, ut sic dixerim, verissimique Idumæi. Hi scilicet
qui suas professiones, suum ordinem, suos sanctos, sua instituta ita
venerantur et efferunt, ut omnium aliorum vel obfuscent vel nihil
ipsi curent, satis carnaliter suos patres observantes et iactantes;
(such was the New Judaism of those), qui suos conventus, suum ordinem
ideo laudant et ideo aliis præstare volunt ac nullo modo doceri, quia
magnos et sanctos viros habuerunt, quorum titulum, nomen et habitum
gestant, … O furor late regnans hodie! Ita nunc pene fit, ut quilibet
conventus contemnat alterius mores acceptare adeo superbe, ut sibi
dedecus putet, si ab alio, quam a se ipso doceatur aut recipiat.
Hæc vera superbia est Iudæorum et hæreticorum, in quo et nos heu
infelices comprehendimur. Quia cum in nullo similes patribus nostris
simus, solum de nomine et gloria eorum contra invicem contendimus et
superbimus.” (_Ib._, 3, p. 332.)

Though what Luther here says might be applied to other religious Orders,
yet it seems more natural to take it as referring chiefly to what was
going on in his own.

_Luther’s then Conception of Cloistral Life and Religious Mendicancy_:
Luther spoke very plainly about that part of the Rule which enjoined
mendicancy; as Conventuals no less than Observantines were bound to
observe this enactment it follows that Luther’s attack was directed,
not so much against the Observantines as such, as against any attempt
seriously to put in practice the Evangelical Counsels. Thus, in the
passage quoted above (vol. i., p. 71) he says: “_O mendicantes,
mendicantes, mendicantes! At excusat forte quod elemosynas propter Deum
recipitis et verbum Dei ac omnia gratis rependitis. Esto sane. Vos
videritis._” (Weim. ed., 3, p. 425.) Here, it is true, he is speaking of
the abuses to which the system led, yet he is also annoyed that their vow
of poverty should be the motive of their preaching: “_Horribilis furor et
cæca miseria, quod nunc nonnisi ex necessitate evangelizamus._”

Now, though these hasty words were open to a perfectly sound
interpretation, yet their effect must have been to arouse a certain
contempt for their calling in the minds of the young men to whom they
were spoken. At any rate Luther had then not yet lost his esteem for the
religious life, particularly as an incentive to humility and general
Godliness. (See vol. i., p. 218 f.)

It is scarcely necessary to say that the fact that, in 1518 (at
Augsburg), Staupitz released Luther “from the observance” has nothing
whatever to do with the question in hand. Luther says: “_me absolvit ab
observantia et regula ordinis_.” (Weim. ed., of the Table-Talk, 1, p.
96.) All that his superior did was to dispense him from his obligation
of carrying out outwardly the rule of the Order, e.g. from dressing as a
monk, etc. Even had Luther been a Conventual he could still have spoken
thus of his having been absolved from the “observance.” It may be that
Staupitz, for his own freedom of action, also absolved Luther from his
duty of obedience to him as Vicar. Even so, however, Luther remained an
Augustinian, returned to his monastery, wrote on behalf of the vows, and,
long after, still continued to wear the Augustinian habit.

* * * * *

One notice brought to light from the Weimar archives and published by
Kawerau (_loc. cit._, p. 68) is of interest. It deals with the practices
of the severer Observantine priories (about the year 1489) with which the
laxer members were later to find fault. Among their practices was that
of “not speaking at meal-time but of listening to a reader, of fasting
from All Hallows till Christmas (in addition to the other fasts), of
singing Matins every night, of abstaining from food and drink outside of
meal-time, and of holding a Chapter every Friday with public admission of
shortcomings and imposition of penance.”

4. Attack upon the “Self-righteous”

In 1516 Luther presided at Bernhardi’s Disputation, “_De viribus et
voluntate hominis sine gratia_.” (Above, vol. i., p. 310 f.) In the
letter to Lang about it he says that Bernhardi had held the debate
“_motus oblatratorum lectionum mearum garritu_.” Some opinions therein
put forward had much scandalised the adherents of Gabriel Biel (“_cum
et mei [Gabrielistæ] vehementer hucusque mirentur_”), but, at any rate,
the Disputation had served its purpose (“_ad obstruendum ora garrientium
vel ad audiendum iudicium aliorum_”). He goes on to speak of the
offence his denial of the authenticity of the tract “_De vera et falsa
pænitentia_”—hitherto ascribed to St. Augustine—had given at Wittenberg
(“_sane gravius offendi omnes_”). Mathesius (above, vol. i., p. 304)
also alludes to the opposition he encountered about this time among his
brethren. At any rate a few months later Luther could triumphantly tell
Lang:

“Theologia nostra et S. Augustinus prospere procedunt et regnant
in nostra universitate, Deo operante.… Mire fastidiuntur lectiones
sententiariæ, nec est ut quis sibi auditores sperare possit, nisi
theologiam hanc … velit profiteri.”

Before this, the young Professor (at Christmas, 1515) had told his
hearers, that, just as the Prophets, wise men and scribes had been
persecuted, so _he_ was being persecuted now:

“Sed state firmiter, neque moveatur ullus contradictionibus; sic enim
oportet fieri. Prophetæ, Sapientes, Scribæ, dum mittuntur ad iustos,
sanctos, pios, non recipiuntur ab ipsis sed occiduntur.”

The supposed “saints” he goes on to describe in their true character.
What they were bent on persecuting was really Grace, viz. what he
preaches under the figure of “Christ our mother-hen”:

“Superbi semper contra iustitiam Dei pugnant et stultitiam æstimant,
quæ sapientia [sic] eis mittitur; similiter veritas eis mendacium
videtur. Imo persequuntur et occidunt eos, qui veritatem dicunt. Sic
enim et ego semper prædico de _Christo, gallina nostra_. Efficitur
mihi errans et falsum dictum: ‘Vult Dominus esse gallina nostra ad
salutem, sed nos nolumus’.… Nolunt audire, quod iustitiæ eorum peccata
sint, quæ gallina egeant, imo quod peius est, versi in vultures etiam
ipsi alios a gallina rapere nituntur et persequuntur reliquos pullos.…
Sicut Iudæi … iustitiam statuentes quod sibi placuit, ita isti hoc
gratiam vocant quod ipsi somniant.” (Weim. ed., 1, p. 31.)

A few pages further on, the new Lutheran teaching on Grace is clearly
seen in its process of growth:

“Ecce impossibilis est lex propter carnem; verumtamen Christus
impletionem suam nobis impertit, dum se ipsum gallinam nobis exhibet,
ut sub alas eius confugiamus et per eius impletionem nos quoque legem
impleamus. O dulcis gallina, o beatos pullos huius gallinæ!” (P. 35.)

To the “vultures,” i.e. his opponents, he returns again in the same
lectures. They build only on their “_sapientia carnis_” when they set out
to gain what they consider to be virtue and the gifts of grace. (Weim.
ed., 1, pp. 61, 62, 70.)

“In his maxime pereunt [peccant?] hæretici et superbi, dum ea
pertinaciter diligunt, quasi ideo Deum diligant, quia hæc diligunt.
Inde enim zelant et furiunt, ubi reprehenduntur in istis, et defendunt
se ac zelum Dei sine scientia exercent.… Quantumlibet sapiant et bene
vivant, recte adhuc de sapientia carnis vivere dicendi sunt.… Servi
[superbi?] sine timore et occultissime superbi.… Talis est stultitia
hypocritarum de virtutibus et gratiis Dei, præsumentium se esse
integros et iustos.”

A trace of the antagonism within the Order is also found in the notes of
the sermons preached in the summer of 1516. On July 6, Luther speaks of
the greatest plague now rampant in the Church:

“Prosequimur, quæ incepimus, nam singularem illi tractatum quærunt,
cum non sit hodie pestis maior per ecclesiam ista peste hominum, qui
dicunt, ‘bonum oportet facere,’ nescire volentes, quid sit bonum vel
malum. Sunt enim inimici crucis Christi i.e. bonorum Dei.”

As we know, his theology was professedly the “theology of the cross.” As
for his foes, lay, clerical or monastic, their outward works were but the
lamb-skins concealing the wolves beneath:

“Ad alia vocati, quam quæ ipsi elegerunt, difficiles imo rebelles
sunt et contrarii, impatientes, [inclinati] detrahere ac iudicare,
alios negligere, contentiosi, opiniosæ cervicis, indomiti sensus,
ideo non pacifici, brevianimes, immansueti, duri, crudi. Hæc vitia et
opera interioris hominis _ovina veste_ contegunt, i.e. actionibus,
oblationibus, gestu, ceremoniis corporalibus, ita ut et sibi et aliis
simplicibus boni et iusti videantur.”

On July 27 he speaks of the “darts” which the foes let fly from their
ambush at those who are right of heart.

“Hæc ideo iam commemoro, quia iam accedo ad subtiliores homines et
invisibiles transgressores præcepti Dei et in abscondito peccantes et
sagittantes eos qui recte sint corde.”

In another sermon preached on the same day, speaking of the Pharisee and
the Publican, he says:

“Credo quod pauci timeant se pharisæo similes esse quem odiunt; sed
ego scio, quod plures ei similes sint.… Non præsumamus securi, quod
publicano similes simus.”

In this sentence, and elsewhere, stress should not be laid on the use of
the first person plural, as it is merely a rhetorical embellishment. The
Pharisee is the self-righteous man; he bears “_idolum iustitiæ suæ in
corde statutum_”; he refuses to be accounted a sinner, hence:

“incurrit in Christum, qui omnes peccatores suscepit in se. Et ideo
Christus iudicatur, accusatur, mordetur, quandocunque peccator
quicunque accusatur, etc. Qui autem Christum iudicat, suum iudicem
iudicat, Deum violenter negat. Vide quo perveniat furens et insipiens
superbia.”

This indeed, in itself, is all capable of a perfectly orthodox
interpretation, not, however, if we take it in conjunction with all
the circumstances. On Aug. 3, the preacher again inveighs against the
“_sensuales iustitiarii_,” who hang on their works and observances: This
is to remain

“… pueri abecedarii in isto statu; sed heu quam plurimi hodie in
illis indurantur, quia hæc putant esse seria, et magna ea æstimant.
[Tamen] qui Spiritu Dei aguntur, ubi didicerint exterioris hominis
disciplinas, non eas multum curant nisi ut præludium.”

True piety on the other hand consisted in allowing oneself to be ridden
by God. The man of God

“vadit quocumque eum Dominus suus equitat; nunquam scit quo vadat,
plus agitur quam agit, semper it et quomodocunque per aquam, per
lutum, per imbrem, per nivem, ventum, etc. Tales sunt homines Dei, qui
Spiritu Dei aguntur.”

The “holy-by-works” soil themselves with the seven deadly sins of the
spirit. Hence, let us not befoul ourselves by making a rock of the
“_opera iustitiæ_.” Let us leave that sort of thing to beginners to whom
indeed we may teach

“multis bonis operibus exercere et a malis abstinere secundum
sensibilem hominem, ut sunt [sic] ieiunare, vigilare, orare, laborare,
misereri, servire, obsequi, etc.”

These words must have been addressed to men with some theological
training, for, in this discourse, Luther dilates at some length on a text
of Alexander of Hales; doubtless those present were members of his Order;
but what then must we think of the teacher who thus proclaims a freedom
from all the observances and traditional rules by which his fellow-monks
were bound? Luther’s point of view was one, which, if adopted, spelt the
end not only of the Observantines but even of Conventualism. Hence it is
no wonder that it caused murmuring.

5. The collapse of the Augustinian Congregation

The fifth Council of the Lateran took measures against many abuses
which had crept in among the mendicant Orders, particularly among the
Hermits of St. Augustine. As we know, the German Congregation under
Staupitz and with Luther as Rural Vicar was no better off than the other
branches. It is from June 30, 1516, i.e. during the period of Luther’s
“vicariate” that we find a curious note in the “Acta Generalatus Ægidii
Viterbiensis.” (Above, p. 497.)

“Universo ordini significamus bellum nobis indictum ab episcopis in
concilio Lateranensi, ob idque nos reformationem indicimus omnibus
monasteriis.” [Cp. 2 Jan., 1517]. “Religioni universæ quæcunque
in concilio acta sunt contra mendicantes per litteras longissimas
significamus et reformationem exactissimam indicimus.”

In thus doing the Minister-General’s intention, to judge by the few
scraps his Acts contain, was to bring back his people “_ad communem
vitam_.” No doubt too many dispensations had been given for the sake
of making study easier, or for other reasons. The reader may remember
the incident (above, vol. i., p. 297, n. 1) of Gabriel Zwilling’s being
sent to Erfurt and the words used by Luther in his letter to Lang.
Zwilling, who, after leaving the Augustinians, became one of the Zwickau
“Prophets” but afterwards accepted an appointment as Lutheran minister
at Torgau, had joined the Augustinians in 1502 and matriculated at
Wittenberg University in 1512; hence he had already been sixteen years an
Augustinian at the time when Luther wrote that he had “not yet seen or
learnt the rites and usages of the Order.” Does not this seem to prove
that the Rule must have been greatly relaxed and that too many exceptions
were allowed in the common way of life? Luther himself, as we know, had
been dispensed in his student-days from attending Matins and had been
assigned a serving-brother; this is proved by the manuscript notes of
the Table-Talk made by Rörer. “_(Staupitzius) absolvit eum a matutinis
et addidit fratrem famulum._” (Kroker, “Archiv für Reformationsgesch.,”
1908, p. 370.) It has indeed been urged that Zwilling’s ignorance of
the “rites” was due to the smallness of the Wittenberg monastery.
But, as Luther wrote to Lang on Oct. 26, 1516, the house contained
“twenty-two priests, twelve students, and, in all, forty-one persons.”
(“Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 67). This was surely enough to allow of the
carrying out of the “rites and usages of the Order.” Zwilling, moreover,
was sent to Erfurt, not only to get a better insight into the ways of the
Order, but, mainly, to learn Greek: “_Ut et ipse et alii quam optime,
~i.e.~ christianiter, græcisent._”

6. _The Tower Incident_ (vol. I, pp. 388-400)

To avoid giving unnecessary offence we did not unduly insist on the
locality in which Luther professed to have received his chief revelation.
To have suppressed all mention of the locality would, however, have been
wrong seeing that the circumstance of place is here so closely bound up
with the historicity of the event. We, however, confined ourselves to
a bald statement and explanation of what is found in the sources, and
chose the most discreet heading possible for the section in question. In
spite of this, Adolf Harnack (“Theol. Literaturztng.,” 1911, p. 302),
dealing with our first volume, informed his readers that, on this point,
we had made our own “the olden fashion of vulgar Catholic polemics” and
had made of the “locality a capital question,” no doubt in the hope that
Catholic readers would take the matter very much as the olden Christians
took Arius’s death in the closet. Needless to say, what Harnack wrote was
repeated and aggravated by the lesser lights of German Protestantism. The
truest remark, however, made by Harnack in this connection, is that, the
actual “locality in which Luther first glimpsed this thought is of small
importance,” and that, even had I made out my case, “what would it really
matter?”

As to our authorities the chief one is Johann Schlaginhaufen’s notes of
Luther’s Table-Talk in which the words are related as having been spoken
some time between July and Sept., 1532.

_The forms in which Luther’s utterance has been handed down_: The
friends who, in 1532, either habitually or occasionally, attended at
Luther’s parties and noted down his sayings were three in number, viz.
Schlaginhaufen, Cordatus and Veit Dietrich. The (yet unpublished) notes
of the last as given in the Nuremberg MS. contain nothing about this
utterance. From Cordatus we have the version given below as No. III. But,
according to Preger, the editor of Schlaginhaufen, Cordatus “at this
time was no longer at Wittenberg”; if this be true, then what he says on
the subject must have come to him at second hand, though, otherwise, his
notes contain much valuable first-hand information. Nevertheless both
Preger and Kroker, two experts on the Table-Talk, are at one in arguing
that an attentive comparison of Cordatus’s notes with those of the other
guests, proves that Cordatus not seldom fails to keep closely enough
to Luther’s actual words and sometimes misses his real meaning, which
is less so the case with Schlaginhaufen. As for Lauterbach, as Kawerau
points out, he was not at that time a regular visitor at Luther’s house,
though we several times hear of his being present at the Table-Talk. It
is more than doubtful whether his version of the utterance in question
(given below as IV) was taken down from Luther’s lips. Moreover his
notes, as printed by Bindseil, often show traces of subsequent correction.

In Schlaginhaufen, on the other hand, we find throughout first-hand
matter, the freshness, disorder, and even faulty grammar, showing how
little it has been touched up by the collector’s hand. He was a personal
friend of Luther’s, and, whilst awaiting a call to the ministry, stayed
at the latter’s house from November, 1531, where he was always present
at the evening repast. Luther was aware that he was taking notes of
the conversations, and, on one occasion (Preger, p. 82) particularly
requested him to put down something. He was comforted in his anxieties by
Luther (above, vol. v., p. 327), nor, when he left Wittenberg at the end
of 1532 to become minister at Zahna, did he break his friendly relations
with Luther. He quitted Zahna in Dec., 1533, and took over the charge of
Köthen.

The notes of Schlaginhaufen made public by Preger in 1888 are not in his
own handwriting. The Munich codex (Clm. 943) used by Preger is rather the
copy made by some unknown person about 1551, written with a hasty hand,
and (as we were able to convince ourselves by personal inspection) by
one, who, in places, could not quite decipher the original (now lost).
There are, however, three other versions of Schlaginhaufen’s notes of
the utterance under consideration: That of Khummer (mentioned above,
vol. i., p. 396), that made in 1550 by George Steinhart, minister in the
Chemnitz superintendency, and that of Rörer, which, thanks to E. Kroker
the Leipzig city-librarian, we are now able to give. That of Steinhart
is found bound up in a Munich codex entitled “Dicta et facta Lutheri
et aliorum.” (Clm. 939, f., 10.) Steinhart evidently made diligent use
of the papers left by Schlaginhaufen, Lauterbach and others. Generally
speaking, his work is well done. Steinhart’s rendering of the utterance
in question agrees word for word with that of Khummer, though they both
differ from the Munich copy published by Preger and show it to be lacking
in some respects. Rörer’s text V, in many ways, stands by itself.

Khummer had fled from Austria on account of his Lutheran leanings and
gone to Wittenberg, where he matriculated on May 11, 1529. He was then
a fellow-student of Lauterbach. He is supposed to have been given by
Luther (between 1541 and 1545) charge of the parish of Ortrand, where
he still was in 1555 when the Visitors gave a good account of him. His
collection, now in the Royal Dresden Library, contains a copy (not all in
his own handwriting) made in 1554 from Lauterbach’s Diary (1538), and,
further, in the second part, this time all in his own handwriting, copies
of many things said by Luther at table. “We shall not be far wrong,” says
Seidemann (p. x.), “if we surmise that Khummer obtained his version from
Pirna [where Lauterbach had been superintendent since 1539].” Below we
give his version as printed in Seidemann (p. 81, n.):

_Luther’s words as they were heard by Schlaginhaufen_:

I. Copies of Steinhart (1550) and Khummer (1554):

“Hæc vocabula iustus et iustitia dei erant mihi fulmen in conscientia.
Mox reddebar pavidus auditor. Iustus, ergo punit. Sed cum semel in hac
turri speculabar de istis vocabulis Iustus ex fide vivit, iustitia
dei, mox cogitaveram, [Steinhart: cogitabam] si vivere debemus iusti
ex fide et iustitia dei debet esse ad salutem omni credenti, mox
erigebatur mihi animus. Ergo iustitia dei est, quæ nos iustificat et
salvat. Et facta sunt mihi hæc verba iucundiora, Dise khunst hat mir
der heilig geist aüff diser cloaca aüff dem Thorm (ein)gegeben.”[1662]

II. Anonymous Copy of (Preger) 1551:

“Hæc vocabula: iustus et iustitia erant mihi fulmen in conscientia.
Mox reddebar pavidus auditis: Iustus—ergo puniet, Iustus ex fide
vivit, Iustitia dei revelatur sine lege. Mox cogitabam, si vivere
debemus ex fide et si iustitia dei debet esse ad salutem omni
credenti, mox erigebatur mihi animus: ergo iustitia dei est, quo nos
iustificat et salvat, et facta sunt mihi hæc verba iucundiora. Dise
kunst hatt mir d[er] S[piritus] S[anctus] auf diss Cl. eingeben.”

Here the identical text of Khummer and Steinhart (I) supplies certain
missing parts in text II, and, as it is the more understandable of the
two, is more likely to represent the earlier form of Schlaginhaufen’s
rendering. Thus in text II, line 1-2, the word “_Dei_” after “_iustitia_”
is wrongly omitted; so also, the words “_Sed cum semel in hac turri
speculabar de istis vocabulis_,” or others to that effect, are required
to introduce the “_mox cogitabam_” a few lines below. Read alone the
“_Iustus ex fide_,” as in II, is not intelligible. In both I and II
there is, on the other hand, an omission, viz. after the words “_omni
credenti_” which III, IV and V seek to supply each in their own way.
Here we shall not be far wrong in assuming the omission to have been the
fault of the lost original of Schlaginhaufen of which they made use. The
fact that No. I here refrains from completing the passage is in itself
a testimony to its copyist’s integrity. Again, in the Steinhart-Khummer
version, the final allusion in the German words at the end to the “Thorm”
(tower) brings us back to the “_turris_” mentioned earlier. Now, what is
noteworthy, is that, at the conclusion of this version which seems the
better of the pair, the word “cloaca” is spelt out in full (as it also is
below, in Rörer’s copy).

In II, however, we find only the abbreviation “Cl.” Now, in the MS.
followed by the editor of text II, though we find a large number of
abbreviations, they are merely the ones in use in those times. “Cl.,”
however, is a most singular one, and, were it not explained by other
texts, would be very difficult to understand. Why then is it used? It can
hardly be merely from the desire to avoid using any word in the least
offensive to innocent ears, for, elsewhere, in the same pages (e.g. in
Preger’s edition, Nos. 364, 366, 375) the coarsest words are written
out in full without the slightest scruple. Hence in this connection
the copyist must have had a special reason to avoid spelling out so
comparatively harmless a word.

* * * * *

The remaining texts are those of Cordatus, Lauterbach and Rörer.

Cordatus was assigned too high a place by his modern editor, Wrampelmeyer
(1885). He had, indeed, his merits, but, as Preger points out, an
inspection of the many items he took from Schlaginhaufen shows him to
have been careless and often mistaken. Moreover, he has wantonly altered
the order of the utterances instead of retaining Schlaginhaufen’s
chronological one. Those utterances which he had not heard himself (such
as the one in question) have naturally suffered most at his hands. As
for Lauterbach’s so-called “Colloquia” preserved at Gotha (ed. H. E.
Bindseil), it also betrays signs of being a revision and rearrangement of
matter collected together or heard personally by this most industrious of
all the compilers of Luther’s sayings. Whether Lauterbach was actually
present on the occasion in question cannot be told, but it seems scarcely
likely that he was if we compare his account carefully with that of
Schlaginhaufen. On Rörer’s connection with Schlaginhaufen, see Kroker,
“Archiv für Reformationsgesch.,” 7, 1910, p. 56 ff.

_Luther’s words in the revised form_:

III. Cordatus 1537 (Wrampelmeyer, p. 423, No. 1571):

“Hæc vocabula iustus et iusticia in papatu fulmen mihi erant
conscientia, et ad solum auditum terrebant me. Sed cum semel in hac
turri (in qua secretus locus erat monachorum) specularer de istis
vocabulis Iustus ex fide vivit et Iusticia dei, etc. obiter veniebat
in mentem: Si vivere debemus iusti fide propter iusticiam et illa
iusticia Dei est ad salutem omni credenti, ergo ex fide est iusticia
et ex iusticia vita. Et erigebatur mihi conscientia mea et animus
meus, et certus reddebar, iusticiam dei esse quæ nos iustificaret et
salvaret. Ac statim fiebant mihi hæc verba dulcia et iucunda verba.
Diesze kunst hatt mir der heilige geist auff diesem thurm geben.”

IV. Lauterbach c. 1559 (Bindseil, 1, p. 52):

“Nam hæc verba iustus et iustitia Dei erant mihi fulmen in
consciencia, quibus auditis expavescebam. Si Deus est iustus, ergo
puniet. Sed Dei gratia cum semel in hac turri et hypocausto specularer
de istis vocabulis Iustus ex fide vivit et Iustitia Dei, mox
cogitabam: Si vivere debemus iusti ex fide et iustitia Dei debet esse
ad salutem omni credenti, non erit meritum nostrum, sed misericordia
Dei. Ita erigebatur animus meus. Nam iustitia Dei est qua nos
iustificamur et salvamur per Christum, et illa verba facta sunt mihi
iucundiora. Die Schriefft hat mir der heilige geist in diesem thuen
[thurm] offenbaret.”

V. Rörer (Jena, Bos. q. 24 s, Bl. 117´, 118):

“Vocabula hæc iustus, misericordia erant mihi in conscientia
tristitia. Nam his auditis mox incutiebatur terror: Si Deus est
iustus, ergo puniet, etc. Cum autem diligentius cogitarem de
significatione et iam incideret locus Hab. 2: Iustus ex fide vivet,
item Iustitia Dei revelatur sine lege, cœpi mutare sententiam: Si
vivere debemus ex fide, et si iustitia Dei est ad salutem omni
credenti, non terrent, sed maxime consolantur peccatores hi loci.
Ita confirmatus cogitavi certo iustitiam Dei esse, non qua punit
peccatores, sed qua iustificat et salvos (salvat) peccatores
pœnitentiam agentes. Diese Kunst hat mir der Geist Gottes auf dieser
cloaca [in horto] eingeben.”

It will be noticed that III and IV resemble each other and both conclude
with a mention of the tower (as in Schlaginhaufen I). At the beginning,
however, each adds a few words of his own not found in Schlaginhaufen.
Cordatus adds a parenthesis about the “_locus secretus_,” i.e. privy
(whether the marks of parenthesis are merely the work of the editor we
cannot say, nor whether the parenthetic sentence is supposed to represent
Luther’s actual words or is an explanation given by Cordatus himself). At
any rate the words really add nothing new to Schlaginhaufen’s account,
if we bear in mind the latter’s allusion at the end to the “cloaca” and
the fact that Cordatus omits to refer to this place at the end of his
account. Hence we seem to have a simple transposition. As to why Cordatus
should have transposed the words, we may not unreasonably conjecture
that, in his estimation, they stood in the earlier form in too unpleasant
proximity with the reception of the revelation.

Lauterbach’s text, even if we overlook the words it adds after
“_credenti_,” betrays an effort after literary polish; it can scarcely
be an independent account and most likely rests on Schlaginhaufen. One
allusion is, however, of importance, viz. the words “_in hac turri et
~[in Rebenstock’s version: _vel_]~ hypocausto_” which here replace the
mention of the cloaca or privy. Here the “_hypocaustum_” signifies either
a heating apparatus or a heated room.

In Rörer the whole text has been still further polished up. He agrees
with II in leaving out the “_in hac turri_,” but, with I, in introducing
the “cloaca” at the end. The words “_in horto_” which are inserted in
his handwriting just above would seem to be his own addition due to his
knowledge of the spot (the tower really stood partly in the garden).

_Other interpretations of the texts in question_: Kawerau (p. 62 f.)
takes Lauterbach’s “_hypocaustum_” to refer to Luther’s workroom in
the tower, which Luther had retained since his monkish years and from
which “he stormed the Papacy.” Unfortunately, in the references given by
Kawerau, we find no allusion to any such prolonged residence in a room in
the tower.

Luther himself once casually alludes to two different “_hypocausta_”
(or warmed rooms) in the monastery. According to a letter dated in
Nov., 1527 (“Briefwechsel,” 6, p. 117), whilst the Plague was raging,
he put up his ailing son Hans in “_meo hypocausto_,” whilst the wife of
Augustine Schurf, the professor of medicine, when she was supposed to
have contracted the malady, was also accommodated in a “_hypocaustum_”
of her own. For another sick lady, Margareta von Mochau, he found room
“_in hybernaculo nostro usitato_,” and, with his family, took up his
own lodgings “_in anteriore magna aula_.” Hans’s “_hypocaustum_” was
probably the traditional room furnished with a stove still shown to-day
as Luther’s (Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 491). Unfortunately this room is
not near the town-wall, or the tower, but on the opposite side of the
building. There is another allusion elsewhere (Feb. 14, 1546, “Briefe,”
5, p. 791) to a “_hypocaustum_,” but, there again, no reference is made
to its being situated in the tower.

An undated saying in Aurifaber’s German Table-Talk, in which Luther
expresses a fear for the future of his “poor little room” “from which I
stormed the Pope” (Erl. ed., 62, p. 209; Förstemann, 4, p. 474) might
refer to any room. As a monk Luther is not likely to have had a warmed
cell of his own but merely the use of the common-room of the community.
He himself speaks of what he suffered from the cold (above, p. 194);
elsewhere he tells us of the noise once made by the devil “in the
chimney” of the refectory (above, p. 125) to which Luther had betaken
himself to prepare his lecture, presumably for the sake of more warmth.

In vol. i. (p. 397) we perhaps too hastily assumed the “necessary
building” to have been a privy which Luther, in 1519, asked permission to
erect. It may even have been the “pleasant room overlooking the water” in
which Luther “drank and made merry”—to the great disgust of the fanatic
Ickelsamer. (See above, vol. iii., p. 302.) Being new it would no doubt
have been “pleasant” and no doubt, too, it also had a fire-place. It
may be conjectured that, possibly Lauterbach, with his allusion to the
“tower” and the “_hypocaustum_” was intending to suggest this room as the
scene of the revelation rather than the more ignoble locality of which
Cordatus speaks.

* * * * *

Others have sought to escape the disagreeable meaning of the text in
other ways. Wrampelmeyer interpreted it figuratively: The tower was
Popery and the “_hypocaustum_” Luther’s spiritual “sweat bath.” Preger
did much the same and even more. He says: “I hold that ‘Cl.,’ from which
abbreviation the other readings seem to have sprung[!], stands for
‘Capitel’ [i.e. chapter].” Even Harnack inclines to this latter view.
The meaning would then be: “This art the Holy Ghost revealed unto me
on this chapter” (of the Epistle to the Romans). But, apart from the
clumsiness of such a construction, as it was pointed out by Kawerau, such
an abbreviation as “Cl.” for “capitel” or “capitulum” is unheard of. With
even less reason Scheel tentatively makes the suggestion to read “Cl.” as
“claustrum,” or “cella.”

Kawerau admits that “Cl.” stands for “cloaca,” but he urges that it
arose through a misunderstanding on Schlaginhaufen’s part of Cordatus’s
“_secretus locus_”—as though Schlaginhaufen was likely to depend on
second-hand information regarding an utterance he had heard himself.

Kawerau further points out, that the locality in which the revelation
was received is, after all, of no great moment, that “the stable at
Bethlehem was not unworthy of witnessing God’s revelation in Christ”;
Scheel, likewise, asks whether all Christians, even those of the Roman
persuasion, do not believe that God is present everywhere? They certainly
do, and nothing could have been further from our intentions than any wish
to prejudice the case by making the locality of the incident a “capital
question.” Had Luther received his supposed revelation on Mount Thabor,
or on Sinai, or before the altar of the Schlosskirche we can assure our
critics that we should have faithfully recorded the testimonies with the
same regard for historical truth.

7. The Indulgence-Theses

In vol. i. (p. 332) and vol. ii. (p. 16) we insinuated that Luther
wilfully concealed the true character of his 95 Theses. Whereas, in
reality, his system had no room for Indulgences at all, in the Theses he
chose to veil his opinions under an hypothetical form. It has, however,
been objected that Luther’s letters to Spalatin and to Scheurl, of Feb.
15 and March 5, 1518, prove that his views were not yet fixed.

But this is scarcely a true presentment of the case. In his private
letter to Spalatin he openly brands Indulgences as an “illusion.”

“Dicam primum tibi soli et amicis nostris, donec res publicetur, mihi
in indulgentiis hodie videri non esse nisi animarum illusionem et
nihil prorsus utiles esse nisi stertentibus et pigris in via Christi.…
Huius illusionis sustollendæ gratia ego veritatis amore in eum
disputationis periculosum labyrinthum dedi me ipsum.”

He tells Spalatin not to bother about gaining Indulgences but rather
to give his money to the poor, otherwise he will deserve the wrath of
God. All would be demonstrated in the forthcoming “Resolutiones”; only
the “_ipsa rudiores ruditate_” still assail him as a heretic, etc.
(“Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 155.) From these words his true opinion emerges
clearly enough, in spite of the previous ones: “_Hæc res in dubio adhuc
pendet et mea disputatio inter calumnias fluctuat_,” and in spite, too,
of his assurance to the Court-preacher, that he had not the slightest
wish to bring the Prince under any suspicion of being unfriendly to the
Church.

As to the letter sent a fortnight later to Scheurl at Nuremberg, the
historian must bear in mind the effect it was calculated by Luther to
produce at Nuremberg, where some were evidently inclined to find fault
with the Theses. In this letter, just as he does in his letter to Bishop
Scultetus (above, vol. ii., p. 16) Luther makes out the Theses to be
quite innocent, almost impartial, and, moreover, in no wise intended for
the outside public. They were to be the subject-matter of a Disputation,
“_ut multorum iudicio vel damnatæ abolerentur vel probatæ ederentur_.”
He is sorry now that they were made so public. “_Sunt enim nonnulla mihi
dubia, longeque aliter et certius quædam asseruissem vel omisissem, si
id ~[their publication]~ futurum sperassem._” He also adds: “_Mihi sane
non est dubium, decipi populum, non per indulgentias, sed usum earum_”
(“Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 166.) Here he seeks to depict his downright
antagonism to Indulgences as such, as merely directed against their abuse.

8. The Temptations at the Wartburg

Luther writes to Melanchthon (July 13, 1521): “_Carnis meæ indomitæ
uror magnis ignibus; summa, qui fervere spiritu debeo, ferveo carne,
libidine, pigritia, otio_.” He adds that for a whole week he had been
“_tentationibus carnis vexatus_,” and concludes: “_Ora pro me, peccatis
enim immergor in hac solitudine_.” In his letter of Nov. 1, 1521, to Nic.
Gerbel, the temptations are also alluded to, but less clearly qualified.

“Mille credas me satanibus obiectum in hac otiosa solitudine. Tanto
est facilius adversus incarnatum diabolum, id est adversus homines,
quam adversus spiritualia nequitiæ in cœlestibus pugnare. Sæpius ego
cado, sed sustentat me rursus dextra excelsi.”

Though, in the former text, there is undoubtedly an element of
exaggeration (as we pointed out, vol. ii., p. 88), yet there can be no
question that his main complaint relates to temptations of the flesh and
that it is in their regard that he asks for prayers of his friends.

9. Prayer at the Wartburg

Against us it has been said that we were too disposed to make of Luther a
“prayerless” man. One critic, in proof of Luther’s prayerfulness, points
out that, in his Wartburg letters, Luther uses the word “Amen” no less
than thirteen times in the text, apart from its use at the end of the
letters. Now, in all the Epistles of St. Paul—which cover far more paper
than these Wartburg letters—the word “Amen” occurs in the text only
eleven times. But, notoriously, Luther was accustomed to use this word in
rather unusual connections, as he does for instance when speaking of the
wife of the “_theologus coniugatus_” Johann Agricola (“_Dominus det, ut
uteri onus feliciter exponat. Amen._” “Briefwechsel,” 3, p. 151).

Moreover, Luther’s prayers were very peculiar. We hear nothing of his
having used his enforced stay at the Wartburg to ask of God whether the
path he had chosen was the right one, and for the grace to carry out, not
his own will, but that of God. In the interests of his new doctrine, he
is, however, “_paratus ire quo Dominus volet, sive ad vos sive alio_.”
(“Briefwechsel,” 3, p. 193.) He asks a friend to pray “_ut non deficiat
fides mea in Domino_,” i.e. that his views may not change (_ib._, p.
214); “_commenda, quæso, tuis orationibus Deo causam nostram_.” (_Ib._,
p. 324.) Elsewhere he writes:

“Benedictus Deus, qui nobis eam non solum dedit colluctationem
adversus spiritualia nequitiæ, insuper revelavit nobis, non esse
carnem aut sanguinem, a quibus oppugnamur in ista causa.… Satan furit
in sapientibus et iustis suis.…”

above all, in Emser, whom he calls a “_vas diaboli proprie obsessum_.”
(_Ib._, 3, p. 197.)

10. Luther’s state during his stay at the Coburg

In addition to the troubles mentioned in vol. ii., p. 390, which tended
to depress Luther at the Coburg there were yet others. He felt keenly
the separation from his family and from those with whom he had been
accustomed to work. His father’s death was also a cause of sadness to
him. Finally the difficulties of corresponding with his friends at
Augsburg were responsible for his being often in a state of uncertainty
as to what was going on at the Diet.

11. Luther’s moral character

Exception has been taken to our interpretation (vol. ii., p. 161, n. 1)
of a certain utterance of Luther’s. In the “Comment. on Galat.,” 1, p.
107 _sq._, he says:

“zelavi pro papisticis legibus … conatus sum eas præstare plus
inedia, vigiliis, etc., … Bono zelo et ad gloriam Dei feci … [Yet]
in monachatu Christum quotidie crucifixi et falsa mea fiducia, quæ
tum perpetuo adhærebat mihi, blasphemavi. Externe non eram sicut
ceteri homines, raptores, iniusti, adulteri, sed servabam castitatem,
obedientiam et paupertatem, denique totus eram deditus ieiuniis,
vigiliis, etc. Interim tamen sub ista sanctitate et fiducia iustitiæ
propriæ alebam … odium et blasphemiam Dei.”

But, in these words written in his old age, he is not witnessing to his
virtuous life in former days, but, on the contrary, he is striving to
show that, for all its outward propriety, it was the merest blasphemy.
Moreover, the words “_servabam … obedientiam_,” etc., cannot be taken too
literally, as Luther himself elsewhere admits that he was careless about
the Office, though this was a matter on which the Rule was very severe.
A more appropriate self-justification would be the utterance recorded in
Veit Dietrich’s MS. of the Table-Talk (Bl. 83) which begins: “_Monachus
ego non sensi multam libidinem_.”

A man’s speech is in some sense an index to his character. Our volumes
teem with samples of the filthy expressions to which Luther was addicted.
No theologian or preacher had hitherto dared to speak as he did; the
Franciscans Johann Pauli and Thomas Murner—albeit by no means too
particular—certainly cannot compare with Luther on this score. Moreover,
it should not be forgotten that Luther uses such language chiefly as a
weapon against his Catholic foes without, and the Protestant “sectarians”
within. In his polemics, insults and foul speaking go hand in hand, and
the greater his wrath the fouler his speech.

In connection with one instance of his use of unseemly comparisons when
(above, vol. ii., p. 144) we spoke of his allusion to the “Bride of
Orlamünde” we were not aware that—as Kawerau now points out—Staupitz,
his old superior, had described in very free language the nature of the
union between the soul and her divine Bridegroom. (“Von der endlichen
Vollziehung ewiger Fürsehung,” 1516.) Such mystical effusions were very
apt to be misinterpreted by the unlearned fanatics, whom Luther ridicules.

12. Luther’s views on lies

That Luther believed in the permissibility of “lies of convenience”
is fairly evident. (Cp. above, vol. iv., p. 108 ff.) The “_mendacium
officiosum_” is an “_honestum et pium mendacium_”; it is useful and
wholesome; “_si hoc peccatum esset, ut non puto_, etc.” In “Opp. lat.
exeg.,” 6, p. 289, speaking of Isaac’s statement that Rebecca was his
sister, he says: “_non est peccatum, sed est officiosum mendacium_.” But,
if it be no sin, then, presumably, it is allowed.

It is true that Luther speaks of Isaac’s untruth as an “_infirmitas_,”
but, by this, he does not mean a “venial sin,” rather he is alluding to
the “_infirmitas fidei_,” which, in Isaac’s case was the cause of his
untruth. Hence Isaac’s untruth, according to Luther, comes under the
category of the

“mendacium officiosum, quo saluti, famæ corporis [corpori?] vel animæ
consulitur; e contra perniciosum (mendacium) petit ista omnia, sicut
officiosum defendit [quod est] pulcherrima defensio contra periculum
animæ, corporis, rerum.”

Hence the “_mendacium officiosum_,” far from being a sin, is an
“_officium caritatis_,” i.e. to tell one is “_servare, non transgredi,
præcepta Dei_.” (_Ib._, p. 288 _sq._)

Even another text which has been quoted to the opposite effect must mean
much the same. Luther says:

“quod non offendatur Deus, sive constanter confitearis, id quod
heroicum est, sive infirmus sis; dissimulat enim et connivet. Atque
ex eo perspicimus nos habere propitium Deum, qui potest ignoscere
et connivere ad infirmitates nostras, remittere peccata, tantum non
perniciose mentiamur … nec proprie sed æquivoce et abusive mendacium
dicitur quia est pulcherrima defensio contra periculum animæ corporis
et rerum.” (_Ib._, p. 288.)

Here the word “_peccata_” cannot well include such untruths since he
distinctly affirms that such “infirmities” “do not offend God.”

Moreover, since, as we know, Luther admits no distinction between mortal
and venial sins, holds that all sins “_ex natura et substantia peccati_”
are equal, and makes no allowance for “_parvitas materiæ_,” it follows
that, even if such untruths as those of Isaac, the Egyptian midwife,
etc., are “infirmities,” yet, since they are not mortal, they are not
sins at all.

In “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 3, pp. 140-143, Luther distinguishes the “_iocosum
mendacium_”—which is merely a “_grammaticum peccatum_”—and the
“_officiosum mendacium_”—such as was Christ’s on the road to Emaus—from
the true lie: “_Revera unum tantum mendacii genus est, quod nocet
proximo_.”

That Luther himself quite realised the novelty of his teaching, comes
out clearly enough in the fragmentary notes of a sermon preached on Jan.
5, 1528, i.e. on the eve of the feast of the Three Kings. The reporter’s
notes are as usual partly in Latin partly in the vernacular.

“Hujusmodi officiosa mendacia, charitable lies, in which I lie for
someone else’s sake, non incommodat, but rather does him a service.
Sic filia Saul.… Illi [magi] mentiuntur, quia sciunt eius object to
be murderous, et tamen non est mendacium, quia quando aliquid loquor
ex bono corde, non est.… Ergo mendacium [est] quando my heart is bad
and false erga proximum.… Si etiam seduxissem [misled others], how I
should rejoice over my trickery, si ita ad salutem seducerem homines.…
Monachi in totum volunt dici veritatem. Sed audistis, etc.” (Weim.
ed., 27, p. 12.)

Hence, as the concluding words show, Luther was of opinion that the
“monks” went too far in insisting on the truth everywhere.

* * * * *

Elsewhere Luther is disposed to follow the teaching of his Nominalist
masters and to see in certain apparent lies (e.g. in that told by Abraham
about his “sister” Sara) the result of divine inspiration. (Cp. “Opp.
lat. exeg.,” 3, p. 142 _sq._) “_Hoc ipsum consilium ex fide firmissima
et ex Spiritu Sancto fuisse profectum iudicem._” Abraham was moved by
the Holy Ghost to take steps to save his person and thus ensure the
fulfilment of the Divine promises made to his posterity. “_Quæ fiunt ad
gloriam Dei et verbum eius ornandum et commendandum, hæc recte fiunt et
merito laudantur._”

Gabriel Biel, a representative Nominalist, admits that a sort of
inspiration may sometimes make lawful what God has forbidden: He says,
e.g.:

“Nam lex [non mentiendi] quantum ad id, ubi concurrit familiare
consilium Spiritus Sancti, per ipsum Spiritus Sancti consilium
revocatur, et ita non erit contra conclusionem et, ubicunque cum
mendacio, secundo modo accepto, concurrit consilium Spiritus Sancti,
ibi excusatur a peccato; et per hoc multa mendacia excusari possent.”
(In III Sent. dist. 38, q. unica.)

Biel appeals to St. Augustine’s excuse of Jacob’s lie to his father
Isaac, and then proceeds to justify it on Nominalist grounds; the
“_potentia Dei absoluta_” can make lies lawful; by virtue of this
“_potentia_” the Holy Ghost, in such inspired cases, can suspend for the
while the prohibition. Biel himself had only the Old Testament instances
in view, but the theory was a dangerous one.

13. Luther’s lack of the missionary spirit

Walter Köhler in his article “Reformation und Mission” (in the Swiss
“Theologische Zeitschrift,” 1911, pp. 49-60) seeks to find the reason for
the Reformers’ lack of interest in the Missions. (See above, vol. iii.,
p. 213 ff.) It cannot be simply because they were too busy with Rome,
for this might indeed explain their not sending out missionaries but not
the fact that even the thought of so doing never occurred to them. Yet a
movement which professed to be Evangelical and to take as its standard
the Apostolic Church should surely have concerned itself more about the
heathen.

Against those who argue that the absence of missionary effort was due to
Luther’s eschatological expectations and his belief in the nearness of
the Last Day, Köhler points out that the teaching of history rather shows
that such expectations, far from hindering, tend to promote missionary
work. He alludes, for instance, to the rapid spread of Christianity at
a time when the Second Coming was thought so near. He might also have
referred to the case of St. Gregory the Great, who, though he believed
the end of the world to be imminent, did not scruple to send his
missionaries to England.

Others have said that the Reformers had no knowledge of the number of the
heathen. But, as Köhler urges, though their knowledge was small compared
with ours, yet they were not wholly ignorant of the state of things. They
had at least heard of the discovery of America, as we see, for instance,
from a sermon of Luther (Weim. ed., 10, 1, 1, p. 21), where he says:
“Quite recently many islands and lands have been found, to which, so far,
in fifteen hundred years, nothing of this grace (of the Gospel) has been
proclaimed.”

The real reason is found by Köhler in the exegesis and theology of the
Reformers: Luther, for instance, opined that the Apostles alone had been
commanded to carry the Gospel throughout the world. He also followed the
olden view that the Apostles had actually preached the Gospel to the very
ends of the earth. Hence, since Apostolic times, no one is any longer
under any obligation to preach Christ everywhere; we are now no longer
apostles, but merely parish-priests.

His theology also comes into play in this. For God alone calls men to
faith and salvation; He it is Who assembles His elect from among the
heathen. But if it is God alone who arouses the faith in helpless man,
then organised activity is useless. True to his principles the Reformer
left the conversion of the heathen in the hands of God. To him an
organised mission would have seemed to partake of the evil nature of
work-service.

14. Notes

In vol. iv., p. 90 the author rather too hastily expresses wonder that
Luther should have spoken of Pope Alexander VI as an “unbelieving
Marane.” Luther, however, in so doing was merely re-echoing what had been
said in Rome. Cp. Pastor, “History of the Popes” (Engl. Trans., vol. vi.,
p. 137): “When Julius II, who was an implacable enemy of the Borgia,
occupied the Papal Chair, it became usual to speak of Alexander as a
‘Maraña.’” Cp. also, _ib._, p. 217 f. “His [Julius’s] dislike for this
family was so strong that on the 26th of November, 1507, he announced
that he would no longer inhabit the Appartamento Borgia, as he could not
bear to be constantly reminded by the fresco portraits of Alexander of
‘those Marañas of cursed memory.’” (Note of the English Editor.)

* * * * *

In connection with the bishopric of Meissen (above, vol. v., p. 200 ff.,
etc.) we may quote a few words from the correspondence of its occupant.
They will show how the Bishops, while taking no steps themselves, were
vexed with the Pope and Kaiser for doing so little to obviate the
danger to religion. Johann von Maltitz, Bishop of Meissen, wrote on
Oct. 16, 1540, as follows to Johann Fabri, Bishop of Vienna (Cardauns,
“Nuntiaturberichte,” 6, p. 233):

“Nihil imprimitur contra hanc sectam [Lutheranam] nec quisquam tale
quid vendere audet, nam cum magna potentia regunt, quibus contra ne
mutire quisquam aliquid audet, et quidquid visitatores et Lutherus in
rebus spiritualibus ordinant, id exequi et servari per omnes debet et
episcopi mandata nihil efficiunt.”

On Dec. 10, 1540, he wrote to the same correspondent:

“Martini Lutheri secta egregie suum processum habet quotidieque
augetur; timeo iram Dei super papam, Cæs. ac Regiam Mᵗᵉᵐ, quod
eorum temporibus ac regimine religionem ita decrescere supprimique
patiuntur, et Sᵗⁱ S. Maiestatibusque illorum iocose objicietur, esse
adhuc pios aliquot homines, qui obedientes essent, si modo haberent,
qui eos ita defenderet. Videmus autem, quod quicquid Lutherani
præsumunt, id patitur et locum habet et quod plures religionis sectæ
efflagitantur ac dantur quam obedientiæ (sic). Misniæ adhuc nulla
divina exequi audemus. Intrusus est nobis vi in nostram ecclesiam
quidam Lutheranus concionator.… Sane ferme in omnibus locis male
agitur quantum ad religionem.” (_Ib._, p. 237 f.)

FOOTNOTES

[1] “An die Radherrn aller Stedte deutsches Lands das sie Christl.
Schulen auffrichten und halten sollen.” “Werke,” Weim. ed., 15, p. 9 ff.;
Erl. ed., 22, p. 170 ff.

[2] Weim. ed., 15, pp. 30, 34, 35 f.; Erl. ed., pp. 22, 173, 178, 180 f.

[3] In such passages “beast” more often merely implies stupidity; cp.
“bête” in French. Hence it would be a mistake to think that Luther is
here crediting the Germans with any actual “bestiality.” Cp. below, p. 15
and above, vol. v., p. 534, n. 2.

[4] Weim. ed., 15, p. 44; Erl. ed., 22, p. 189.

[5] “De constituendis scholis,” etc.

[6] Weim. ed., 15, p. 53; Erl. ed., 22, p. 198.

[7] A schoolmaster of Zwickau remarked on the writing to the Councillors:
“With this pamphlet Luther will win back the favour of many of his
opponents.” Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 548.

[8] Erl. ed., 14², pp. 390, 389.

[9] Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 519 f.; Erl. ed., 17², p. 381, in “Das man
Kinder,” etc. The object of furthering the Evangel which is set forth in
both this and the former writing is indicated by the very title of the
first writing with its reference to “Christian” schools.

[10] _Ib._, p. 518=379, in the writing mentioned below. See, however,
below, p. 36.

[11] _Ib._, p. 519=380.

[12] “Predigt, das man Kinder zur Schulen halten solle.” Weim. ed.,
30, 2, p. 508 ff.; Erl. ed., 17², p. 378 ff. As early as July 5, 1530,
Luther wrote from the Coburg to Melanchthon that he was “meditating”
this writing and adds: “_Mirum, si etiam antea fui tam verbosus, ut nunc
fieri mihi videor, nisi senectutis ista garrulitas sit_.” It is curious
to hear him already speaking of his old age. When sending the finished
work to Melanchthon on Aug. 24, 1530, he wrote: “_Mitto hic sermonem de
scholis, plane Lutheranum et Lutheri verbositate nihil auctorem suum
negans, sed plane referens. Sic sum. Idem erit libellus de clavibus_”
(“Briefwechsel,” 8, pp. 80, 204). The latter remark certainly applies to
his long writing, “Von den Schlüsseln,” 1530 (Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 428
ff.; Erl. ed., 31, p. 126 ff.).

[13] Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 519; Erl. ed., 17², p. 381.

[14] P. 554=401, 402.

[15] Pp. 556, 559=403, 404.

[16] P. 586=420 f.

[17] P. 587=421.

[18] _Ib._, 15, p. 34=22, p. 178.

[19] “Reformation und Gegenreformation” (W. Möller, “Lehrb. der KG.”),
3³, p. 437, No. 2.

[20] Cp. Kawerau, _ib._

[21] “Gesch. des gelehrten Unterrichts,” etc., 1², 1896, p. 197.

[22] See below, p. 20, n. 3.

[23] See above, vol. iii., p. 361.

[24] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 2, p. 15: “_Scholæ crescentes verbi Dei
sunt fructus_,” says Luther, “_et ecclesiarum seminaria_”; if these
are furthered, then, so God will, things will be in a better case (in
Rebenstock: “_Hæc si promoveantur, tunc Deo volente, nostrum inceptum
meliorem habebit progressum_”). _Ib._, p. 14: Although the work of
the schools was performed quietly, “_attamen magnum fructum exhibent,
ex quibus ecclesiæ conservatio consistit.… Inde collaboratores et
ludimagistri vocantur ad ministerium ecclesiæ_.”—Cp. Mathesius,
“Tischreden” (Kroker), p. 208: “Wretched parsonages are not the place
for schoolmasters”; they deserve to be superintendents and to rule over
others. _Ib._, p. 213 on the importance of the schools.

[25] Weim. ed., 15, p. 29 f.; Erl. ed., 22, p. 173.

[26] _Ib._, p. 35 f.=175.

[27] See also above, n. 1.

[28] Proofs in G. Rietschel, “Luther und die Ordination,” ², 1889. Cp.
Paulsen, p. 203.

[29] Weim. ed., 15, p. 47 f.; Erl. ed., 22, p. 193.

[30] _Ib._, p. 40=185.

[31] _Ib._, p. 53=198.

[32] _Ib._, 30, 2, p. 588=17², p. 421 f.

[33] See above, p. 6, n. 3.

[34] Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 582; Erl. ed., 17², p. 418.

[35] _Ib._, p. 584=419.

[36] P. 530=387.

[37] Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 456; Erl. ed., 17², p. 396.

[38] P. 586=421.

[39] _Ib._, 15, p. 36 f.=22, p. 181 f.

[40] Cp. F. M. Schiele, in H. Delbrück, “Preuss. Jahrbücher,” 132, 1908,
Art. “Luther und das Luthertum in ihrer Bedeutung für die Gesch. der
Schüle und der Erziehung,” p. 381 ff. P. 386: “The principal motive with
Melanchthon … is the love of learning, Luther’s motive [in the above
writings] is to educate leaders for Christendom who shall deliver her
from the unholy abominations of the olden days.… With this is connected
the fact that for him ‘government,’ whether exercised by the sovereign,
the bishop, or the father of the family, is a work of charity.” P.
384: According to Luther “the erection of schools must always remain a
matter which concerns the Christian authorities.” To those historians of
education, who, according to Schiele, are wont to ask: “Was not Luther
the father of the national schools?” he replies: “The matter wears
a different aspect when viewed in the light of history.” He roundly
describes as fabulous the supposed foundation of the national schools
by Luther. “Nor do we find in Luther’s schemes for the organisation of
education the slightest trace of any tendency to the secularisation of
the schools” (pp. 384, 381 f.). The last words are aimed at the friends
of the secularised or undenominational schools of the present day.

[41] In the Introduction to the Weimar edition of the writing “An die
Radherrn” (15, 1899, p. 9 ff.) we read: “It is very characteristic of the
reformer’s attitude to the question of education in his day that he does
not, as we might expect, give the preference to these German elementary
schools in which we can see the beginnings of the national schools, but,
whilst admitting their claims, insists emphatically on the need of a
classic training.” “To characterise the writing in question as ‘of the
utmost importance for the development of our elementary-school system’
(“Mon. Germ. Pædag.” III, iii.) is to be unfair to it.”

[42] Erl. ed., 62, p. 307.

[43] _Ib._, p. 306.

[44] _Ib._, p. 297; cp. p. 289.

[45] Weim. ed., 19, p. 445; Erl. ed., 26², p. 7: “Proposal how permanent
order may be established in the Christian community.”

[46] Compare with this Luther’s letter to Johann, Elector of Saxony (Nov.
22, 1526), advocating the Visitation; Erl. ed., 53, p. 386 (“Briefe,”
5, p. 406). Of the final article of the Instructions for the Visitors
(1538), which refers to the schools, Köstlin-Kawerau says, 2, p. 37: “The
chief point kept in view here, as in Luther’s exhortations referred to
above [in his writing to the Councillors], was the need of bringing up
people sufficiently skilled to teach in the churches and to be capable
also of ruling. Hence the regulations prescribed the erection of schools
in which Latin should be taught.”

[47] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 311, a conversation dating from 1542-3
noted down by Heydenreich.

[48] _Ib._, p. 332. It may be mentioned here that amongst the German
universities, Erfurt, where he had received his own education, always
held a high place in his memory. “The University of Erfurt,” he once
said in later years, “enjoyed so high a reputation that all others in
comparison were looked upon as apologies for universities—but now,” so
he adds sadly, “its glory and majesty are a thing of the past, and the
university seems quite dead.” He extols the pomp and festivities that
accompanied the conferring of the mastership and doctorate, and wishes
that such solemnities were the rule everywhere. Erl. ed., 62, p. 287.

[49] “Gesch. des gelehrten Unterrichts,” 1², p. 198.

[50] Weim. ed., 15, p. 46 f.; Erl. ed., 22, p. 192.

[51] Cp. Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 37.

[52] Schiele (above, p. 13, n. 2), p. 389, where he adds: “What the
children needed to fit them for household work they could as a matter of
fact have learnt better from their parents or at the dame-school than
in the Councillors’ schools which Luther so extols.” Cp. above, p. 7,
Luther’s statement: “German books are principally intended for the common
people to read at home,” etc.

[53] Weim. ed., 26, pp. 236-240.

[54] _Ib._, 6, p. 462; Erl. ed., 21, p. 349 f., “An den Adel.”

[55] Erl. ed., 62, p. 458 f., “Tischreden.”

[56] _Ib._, p. 344.

[57] Paulsen, _ib._, p. 204. O. Schmidt, “Luther’s Bekanntschaft mit den
Klassikern,” Leipzig, 1883.

[58] “An die Radherrn,” Weim. ed., 15, p. 46; Erl. ed., 22, p. 191 f.

[59] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 431. Uttered in 1537 and noted by
Lauterbach and Weller.

[60] Cp. Janssen, “Hist. of the German People” (Engl. Trans.), 13, p.
166.—K. v. Raumer, “Gesch. der Pädagogik,” 1, Stuttgart, 1843, p. 272,
says: “It seems to us incredible that the learning by heart and acting
of plays so unchaste as those of Terence could fail to exert a bad
influence on the morals of the young.… If even the reading of Terence was
questionable, how much more questionable was it when the pupils acting
such plays identified themselves wholly with the events and personages
of the drama.”—Cp. above, vol. iii., p. 443 f., Melanchthon on the Roman
condemnation of the school edition of Erasmus’s “Colloquia.” Luther
condemned this book of his opponent in very strong language.

[61] “An die Radherrn,” etc., Weim. ed., 15, p. 46; Erl. ed., 22, p. 192.

[62] _Ib._, p. 47=192.

[63] “Martin Luthers Werke,” Stuttgart und Leipzig, 1907, p. 231.

[64] Before this Boehmer had said: “The importance of the lower schools,
girl schools and national schools, was fully recognised. Luther’s
concern was, however, with higher education.… It was not indeed his
intention to promote classical studies as such, but he wished to see them
harnessed to the service of the Gospel and to the furthering of its right
understanding. Hence, though Luther had in view other classes besides
the theologians, and though he advanced other motives in support of his
plans, still it was the religious standpoint which was the determining
one.”

[65] Weim. ed., 6, p. 461; Erl. ed., 21, p. 350, “An den Adel.”

[66] Paulsen, “Gesch. des gelehrten Unterrichts,” 1², p. 185.

[67] Weim. ed., 6, p. 462; Erl. ed., 21, pp. 347, 348, “An den Adel.”

[68] _Ib._, Erl. ed., 62, p. 304 f., “Tischreden.”

[69] _Ib._, 63, p. 281 f. (“Briefe,” 7, p. 73). Written in the middle of
March, 1529, this served at the same time as a preface to the work by
Justus Menius, “Œconomia christiana.”

[70] _Ib._, p. 280.

[71] Thus in the Introduction to Luther’s “An die Radherrn,” Weim. ed.,
15, p. 9 f.

[72] See above, p. 6.

[73] Erl. ed., 63, p. 280 f.

[74] Luther expressed this in his way as follows: Of all “the wiles of
Satan” this, aimed at the holy Gospel, was perhaps the worst, for it
suggested to men such dangerous ideas as these: Now that there is “no
longer any hope for the monks, nuns or priestlings there is no need of
learned men or of much study, but we must rather strive after food and
wealth,” “truly a masterpiece of diabolical art,” for creating “in the
German lands a wild, hideous mob of ‘Tatters’ or Turks.” Weim. ed., 30,
2, p. 522 f.; Erl. ed., 17², p. 383, Preface to the work on the schools
(1530).

[75] “Werke,” _ib._, 6, p. 462=21, p. 349 f., “An den Adel.”

[76] The violence of the tone in which Luther speaks of the Universities
in the writings which followed his “An den Adel,” as the real strongholds
of the devil on earth, has perhaps never been equalled in any attack
on these institutions either before or after his day. See passages in
Janssen, _ib._, Engl. Trans., iii., _passim_. Some of the preachers
of the pure Gospel, who soon sprang up in great numbers, went a step
further: “The Word of God alone was sufficient and in order to understand
it what was required was, not learning, but the spirit.” Paulsen, “Gesch.
des gelehrten Unterrichts,” 1², p. 185.

[77] “Gesch. des gelehrten Unterrichts,” 1², p. 177.

[78] Erl. ed., 62, p. 319. The Note is by Lauterbach. Copernicus is not
named, but is merely alluded to as “the new astrologer”=astronomer. His
work “De orbium cœlestium revolutionibus,” with its detailed proofs in
support of the new theory of the heavens, appeared only in 1543, at
Nuremberg.

[79] Cp. for proofs H. Stephan, “Luther in den Wandlungen seiner Kirche,”
p. 35 f.

[80] Weim. ed., 15, p. 36; Erl. ed., 22, p. 180 f., “An die Radherrn.”

[81] “Didymi Faventini pro M. Luthero adversus Thomam Placentinum
oratio,” “Corp. ref.,” 1, pp. 286-358, particularly p. 343. Cp. Paulsen,
_ib._, p. 186 f.

[82] “Preuss. Jahrbücher,” 132, 1908 (see above, p. 13, n. 2), p. 381
f. The author safeguards himself by remarking that the above account
contains “nothing new.” In Janssen, “Hist. of the German People,” vol.
xiii., this subject is dealt with in full.

[83] P. 382. In the “Archiv für Kulturgesch.,” 7, 1909, p. 120, Schiele’s
art is described as “an excellent piece of criticism.”

[84] To Eobanus Hessus, March 29, 1523, “Briefe,” 4, p. 118.

[85] Hessus had told Luther of this complaint, as is evident from the
latter’s reply.

[86] For a detailed account see above, vol. ii., p. 336 ff.

[87] Janssen, Engl. Trans., xiii., p. 258.

[88] _Ib._

[89] Luschin v. Ebengreuth, “Gött. Gel. Anz.,” 1892, p. 826 f., in a
review of Hofmeister, “Die Matrikel der Universität Rostock,” Part II.,
1891. Cp. Janssen, _ib._, p. 266.

[90] F. Eulenburg, “Über die Frequenz der deutschen Universitäten in
früherer Zeit,” “Jahrbücher f. Nationalökonomie u. Statistik,” 3. Vol.
13, 1897, pp. 461-554, 494, 525. Janssen, _ib._

[91] Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 550; Erl. ed., 17², p. 399, “Das man Kinder zur
Schulen halten solle.”

[92] N. Paulus, “Wolfgang Mayer, Ein bayerischer Zisterzienserabt des 16.
Jahrh.” (“Hist. Jahrb.,” 1894, p. 575 ff.), p. 587 f. from MS. notes.

[93] Weim. ed., 15, p. 28; Erl. ed., 22, p. 171 f., “An die Radherrn.”

[94] Cp. on Wittenberg, Janssen, Engl. Trans., xiii., 286 and below,
xxxix, 1.

[95] Erl. ed., 53, p. 387. See above, vol. v., pp. 582, 590.

[96] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 483.

[97] Cp. Chr. Scheurl, “Briefbuch, ein Beitrag zur Gesch. der Ref.,”
ed. Soden and Knaake, 2, 1872, pp. 127, 132, 138, 177. See also
Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 790 (p. 653, N. 2).

[98] Cp. for the change in Humanism, above, vol. ii., p. 38 ff., etc.

[99] “Gesch. des gelehrten Unterrichts,” 1², p. 177.

[100] “Opp.,” 3, col. 777: “_Lutherana factio … perdit omnia studia
nostra_.”

[101] _Ib._, col. 915: “_… intolerabili degravavit invidia_.”

[102] _Ib._, col. 1089: “_Tantam ignaviam invexit hoc novum evangelium_.”

[103] _Ib._, col. 1069: “_Amant viaticum et uxorem, cetera pili non
faciunt_.”

[104] To Œcolampadius, June 20, 1523, “Briefe,” 4, p. 164.

[105] Weim. ed., 15, p. 29; Erl. ed., 22, p. 172, “An die Radherrn.”

[106] Work cited above, p. 29, n. 2 (p. 525).

[107] _Ib._, p. 260.

[108] Janssen, “Hist. of the German People” (Engl. Trans.), 1, p. 68 ff.

[109] Raynald., “Annal. eccles.,” a. 1514, n. 29.

[110] Cp. Janssen (Engl. Trans.), xiii., 9 ff.

[111] _Ib._, i., p. 25 ff.

[112] Weim. ed., 15, p. 33; Erl. ed., 22, p. 177, “An die Radherrn”:
“When I was young there was a saying in the schools: ‘_Non minus est
negligere scholarem quam corrumpere virginem_.’ This was said in order to
frighten the schoolmasters.”

[113] “_Ubicunque regnat Lutheranismus, ibi litterarum est interitus.
Et tamen hoc genus hominum maxime litteris alitur. Duo tantum quærunt,
censum et uxorem. Cætera præstat illis evangelium, ~i.e.~ potestatem
vivendi ut volunt._” To Pirkheimer, 1528, from Basle. “Opp.,” 3, col.
1139.

[114] Schiele, _ib._, p. 391.

[115] C. Hagen, “Deutschlands literarische und religiöse Verhältnisse im
Reformationszeitalter,” 3², 1868, p. 197. Janssen, _ib._, xiii., p. 100.

[116] “Opp.,” 3, col. 1363 _sq._

[117] M. Töppen, “Die Gründung der Universität Königsberg,” etc., 1844,
p. 78. Janssen, _ib._, p. 101.

[118] Janssen, _ib._, p. 102.

[119] Cp. Döllinger, “Die Ref.,” 1, p. 483 ff.; 2, p. 584 ff.

[120] For proofs see Janssen (Engl. Trans.), xiii., p. 71 ff.

[121] “Preuss. Jahrb.,” _loc. cit._, p. 392.

[122] _Ib._, p. 393.

[123] Janssen, _ib._, p. 43. Schiele, _ib._, p. 593.

[124] Schiele, _ib._, p. 390.

[125] He even says: “_Academiæ nunc quidem Dei beneficio omni genere
doctrinarum florent_.” “Corp. ref.,” 3, p. 1068. Bishop Julius Pflug
informed Pope Paul III, in a letter in which he gives him a vivid
picture of the needs of the country in order to determine him to active
assistance: “_Scholæ Lutheranorum cum privatæ tum publicæ florent, nostræ
frigent plane ac iacent_.” “Epistolæ Mosellani,” etc., p. 150 _sq._
Kawerau, “Reformation und Gegenreformation”³, (Möller, “Lehrb. der KG.,”
3, p. 437.)

[126] G. Steinhausen, “Gesch. der deutschen Kultur,” Leipzig and Vienna,
1904, p. 515. There we read (p. 514) in the description of the education
given by the Protestant Universities that it was “rendered sterile” by
the new theology. “The intellectual leaders of the time became more and
more Court theologians. It is noteworthy that many of the edicts and
regulations begin with an improving theological preface.… What had become
of the intellectual revival of the first decades of the 16th century?”
Eobanus Hessus had prophesied in 1523 that the new theology would bring
in its train a worse barbarism than that which had been overthrown, and
already in 1524 he had been obliged to speak of the “New Obscurantists.”

[127] Döllinger, “Die Ref.,” 1², p. 509.

[128] M. Ritter, “Matthiä Flacii Illyrici Leben”², 1725, p. 105 Janssen,
_ib._, p. 265.

[129] For proofs see Janssen, _ib._, p. 286 ff.

[130] _Ib._, p. 295.

[131] On the contrast between mediæval and Lutheran charity, see above,
vol. iv., p. 477 ff., and Janssen, “Hist. of the German People” (Engl.
Trans.), vol. xv., pp. 425-526.

[132] Adolf Bruder, art. “Armenpflege,” “Staatslexikon der
Görresgesellschaft.”

[133] F. Ehrle, “Beiträge z. Gesch. u. Reform der Armenpflege,” 1881; do.
“Die Armenordnungen von Nürnberg (1522) und von Ypern (1525),” “Hist.
Jahrb.,” 9, 1888, p. 450 ff. Ratzinger, “Gesch. d. kirchl. Armenpflege”²,
1884, p. 442 ff. Janssen, p. 431.

[134] L. Feuchtwanger, “Gesch. der sozialen Politik und des Armenwesens
im Zeitalter der Reformation” (“Jahrb. für Gesetzgebung,” etc., ed. G.
Schmoller, N.F. 32, 1908, p. 168 ff. (I), and 33, 1909, p. 191 ff. (II),
I, p. 169.)

[135] “De origine, situ, moribus et institutis Norimbergæ,” cap. 12.

[136] Reprint of the Regulations of 1522 according to the oldest
revision, in Ehrle, “Die Armenordnungen,” p. 459 ff. For the passage “Our
salvation,” etc., see p. 467.

[137] Ehrle, _ib._, p. 477 f. Feuchtwanger, _ib._, I., p. 184.

[138] Janssen, _ib._, xv., p. 439 ff.

[139] Feuchtwanger, _ib._, p. 182. For all the towns mentioned above see
Janssen, _loc. cit._

[140] Weim. ed., 26, p. 639; Erl. ed., 63, p. 270.

[141] _Ib._, 6, p. 450 f.=21, p. 335 f.

[142] Cp., for instance, the passage in the Church-Postils, Erl. ed.,
14², p. 391: “The whole world is full of idle, faithless, wicked knaves,
among the day labourers, lazy handicraftsmen, servants, maids, to say
nothing of the greedy, work-shy beggars,” etc.

[143] Weim. ed., 6, p. 42; Erl. ed., 16², p. 87. (Longer) Sermon on
Usury, 1520.

[144] _Ib._, 19, p. 654 f.=22, p. 281 in “Ob Kriegsleutte auch ynn
seligen Stande seyn künden.”

[145] Barge, “Andreas Karlstadt,” 2, p. 559 f.

[146] E. Sehling, “Die evang. Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrh.,” 1, 1, p.
696 ff.

[147] _Ib._, p. 596 ff.; also “Luthers Werke,” Weim. ed., 12, p. 11 ff.;
Erl. ed., 22, p. 112 ff. On Leisnig cp. above, vol. v., p. 136 ff.

[148] _Ib._, pp. 11 ff., 14=106 ff., 110.

[149] Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 551.

[150] It was the first to be established with so much pomp and
circumstance.

[151] To Spalatin, Nov. 24, 1524, “Briefwechsel,” 5, p. 72 f.

[152] Cp. Ehrle, “Die Armenordnungen,” etc. (“Hist. Jahrb.,” 9, 1888), p.
475. The Altenburg regulations are no longer extant.

[153] Feuchtwanger, “Jahrb. f. Gesetzgebung,” etc., I., p. 173. He quotes
the enthusiastic words written on this occasion by the Wittenberg student
Ulscenius: “_O factum apostolicum, fervet hodie in Wittenbergensium
cordibus Dei et proximi dilectio ardentissima_,” etc., and remarks:
We may take in conjunction with this statement the libertinism which
actually prevailed in the town at the end of 1521.

[154] Cp. below.

[155] Weim. ed., 19, p. 74 ff.; Erl. ed., 22, p. 231.

[156] _Ib._, 30, 2, p. 584 f.=17², p. 419 f.

[157] See Döllinger, “Die Ref.,” 1, p. 303 ff.

[158] Erl. ed., 14², p. 391. Church Postils.

[159] _Ib._, p. 389.

[160] Weim. ed., 32, p. 409; Erl. ed., 43, p. 164. Expos. of Matt. vi.

[161] _Ib._, Erl. ed., 44, p. 356. Sermons on Matt. xviii.-xxiii.—For
similar statements see the passage in the last Note and Erl. ed., 23,
p. 317; also above, vol. iv., _passim_. Cp. also Luther’s statements in
Janssen, “Hist. of the German People,” xv., p. 465 ff.; Döllinger, “Die
Ref.,” 2, p. 215, 306, 349.

[162] Erl. ed., 23, 313 f. “An die Pfarherrn wider den Wucher.” 1539.

[163] Feuchtwanger, II. (see above, p. 44, n. 2), p. 192.

[164] _Ib._, pp. 197, 180, 177 f., 176.

[165] The quotations here and in what follows are from Feuchtwanger.

[166] Feuchtwanger, II., p. 197. He quotes from the compilation of A.
L. Richter, “Die evang. Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrh.,” and Sehling
(above, p. 49, n. 3) Bugenhagen’s “Ordnungen” subsequent to those set up
for Wittenberg in 1527. Cp. in K. A. Vogt, “Bugenhagen,” 1867, p. 101
ff., on the latter’s “Von den Christen-loven,” etc., 1526.

[167] Cp. Janssen, xv., p. 456 f.

[168] Feuchtwanger, _ib._, II., p. 206.

[169] Cp. _ib._, p. 214.

[170] _Ib._, p. 212.

[171] In his instruction against the Anabaptist doctrines (Wittenberg,
1528, D 3b) Melanchthon says: “Never have the people shown themselves
more unfriendly and malicious towards the parsons and ministers of the
Church than now. Some who wish to be thought very Evangelical seize upon
the property given to the parsons, pulpits, schools and churches, and
without which we should end by becoming heathen. The common people and
the mob refuse to pay the parson his dues,” etc.

[172] See Janssen, _ib._, xv., p. 480, n. 1, where the touching complaint
of Eber’s is quoted, viz. that the ministers of the Church were stripped
and left to starve. He prophesies that future times will show how “little
blessing spoliation brought those who warmed and fed themselves on Church
property.” It was everywhere worst in the villages and small towns.

[173] _Ib._, xv., p. 477.

[174] _Ib._, p. 469 ff.

[175] _Ib._, p. 481 ff.

[176] For proofs see Janssen, _ib._

[177] G. Kawerau, “Lehrb. der KG.,” 3, ed. W. Möller, 3rd ed., 1907, p.
434, with a reference to the works of Bossert.

[178] Weim. ed., 10, 2, p. 303 f.; Erl. ed., 16², p. 541 (in 1522).

[179] Cp. Janssen, _ib._, xv., p. 501.

[180] O. Jolles, “Die Ansichten der deutschen nationalökonomischen
Schriftsteller des 16. und 17. Jahrh. über Bevölkerungswesen” (“Jahrb. f.
Nationalökonomie u. Statistik,” N.F. 13, 1886, p. 196). Janssen, _ib._

[181] Janssen, _ib._, xv., p. 505. Feuchtwanger must have been familiar
with all this though he never quotes Janssen. He says (p. 214): “Only one
who was unfavourable to the reformation would judge Protestantism by the
fruits of its first two centuries.”

[182] “Reden und Aufsätze,” 2, 1904, p. 52, in the lecture “Die
evangelischsoziale Aufgabe im Lichte der Gesch. der Kirche.”

[183] F. Schaub, “Die kath. Caritas und ihre Gegner,” 1909, p. 45.

[184] See the excellent work by Schaub, p. 14 ff., quoted in the previous
Note, where it is stated, that, under present conditions, private
charity certainly does not suffice and that, therefore, State relief is
necessary; yet the latter is always merely subsidiary, because what is
assumed by real Christian charity, i.e. self-sacrifice, and individual
care, can only be realised in private relief of the poor; the State,
on the other hand, has its efficient compulsory taxation (“_caritas
coacta_”) and its own bureaucratic means of carrying out its work; in any
case the State must not monopolise any branch of poor relief, and public
and private charity ought to be in close touch. These remarks may serve
to assist in the right appreciation of the historical movement described
above.

[185] Feuchtwanger, II., p. 194.

[186] _Ib._, pp. 212, 214.

[187] Cp. _ib._, p. 214.

[188] Vol. iv., p. 127 ff.

[189] Erl. ed., 31, p. 236. “Verantwortung der auffgelegten Auffrur,”
1533. Above, vol. v., p. 59.

[190] _Ib._, p. 239 f.

[191] “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 4, pp. 202-204.

[192] Cp. N. Paulus, “Die Wertung der weltlichen Berufe im MA.,” (“Hist.
Jahrb.,” 1911, pp. 725-755). “Similar testimony,” Paulus says, p. 740,
“dating from the close of the Middle Ages is to be found in abundance.”
He lays particular stress on the witness of monks and friars.

[193] Sermon on Marriage in his “Sermones dominicales,” Leipzig, 1530,
Bl. J. 4a, L1. Q 2b. Paulus, _ib._, p. 741.

[194] Of pilgrimages in particular, Luther is fond of saying, that the
monks enjoined them at the expense of the duties of a man’s calling. Cp.,
for instance, the passage cited above, p. 67, n. 1 (p. 203): “_Mater
familias … non faciat, quæ in papatu solent, ut discurrat ad templa_,”
etc. For the passages from Hollen see Paulus, _ib._, p. 740, and Fl.
Landmann, “Das Predigtwesen in Westfalen in der letzten Zeit des MA.,”
1900, p. 179 f.

[195] Janssen, “Hist. of the German People” (Engl. Trans.), 2, p. 9 f.
Paulus, _ib._, p. 749.

[196] Janssen, _ib._ Paulus, _ib._, p. 748.

[197] Cp. Paulus, _ib._, p. 750 ff., and H. Pesch, “Lehrb. der
Nationalökonomie,” 2, 1909, p. 726.

[198] Weim. ed., 19, p. 635; Erl. ed., 22, p. 259. “Ob Kriegsleutte auch
ynn seligen Stande seyn künden?” 1526.

[199] _Ib._, 18, p. 394=24², p. 324. “Sendebrieff von dem harten Buchlin
widder die Bauren,” 1525.

[200] _Ib._, 19, p. 659=22, p. 287.

[201] _Ib._, 10, 2, p. 157=28, p. 200.

[202] _Ib._, p. 631=255. He speaks before this of nobles, who, after the
peasant risings, had gone too far in their revenge.—Luther inveighs in
the strongest language against the way in which the nobles oppressed the
poor “burghers, unhappy pastors and preachers,” and says: “Here the lion
has caught a mouse and fancies he has overcome the dragon. Germany is now
full of such nobles and Junkers, who stink out the beer-houses and draw
their steel only on the poor, wretched, defenceless people; such are the
nobles. Out on such abandoned people! We Germans are indeed swine and
savage beasts, and have no noble thoughts or courage in us, as the world
too thinks!” This in the Commentary on the Four Psalms of Consolation,
1526. Weim. ed., 19, p. 604 f.; Erl. ed., 38, p. 439 f.

[203] Weim. ed., 11, p. 246 f.; Erl. ed., 22, p. 62 f. “Von welltlicher
Uberkeytt,” 1523, Preface.—Cp. what was said, above, vol. ii., p. 205 f.,
etc.

[204] Weim. ed., 19, p. 278 f.; Erl. ed., 65, p. 43. “Widder den
Radschlag der Meintzischen Pfafferey,” 1526 (not published by him on
account of his sovereign’s prohibition).

[205] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 175.

[206] Weim. ed., 28, p. 520; Erl. ed., 36, p. 175.

[207] Cp. Janssen, “Hist. of the German People,” xv., p. 137 ff.

[208] K. J. Fuchs, “Die Epochen der deutschen Agrargesch.” (“Allg.
Ztng.,” 1898, Suppl. 70).

[209] Weim. ed., 16, p. 244; Erl. ed., 35, p. 233 (1524-26).

[210] _Ib._, 33, p. 659=48, p. 385 (1530-32).

[211] _Ib._, 24, p. 367 f.=33, p. 389 f.

[212] To the Elector Johann Frederick, Erl. ed., 55, p. 239;
“Briefwechsel,” 12, p. 246.

[213] Hausrath, “Luthers Leben,” 2, 1904, p. 388.

[214] _Ib._

[215] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 245.

[216] Weim. ed., 34, 1, p. 529 f.

[217] _Ib._, p. 518 ff., Sermon of June 11, 1531.

[218] _Ib._, p. 109.

[219] _Ib._, p. 334 f.

[220] Weim. ed., 28, p. 329; Erl. ed., 50, p. 350. “We are ministers in
a hostel where the devil is the landlord and the world the landlady, and
the barmaids all kinds of wicked lusts, and all these, landlord, landlady
and barmaids, are enemies and opponents of the Evangel.”

[221] Erl. ed., 32, p. 77.

[222] Above, vol. v., p. 403 ff.

[223] Erl. ed., 62, p. 375 f., “Tischreden.”

[224] _Ib._, p. 366.

[225] Janssen, “Hist. of the German People,” xv., p. 49 ff. Lucas
Osiander the Elder sent Luther’s Schem Hamphoras to Duke Frederick of
Würtemberg in 1598 in support of his petition for the expulsion of all
Jews. For the same purpose, in 1612, the theological faculty of Giessen
had some of Luther’s strongest sayings against the Jews reprinted. _Ib._,
p. 51, n.

[226] C. Krause, “Eoban Hessus, sein Leben und seine Werke,” 2, 1879, p.
107. Janssen, _ib._, xiii., p. 101.

[227] 1, p. 279.

[228] To Johann Lang, Dec. 18, 1519, “Briefwechsel,” 2, p. 281:
“_facturus, ut multo plures offendat Christi pura doctrina_.”

[229] Weim. ed., 6, p. 38; Erl. ed., 16², p. 82. Sermon on Usury, 1519.

[230] _Ib._, p. 37 f.=81, on the words of Christ, Matt. v. 40 f., that,
to him who takes our coat we should leave our cloak also: “Many fancy
this is not commanded or to be observed by every Christian, but is merely
a voluntary counsel of perfection, and, like virginity and chastity,
counselled not commanded.” But “these are the artifices whereby the
teaching and example of our dear Lord Jesus Christ as given in the holy
Gospel, together with that of all His Martyrs and Saints, is reversed,
neglected and altogether suppressed.… God will blind and disgrace
those who turn His clear and holy Word into darkness.… No excuse is of
any avail, it is simply a command which we are bound to observe.” He
continues: As true Christians we have to observe it, but, as members of
a commonwealth we enjoy a divine institution whereby “the secular sword”
protects us from any injury to our possessions.

[231] _Ib._, p. 50 f.=98.

[232] _Ib._, p. 6=117; cp. p. 50=98.

[233] Weim. ed., 15, p. 294 f.; Erl. ed., 22, p. 201.

[234] _Ib._, p. 312 ff.= 223 ff.

[235] _Ib._, 6, p. 466=21, p. 357.

[236] Cp. _ib._, 15, p. 304=22, p. 214 f.

[237] “Darstellung und Würdigung der Ansichten Luthers vom Staat und
seinen wirtschaftlichen Aufgaben,” 1898, p. 83.

[238] Quoted by Luther in 1540, see Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 78.

[239] _Ib._

[240] Weim. ed., 6, p. 466; Erl. ed., 21, p. 357.

[241] _Ib._, 15, p. 304=22, p. 213 f. Von Kauffshandlung, etc.

[242] _Ib._, p. 36=181. “An die Radherrn.”

[243] _Ib._, 6, p. 465 f.=21, p. 356.

[244] _Ib._, p. 466=356.

[245] _Ib._, 24, p. 351 f.=33, p. 370 f.

[246] _Ib._, 18, p. 391=24², p. 320 (1525).

[247] Ward, “Darstellung,” etc., p. 73.

[248] Kampschulte, “Johannes Calvin,” 1, 1869, p. 430. Ward, _ib._

[249] Ward, _ib._, p. 74.

[250] Weim. ed., 15, p. 296; Erl. ed., 22, p. 204. Ward, _ib._, p. 75.

[251] “Werke,” _ib._, p. 295=202.

[252] Ward, p. 101.

[253] Ward, _ib._, p. 94

[254] Weim. ed., 24, p. 368; Erl. ed., 33, p. 390.

[255] On June 18, 1524, Erl. ed., 53, p. 244 (“Briefwechsel,” 4, p. 354).

[256] Cp. Enders in n. 3 to the above letter.

[257] See above, vol. iv., p. 13 ff.

[258] Weim. ed., 24, p. 8; Erl. ed., 33, p. 11 (1527).

[259] Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 279. Cp. J. Schneid, “Hist.-pol. Bl.,” 108,
1891, pp. 241 ff., 473 ff., and B. Duhr, “Zeitschr. f. Kath. Theol.,” 24,
1900, p. 210.

[260] Cp. the Sermons on Usury of 1519, also certain passages in his “An
den christl. Adel,” the booklet “Von Kauffshandlung und Wucher,” 1524,
and the Sermon against Usury of April 13, 1539, which he followed up by
a written appeal to the Wittenberg magistrates. M. Neumann, “Gesch. des
Wuchers in Deutschland,” Halle, 1868, pp. 481, 618 ff.

[261] Erl. ed., 23, p. 283 f.

[262] _Ib._, p. 285.

[263] The Anabaptist Jorg Schnabel said in 1538, that on 20 gulden two or
three were now taken as interest. For the text, see Janssen, _ib._, xv.,
p. 38.

[264] Erl. ed., 23, p. 285.

[265] _Ib._, p. 304 f.

[266] _Ib._, p. 285.

[267] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 259; according to Heydenreich’s Notes.
Erl. ed., 57, p. 360.

[268] Erl. ed., 23, p. 306 f.

[269] _Ib._, p. 319.

[270] _Ib._, cp. above, p. 80, n. 4.

[271] _Ib._, p. 311 f.

[272] P. Schanz, “Commentar über das Lukasevang.,” 1883, p. 226.

[273] Printed in H. Grisar, “Iacobi Lainez Disputationes Tridentinæ tom.
2: Disaput. variæ; accedunt Commentarii morales,” Oeniponte, 1886, pp.
227-321, with Introduction, pp. 60*-64*.

[274] P. 240; cp. p. 63*.

[275] P. 244 _sqq._

[276] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 432.

[277] P. 287.

[278] P. 294.

[279] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 259.

[280] Erl. ed., 23, p. 306 f.

[281] _Ib._, p. 338.

[282] Sep. 19, 1525, Erl. ed., 65, p. 239 f. (“Briefwechsel,” 5, p. 243).

[283] To Dorothy Jörger, March 7, 1532, Erl. ed., 54, p. 277
(“Briefwechsel,” 9, p. 160).

[284] Ward, “Darstellung,” etc., p. 94.

[285] _Ib._, p. 95.

[286] Weim. ed., 6, p. 53; Erl. ed., 16², p. 102 (1519).

[287] _Ib._, p. 51=99.

[288] _Ib._, p. 466=21, p. 356 f.

[289] _Ib._

[290] _Ib._, 6, p. 58=16², p. 108 (1519).

[291] June 18, 1524, Erl. ed., 53, p. 245 f. (“Briefe,” 4, p. 354).

[292] To Sebastian Weller at Mansfeld, July 26, 1543, Erl. ed., 56, p.
lviii.

[293] To Count Wolfgang von Gleichen, March 9, 1543, _ib._, p. 57.

[294] _Ib._, 45, p. 7.

[295] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 259. “The properties have risen. Where
formerly an estate was worth one hundred florins it is now worth quite
three; _qui ante potuit dare 5, potest nunc dare 6 vel septem_.”

[296] Erl. ed., 23, pp. 286, 338. In the above letter to Sebastian Weller
he declares (p. lviii) that, in his epistle to the parsons, he had only
spoken “of _mutuum_ and _datum_.”

[297] _Ib._, p. 289.

[298] _Ib._, p. 298.

[299] _Ib._, p. 289.

[300] _Ib._, p. 296. Very mild indeed are the directions he gives in his
letter to the town-council of Dantzig on the charging of interest (May
5 (?), 1525, “Werke,” Erl. ed., 53, p. 296, “Briefwechsel,” 5, p. 165):
“The Gospel is a spiritual rule by which no government can act.… The
spiritual rule of the Gospel must be carefully distinguished from the
outward, secular rule and on no account be confused with it. The Gospel
rule the preacher must urge only by word of mouth and each one be left
free in this matter; whoever wishes to take it, let him do so, whoever
does not, let him leave it alone. I will give an example: the charging of
interest is altogether at variance with the Gospel since Christ teaches
‘lend hoping for nothing.’ But we must not rush in here and suddenly
put an end to all dissensions in accordance with the Gospel. No one has
the right or the power to do this, for it has arisen out of human laws
which St. Peter does not wish abrogated; but it is to be preached and
the interest paid to those to whom it is due, whether they are willing
to accept this Gospel and to surrender the interest or not. We cannot
take them any further than this, for the Gospel demands willing hearts,
moved by the Spirit of God.” The letter seems also to be aimed at the
fanatics, whose violent action in opposing the charging of interest as
un-Evangelical, Luther frowned on.

[301] “Luthers Theol. in ihrer geschichtl. Entwicklung,” 2², 1901, p. 328.

[302] Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 331, quotes G. Schmoller (“Zur Gesch. der
nationalökonomischen Ansichten in Deutschland während der Reformperiode,”
in the “Zeitschr. f. die gesamte Staatswissenschaft,” 16).

[303] From the Munich Kreisarchiv, in B. Duhr, “Zeitschr. f. kath.
Theol.,” 1905, 29, p. 180.

[304] Duhr, _ib._, 1908, 32, p. 609. Cp. 1900, 24, pp. 208 f., 210, on
Eck.

[305] G. Scherer, “Drey unterschiedliche Predigten vom Geitz,” etc.,
Ingolstadt, 1605, p. 57 f.

[306] “Corp. ref.,” 6, p. 158. “Vitæ reformatorum,” ed. Neander, p. 5.
See above, vol. i., p. 17.

[307] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 405. Cp. “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 6, p.
158: “_Totus stupebam et cohorrescebam.… Tanta maiestas (Dei)_,” etc.;
Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 89: “I thought of fleeing from the altar
… so terrified was I,” etc. (1532); Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 186:
“_fere mortuus essem_”; “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 119; 3, p. 169;
“Werke,” Erl. ed., 60, p. 400. See above, vol. i., p. 15 f.

[308] Erl. ed., 58, p. 140; cp. 60, p. 129. Of his “_territus_” we hear
also from Cordatus, “Tagebuch,” p. 95, and “Colloquia,” ed. Bindseil, 2,
p. 292.

[309] See above, vol. i., p. 16 f.

[310] Mainz, 1549, Bl. B. 8a. The book was written in Latin in 1533.

[311] “Acta Lutheri,” p. 1.

[312] What Denifle urges to the contrary (“Luther und Luthertum,” 1, p.
726, n. 2) is not convincing.

[313] Cp. Kawerau, “Deutsch-evang. Bl.,” 1906, p. 447: “What anguish of
soul he went through in the monastery is related by himself as early as
1518 in the touching account contained in the ‘Resolutiones’ to his 95
Theses.”

[314] “Ein Wort zu Denifles Luther,” p. 30.

[315] See above, vol. i., p. 381 f.

[316] Weim. ed., 1, p. 557 f.; “Opp. lat. var.,” 2, p. 180 _sq._

[317] See above, vol. ii., p. 170.

[318] “Etwas vom kranken Luther” (“Deutsch-evang. Bl.,” 29, 1904, p. 303
ff.), p. 305.

[319] To Spalatin, Jan. 13, 1527, “Briefwechsel,” 6, p. 12: “_me subito
sanguinis coagulo circum præcordia angustiatum pœneque exanimatum
fuisse_.”

[320] Cp. vol. v., p. 333, above, and Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 168.

[321] “Briefwechsel des Jonas,” ed. Kawerau, 1, p. 104 ff.; also
“Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 3, p. 160 _sqq._ Cp. Bugenhagen’s account in his
“Briefe,” ed. Vogt, p. 64 ff.

[322] “Briefwechsel des Jonas,” 1, p. 109: “_in illis undis
tentationum_.” Cp. above, vol. v., pp. 334, 339.

[323] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 200, where we read (under Dec.
19, 1536): “_Eo die Lutherus magno paroxysmo angustia circa pectus
decubuit_.” The dates given in the Table-Talk are not as a rule
altogether reliable, but here they may be trusted because they happen to
coincide with a portent in the sky looked upon as a bad omen.

[324] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 622 f.

[325] We may here call attention to what will be said in the next chapter
concerning similar phenomena in Luther’s early days. This chapter, no
less than the present one, is important for forming a just opinion on
Luther’s pathological dispositions.

[326] To Johann Hess at Breslau, Jan. 31, 1529, “Briefwechsel,” 7, p. 50.

[327] To Johann Agricola, Feb. 1, 1529, _ib._, p. 51.

[328] Enders, _ib._, p. 54, n. 3.

[329] To Nicholas Hausmann at Zwickau, Feb. 13, 1529, _ib._, p. 53.

[330] To the same, March 3, 1529, _ib._, p. 61: “_fere assidue cogor
sanus ægrotare_.”

[331] To Melanchthon, Aug. 1, 1530, _ib._, 8, p. 162: “_ut neque
tuto legere litteras possim neque lucem ferre_”—common symptoms of
neurasthenia.

[332] _Ib._

[333] Aug. 3, 1530, _ib._, 8, p. 166. Cp. above, vol. v., p. 346.

[334] To Hans Honold at Augsburg, Oct. 2, 1530, Erl. ed., 54, p. 196
(“Briefwechsel,” 8, p. 275).

[335] Kawerau, “Etwas vom kranken Luther,” p. 313.

[336] Dietrich’s Latin account, ed. Seidemann, “Sachs. Kirchen- und
Schulblatt,” 1876, p. 355. Cp. Küchenmeister, “Luthers Krankengesch.,” p.
71; Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 264; Kawerau, “Etwas vom kranken Luther,” p.
314.

[337] Cordatus, “Tagebuch,” p. 125.

[338] To Melanchthon, April 12, 1541, “Briefwechsel,” 13, p. 300.

[339] _Ib._

[340] Hausrath, “Luthers Leben,” 2, 1904, pp. 189, 223, 226.

[341] Cp. above vol. v., pp. 107-16, and vol. iv., p. 284 ff.

[342] See vol. ii., p. 163, n. 3.

[343] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 268.

[344] On uric acid and gout as the explanation of all his bodily
troubles, see below, xxxvi. 5.

[345] Cp. above, vol. v., 333 ff.

[346] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 268.

[347] For the different passages quoted cp. “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil,
2, p. 315: Other temptations were nothing compared with this interior
“_angelus Sathanæ colaphizans_, σκόλοψ,” where a man is nailed to the
gibbet. Cp. “Briefwechsel,” 7, p. 53: “_Ego vertigine seu capite hactenus
laboravi, præter ea quæ angelus Sathanæ operatur. Tu ora pro me Deum,
ut confortet me in fide et verbo suo_” (to N. Hausmann, Feb. 13, 1529).
The “sting of the flesh” was not in his case, as has been asserted, the
result of nervousness, but an intellectual temptation to waver in the
“faith” he preached, and to doubt of the “Word.”

[348] Cp. the numerous statements of contemporaries who were unable to
explain Luther’s uncanny behaviour, his “infernal outbreaks of fury” and
morbid hatred of the Pope (above, vol. v., p. 232 f.), otherwise than by
supposing him to be possessed or mad (vol. iv., p. 351 ff.).

[349] To Hier. Weller (July?), 1530, “Briefwechsel,” 8, p. 159 f.

[350] Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 9, of Staupitz: “_dicebat, se
nunquam sensisse_.”

[351] Cordatus, “Tagebuch,” p. 129.

[352] See vol. i., pp. 120 ff., 223 ff., 269 ff.

[353] Weim. ed., 18, p. 633; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p. 154.

[354] Nov. 11, 1517, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 126.

[355] July 16, 1517, _ib._, p. 102.

[356] Oct. 26, 1516, _ib._, p. 67: “_præter proprias tentationes cum
carne, mundo et diabolo_.” Cp. above, vol. i., p. 275.

[357] “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 223.

[358] Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 196.

[359] Cp. above, vol. i., p. 166 ff., and, in particular, pp. 230-40.

[360] Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 50: “_illos horrores contra Deum_,”
etc., March 29, 1538.

[361] June 4, 1518, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 207.

[362] (In Sep.?) 1516, _ib._, p. 55.

[363] May 18, 1517, _ib._, p. 100.

[364] March 1, 1517, _ib._, p. 88.

[365] Nov. 11, 1517, _ib._, p. 124.

[366] Luther wrote this about the time of the “Tower incident” (above,
vol. i., p. 377 ff.), when engaged in wrestling after “certainty.”

[367] Weim. ed., 5, p. 165. Cp. W. Köhler, “Luther und die KG.,” I, 1
(1900), p. 260.

[368] “Werke,” _ib._, p. 203; Köhler, _ib._, p. 259.

[369] Erl. ed., 10², p. 67.

[370] “Briefwechsel,” 2, p. 70.

[371] Weim. ed., 9, p. 215; Erl. ed., 16², p. 52, in the first
non-expurgated form of the sermon (cp. above, vol. ii., p. 148).

[372] “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 19, p. 100.

[373] Feb. 20, 1519, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 431. For “_titillatio_” see
vol. ii., p. 94.

[374] To Melanchthon, July 13, 1521, “Briefwechsel,” 3, p. 189. An
attempt has been made to deprive the word _libido_ of the sense it
always has with Luther (cp. 1st Comm. on Galatians, 1519, and the later
Commentary of 1531). It was alleged to mean “nothing more than an unusual
desire for food and drink”; in the same way the word “flesh” was taken
merely as the antithesis of “spirit,” i.e. the Holy Ghost!

[375] _Ib._, p. 193: “_peccatis immergor in hac solitudine_.”

[376] Aug. 3, 1521, _ib._, p. 213.

[377] To Nicholas Gerbel of Strasburg, Nov. 1, 1521, _ib._, p. 240.

[378] To Spalatin, Nov. 11, 1521, _ib._, p. 247 f.

[379] _Ib._

[380] Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 9.

[381] Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 55. Cp. above, vol. ii., p. 81.

[382] “Myconii Historia reformationis,” ed. E. S. Cyprianus, p. 42.

[383] “Ratzebergers Handschriftl. Gesch.,” etc., p. 54.

[384] “Hist.,” Bl., 196.

[385] _Ib._

[386] Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 440.

[387] Erl. ed., 59, p. 340 f.

[388] “Tagebuch,” p. 293.

[389] Erl. ed., 59, p. 341.

[390] _Ib._

[391] Erl. ed., 60, p. 70.

[392] Mathesius, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 85, where Lœsche remarks that the Gotha
Codex 263, 122 proved this by an instance taken from Luther’s life. Cp.
also Erl. ed., 59, p. 337.

[393] Erl. ed., 59, p. 337.

[394] _Ib._, 57, p. 65.

[395] _Ib._, 60, p. 108.

[396] _Ib._, 58, p. 128 f. Cp. above, vol. v., p. 286 f.

[397] In Aurifaber’s edition, 1568, Bl. 91, 92. Stangwald, who as a rule
eliminates, as he assures us, all that was not Luther’s very own, has
retained it in his edition of the Table-Talk (1571); likewise Selnecker
(1577). For this reason we also find it in Förstemann’s 1st ed., 1844, p.
400. It is not given in the Latin Table-Talk, but, as a comparison with
Bindseil’s “Tabellen,” 3, p. 471, shows, we miss in the Latin a whole
number of unquestionably authentic Luther conversations occurring in the
German editions. It is to be found in “Werke,” Erl.

[398] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 517.

[399] Erl. ed., 58, p. 128.

[400] Kolde, “Anal. Lutherana,” p. 72.

[401] _Ib._, p. 71.

[402] Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 39, Jan. to March, 1532. The
passage commences: “_Tanta spectra vidi_,” seemingly referring to the
ghosts at the Wartburg.

[403] Mathesius, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 97.

[404] Erl. ed., 58, p. 4.

[405] “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, p. 20. Preface dating from 1545.

[406] See below, p. 142 ff.

[407] “_Fui (dignus), cui sub æternæ iræ maledictione interminaretur,
ne ullo modo de iis dubitarem._” Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 81, n. From
Khummer’s “Tagebuch.” Reference to some external apparition is not
excluded.

[408] See above, p. 125.

[409] Cp. above, p. 117, etc.

[410] Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 42. Cp. Cordatus, “Tagebuch,” p.
95.

[411] Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 127.

[412] Cordatus, _ib._, p. 95. Cp. Erl. ed., 57, p. 305.

[413] From the MS. quoted by Kawerau, “Zeitschr. f. kirchl. Wissenschaft
und kirchl. Leben,” 1, 1880, p. 50. Cp. F. Küchenmeister, “Luthers
Krankengesch.,” p. 67 f.

[414] “Werke,” Weim. ed., on the German Bible, 3, p. xlii. Risch, “N.
kirchl. Zeitschr.,” 1911, p. 80.

[415] Above, p. 123.

[416] “Deutsch-evangel. Blätter,” 29, 1904, p. 310.

[417] Alber Erasm., Dialogus vom Interim, 1548, Bl. B. III. Cp.
Seidemann, “Theol. Stud. und Krit.,” 1876, p. 564 f.

[418] Above, p. 123 f.

[419] C. F. Kahnis, “Die deutsche Reformation,” 1, 1872, p. 142.

[420] “Luthers Werke,” Walch’s ed. 21, Suppl., p. 325.*

[421] “Handschriftl. Gesch.,” etc., p. 133.

[422] Ratzeberger, _ib._

[423] To Cath. Bora, “Briefe,” ed. De Wette, 5, p. 786. Cp. the letter of
Feb. 7 to the same, _ib._, 5, p. 787: “I think that hell and the whole
world must be empty of devils who have all forgathered here at Eisleben
on my account; so great are the difficulties.”

[424] “Fünf Briefen aus den letzten Tagen Luthers,” ed. Kawerau (”Stud.
und Krit.,“ 54, 1881, p. 160 ff.), p. 162: “_Ut video, Sathan nates
videndas porrigit mihi et ultro derisum adest (addit?)_”; after this,
adds Friedrich, the way was paved for some sort of reconciliation.

[425] To Amsdorf, Jan. 8, 1546, “Briefe,” ed. De Wette, 5, p. 773:
“_Satanica sunt hæc, sed Deus, quem rident, ridebit eos suo tempore_.”
Cp. also vol. v., _passim_.

[426] Mathesius, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 113. Erl. ed., 60, pp. 55, 73.

[427] p. 193 ff.

[428] _Ib._, p. 200.

[429] Erl. ed., 31, p. 311.

[430] To Nich. Hausmann, Dec. 17, 1533, “Briefwechsel,” 9, p. 363.

[431] Cp. G. Koffmane, “Handschriftl. Überlieferung von Werken Luthers,”
1907. See above, vol. iv., p. 520 f.

[432] This was the view taken, e.g. by Fr. Balduinus, who published a
work at Eisleben in 1605 against the unfortunate attempt of the learned
Jesuit, Nicholas Serarius, to uphold the reality of the dialogue with the
devil. According to Balduinus it was really a “_gravissima tentatio beati
Lutheri_,” by which the devil sought to reduce him to despair.

[433] Cp. Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 9, of Dec. 14, 1531.

[434] _Ib._, p. 89, in May, 1532, thus only a few months after the above
statement.

[435] Seb. Fröschel, “Von den heiligen Engeln, vom Teuffel und des
Menschen Seele. Drey Sermon,” Wittenberg, 1563, Bl. L2 to Bl. 4a.—Friedr.
Staphylus, “Nachdruck zu Verfechtung des Buches vom rechten waren
Verstandt des göttlichen Worts,” Ingolstadt, 1562, p. 154´.

[436] “Whereupon Luther became even more anxious and alarmed.… It was
wonderful to see how he ran about the sacristy meanwhile, wringing his
hands for very fear.”

[437] Cp. “Briefe,” ed. De Wette, 5, p. xxiv., where the exorcism is
transposed to Jan. 18(19).—_Ib._, p. 772, Luther relates how he had cured
the madness (“_mania_”) of a “melancholy” person who had been subjected
by the devil to this “temptation,” and also explains how blessings were
to be given.

[438] See above, vol. v., p. 240 f.

[439] To Bora, July 2, 1540, “Briefwechsel,” 13, p. 107.

[440] Erl. ed., 60, pp. 138-40.

[441] Luther to Ebert, Aug. 5, 1536, “Briefwechsel,” 11, p. 21.

[442] Kirchhoff is alluding to the case of the “changelings” mentioned
above, vol. v., p. 292. It is true Luther did not regard them as human
beings.

[443] “Allg. Zeitschr. für Psychiatrie,” 44, 1888, p. 329 ff.—For
Luther’s view of the insane as possessed, see above, vol. v., p. 281.

[444] See above, p. 128, n. 7.

[445] Vol. i., p. 391.

[446] Above, vol. v., p. 322.

[447] Above, vol. v., p. 226 ff.

[448] Erl. ed., 9², p. 358 f.

[449] See above, vol. i., p. 391 ff.

[450] Above, vol. i., p. 398.

[451] Erl. ed., 53, p. 106 (“Briefwechsel,” 3, p. 296, end of Feb.,
1522). Cp. above, vol. iii., p. 111.

[452] Weim. ed., 10, 2, p. 106 f.; Erl. ed., 28, p. 143 f.

[453] Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 81; above, p. 128, n. 7.

[454] Above, vol. iv., p. 258.

[455] 1 Cor. xiv. 30. The passage, however, refers to the “charismata” of
the early Church and sets up no sort of standard for judging of doctrine
in later times.

[456] “Briefwechsel,” 3, p. 175 f. Greving, p. 18 f. Cp. Steph. Ehses,
“Röm. Quartalschrift,” 12, 1898, p. 456, on M. Spahn, “Cochlæus,” p.
81, who criticises Cochlæus unfavourably because he demanded signs and
wonders from Luther.

[457] Weim. ed., 10, 3, p. 8; Erl. ed., 28, p. 211, from notes taken at
the time.

[458] Jonas, i., 2: “_Surrexit Ionas, ut fugeret a facie Domini_.”

[459] “Werke,” _ib._, pp. 11=214.

[460] Weim. ed., 10, 2, p. 40; Erl. ed., 28, p. 316 in the revision
of the above Wittenberg sermon entitled: “Von beider Gestallt des
Sacramentes zu nehmen.”

[461] Weim. ed., 10, 2, p. 184; “Opp. lat. var.,” 6, p. 391: “_Certus
sum, dogmata mea habere me de cœlo_” (against Henry VIII).

[462] Weim. ed., 30, 3, p. 496; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p. 23: “_revelatione
divina ad hoc vocatus_.”

[463] Weim. ed., 20, p. 674. The passage is from the Wolfenbüttel MS.,
which reproduces Rörer’s Notes (revised, possibly, by Flacius). In
another set of Notes Luther speaks here of his doctrine as “_evangelium
veritatis_.”—Cp. vol. iv., p. 408: “_not without a revelation_ of the
Holy Ghost.”

[464] Weim. ed., 32, p. 477; Erl. ed., 43, p. 263.

[465] Note in Lauterbach’s “Tagebuch,” p. 81.

[466] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” ed. Kroker, p. 169: “_Deus revelavit in
hoc schola verbum suum. Quicumque nos fugiunt et sugillant nos clanculum,
ii defecerunt a fide_,” etc. In 1540.

[467] “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, p. 22 _sq._; cp. “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 7, p. 74.
Cp. Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 211.

[468] “Luthers Werke,” Walch’s ed., 21, p. 363* f. Seckendorf,
“Commentaria de Lutheranismo,” gives the passage as follows: “_Ionas sæpe
eum dixisse memorat, se nemini mortalium aperturum esse_, etc., _fore
autem ut in die novissimo innotescant, sicut et revelationes egregiæ,
quæ sub initium doctrinæ habuerit et nemini detexerit_” (Lips., 1694,
lib. 3, sect. 36, p. 647). Bugenhagen says in his funeral oration (Walch,
21, p. 329*), that God the Father had revealed His Son through Luther,
whilst Melanchthon goes so far as to boast that the latter had received
his doctrine, not from “human sagacity,” but that God had revealed it to
him (see “Corp. ref.,” 6, p. 58 _sq._, and Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 625).
The expression that Luther’s gospel had been “revealed” became quite
usual, as we see from the heading of a chapter in the Latin “Colloquia,”
entitled: “_Occasio et cursus evangelii revelati_” (ed. Bindseil, 3,
p. 178).—Just as Luther asserted he was reforming the Church, “_divina
auctoritate_” (“Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 16), so Calvin, too,
claimed to derive his ministry of the Word (which differed from that of
Luther in so many points) from Christ. Zwingli did the same, and his
followers cared but little for Luther’s claim to the contrary.

[469] Weim. ed., 10, 3, p. 8 f.; Erl. ed., 28, p. 212.

[470] _Ib._, 10, 2, p. 23=28, p. 298.

[471] P. 40=316.

[472] _Ib._

[473] P. 23=298; op. Gal. i. 28.

[474] Paul forbade his disciples to say: “_Ego sum Pauli_,” and asked:
“_Numquid Paulus crucifixus est pro vobis?_” (1 Cor. i. 12 _sq._).

[475] Cp. above, vol. ii., p. 363 ff.

[476] In Casel’s account, Kolde, “Anal. Lutherana,” p. 74.

[477] Weim. ed.; 25, p. 120; cp. “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 22, p. 93 _sq._

[478] Mathesius, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 49; cp. above, vol. v., p. 352. Above,
vol. v., pp. 339 f., 319, 328. Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 176.

[479] Above, vol. v., p. 327 f.

[480] Weim. ed., 5, p. 385. “Operationes in Psalmos,” 1519-21.

[481] Erl. ed., 38, p. 225.

[482] _Ib._, p. 221.

[483] See vol. iv., p. 222.

[484] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 53; cp. Erl. ed., 49, p. 91, on John
xiv.-xv.

[485] “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 20, p. 181 _sq._ Enarr. ps. cxxx.; cp. Weim.
ed., 1, p. 206 ff.; Erl. ed., 37, p. 420 ff.

[486] Cordatus, “Tagebuch,” p. 27 f.

[487] On Marcus, cp. Weim. ed., 61, pp. 1, 73.

[488] Cp. vol. ii., pp. 377 f., 371 f., and, with regard to Campanus, p.
378.

[489] Cordatus, _ib._, p. 28.

[490] Weim. ed., 18, p. 783=“Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p. 362. “De servo
arbitrio.” See vol. ii., p. 276.

[491] To the Elector Augustus of Saxony, “Corp. ref.,” 9, p. 766:
“_Stoica et manichæa deliria_.” Cp. vol. v., p. 258.

[492] _Ib._, 24, p. 375; cp. N. Paulus, “Protestantismus und Toleranz im
16. Jahrb.,” p. 81.

[493] Cp. vol. iii., pp. 45, 75 f., 125 f.

[494] On his discovery of Antichrist see above, vol. iii., p. 141 ff. He
reached it amidst strange fears: “_Ego sic angor_,” etc. To Spalatin,
Feb. 24, 1520, “Briefwechsel,” 2, p. 332. On the thoughts of Satan see
the letter to Egranus of March 24, 1518, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 173:
“_Nisi cogitationes Satanæ scirem, mirarer quo furore ille [Eccius]
amicitias solveret_,” etc.

[495] Vol. iii., p. 149 ff.

[496] Cp. above, vol. iv., p. 301.

[497] Erl. ed., 60, pp. 176-311.

[498] Cp. his statement in Schlaginhaufen’s Table-Talk, p. 56:
“_Adversariorum verbi natura non est humana, sed plane diabolica_” (1532).

[499] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 404 f. (Jan., 1537), with reference to
Dan. xi. 36; xii. 1. The “_Sic volo_,” etc., from Juvenal, “Sat.,” 6,
223, he applies to himself, above, vol. v., p. 517.

[500] Mathesius, _ib._, p. 293. In 1542-3. The picture given at the
beginning of this portion of the Table-Talk of how Luther the “monk”
and Catherine the “nun” seated at table after dinner raise the cross
hand-in-hand against Antichrist and say: “_Post scripturam non habemus
firmius argumentum quam crucem!_” speaks volumes for their infatuation.

[501] Weim. ed., 34, 2, p. 410, in a sermon of Nov. 1, 1531.

[502] Erl. ed., 63, p. 276. On his abnormal hatred see vol. iv., p. 300 f.

[503] _Ib._

[504] To Lang, Aug. 18, 1520, “Briefwechsel,” 2, p. 461.

[505] Cp. vol. iv., p. 95 f. My belief that in the passage in question
in Luther’s letter to Melanchthon of Aug. 28, 1530 (“Briefwechsel,” 8,
p. 235), the word “_mendacia_” should be read after “_dolos_” as in the
oldest Protestant editions, has since received confirmation from P.
Sinthern in the “Zeitschr. f. kath. Theol.,” 1912, p. 180 ff., where the
quotations from Johann Lorenz Doller, “Luthers katholisches Monument,”
Frankfurt-am-Main, 1817, p. 309 ff., are set forth in their true light.

[506] Erl. ed., 25², p. 425.

[507] Weim. ed., 26, p. 509; Erl. ed., 30, p. 372 f.

[508] Vol. iv., p. 304.

[509] See vol. iv., p. 327 ff., and the remark of Harnack, _ib._, p. 340
f.: “Either he suffered from the mania of greatness or his self-reliance
really corresponded with his task and achievements.”

[510] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 210.

[511] _Ib._, p. 308 (1540). Cp. above, vol. v., p. 241 ff.

[512] To Lang: “_Sitne libellus meus [De captivitate babylonica] tam
atrox et ferox tu videris et alii omnes. Libertate et impetu fateor
plenus est, multis tamen placet, nec aulæ nostræ penitus displicet.
Ego de me in his rebus nihil statuere possum. Forte ego præcursor sum
Philippi [Melanchthonis], cui exemplo Heliæ viam parem in spiritu et
virtute, conturbaturus Israel et Achabitas ~[cp. 1 Kings xviii. 17]~
oratione itaque opus erit, si quid peccatum est._” A little later he
says of Antichrist: “_Odi ego ex corde hominem illum peccati et filium
perditionis ~[2 Thes. ii. 3]~ cum universo suo imperio._”

[513] In Casel’s report (Nov. 29, 1525), Kolde, “Anal. Lutherana,” p. 74.

[514] To Lang, Nov. 11, 1517, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 126.

[515] Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 6.

[516] Erl. ed., 57, p. 73. “Tischreden,” ed. Aurifaber, Eisleben, 1566,
pp. 18 and 18´.

[517] Above, vol. iii., p. 121.

[518] Erl. ed., 65, p. 62, preface to his translation of Jeremias.

[519] See below, xxxviii, 1.

[520] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 169.

[521] Weim. ed., 32, p. 474; Erl. ed., 43, p. 263.

[522] _Ib._, p. 473=265.

[523] Cp. Spangenberg, “Theander Lutherus,” pp. 45 and 51.

[524] See above, vol. iii., p. 159 ff. On the nun Florentina.

[525] Schlaginhaufen, “Tischreden,” p. 92: “_Articulus remissionis
peccatorum est in omnibus creaturis_” (a. 1532). Cp. p. 139: “_Deus in
omnibus officiis, statibus intromisit remissionem peccatorum_,” etc.

[526] Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 201 (Khummer): “_Melanthon retulit,
Lutherum sæpe dixisse, articulum de remissione peccatorum esse
fundamentum, unde exstruatur articulus de creatione_.”

[527] Erl. ed., 58, p. 390.

[528] See vol. iii., p. 195 ff.

[529] See above, vol. v., p. 517.

[530] Cp. above, vol. v., p. 585; vol. iv., pp. 331, 343; vol. ii., p.
294.

[531] Weim. ed., 26, p. 531; Erl. ed., 63, p. 273 (1528).

[532] _Ib._, p. 530=272.

[533] See vol. iii., p. 175 ff.

[534] Erl. ed., 60, p. 129 f.: “Break out at once into abuse,
particularly if the devil attacks you with justification! He frequently
assails me with an argument that is not worth a snap, but in the turmoil
and temptation I do not notice this; but when I have recovered I see it
plainly.”

[535] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 515.

[536] To Chancellor Brück, Jan. 27, 1524, “Briefwechsel,” 4, p. 282.

[537] Erl. ed., 60, p. 129.

[538] To Melanchthon, Aug. 3, 1530, “Briefwechsel,” 8, p. 166: “My head
is indeed obstinate as you fellows say.”

[539] Paul Pietsch, in the preface (p. xxi. f.) to vol. 32 of the Weim.
ed.: “His annoyance and his tendency to see only the darker side of
things show plainly enough … that Luther was suffering from that deep
depression to which great men are sometimes liable. In later life, for
instance in 1544, this depression again overtook Luther, and he even
resolved to quit Wittenberg, and it was only with difficulty that he was
dissuaded from doing so. In 1545 again something similar occurred. Yet in
1544 and 1545 his discouragement had again no real cause.”

[540] Cp. Paulus, “Köln. Volksztng.” (Lit. Beil.), 1906, p. 355, on vol.
32 of the Weimar edition.

[541] To Link, Dec. 1, 1530, “Briefwechsel,” 8, p. 326.

[542] “_Si quid hic iocis aut conviciis excedit._”

[543] “Briefwechsel Bugenhagens,” ed. Vogt, p. 67 ff.

[544] We remember having recently read in a review, that many, at the
present day, consider “mental aberration an indispensable condition of
mental greatness.”

[545] “_Si hæc a febricitante dicerentur, quid dici possit insanius!_”
“_Opp._,” 10, col. 1282, in 1526.

[546] The passages are given in Latin above, vol. iv., p. 353, n. 3.

[547] Cp. above, vol. ii., pp. 267 and 274; cp. also below, what Hausrath
and Möbius say. The expression “abnormal state of temper” is used by
W. Köhler in the “Theol. Literaturbericht,” vol. 23 (1903), p. 499.
Elsewhere he calls Luther “the most paradoxical figure imaginable, who
speaks differently to every hearer” (_ib._, vol. 24, 1904, p. 517).—See
also Döllinger (“Kirchenlexikon,”[2] art. “Luther,” col. 344), and
Möhler, “Symbolik,” § 48, 1873 ed., p. 423. U. Berlière, O.S.B., recently
remarked: “Une étude psychologique de Luther ne peut être séparée de
son histoire ni de l’évolution de sa vie intérieure, encore moins de
son état pathologique.… Cette étude n’est pas encore achevée” (“Revue
bénédictine,” 1906, p. 630 f.).

[548] See Köhler, “Ein Wort zu Denifles Luther,” p. 27.

[549] Cp. above, vol. i., p. 383. Cp. also the remarks on the next page,
n. 2.

[550] In the art. “Luthers Bekehrung” (“N. Heidelb. Jahrb.,” 6, 1896), p.
193.

[551] “Luthers Leben,” 1, 1905, p. 109 f. The author speaks of the
“secret sufferings of soul” which did not, however, interfere with the
thoroughness of his work (p. 110); incidentally, in exoneration of the
violence of Luther’s writings against Zwingli, he urges that Luther wrote
it “at a time of great depression, which he even wished his opponents
might endure for but a quarter of an hour to see if it would not convert
them” (2, p. 213). At the Wartburg “his mental suffering returned, as
it always did when he remained for any length of time without outward
stimulus or active intercourse with the outside world” (1, p. 475). In
the supplement to his unaltered 2nd edition Hausrath deals with the
objections raised against his “pathological” view though he considerably
modifies his wordings (1, p. 573 ff.).

[552] On Ebstein see below, p. 176 f. Ebstein’s is an improvement on
Küchenmeister, “Dr. Martin Luthers Krankengesch.,” Leipzig, 1881.
Küchenmeister did not do justice to the historical material and always
quotes at second hand. Th. Kolde rightly speaks of his work as a “book
that had better not have been written” (“Anal. Lutherana,” p. 50). He
also thinks Berkhan’s treatment of the subject (_ib._, p. 51) “of small
value.”

[553] “Deutsch-evangelische Bl.,” 29, Halle, 1904, p. 303 ff.

[554] See above, p. 109 ff.

[555] P. 316.

[556] “Archiv f. Psychiatrie,” 11, Berlin, 1880-1, p. 798 ff.

[557] P. 799. Cp. above, p. 100 ff.

[558] Möbius proceeds on the principle that “in each of us what is
healthy is mixed with what is morbid and the more anyone rises above
the average, the further he departs from the normal.” “The pathological
element is part of every eminent man.” This, according to Möbius, is
particularly the case with the genius. Hence, in his studies, it is
his aim to show how psychiatry “may be used for appreciating great
men.” Möbius intended to deal in detail with the pathology of Luther
but was prevented by death from carrying out his plan. In his study
on Schopenhauer (“Ausgewählte Werke,” Bd. 4)—who according to him
was certainly not insane in the ordinary sense—he says: “I consider
Schopenhauer one of the best instances to prove that it is only pathology
which teaches us rightly to understand great writers and their works.…
Schopenhauer became the philosopher of pessimism because, from the
beginning, he was a sickly man. It was not the recognition of the evils
in the world that made him take this line, but he deliberately sought out
and described the evils because he needed to vindicate his own pessimism.
He had displayed the latter even as a boy, having inherited it from his
father, and his morbid disposition influenced his whole mode of thought.”

[559] In “Schmidts Jahrb. der in- und ausländischen gesamten Medizin,”
ed. P. J. Möbius and H. Doppe, 288, Leipzig, 1905, Hft. 12, Dec., p. 264
in the notice of my articles “Ein Grundproblem aus Luthers Seelenleben,”
in the “Köln. Volksztng.,” Lit. Beilage, 1905, Nos. 40 and 41.

[560] [Above, p. 173.]

[561] [Emil Kraepelin, “Psychiatrie, Ein Lehrbuch für Studierende und
Ärzte,”⁶ Leipzig, 1899, Cap. ix.: “Das manisch-depressive Irresein,” pp.
359-425.]

[562] “Dr. Martin Luthers Krankheiten und deren Einfluss auf seinen
körperlichen und geistigen Zustand,” Stuttgart, 1908.

[563] Pp. 7, 64.

[564] Pp. 45 ff., 56 ff.

[565] Pp. 62, 10, 63 f., 60, 55, 54, 64.

[566] This Ebstein admits (p. 44), though he argues that the “seizures in
the joints” of which Luther complains must have had a gouty origin.

[567] _Ib._, p. 40. But cp. above, p. 110 f.

[568] Cp. in “Briefwechsel Luthers,” 6, p. 191, for the proofs in support
of this letter quoted by Enders from Kawerau.

[569] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 168.

[570] Ebstein, _ib._, p. 44.

[571] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 691 f.

[572] Pp. 49, 53.

[573] P. 55 f.

[574] P. 56.

[575] P. 12.

[576] P. 62.

[577] P. 10.

[578] P. 44 f.

[579] “Luther auf dem Standpunkt der Psychiatrie beurteilt,” Wien, 1874.
Bruno Schön declares that Luther was “in part excused by the fact that
he was deranged” (p. 3); this derangement Luther contrived to explain
away by laying it all down to the devil, whom he had seen in actual
hallucinations (p. 9); he had regarded all his opponents as fools,
just as the inmates of an asylum look upon all others as fools and on
themselves as perfectly sane (p. 28), etc.

[580] “Grundriss einer Gesch. der deutschen Irrenpflege,” 1890, p. 76.

[581] “Antwort auf das Sendschreiben,”³ Sulzbach, 1817, p. 70 ff.

[582] See the 2nd ed. of this writing, bearing the same title as the
1st, “Seitenstück zur Weisheit Luthers.” The 1st ed. is weaker in its
animadversions than the 2nd.

[583] P. 188.

[584] See above, vol. i., p. 16.

[585] “Zeitschr. des Harzvereins,” 39, 1906, p. 191 ff. It cannot be
proved from the records that the second Hans Luther had been guilty of
actual manslaughter. Hence in vol. i., it was not necessary to point out
that the manslaughter of which Wicel accuses Martin Luther’s father,
repeating his accusation most emphatically in public writings without its
being called into question by Luther, cannot be placed to the account
of the second Hans with any semblance of likelihood (though it has been
done, cp. “Luther-Kalender,” 1910, p. 76 f). Wicel came to Eisleben in
1533, thus only a few years after the father’s death, and was able to
assure himself of the facts, concerning which there was not likely to be
any mistake owing to Martin Luther’s celebrity at that time.

[586] Aug. Cramer, “Die Nervosität,” Jena, 1906.

[587] “Grundriss der Psychiatrie,” Leipzig, 1906, p. 104.

[588] _Ib._, p. 141 f.

[589] “Monatsschr. für Psychiatrie,” Berlin, 1907, p. 230.

[590] _Ib._, p. 236.

[591] A. Hausrath, “Luthers Leben,” 2, p. 432.

[592] _Ib._, p. 432 f.

[593] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 3, p. 169.

[594] _Ib._, (from Rebenstock).

[595] _Ib._, p. 175.

[596] _Ib._, p. 170.

[597] _Ib._

[598] Erl. ed., 31, p. 257.

[599] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 3, p. 195.

[600] _Ib._, p. 188: “… _et D. Staupitius me incitabat contra papam_.”

[601] _Ib._, p. 176.

[602] See above, vol. i., pp. 104 ff., 184 ff., 303 ff., where his
theological attitude previous to the indulgence theses is discussed. It
is taken for granted that the account of his development given in vol. i.
is already known to the reader. The fictions have already been discounted
in vol. i., p. 20 f. and p. 110 f.

[603] “Dokumente zu Luthers Entwicklung” (“Sammlung ausgewählter kirchen-
und dogmengesch. Quellenschriften,” 2, Reihe 9. Hft.), 1911, p. 11 ff.

[604] Luther’s untrustworthiness here, where it is a question of his
polemics, does not render untrue certain other data of a non-polemical
character and otherwise supported. This is the case, e.g. with the date
given above when the meaning of Rom. i. 17 first dawned upon him; this
happens to agree with the facts. Cp. above, vol. i., p. 388 ff.

[605] Erl. ed., 63, p. 405, in the preface of 1539 to his German writings.

[606] See vol. iii., p. 153 ff. Cp. “Werke,” _ib._, p. 370, in a preface
of 1531, where, referring to the “many and great miracles,” he makes no
distinction between Evangel and Gospel.

[607] _Ib._, p. 373 (1542).

[608] _Ib._, p. 400 in the preface of 1539 to his German writings.

[609] _Ib._, p. 328.

[610] _Ib._, p. 295 (1530).

[611] Hausrath, “Luthers Leben,” 2, p. 432.

[612] “Studien und Skizzen zur Gesch. des Reformationszeitalters,” p. 219.

[613] “Schriften des Vereins f. RG.,” Hft. 100, 1910, p. 14.—Cp. K. A.
Meissinger, quoted above, vol. ii., p. 362, n. 2.

[614] “Theol. Stud. und Krit.,” 1908, p. 580.

[615] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 3, p. 182.

[616] Weim. ed., 33, p. 431 f.; Erl. ed., 48, p. 201.

[617] _Ib._, 49, p. 118.

[618] _Ib._, 20², 2, p. 420.

[619] “Comment. in Galat.,” Weim. ed., 40, 1, p. 138; Irmischer, 1, p.
109 _sq._

[620] “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 19, p. 100.

[621] _Ib._, 7, p. 74.

[622] Weim. ed., 33, p. 560; Erl. ed., 48, p. 306.

[623] Erl. ed., 49, p. 27. Cp. 20, 2, p. 420.

[624] Weim. ed., 33, p. 575; Erl. ed., 48, p. 317.

[625] Erl. ed., 46, p. 73.

[626] At the time the present writer’s series of articles on Luther’s
intellectual development was appearing in the “Köln. Volkszeitung” (1903,
1904), Denifle’s work which also insists on the unreliable nature of the
legend (“Luther und Luthertum,” 1¹ 1904, pp. 389 ff., 725 f., 739 f.) was
already in print.

[627] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 3, p. 183.

[628] “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 11, p. 123 (1545).

[629] Erl. ed., 49, p. 300. Comm. on John xiv.-xvi., of 1537.

[630] “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 7, p. 72. “Enarr. in Genesim,” c.a. 1541.

[631] _Ib._, 5, p. 267, a. 1539.

[632] Erl. ed., 49, p. 27 (1537).

[633] Weim. ed., 33, p. 561; Erl. ed., 48, p. 306. Comm. on John
vi.-viii., 1531.

[634] Erl. ed., 31, p. 273. “Kleine Anwort auff H. Georgen nehestes
Buch,” 1533.

[635] Comment. in Galat., Weim. ed., 40, 1, p. 135; Irmischer, 1, p. 107.
Cp. p. 138=p. 109. The passage was only introduced by Luther in the 1538
ed., a fact remarkable for the history of the legend.

[636] Erl. ed., 20², 2, p. 420.

[637] Comment. in Galat. ed. Irmischer, 3, p. 20, 1535.

[638] “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 18, p. 226. Enar. in ps. 45, a. 1532.

[639] See above, p. 126.

[640] See above, p. 150.

[641] Erl. ed. 58, p. 377.

[642] “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 23, p. 401. Enarr. in Is. (1543).

[643] Comm. in Gal., Weim. ed., 40, 1, p. 137; Irmischer, 1, p. 109, of
1535.

[644] Erl. ed. 45, p. 156. Sermon of Dec. 7, 1539.

[645] Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 36. From Khummer, no date, but a late
utterance.

[646] “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, p. 23, preface to the Latin works (1545).

[647] N. Ericeus, “Sylvula sententiarum,” 1566, p. 174 ff.

[648] “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 19, p. 100 (1532).

[649] To Bugenhagen (1532), preface to the latter’s edition of
Athanasius, “De trinitate,” “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p. 523 (“Briefwechsel,”
9, p. 252).

[650] Weim. ed., 34, 2, p. 410 (1531). In the text, for “_deinde
quando_,” read “_deinde quanto_.” A second hasty report, _ib._, gives the
passage in this form: “_Multos scio, et ego unus fui, quando confessus_
and clean _et dixi orationes meas_, I came to the altar it was all not
worth a straw; _vocabam presbyterum, et quando absolutio_ had been
pronounced _et missa perfecta [erat], tum certus ut antea [eram]_ and as
much at peace with God _ut antea_, …” Of the Last Day: “_Ego non libenter
audiebam istum diem_.”

[651] Above, vol. i., p. 290 f.

[652] Ericeus, “Sylvula,” l. c.

[653] G. Buchwald, “Ungedruckte Predigten Luthers 1537-1540,” 1905, p. 61
f. Scheel, “Dokumente,” p. x., n.

[654] Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 122 (1532).

[655] Erl. ed., 45, p. 156. Sermon of Dec. 7, 1539.

[656] _Ib._, p. 154, from the same sermon.

[657] _Ib._, 31, p. 279. “Anwort auff H. Georgen nehestes Buch.”

[658] Dr. Kirchhoff, “Zeitschr. f. Psychiatrie,” vol. 44, 1888, p. 376.

[659] Cp. previous volumes, _passim_, particularly vol. iv., pp. 120-31.

[660] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 3, p. 182. See above, p. 192.

[661] Erl. ed., 14², p. 342.

[662] Comment. in ep. ad Galat., Weim. ed., 40, 1, p. 137. Irmischer, 1,
p. 109.

[663] Erl. ed., 47, p. 37.

[664] _Ib._, 49, p. 27.

[665] _Ib._, 45, p. 156 f.

[666] _Ib._

[667] _Ib._, 14², p. 185.

[668] “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 10, p. 232.

[669] _Ib._, 19, p. 100.

[670] See above, vol. i., p. 278.

[671] Cp. apart from the “Dicta Melanchthoniana” (ed. Waltz, “Zeitschr.
f. KG.,” 4, 1880, p. 324 ff.), p. 330:—“_diebus Sabbati, cum esset vacuus
a concionibus_,” etc., “_initio evangelii—_” “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil,
where the same thing is related no less than three times: 1, p. 67; 1, p.
198; 3, p. 279, the German Table-Talk, Erl. ed., 59, pp. 10 and 21, and
Ericeus, “Sylvula Sententiarum,” 1566, p. 174 _sq._

[672] Erl. ed., 47, p. 37.

[673] _Ib._, 49, p. 315.

[674] Aquinas, “Summa theol.,” 3, q. 40, a. 2 ad 1. In ep. ad Tim. c. 4,
lect. 2. “Summa theol.,” 2, 2, q. 88, a, 2 ad 3. Denifle, _ib._, 1², p.
365 f., where other quotations are given from Thomas and the mediæval
theologians.—Cp. the wholesome teaching of the “Imitation”—already widely
read in Luther’s day—on the value of outward works compared with interior
virtue and charity (Bk. II., cap. 1): “_Regnum Dei intra vos est, dicit
Dominus_,” are the words with which it begins. Bk. I., c. 19: “_Multo
plus debet esse intus quam quod cernitur foris_,” and, again: “_Iustorum
propositum in gratia Dei potius quam in propria sapientia pendet_,” etc.
On the need of discretion see _ib._, 3, c. 7.

[675] “De non esu carnium ap. Carthus.,” “Opp.,” 2, pp. 723, 729.
Denifle, _ib._, p. 370.

[676] Cp. Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 49.

[677] See above, vol. i., p. 80 ff.

[678] Weim. ed., 4, p. 626. Denifle, 1², p. 376 f.

[679] _Ib._, 6, p. 246; Erl. ed., 16², p. 180. Denifle, 1², p. 377 f.

[680] Weim. ed., 37, p. 661. Sermon of Feb. 1, 1534.

[681] “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 18, p. 226. Enarr. in ps. 45. Jan., 1532.

[682] Weim. ed., 33, p. 561; Erl. ed., 48, p. 306. In the Comment. on
John vi.-viii., 27 Oct., 1531.

[683] Erl. ed., 49, p. 300 (1537): “I myself must testify from my own
experience: After having been a pious monk _for over twenty years_.” This
reading of the sermons reported and edited by Cruciger is embodied in the
text, whereas, in the notes, it is corrected to “fifteen.”

[684] Erl. ed., 46, p. 78, Sermon of 1537.

[685] On March 28, 1519, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 490: “_Fraterculus in
Christo … in angulo sepultus_,” etc.

[686] To Joh. Braun, April 22, 1507, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 1 f; “_sola et
liberalissima sua misericordia … tanta divinæ bonitatis magnificentia_.”

[687] March 17, 1509, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 6.

[688] From a MS. sermon of Luther’s of 1544 at Gotha. Scheel,
“Dokumente,” p. 20.

[689] To N. Paulus is due the credit of having drawn attention in 1893
to the description given by Luther to Usingen. Hausrath in his article
“Luthers Bekehrung” in 1896 (“N. Heidelb. Jahrb.,”) also noted how happy
Luther had at first been in the convent. Cp. his “Leben Luthers,” 1, p.
22.

[690] Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 197 (Khummer): The good old man
had taught him to commit perplexing matters of conscience “_divinæ
bonitati_.”—Preface to Bugenhagen’s edition of St. Athanasius “De
Trinitate”: “_Vir sane optimus et absque dubio sub damnato cucullo verus
christianus_.”—Cp. “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 19, p. 100, on the preceptor’s
words (above, vol. i., p. 10): “_Fili quid facis, an nescis, quod
ipse Dominus iussit nos sperare?_”—Cp. Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p.
84 (Khummer): Luther’s reminiscence of the wise exhortation of his
preceptor on conversations with women (“_pauca et brevia loquatur_”).—Cp.
“Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 2, p. 1.

[691] See above, vol. i., p. 11.

[692] To George Leiffer, Augustinian at Erfurt, April 15, 1516,
“Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 31.

[693] Flacius Illyr., “Clarissimæ quædam notæ veræ ac falsæ religionis,”
Magdeburgi (1549), pages not numbered, end of cap. xv.: “_Affirmabat
is Martinum Lutherum apud ipsos sancte vixisse, exactissime regulam
servasse et diligenter studuisse_.” Copy of this rare work in the Vienna
Hofbibliothek.

[694] On the passages in the Comm. on Rom. of 1515-16 in which he speaks
well of the religious life, see above, vol. i., p. 270.

[695] Weim. ed., 2, p. 736; Erl. ed., 21, p. 242. Denifle, 1², p. 39.

[696] _Ib._, 2, p. 644; “Opp. lat. var.,” 2, p. 500, and in his “Letter
to the Minorites of Jüterbogk,” May 15, 1519, “Briefwechsel,” 2, p. 40:
“_Media quibus facilius implentur præcepta_.” Cp. Denifle, 1², p. 36.

[697] Sep. 9, 1521, “Briefwechsel,” 3, p. 226.

[698] Above, vol. ii., p. 181 ff.

[699] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 3, p. 183: “_in gloriam Dei et confusionem
sathanæ_.”

[700] Cordatus, “Tagebuch,” p. 450: “_etiam in complexus veni coniugis_,”
etc. Cp. “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 2, p. 299. See above, vol. v., p. 354;
vol. iii., p. 175.

[701] To Nich. Gerbel of Strasburg, Nov. 1, 1521, “Briefwechsel,” 3,
p. 241: “_ut nihil iam auribus meis sonet odiosius monialis, monachi,
sacerdotis nomine et paradisum arbitrer coniugium vel summa inopia
laborans_.” Thus the monk and priest, four years before his marriage.

[702] To George Mascov, Provost of the Premonstratensian house at
Leitzkau, end of 1516, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 76. At the close of the
letter, of which only fragments have been preserved, we read: “_Quam
maxime rogo ut pro me Dominum ores; confiteor enim tibi, quod vita mea in
dies appropinquet inferno, quia quotidie peior fio et miserior_,” which
must, of course, be understood of his moral, not his physical, condition.
The “drawing nigh to hell” is an echo of Ps. lxxxvii., which was such a
favourite of his, where we read: “_repleta est malis anima mea et vita
mea inferno appropinquavit_” (v. 3), and: “_In me transierunt iræ tuæ, et
terrores tui conturbaverunt me_” (v. 17).

[703] Above, vol. i., p. 88.

[704] To Spalatin, Dec. 14, 1516, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 73 f., where he
begins by humbly confessing his unworthiness to receive any attention
from the Elector (“_talis tantusque princeps_”), at whose Court Spalatin
held a post.

[705] To Joh. Lang, Feb. 8, 1517, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 86. “_Quid
enim non credant, qui Aristoteli crediderunt, vera esse, quæ ipse
calumniosissimus calumniator aliis affiingit et imponit tam absurda, ut
asinus et lapis non possint tacere ad illa?_” (_ib._, p. 85).

[706] Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 44, from Dietrich’s MSS.

[707] To Hier. Weller, July (?), 1530, “Briefwechsel,” 8, p. 160.

[708] “_Videbis_,” Staupitz had said, according to him, “_quod ad res
magnas gerendas te ministro (Deus) utetur. Atque ita accidit_,” Luther
goes on. “_Nam ego magnus (licet enim hoc mihi de me iure prædicare)
factus sum doctor_.” Such utterances, he continues, have in them
something of the “_oraculum et divinatio_.” Then follows the statement
quoted above concerning the other prophecy of his future greatness:
“_huius dicti sæpissime memini_,” and again he declares such words
contain “_aliquid divinationis et oraculi_.”

[709] Above, p. 102.

[710] Reprinted in Luther’s “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 79: “_De tua
præstantia, bonitate, eruditione creber sermo incidit_.” After having
spoken of Luther’s “_celebris fama_,” Scheurl expresses the wish “to
become his friend.” The words are simply those in common use among the
humanists.

[711] Jan. 27, 1517, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 82 ff.

[712] Weim. ed., 1, p. 30; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, p. 57: “_Nolunt audire,
quod iustitiæ eorum peccata sint.… Gratiam maxime impugnant, qui eam
iactant_.”

[713] “_Incurrunt inobedientiam et rebellionem._” See vol. i., p. 69.

[714] “_Hæc est lux angeli Sathanæ_” (_ib._).

[715] _Ib._, p. 53.

[716] Weim. ed., 1, p, 12; “Opp. lat. var.,” I, p. 33.

[717] To Spalatin, June 8, 1516, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 41: “_præsulari id
est pergræcari sodomitari, romanari_.”

[718] To Spalatin, in the spring, 1517, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 91:
“_eruditio sæculi nostri ferrea, immo terrea, sive sit Græcitatis sive
Latinitatis sive Hebræitatis_.”

[719] To Lang, March 1, 1517, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 88.

[720] See above, vol. i., p. 228.

[721] _Ib._, p. 70.

[722] To Nich. Hausmann at Zwickau, “Briefwechsel,” p. 144: “_Corpore
satis bene valeo, sed tot distrahor externis actibus, ut spiritus prope
extinguatur raroque sui curam habeat. Ora pro me, ne carne consummer._”
Cp. Gal. iii. 3: “_Sic stulti estis, ut quum spiritu cœperitis, nunc
carne consummemini_.”

[723] To Lang, Oct. 26, 1516, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 67: “_raro mihi
integrum tempus est_,” etc.; above, vol. i., p. 275.

[724] To Lang, Sep. 4, 1517, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 106. Cp. vol. i., p.
313.

[725] To Chr. Scheurl, May 6, 1517, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 97: “_Sunt
paradoxa modestis et qui non ea cognoverint, sed eudoxa et calodoxa
scientibus, mihi vero aristodoxa. Benedictus Deus, qui rursum iubet de
tenebris splendescere lumen._”

[726] To George Leiffer, Augustinian at Erfurt, April 15, 1516,
“Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 31: “_sola prudentia sensus nostri causa et radix
universæ inquietudinis nostræ_.”

[727] “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 88: “_si nulli placerent, mihi optime
placerent_.”

[728] March 28, 1519, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 489.

[729] Vol. i., p. 391: “_furebam ita sæva et perturbata conscientia_,”
etc.

[730] Erl. ed., 26², p. 71.

[731] To Sylvius Egranus (Joh. Wildenauer), March 24, 1518,
“Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 173: “_Ego quo magis illi furunt, eo amplius
procedo; relinquo priora, ut in illis latrent, sequor posteriora, ut et
illa latrent_.”

[732] Cp. Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 512.

[733] To Staupitz, Feb. 20, 1519, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 430: “_Deus
rapit, pellit, nedum ducit me; non sum compos mei, volo esse quietus et
rapior in medios tumultus_.”

[734] Above, vol. ii., p. 17.

[735] Lectures on Romans, ed. J. Ficker, 1908, Scholia, p. 221.

[736] _Ib._, p. 220.

[737] _Ib._

[738] Weim. ed., 26, p. 504; Erl. ed., 30, p. 366. “Vom Abendmal
Bekentnis,” 1528.

[739] Melanchthon in his “Elogium” on Luther, “Corp. ref.,” 6, p. 158:
“Vitæ Reformatorum,” ed. Neander, p. 5. See above, p. 100.

[740] To supplement what we said in vol. i., p. 4, we may give a
passage from Rörer’s notes of the Table-Talk (ed. Kroker, in “Archiv f.
RG.,” 5, 1908, p. 346): “_Cum in monasterium intrabam et relinquebam
omnia desperans de me ipso, postulavi iterum biblia_.” _Ib._, p. 369
f. “_Causa ingrediendi monasterii fuit, quia perterrefactus tonitru,
cum despatiaretur ante civitatem Erphordiæ, votum vovit Hannæ et
fracto propemodum pede_ [? through being thrown down by the stroke of
lightning?] he entered the cloister and bound himself by vows.”

[741] Vol. i., p. 16.

[742] Dungersheim, “Dadelung,” etc., Bl. 14.

[743] “Chronik.” etc., ed. Euling, 1891, p. 30.

[744] Account published by Tschakert in “Theol. Stud. und Krit.,” 1897,
p. 578. The passage may possibly have been influenced by Luther’s
statement above concerning his father’s words “_illusio et præstigium_.”
Cp. below, p. 224, n. 6.

[745] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 408 (in 1537).

[746] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 3, p. 187, related by Luther to his
friends on the feast-day of St. Anne, July 16 [? 26], 1539.

[747] _Ib._, under date, July 16 (1539), the anniversary of his entering
the convent.

[748] See above, vol. i., p. 4.

[749] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 3, p. 182.

[750] _Ib._, 3, p. 185.

[751] Weim. ed., 8, p. 573 f.; “Opp. lat. var.,” 6, p. 239, in the
dedication to his father of “De Votis monasticis” (“Briefwechsel,” 3, p.
249).

[752] _Ib._, he refers to the same remark of his father’s in a letter
to Melanchthon of Sep. 9, 1521, “Briefwechsel,” 3, p. 225: “_Utinam non
esset sathanæ præstigium.… Videtur mihi per os eius Deus velut a longe me
allocutus, sed tarde, tamen satis._”

[753] To Joh. Braun at Eisenach, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 6: “_Quod si
statum meum nosse desideras, bene habeo Dei gratia, nisi quod violentum
est studium_.”

[754] B. Heyne, “Über Besessenheitswahn bei geistigen
Erkrankungszuständen,” Paderborn, 1904, p. 126.

[755] Erl. ed., 44, p. 127.

[756] _Ib._, 45, p. 156. See above, p. 197.

[757] _Ib._, Weim. ed., 36, p. 553 f.; Erl. ed., 51, p. 146, Comment. on
1 Cor. xv.

[758] See above, p. 99 ff.

[759] Erl. ed., 45, p. 156.

[760] Note, _ib._

[761] _Ib._, 44, p. 127.

[762] G. Buchwald, “Luthers ungedruckte Predigten 1528-1546,” vol. iii.,
1885, p. 50: In Popery “horrible fears” had been caused by the doctrine
of Christ as Judge. “_Iuventus non intelligit; videat ne amittat hanc
lucem ~[of his Evangel]~. Si scivissemus non ivissemus in cœnobia. Quando
Christum inspexi, vidi diabolum._”

[763] W. Köhler, “Ein Wort zu Denifles Luther,” p. 28. The mental
struggle had not been denied, either by Denifle, or in my article in the
Beilage of the “Köln. Volksztng.,” 1903, No. 44.

[764] Köhler, _ib._, pp. 27-29. Cp. Köhler, “Katholizismus und
Reformation,” p. 69.

[765] Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 330; Erl. ed., 24², p. 391.

[766] _Ib._, p. 280=365.

[767] _Ib._, p. 279 f.=364.

[768] _Ib._, p. 290=370.

[769] Late in June, 1530, “Briefwechsel,” 8, p. 159 f.

[770] See above, vol. i., p. 269 f.

[771] Above, p. 101 f.

[772] Weim. ed., 18, p. 783; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p. 362.

[773] _Ib._

[774] Weim. ed., 28, p. 48, June 10.

[775] Weim. ed., 26, p. 508; Erl. ed., 30, p. 372.

[776] _Ib._, p. 504=366.

[777] _Ib._

[778] Weim. ed., 33, p. 574 f.; Erl. ed., 48, p. 317.

[779] Weim. ed., 32, p. 241. Cp. the similar passage quoted above, p.
197, from Schlaginhaufen.

[780] Erl. ed., 31, p. 273 in “Kleine Anwort auff H. Georgen nehestes
Buch.” Given more in detail above, p. 195.

[781] Weim. ed., 36, p. 554; Erl. ed., 51, p. 146.

[782] Erl. ed., 20², 2, p. 420.

[783] Comm. in Gal., Weim. ed., 40, 1, p. 135; Irmischer, 1, p. 109.

[784] Cp. Erl. ed. 31, p. 273.

[785] “Opp. lat. exeg.” 11, p. 123.

[786] Erl. ed., 14², p. 343.

[787] See above, vol. iii., p. 206; vol. iv., p. 213 f.

[788] Denifle, 1², p. 392.

[789] Erl. ed., 19², p. 151 f.

[790] Weim. ed., 33, p. 574 f.; Erl. ed., 48, p. 317 f.

[791] _Ib._, 14², p. 342 ff.

[792] Erl. ed., 63, p. 369 f., 1542.

[793] _Ib._, p. 372.

[794] _Ib._, 63, p. 374. Preface to his “Barfuser Eulenspiegel und
Alcoran,” 1542.

[795] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 423.

[796] Weim. ed. 42, p. 504; “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 3, p. 119.

[797] _Ib._, p. 505=200.

[798] Cp. Denifle, 1², p. 368 and above, p. 202.

[799] _Ib._

[800] Erl. ed., 45, p. 156 f.

[801] _Ib._, 31, p. 279.

[802] Cp. Weim. ed., 11, pp. 408-416; Erl. ed., 22, pp. 141-151.

[803] Above, vol. v., p. 432 ff., and vol. iii., p. 9 ff.

[804] Cp. vol. ii., p. 346.

[805] Weim. ed., 15, p. 218 f.; Erl. ed., 53, p. 265, 1524.

[806] Above, vol. iii., p. 392 f.

[807] _Ib._, p. 10.

[808] Weim. ed., 1, p. 624; “Opp. lat. var.,” 2, p. 288. In the
Resolutions, 1518.—Weim. ed., 7, pp. 139, 439; Erl. ed., 24², p. 139.
“Opp. lat. var.,” 5, 221. In the “Assertio omnium articulorum.” Cp.
proposition 33 condemned by Leo X, 1520, in the Bull “Exsurge Domine.” N.
Paulus, in “Hist.-pol. Bl.,” 140, 1907, p. 357 ff., and “Protestantismus
und Toleranz im 16 Jahrb.,” 1911, p. 26 f.

[809] Weim. ed., 7, p. 139; “Opp. lat. var.,” 5, p. 221.

[810] Cp. above, vol. iii., p. 424: “Hence there is no alternative, you
must either believe everything or nothing,” and vol. v., p. 398, n. 3.

[811] Weim. ed., 11, p. 267; Erl. ed., 22, p. 90.

[812] Weim. ed., 18, p. 298 f. Erl. ed., 24², p. 276.

[813] Erl. ed., 53, p. 134 (“Briefwechsel,” 3, p. 356). He adds that he
had notified the Altenburgers that “the rights, authority, revenues and
power of the Canons were at an end because they were publicly opposed to
the Evangel.”

[814] To the Wittenberg Canons, July 11, 1523, Erl. ed., 53, p. 178 f.
(“Briefe,” 4, p. 176).

[815] In a sermon of Aug. 2, 1523, Weim. ed., 12, p. 649; Erl. ed., 17²,
p. 57. Paulus, “Protestantismus und Toleranz,” p. 5.

[816] Burkhardt, “Luthers Briefwechsel,” p. 76. According to Burkhardt,
Hier. Schurf and the licentiate Pauli were entrusted with the mission
to Luther; but “Luther continued to storm, and the council took steps
to forbid the Mass and even intercourse with others. So far had Luther
carried matters!”—Bezold, “Gesch. der deutschen Ref.,” Berlin, 1890, p.
563, observes of Luther’s attitude at that time: “It is of interest to
note his transition from the principles of freedom of conscience and the
independence of the Church to religious coercion and State assistance.”

[817] Cp. above, vol. ii., p. 327 ff.; vol. iv., p. 510.

[818] Cp. N. Paulus, “Protestantismus und Toleranz,” p. 10.

[819] Reprinted in Kolde’s, “Friedrich der Weise,” 1881, p. 68 ff.

[820] _Ib._, p. 72.

[821] The Memo. of the three preachers in “Mitteil. der geschichtsforsch.
Gesellschaft des Osterlandes,” 6, 1866, p. 513 ff.; cp. Enders, “Luthers
Briefwechsel,” 5, p. 318, n. 1. On Altenburg, see above, vol. ii., p. 314
ff.

[822] Erl. ed., 53, p. 367 (“Briefwechsel,” 5, p. 318).

[823] In Burkhardt, “Luthers Briefwechsel,” p. 102, and Enders,
“Briefwechsel,” 5, p. 320.

[824] Text in Sehling, “Die evang. Kirchenordnungen des 16 Jahrh.,” Abt.
1, 1. Hälfte, 1902, p. 142 ff. See above, vol. v., p. 592 f.

[825] _Ib._ These stern measures were aimed at the followers of Carlstadt
and Zwingli, but were also applied to the Catholics.

[826] The writing, most probably by Link (spring, 1524), is in the
“Mitteilungen der geschichtsforsch. Gesellschaft des Osterlandes,” 6, p.
119 ff.

[827] In the Mem. referred to above, p. 241, n. 3.

[828] Paulus, _ib._, p. 12.

[829] “Corp. ref.,” 2, p. 307.

[830] Cp. their petition to George drafted by Luther, “Briefwechsel,” 9,
p. 285.

[831] Letter of the first half of July, 1533, “Werke,” Erl. ed., 31, p.
243 ff. (“Briefwechsel,” 9, p. 318).

[832] Sep. 19, “Briefwechsel,” 12, p. 246.

[833] Beginning of July, 1539, in the Memorandum on the need of
abolishing the Mass at Meissen. _Ib._, p. 189. Paulus, _ib._, p. 15.

[834] Paulus, _ib._

[835] To Jos. Levin Metzsch of Mila, Aug. 26, 1529, “Werke,” Erl. ed.,
54, p. 97 (“Briefwechsel,” 7, p. 149).

[836] On Sep. 14, 1531, “Werke,” Erl. ed., 54, p. 255 (“Briefwechsel,” 9,
p. 103).

[837] Sehling, “Kirchenordnungen,” 1, 1, pp. 175, 176, 187, 195. Cp.
Luther to Beier of Zwickau, 1533, undated, “Briefwechsel,” 9, p. 365.

[838] Above, vol. ii., p. 311, and present vol., p. 240, n. 1.

[839] _Ib._, vol. ii., p. 318.

[840] _Ib._, p. 381.

[841] _Ib._, p. 319.

[842] _Ib._, p. 318.

[843] Above, vol. iv., p. 298.

[844] Above, vol. iii., p. 45.

[845] _Ib._, p. 359.

[846] _Ib._, p. 79 f.

[847] Above, vol. v., p. 367.

[848] _Ib._, p. 578.

[849] _Ib._, p. 580.

[850] _Ib._, p. 579.

[851] Paulus, _ib._, p. 32.

[852] “Werke,” Erl. ed., 39, p. 250 f. Paulus, _ib._, p. 35.

[853] Above, vol. iii., p. 431.

[854] Denifle, “Luther und Luthertum,”¹ p. 801. Cp. above, vol. v., p.
384, and elsewhere.

[855] Above, vol. ii., p. 324.

[856] Above, vol. v., p. 110.

[857] Vol. ii., p. 13.

[858] Above, vol. v., p. 383.

[859] “Werke,” Erl. ed., 55, p. 156 (“Briefwechsel,” 11, p. 136).

[860] Liborius Magdeburger (Dec. 2, 1536) to the Town Clerk of Zwickau
Johann Roth. Enders, “Luthers Briefwechsel,” _ib._, p. 136, n. 3.

[861] Enders, _ib._

[862] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 171.

[863] _Ib._, p. 180.

[864] Cp. above, vol. iii., p. 44 ff.

[865] Vol. ii., p. 101.

[866] _Ib._

[867] Vol. iii., p. 46.

[868] _Ib._

[869] _Ib._

[870] _Ib._, p. 126.

[871] Weim. ed., 15, p. 218 f.; Erl. ed., 53, p. 255 f.

[872] “Briefwechsel,” 5, p. 117.

[873] Weim. ed., 18, p. 299; Erl. ed., 24², p. 276. Paulus, _ib._, p. 28
f.

[874] Erl. ed., 4², p. 290 f. Paulus, _ib._, p. 30 f.

[875] Letter of July 14, 1528, “Briefwechsel,” 6, p. 299: “_In hac causa
terret me exempli sequela, quam in papistis et ante Christum in Iudœis
videmus.… Idem sequuturum esse timeo et apud nostros._” If on the other
hand they erred on the side of severity in the matter of banishment, the
evil was not so great. Paulus, p. 31.

[876] Paulus, _ib._, p. 29.

[877] _Ib._, p. 31.

[878] “Corp. ref.,” 2, p. 17 _sq._ Paulus, _ib._, p. 32.

[879] Erl. ed., 39, p. 224 ff.

[880] _Ib._, pp. 250, 252, 254. The Commentary was printed in the spring
of 1530.

[881] U. Haussdorff, “Leben Spenglers,” Nuremberg, 1741, p. 190 ff.
Paulus, _ib._, p. 34.

[882] Aug. 3, 1530, “Briefwechsel,” 8, p. 163.

[883] “Corp. ref.,” 4, pp. 737-740. Cp. Paulus, _ib._, p. 41 f.

[884] Printed at Wittenberg in 1536 and signed by Luther, Bugenhagen,
Cruciger and Melanchthon on June 5. Cp. “Briefwechsel,” 10, p. 347;
“Corp. ref.,” 3, p. 195 _sqq._

[885] Vol. 32, 1911, p. 155, in a review of Wappler’s work. For further
details from Wappler and from the valuable studies of W. Köhler see
below, p. 266 ff.

[886] Weim. ed., 32, p. 507; Erl. ed., 43, p. 313.

[887] _Ib._, p. 475=264 f. Paulus, _ib._, p. 45.

[888] Weim. ed., 30, 3, p. 552 f.; Erl. ed., 54, p. 288 f., Letter of
Feb. or the beginning of March, 1532 (“Briefwechsel.” 9, p. 157).

[889] Erl. ed., 1², p. 196 f. (_c._ 1533).

[890] _Ib._, 39, pp. 318-320.

[891] Weim. ed., 18, p. 148; Erl. ed., 30, p. 68.

[892] _Ib._, p. 148 ff.=68 f.

[893] See Wappler, “Die Stellung Kursachsens und des Landgrafen Philipp
von Hessen zur Täuferbewegung,” 1910 (“RGI. Studien und Texte,” ed. J.
Greving), p. 156.

[894] Wappler, _ib._, p. 4.

[895] _Ib._, pp. 12, 36, 85.

[896] P. 204 f.

[897] P. 37 ff., 83 ff.

[898] Wappler, “Inquisition und Ketzerprozesse in Zwickau zur
Reformationszeit,” Leipzig, 1908, p. 28 ff., 70 ff. Paulus, _ib._, p. 316.

[899] Wappler, _ib._, p. 96 ff.

[900] Hasche, “Diplomatische Gesch. Dresdens,” vol. ii., 1817, p. 221.
Paulus, _ib._, p. 317.

[901] Wappler, “Stellung Kursachsens,” p. 242. Paulus, _ib._, p. 319.

[902] Wappler, _ib._, p. 164. Paulus, _ib._, p. 314.

[903] Wappler, _ib._, pp. 155, 234. Paulus, _ib._, p. 311.

[904] To Spalatin, Nov. 11, 1525. This is one of the answers he gave to
opponents who say, “_neminem debere cogi ad fidem et evangelion_,” and
“_principes in externis solum ius habere_.” To the latter he replies:
“_principes cohibent externas abominationes_,” and goes on to add:
“_Cum igitur ipsimet [adversarii] fateantur, in externis rebus esse
ius principum, ipsi sese damnant_.” If they wanted an example let them
remember Christ Who drove the sellers out of the Temple. This he wrote,
relying on the favour which the new Elector had extended to his cause:
“_Nosti quantum princeps iste noster est evangelii studiosus_,” so he
remarks with satisfaction. “Briefwechsel,” 5, p. 271.

[905] In the Visitation Rules of 1527, Sehling, _ib._

[906] Brandenburg, “Moritz von Sachsen,” 1, p. 22 f.

[907] Erl. ed., 57, p. 6.

[908] Commentary on Ps. lxxxii. Erl. ed., 39, p. 257 f.

[909] Memorandum of 1530, Erl. ed., 54, p. 179 f. (“Briefwechsel,” 8, p.
105).

[910] Comm. on Ps. lxxxii., p. 251 f.

[911] _Ib._

[912] _Ib._, p. 252 f. Paulus, _ib._, p. 39.

[913] Above, p. 252, n. 1.

[914] “Briefwechsel,” 10, p. 346.

[915] Comment. on Ps. lxxxii. Erl. ed., 39, p. 250 f.

[916] _Ib._, p. 251 f. Paulus, _ib._, p. 36.

[917] To Albert, Margrave of Brandenburg. “Ein Sendbrief und Vorred der
Dieneren zu Zürich,” Zürich, 1532, A 4b. Paulus, _ib._, p. 48.

[918] Comm. on Ps. lxxxii., _ib._

[919] _Ib._

[920] Above, vol. ii., p. 347.

[921] Vol. iii., p. 390.

[922] _Ib._, p. 392.

[923] Above, vol. v., p. 399.

[924] _Ib._, p. 448.

[925] Above, p. 144.

[926] Erl. ed., 20², p. 555 ff. Aurifaber assures us that he “took
down the sermon from Luther’s lips” and revised it “with diligence” at
Wittenberg. Paulus, _ib._, p. 57 f.—Cp. the intolerant sermon preached at
Halle shortly before, below, p. 274.

[927] Above, vol. iii., p. 39.

[928] Erl. ed., 54, p. 98 (“Briefwechsel,” 7, p. 151).

[929] “Briefwechsel,” _ib._

[930] Weim. ed., 26, p. 223; Erl. ed., 23, p. 45 f.

[931] Weim. ed., 30, 1, p. 349; Erl. ed., 21, p. 7.

[932] Enders, “Briefwechsel,” 9, p. 104, n. 11.

[933] In 1533, undated, “Briefwechsel,” 9, p. 365.

[934] Sehling, 1, p. 195.

[935] “Ordnungen,” etc., Dresden, 1573, Bl. 132, 146. Paulus, _ib._, p.
318.

[936] Cp. the Rescript of Sep. 1, 1623. Paulus, _ib._

[937] Hannoviæ, 1652, p. 861. Cp. _ib._, p. 858 _sqq._ Paulus, _ib._, n.
4.

[938] “Practica nova,” I, q. 44, n. 45: “_Usu ac consuetudine saxonica
obtinuit, eiusmodi hæreticos seditiosos aut blasphemantes igne comburi_.”
Paulus, _ib._, p. 323, n. 7.

[939] Paulus, _ib._, p. 49 against O. Ritschl.

[940] C. E. Förstemann, “Liber Decanorum facultatis theol. acad.
Vitebergensis,” 1838, p. 152 _sqq._

[941] “Gesch. des gelehrten Unterrichtes,” 1², p. 212.

[942] “Briefwechsel,” 13, p. 57.

[943] _Ib._, p. 35, April 18, 1540.

[944] Luther to Myconius at Gotha, Oct. 24, 1535, _ib._, 10, p. 248.

[945] “Corp. ref.,” 23, p. cvii. _sq._

[946] P. 25 f.

[947] P. 29.

[948] P. 38.

[949] Köhler, “Theol. Literaturztng.,” 1906, p. 211.

[950] “Ref. und Ketzerprozess,” p. 23.

[951] Cp. above, p. 252.

[952] “Stellung Kursachsens,” p. 123 f.

[953] _Ib._, p. 125.

[954] _Ib._, p. 126 f.

[955] “Die Inquisition,” p. 70 f.

[956] _Ib._, p. 69 ff.

[957] “Inquisition,” etc., p. 6 f.

[958] “Studien und Skizzen zur Gesch. der RZ.,” 1874, p. 20.

[959] “Die Reformation und die älteren Reformparteien,” 1885, p. 446.
Paulus, _ib._, p. 314.

[960] “Die rechtliche Stellung der evangel. Kirche in Deutschland,” 1893,
p. 90.

[961] “Lehrb. der DG.,” 3⁴, p. 816.

[962] “Andreas Bodenstein von Carlstadt,” 2, 1905, pp. 138, 187.

[963] “Literarisches Zentralblatt,” 1905, No. 36.

[964] “Deutsche Literaturztng.,” 1896, No. 2, on Paulus, “Über die
Reformatoren und die Gewissensfreiheit,” 1895.

[965] “Deutsche Zeitschr. für KR.,” 1896, p. 138.

[966] Neander, “Das Eine und Mannigfaltige des christl. Lebens,” 1840, p.
224.

[967] “Ursachen, warumb die altgleubige catholische Christen bei dem
alten waren Christenthumb verharren sollen,” Cologne, 1589, p. 354.

[968] “Kirche und Kirchen,” 1861, p. 68.

[969] _Ib._, p. 50 f.

[970] Above, vol. iii., pp. 358 ff., 438 ff.

[971] _Ib._, p. 358.

[972] _Ib._, Cp. Paulus, _ib._, p. 74 f.

[973] “Corp. ref.,” 10, p. 851 _sqq._: “Quæstio, an politica potestas
debeat tollere hæreticos.”

[974] “Zeitschr. f. Rechtsgesch.,” 8, 1869, p. 264.

[975] “Die Theol. der Gegenwart,” 3, 3, 1909, p. 49.

[976] To Camerarius, “Corp. ref.,” 2, p. 334.

[977] M. Mayer, “Spengleriana,” 1830, p. 70 ff. Paulus, _ib._, p. 33.
Luther’s “booklet” to which his opponents appealed is the letter of July,
1524, to the Saxon Princes, quoted above, vol. ii., p. 365.

[978] Paulus, _ib._, p. 143.

[979] _Ib._, p. 144.

[980] P. 156 ff.

[981] P. 166.

[982] Paulus, pp. 223, 226.

[983] Cp. Kawerau in Möller’s “KG.,” 3³, p. 471 ff.

[984] _Ib._, p. 474.

[985] To Martin Frecht at Ulm, “Corp. ref.,” 2, p. 955. Cp. his letter to
Buchholzer, Aug. 5, 1558, against Schwenckfeld, _ib._, 9, p. 579. Paulus,
_ib._, p. 78.

[986] “Corp. ref.,” 3, p. 983. Cp. on Franck’s objections to compulsion,
A. Hegler, “Geist und Schrift bei S. Franck,” 1892, p. 260 ff.—See also
below, p. 289.

[987] Wappler, “Die Stellung Kursachsens,” pp. 155, 223, 234. Paulus
_ib._, p. 311.

[988] Paulus, _ib._, p. 75. Cp. vol. iii., p. 358.

[989] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 274, 1542. Cp. vol. iii., p. 409.

[990] Feb. 4, 1538, to Luther and “_Domini in Christo et venerandi et
amandi_,” i.e. the other theologians at Wittenberg, “Briefwechsel,” 11,
p. 328: “_Parata est paulo post satis feliciter per Christum ordinatio
ecclesiarum totius regni Daniæ a sereniss. rege_,” etc. “_Per totum
regnum Daniæ regnat Christus in omnibus ecclesiis_,” etc.

[991] See vol. iii., p. 413.

[992] See J. C. v. Dreyhaupt, “Ausführliche Beschreibung des
Saal-Kreyses,” 1, 1749, p. 982 ff. “Briefwechsel des Jonas,” ed. Kawerau,
2, p. 1. Paulus, _ib._, p. 80 ff.

[993] On this sermon of Jan. 26, 1546, see below, xxxix., 3.

[994] Dreyhaupt, _ib._, p. 210 ff. “Briefwechsel des Jonas,” 2, p. 191.

[995] To Lang the Erfurt preacher, “Briefwechsel des Jonas,” 2, p.
224: Halle, with the whole of its Church, had submitted to the Elector
“_beneficio altissimi Dei … a cultu Baal, a fanis idololatricis et omni
idololatria tandem expurgata_.”

[996] Above, p. 240 f.

[997] _Ib._ Cp. his letter to the Elector, Oct. 1, 1525, Kolde,
“Friedrich der Weise,” 1881, p. 72. Paulus, _ib._, p. 11.

[998] To Philip of Hesse, Jan. 15, 1532. Wappler. “Die Stellung
Kursachsens,” p. 156.

[999] His letter of 1533, above, p. 255 f.

[1000] “Verlegung,” etc. (Wittenberg, 1536), Bl. A 4a, E 3a. Paulus,
_ib._, p. 71 f.

[1001] “Prozess,” etc., Worms (1557). Paulus, _ib._, p. 72 f.

[1002] “Ob eine weltliche Obrigkeit … möge die Wiedertäufer … richten
lassen,” Marburg, 1528. Paulus, _ib._, p. 115, correcting Enders,
“Briefwechsel Luthers.”

[1003] Melanchthon, Feb., 1530, to a friend, “Corp. ref.,” 2, p. 18.

[1004] F. L. Heyd, “Ulrich, Herzog zu Würtemberg,” 3, 1844, p. 172.
Paulus, _ib._, p. 123.

[1005] Chr. Besold, “Virginum sacrarum monimenta,” etc., 1636, p. 237
_sqq._ Janssen-Pastor, “Hist. of the German People” (Engl. trans.), 7,
pp. 80-90.

[1006] “Von den Worten Christi, Matt. xiii. (v. 30),” no place, 1541, Bl.
C 1 to D 3, Paulus, p. 92 f.

[1007] Cp. Paulus, _ib._, pp. 86-91.

[1008] Cp. _ib._, pp. 100-115, with extracts from A. Wrede, “Die
Einführung der Reformation im Lüneburgischen durch Herzog Ernst den
Bekenner,” 1887. Cp. Wrede, “Ernst der Bekenner,” 1888.

[1009] “Responsio de missa, matrimonio et iure magistratus in
religionem,” Argentorati, 1537. 2nd ed. 1540. Extracts from the latter in
Paulus, p. 129 ff.

[1010] C. Hagan, _ib._, quoted p. 153.

[1011] Paulus, _ib._, p. 155.

[1012] P. v. Stetten, “Gesch. der Stadt Augsburg,” 1, 1743, p. 445.

[1013] Paulus, _ib._, p. 160.

[1014] On Bucer, cp. Paulus, _ib._, pp. 142-175.

[1015] Janssen, “Hist. of the German People” (Engl. Trans.), 7, p. 91.

[1016] _Ib._

[1017] To Anton Lauterbach, May 7, 1542, “Briefe,” ed. De Wette, 5, p.
468. The persons in question had already frequently communicated under
both kinds as a sign of their entry into Lutheranism, but had passed
unfavourable criticisms on certain measures of Luther’s. He commissions
Lauterbach: “_Ubi etiam pœnituerint, hoc exigendum est, ut hactenus a
nobis gesta et in posterum gerenda probent. Alioqui quæ erit pœnitentia,
si nostra facta damnaverint hoc est sua omnia per fictam pœnitentiam
stabilierint?_”

[1018] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 3, p. 322.

[1019] Deut. xiii. 5 ff., above, p. 273.

[1020] Erl. ed., 61, p. 7, “Tischreden.”

[1021] _Ib._, p. 26.

[1022] P. 8 f.

[1023] Cp. above, vol. ii., p. 377.

[1024] “Werke,” _ib._, p. 26.

[1025] P. 30.

[1026] P. 11.

[1027] P. 27 ff.

[1028] P. 31.

[1029] P. 14.

[1030] See e.g. the next quotation.

[1031] Weim. ed., 19, p. 609 f.; Erl. ed., 38, p. 445 f., “Vier
trostliche Psalmen … an die Königyn zu Hungern.”

[1032] _Ib._, p. 585=414.

[1033] _Ib._, Weim. ed., 7, p. 394; Erl. ed., 24², p. 112.

[1034] _Ib._, 19², p. 273.

[1035] _Ib._, 38, p. 177 f.

[1036] _Ib._, Weim. ed., 17, 1, p. 235; Erl. ed., 39, p. 114.

[1037] _Ib._, 10², p. 193 f.

[1038] Mathesius, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 83.

[1039] Erl. ed., 61, p. 17.

[1040] Cp. Weim. ed., 8, p. 684; Erl. ed., 22, p. 56.

[1041] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 3, p. 321.

[1042] Erl. ed., 61, p. 5.

[1043] _Ib._, Weim. ed., 8, p. 683; Erl. ed., 22, p. 52 f.

[1044] _Ib._, 11², p. 267.

[1045] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 3, p. 323.

[1046] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 295.

[1047] _Ib._, p. 317.

[1048] _Ib._, p. 295.

[1049] Erl. ed., 61, p. 21.

[1050] _Ib._, p. 1.

[1051] Cp. above, vol. iii., p. 153 ff.

[1052] Cp. above, vol. iii., p. 162.

[1053] Letter of Aug. 21, 1524, Weim. ed., 15, p. 240 (“Briefwechsel,” 4,
p. 377 f.; “Briefe,” ed. De Wette, 2, p. 538).

[1054] Above, vol. iii., p. 154.

[1055] “Briefe,” 6, p. 199 f. See above, vol. iv., p. 292.

[1056] “Corp. ref.,” 3, p. 549.

[1057] Erl. ed., 60, p. 318 f. “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 156 _sq._

[1058] See above, vol. iii., p. 234, n. 1.

[1059] Ed. Const. v. Höfler, “SB. der böhm. Gesellschaft der
Wissenschaften,” 1892, p. 79 f.

[1060] P. 123 Lemnius says the following of Luther’s private life:
“_Dum se episcopum iactitat evangelicum, qui fit, ut ille parum sobrie
vivat? Vino enim ciboque sese ingurgitare solet suosque adulatores et
assentatores secum habet, habet suam Venerem ac fere nihil prorsus illi
deesse potest, quod ad voluptatem ac libidinem pertinet._” Cp. above,
vol. iii., p. 274.

[1061] “Apologia,” p. 136.

[1062] See above, vol. v., pp. 169 ff., 250 ff.

[1063] Erl. ed., 61, p. 16

[1064] _Ib._, p. 7 f.

[1065] P. 8 f.

[1066] P. 17.

[1067] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” ed. Kroker, p. 249.

[1068] _Ib._, p. 239.

[1069] P. 167.

[1070] P. 90.

[1071] P. 154.

[1072] P. 253.

[1073] P. 109.

[1074] P. 166.

[1075] P. 403.

[1076] Erl. ed., 61, p. 19 f.

[1077] _Ib._, p. 22.

[1078] P. 24.

[1079] P. 25.

[1080] Above, vol. ii., p. 377.

[1081] Erl. ed., 63, p. 415, in the Preface to the 2nd part of his German
Works (compiled from his writings). Cp. vol. 28, pp. 64, 89.

[1082] “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p. 529 (1534).

[1083] Weim. ed., 30, 3, p. 407; Erl. ed., 63, p. 303 (1531).

[1084] Erl. ed., 49, p. 163 f.

[1085] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 17.

[1086] “_Ecclesiæ ratio diligenter habenda est._” _Ib._

[1087] To Melanchthon, July 21, 1530, “Briefwechsel,” 8, p. 128: a bishop
has no ecclesiastical authority, no “_potestas statuendi quidquam … quia
ecclesia est libera et domina_.”

[1088] Weim. ed., 6, p. 300 f.; Erl. ed., 27, p. 107. Cp. _ib._, p. 296
f.=102; the Church is chiefly “inward, spiritual Christianity,” though
she, like the soul in the body, has also an external existence of a kind;
P. 297 f.=103: She is governed only by Christ. “Who can tell who really
believes or not?”

[1089] Weim. ed., 7, p. 719: “Opp. lat. var.,” 5, p. 309 (1521): “_Dicet
autem, si ecclesia tota est in spiritu et res omnino spiritualis, nemo
ergo nosse poterit, ubi sit ulla eius pars in toto orbe_.”

[1090] Erl. ed., 25², p. 440 (1539).

[1091] Weim. ed., 8, p. 419; “Opp. lat. var.,” 6, p. 127 (1522): “_Quis
ecclesiam nobis monstrabit, quum sit occulta in Spiritu et solum
credatur? Sicut dicimus: Credo ecclesiam sanctam._”

[1092] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 20.

[1093] Köstlin, Art. Kirche, in “R.E. f. prot. Th.,” 10³, 1901.

[1094] Weim. ed., 6, p. 301; Erl. ed., 27, p. 108.

[1095] Cp. the passage quoted by Möhler, “Symbolik,” § 49, p. 427, from
“De servo arbitrio.”

[1096] Erl. ed., 25², p. 416.

[1097] Cp. the theological doctrine of the distinction between the body
and soul of the Church. H. Hurter, “Theol. dogm. Comp.,” 1¹¹, 1903, p.
259. Tract iii., art. 2.

[1098] Erl. ed., 25², p. 418.

[1099] _Ib._, p. 419.

[1100] P. 420.

[1101] P. 421 ff.

[1102] For Bellarmine, see “Controversiæ,” Colon., 2, 1615, 1. 3. “De
ecclesia militante,” p. 65 _sq._

[1103] Cp. above, p. 150 ff.

[1104] Bellarmine, l. c., p. 65.

[1105] Hurter, “Theol. dogm. Comp.,” p. 227.

[1106] Erl. ed., 25², p. 434.

[1107] “Symbolik,” §49, p. 424 f.

[1108] Cp. “Apol. conf. August.,” art. 7. Müller-Kolde,¹⁰ p. 153.

[1109] The Church, according to his explanation of the article of the
Creed in question, is “the assembly of the Saints, i.e. an assembly
composed only of saints,” not an assembly of all those who have been
baptised. Cp. Köstlin, “Luthers Theol.,” 2², pp. 257, 278.

[1110] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 21.

[1111] Erl. ed., 66, p. 440 f.

[1112] Art. “Kirche,” in “RE. f. prot. Th.,” 10³, 1901, pp. 337, 349.

[1113] Cp. Köstlin, “Luthers Theol.,” 2², p. 262, with the quotation from
Erl. ed., 9², p. 285 f.: “In her each one must be found, in her each
one must be enrolled, whoso wishes to be saved and to come to God, and,
outside of her, no one will be saved.”

[1114] Köstlin, _ib._, p. 269.

[1115] _Ib._, p. 169.

[1116] See above, vol. ii., pp. 267 f., 287 f.

[1117] Prop. 23.

[1118] Prop. 24.

[1119] See above vol. i., p. 371.

[1120] “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 224.

[1121] See above, vol. iii., p. 143 ff.

[1122] And yet he declares later (“Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 15) that
he would gladly have acknowledged the Pope (i.e. sacrificed his doctrine
of the Church) “_modo evangelium docuisset_,” i.e. if the Pope had agreed
to his doctrine of Justification. Indeed at the end of Feb., 1519, he
says, in the “Unterricht auff etlich Artikell” (see below, p. 307) “for
no kind of sin or abuse” is it lawful to begin a schism. Weim. ed., 2, p.
72; Erl. ed., 24², p. 10. Cp. W. Walther, “Für Luther,” 1906, p. 20.

[1123] “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 316.

[1124] To Spalatin, Jan. 14, 1519, “Briefwechsel,” 1, p. 352; he adds:
“_Non ligat nec nocet ira Decretalium, quando tuetur misericordia
Christi_.”

[1125] Weim. ed., 2, p. 183 ff. “Opp. lat. var.,” 3, p. 296 _sqq._

[1126] Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 250.—Other statements made by Luther at
this time must be read in the light of the above theory, e.g. his words
in the “Comm. on Gal.”: “As widely, broadly, and deeply as possible do
I distinguish between the Roman Church and the Roman Curia.” “They must
know that they are mistaken when they cry out that I do not hold with the
Roman Church; I who love so truly not only the Roman Church but the whole
Church of Christ.” “Comm. on Gal.,” ed. Irmischer, 3, p. 134 _sq._ Cp. W.
Walther, “Für Luther,” 1906, p. 24.

[1127] Weim. ed., 2, pp. 399, 404 ff., 427, 429; “Opp. lat. var.,” 3, pp.
240, 244 _sqq._, 281, 284. Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 255 ff.

[1128] For his earlier days cp. the passage in “Freiheyt dess Sermons
Bepstlichen Ablass belangend” (1518), Weim. ed., 1, p. 384; Erl. ed.,
27, p. 12: “If already so many and thousands more, and all of them holy
Doctors had held this or that, yet they are of no account as compared
with a single verse of Holy Writ, as St. Paul says, Gal. (i. 8): ‘Even
though an angel from heaven,’ etc.”

[1129] Weim. ed., 2, p. 431; “Opp. lat. var.,” 3, p. 287.

[1130] _Ib._, p. 183 ff.=296 _sqq._ (Thesis 13).

[1131] Denzinger-Bannwart, “Enchiridion,” p. 259.

[1132] Cp. Möhler, “Symbolik,” §44, p. 399.

[1133] Cp. above, vol. iv., p. 387 ff. and vol. ii., p. 368.

[1134] Above, p. 237.

[1135] Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 256, from Weim. ed., 2, p. 430; “Opp. lat.
var.,” 2, p. 285.

[1136] Cp. Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 349. Augustine, however, is speaking of
truth in general.

[1137] See above, vol. iv., p. 403 ff.

[1138] Cp. Möhler, “Symbolik,” §46, p. 409, with the following quotation
from Luther’s “De captiv. Babylon.”: “_Christianis nihil nullo iure posse
imponi legum, sive ab hominibus, sive ab angelis, nisi quantum volunt;
liberi enim sumus ab omnibus_.”

[1139] Cp. Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 398. The work is printed in Weim. ed.,
7, p. 704 ff.; “Opp. lat. var.,” 5, p. 286 _sqq._

[1140] Weim. ed., 12, p. 169 ff.; “Opp. lat. var.,” 6, p. 494 _sqq._

[1141] Cp. the passages quoted by Möhler, “Symbolik,” §45, p. 405, n.
2: “_Christianus ita certus est, quid credere et non credere debeat, ut
etiam pro ipso moriatur, aut saltem mori paratus sit_.” Thus to teach as
a priest involved nothing very dreadful, “_cum verbum Dei hic luceat et
iubeat, simul necessitas animarum cogat_.”

[1142] “Symbolik,” §45, p. 409.

[1143] _Ib._, §45, p. 406.

[1144] _Ib._, §44, p. 399.

[1145] Art. Kirche, “RE. f. prot. Th.,” 10³, p. 337.

[1146] Cp. Möhler, “Symbolik,” §49, p. 427.

[1147] Erl. ed., 26², p. 188.

[1148] Köstlin in the “RE. f. prot. Th.,” 7², p. 716. Omitted in the 3rd
ed.

[1149] “Christl. Welt,” ed. Rade, 1, 1902, No. 38.

[1150] Weim. ed., 2, p. 69 ff; Erl. ed., 24², p. 5 ff.

[1151] _Ib._,6, p. 477 ff.; 9, p. 302 ff.=12 ff.

[1152] _Ib._, 2, p. 72 f.=24², p. 10 f.

[1153] _Ib._, 6, p. 480=24², p. 13. Cp. Weim. ed., 6, p. 303 f.; 9, p.
476 f.

[1154] _Ib._, 10, 2, p. 232=28, p. 350.

[1155] _Ib._, p. 232=351.

[1156] Weim. ed., 30, 3, p. 86 ff.; Erl. ed., 24², p. 337 ff. “Corp.
ref.,” 26, p. 151 _sqq._ Kolde, “Die Augsburgische Konfession,” p. 123 ff.

[1157] Vol. ii., p. 179.

[1158] Cp. Möhler, “Symbolik,” §49, p. 428 n.

[1159] “Confessio August.,” art. 7. “Symbolische Bücher,” ed. Müller
Kolde, p. 40.

[1160] “Apol. confess.,” art. 7, “Symbol. Bücher,” p. 152.

[1161] Art. 14, “Symbol. Bücher,” p. 42.

[1162] “De potestate et iurisdict. episcoporum” (by Melanchthon).
“Symbol. Bücher,” p. 341 f.

[1163] Erl. ed., 31, p. 348 f. (1533).

[1164] _Ib._, Weim. ed., 19, p. 75; Erl. ed., 22, p. 230.

[1165] In “Von den Schlüsseln,” 1530, Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 435 ff.; Erl.
ed., 31, p. 126 ff. Cp. Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 222 f.

[1166] See above, vol. ii., p. 112.

[1167] “Symbolik,” §47, p. 416.

[1168] Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 398.

[1169] “Christlicher Gegenbericht,” 1561, Bl. Y III´. (The copy in the
Munich State Library contains the autograph dedication of Staphylus to
Joh. Jacob Fugger.) Also in the “Apologia,” by Laur. Surius, Colon, 1562,
p. 353. Cp. Bellarminus, “Controversiæ,” t. 2 (Colon, 1615), p. 58.

[1170] “Centur.,” 1, lib. 1, c. 4, col. 170, in Bellarmin, _ib._ In
recent times Protestant theologians have divided on the subject, some
favouring more the visible, others the invisible Church. The latter are
the more logical. Cp. G. Kawerau’s statement: “We may dispute as to
whether the term invisible ‘Church’ is well chosen or not, but what it
means is clear; for what else is it but a decided protest against every
attempt to attribute within the domain of the Evangel, to a visible,
ecclesiastical, legally constituted society the attributes of the Church
in which we believe? Protestantism by its very nature cannot make of its
outward edifice an ‘_ecclesia proprie dicta_.’” “Über Berechtigung und
Bedeutung des landesherrlichen Kirchenregiments,” 1887, p. 12.

[1171] See above, p. 265.

[1172] Testimonial of May 17, 1540, “Briefwechsel,” 13, p. 57 f.

[1173] Testimonial of April 18, 1540, _ib._ p. 35 f.

[1174] Above, vol. iii., p. 41.

[1175] See above, vol. v., p. 250.

[1176] Erl. ed., 43, p. 281. Cp. Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 102.

[1177] Above, vol. v., p. 191, n. 4.

[1178] _Ib._

[1179] Above, vol. v., p. 170.

[1180] _Ib._

[1181] _Ib._, p. 171.

[1182] _Ib._

[1183] Cp. above, vol. v., p. 138 f.

[1184] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 26.

[1185] Above, vol. v., p. 180.

[1186] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 47.

[1187] Aug. 26, 1529, “Briefwechsel,” 7, p. 151.

[1188] Köstlin, Art. “Kirche” in the “RE. f. prot. Th. und Kirche,” vol.
10³.

[1189] Above, vol. v., p. 180.

[1190] Cp. “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 20: “_Lutherus dicebat de usu
et necessitate consistorii, quod lapsam et pendentem ecclesiam iterum
fulciret_,” etc.

[1191] Weim. ed., 30, 3, p. 520; Erl. ed., 31, p. 217, in the writing
“Von den Schleichern und Winckelpredigern” (1532), Luther directs
“officials, judges and whoever has to rule” to ask the teachers who
were under suspicion: “Who has sent you?” “Why are you after setting up
something new?” “If this work was done with zeal it would be of great
profit.… Otherwise, unless they insisted on the call or command, there
would come to be no Church left.”—Concerning the provision for the
Church’s needs Luther speaks of the “duty” of the Elector to see in some
way that the parsonages were adequately supported “in order that the
Universities and divine worship be not hindered from want, from the needs
of the poor belly.” Erl. ed., 53, p. 331.

[1192] Köstlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 552.

[1193] “Luther, eine Skizze,” p. 50; Art. “Luther,” “KL.,” 8², p. 338.

[1194] Weim. ed., 30, 3, p. 625 f.; Erl. ed., 48, p. 358.

[1195] _Ib._, Erl. ed., 50, p. 8.

[1196] _Ib._, 46, p. 226.

[1197] Luther says, for instance, that, in earlier days, “Emperors
and Kings had commanded and instituted public worship in their lands”
(Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 42).

[1198] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 42.

[1199] To Albert Count of Mansfeld, Oct. 5, 1536, Erl. ed., 55, p. 147
(“Briefwechsel,” 11, p. 90).

[1200] We may quote the remarkable letter to the Town Council of Zwickau,
dated Sep. 27, 1536, Erl. ed., 55, p. 146 (“Briefwechsel,” 11, p. 88):
“My feeling is always that the two rules, the spiritual and the secular,
or Church and Town-Hall, are not to intermingle, otherwise the one
devours the other and both perish as happened in Popery.” Cp. on the
other hand, above, vol. v., p. 580: “everything must be equal and made to
intermingle whether it be termed spiritual or secular.”

[1201] To Daniel Cresser, parson at Dresden, Oct. 22, 1543, “Briefe,” 5,
p. 596.

[1202] Weim. ed., 6, p. 409; Erl. ed., 21, p. 284.

[1203] Mejer (†) und Sehling, “Kirchengewalt,” in the “RE. f. prot.
Th.,”³. Cp. the art. “Kirchenregiment”: “The Church, as a body separate
from the State, is something modern (?) and quite unknown to Luther.”

[1204] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 22.

[1205] See Emil Richter, “Gesch. der evangel. Kirchenverfassung in
Deutschland,” 1851, p. 64.

[1206] Erl. ed., 25², p. 424 f.

[1207] _Ib._, Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 424 f.; Erl. ed., 31, p. 122 f.

[1208] To Melanchthon, July 21, 1530, “Briefwechsel,” 8, p. 129 f.

[1209] H. Hermelink, “Der Toleranzgedanke im Reformationszeitalter”
(“Schriften des Vereins f. RG.,” Hft., 98, pp. 37-70), 1908, p. 49.

[1210] _Ib._, p. 66, n.

[1211] Above, vol. v., p. 565.

[1212] See Paulsen, above, vol. v., p. 57.

[1213] Janssen, “Hist. of the German People” (Engl. Trans.), vol. vi., p.
148.

[1214] Köstlin refers to the same thing when he says: “The fact that
there was originally in Christianity a well defined office of overseers
was either not recognised by him at all, or at least not adequately.”
Art. “Kirche,” “R.E. f. prot. Th.,” 10³.

[1215] Scholia to Romans, p. 248 f. Cp. above, vol. i., p. 323.

[1216] Above, p. 297.

[1217] Memo. of Aug. 22(?), 1536, “Briefwechsel,” 11, p. 40 ff.

[1218] “An die Christen zu Erfurt,” Jan.-Feb., 1527, Erl. ed., 53, p. 411
(“Briefwechsel,” 6, p. 15).

[1219] Above, vol. ii., p. 360.

[1220] Sep. 30, 1533, Erl. ed., 55, p. 25 (“Briefwechsel,” 9, p. 341).

[1221] Cp. above, vol. ii., p. 336 ff.

[1222] In the Notes to the memorandum of 1533, “Briefwechsel,” 9, p. 342.

[1223] To Daniel Cresser, Oct. 22, 1543, “Briefe,” 5, p. 596. See the
text, above, vol. v., p. 182.

[1224] Erl. ed., 26², p. 124.

[1225] Cp. above, p. 320 n. 1.

[1226] Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 130 f.; Erl. ed., 31, p. 58 f.

[1227] Erl. ed., 65, p. 177.

[1228] See above, vol. ii., p. 297 ff.

[1229] To the Elector Johann, Aug. 26, 1530, Erl. ed., 54, p. 188
(“Briefwechsel,” 8, 215).

[1230] To Spalatin, Nov. 11, 1525, “Briefwechsel,” 5, p. 272.

[1231] Köstlin, “Luthers Theol.,” 2¹, pp. 554, 563. In the 2nd ed. the
chapter has been altered and not always for the better.

[1232] _Ib._, p. 563.

[1233] Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 339 f.; Erl. ed., 24², p. 396 ff.

[1234] _Ib._, p. 338-396.

[1235] Joh. Mensing, “Gründtliche Unterrichte, was eyn frommer Christen
von der heyligen Kirche … halten sol,” 1528, in Paulus, “Die deutschen
Dominikaner,” 1903, p. 25.

[1236] Erl. ed., 26², p. 66.

[1237] Köstlin, “Luthers Theol.,” 2¹, p. 546.

[1238] Erl. ed., 26², p. 66.

[1239] “Digamy” as a canonical hindrance to ordination is founded on the
prescription of St. Paul, 1 Tim. iii. 2, 12. For the history of this
impediment see Phillips, “Kirchenrecht,” 1, p. 519 ff.

[1240] Erl. ed., 25², p. 427.

[1241] _Ib._, p. 428.

[1242] Erl. ed., 26², p. 45 f.

[1243] _Ib._, p. 46.

[1244] _Ib._, p. 43. This, some years later, was to form the frontispiece
of his book “Wider das Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft.”

[1245] Cp. what he says elsewhere: “The Church is an assembly of the
people which is founded on the invisible. It is the ungodly who see in
the Church nothing but misery, weakness, scandal and sin. The wise of
this world take offence at her look because she is subject to scandals
and divisions; they dream of a holy, pure and undefiled Church, the
Divine Dove. It is true that, in God’s sight, the Church does so appear,
but to the eyes of men she resembles her bridegroom Christ Who according
to Isaias liii., seemed torn, bruised, spit upon, crucified, mocked at”
(“Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 14).—Luther was perfectly aware of the
works of holiness by which the Catholic Church is distinguished, her
penitential practices and life of prayer. Speaking of this he is fond of
depreciating it as something external and declaring: “Hence we must speak
differently of the matter and learn to know that the Christian Church is
holy, not in herself nor in this life, but in Christ; a holiness by grace
is indeed received here, but it is completed in the next world.” Weim.
ed., 30, 3, p. 408 f.; Erl. ed., 63, p. 304 f. Preface to Crossner’s
“Sermon von der Kirche,” 1531.

[1246] Erl. ed., 26², p. 55.

[1247] P. 66.

[1248] P. 55.

[1249] These errors constituted, according to Luther, a “flood of all
kinds of human doctrine, lies, errors, idolatry and abominations,”
“countless devilish dens of murderers in which the welfare of souls
suffers gruesomely” (Erl. ed., 31, p. 336 f.).

[1250] _Ib._, 26², p. 53. Cp. _ib._, 31, p. 337: “The Church, or
Christendom, has remained and will stand, this is undoubtedly true.”

[1251] Above, p. 330 n. 3. Paulus, _ib._, p. 24.

[1252] Köstlin’s summary, “Luther’s Theol.,” 2¹, p. 552.

[1253] Erl. ed., 31, p. 333.

[1254] _Ib._, p. 332.

[1255] _Ib._, p. 334.

[1256] _Ib._, p. 332.

[1257] Cp. Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 552: “While he … repeatedly declared,
that, in spite of the Divine promises, Christendom had fallen into error
on certain points, he could never be induced to admit this of the article
of the Presence of the Body [of Christ in the Sacrament].”

[1258] Erl. ed., 31, p. 339. Elsewhere he likewise admits, that, in the
olden Church and particularly in the convents “there lived many great
saints”; it was true that they, “the elect of God,” had been led astray,
“yet they were at last delivered and made their escape through faith in
Jesus Christ.” Weim. ed., 26, p. 504; Erl. ed., 30, p. 366 (1528).

[1259] Erl. ed., 26², p. 46 f.

[1260] _Ib._, p. 43.

[1261] “_Augustinus voluit scribere iudicanda non credenda, sicut alius
locus eiusdem scriptoris testatur: Nolo meis scriptis plus credi_,” etc.
(“Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 17). Cp. vol. iv., p. 400.

[1262] “_Ecclesia verbo Dei generatur, alitur, nutritur, roboratur_”
(Erl. ed., 25², p. 420).

[1263] Mensing, in Paulus, _ib._, p. 25.

[1264] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, pp. 13-25: “_Ecclesia, quæ regnum
Christi dicitur_.”

[1265] Erl. ed., 26², p. 172 ff., “Wider das Bapstum zu Rom vom Teuffel
gestifft,” 1545.

[1266] As early as the Leipzig Disputation Luther had been obliged to
have recourse to the explanation, that by the rock was meant either the
faith Peter had confessed, or else Christ Himself. Köstlin-Kawerau, 1,
245, remarks on this: “We cannot honestly deny its weakness.”

[1267] “Das Matthäusevangelium und seine Parallelen,” Halle, 1876, p. 393.

[1268] “Zeitschr. f. wissensch. Theol.,” ed. Hilgenfeld, 1878, p.
115.—H. A. Meyer, “Kritisch-exegetisches Handb. über das Evangelium des
Matthäus,”⁶ Göttingen, 1876, says of Matt. xvi. 18 f.: “There is no doubt
that the primacy among the Apostles is here bestowed on Peter.”—Schelling
wrote (“Philosophie der Offenbarung,” 2, Stuttgart. 1858, p. 301):
“These words of Christ (Matt. xvi. 18 f.) are conclusive to all eternity
as to the primacy of St. Peter among the Apostles; it requires all the
blindness of party spirit to fail to see this or to give them any other
meaning.”

[1269] P. 185.

[1270] Above, p. 305.

[1271] P. 188.

[1272] “Briefe,” ed. De Wette, 5, p. 638.

[1273] See vol. iv., p. 329. Cp. vol. iii., p. 436 f.

[1274] Jan. 9, 1541, “Briefe,” 5, p. 327.

[1275] Dec. 2, 1544, “Briefe,” 5, p. 701.

[1276] To Wenceslaus Link, Jan. 17, 1545, “Briefe,” 5, p. 714.

[1277] May 7, 1545, “Briefe,” 5, p. 737.

[1278] _Ib._, p. 735.

[1279] P. 733.

[1280] P. 737.

[1281] P. 738.

[1282] P. 739.

[1283] See below, p. 355 ff.

[1284] “Briefe,” 5, p. 741.

[1285] _Ib._, p. 742.

[1286] P. 743.

[1287] _Ib._, 6, p. 379.

[1288] _Ib._, 5, p. 380.

[1289] P. 739.

[1290] P. 745.

[1291] P. 746.

[1292] P. 746.

[1293] P. 750.

[1294] Pp. 744, 750 f.

[1295] P. 751.

[1296] P. 754. To Ratzeberger, Court Physician to the Elector, Aug.
6, 1545: “_credo, nos esse tubam illam novissimam, qua præparatur e
præcurritur adventus Christi_.” Cp. above, vol. v., p. 239.

[1297] P. 740.

[1298] See below, p. 352.

[1299] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 606.

[1300] To Amsdorf, June 15, 1545, “Briefe,” 5, p. 743.

[1301] “Corp. ref.,” 5, p. 513. Cp. also the passage quoted above, vol.
v., p. 237.

[1302] For the breaking off of the sermons in 1530 see above, p. 168. We
read in the “Historien” of Mathesius, that Luther “In [15]39 said wildly
that he would never again get up in the pulpit.”

[1303] “Briefe,” 5, p. 752 f.

[1304] On Catherine’s position at Wittenberg the following words speak
volumes: “After my death the four elements [Faculties] at Wittenberg
will most likely not put up with you, hence it would be better that what
there is to do were done during my lifetime.” Luther was right in his
anticipations. After his decease “the sad fate of a poor parson’s widow
was not spared her. In countless petitions to the King of Denmark, ‘Dr.
Martin’s widow’ had year by year to beg for support now that ‘everyone
looks at me askance and no one comes to my assistance.’” Hausrath,
“Luthers Leben,” 2, p. 497 f.

[1305] Cp. Cruciger, “Corp. ref.,” 5, p. 313.

[1306] Ratzeberger, “Gesch.,” p. 125.

[1307] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 608. What Aurifaber relates in the German
Table-Talk of a conversation of Luther’s on the bigamy of Philip of Hesse
“at Leipzig in 1545 during a convivial gathering” (Erl. ed., 61, p.
302) rests on a false chronology and only repeats a conversation which
took place much earlier. For the incorrectness of the date given, see
Cristiani in the “Revue des questions historiques,” 91, 1912, p. 113.

[1308] “Briefwechsel,” ed. Burkhardt, p. 482 f.

[1309] In Latin in “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, p. 480 _sqq._ German according to
the Wittenberg original ed. of 1545, in Erl. ed., 65, p. 170 ff.

[1310] See above, vol. iii., p. 268.

[1311] Theses 31 and 32, p. 173.

[1312] Cp. Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 609.

[1313] Letter of Jan. 17, 1546, “Briefe,” 5, p. 778.

[1314] See vol. iii., p. 147.

[1315] “Briefe,” 5, p. 761

[1316] Above, vol. v., p. 394 f.

[1317] Cp. “Theol. Stud. und Krit.,” 1894, p. 771 f.

[1318] “Briefe,” 5, p. 764 f.

[1319] Aug. 19, 1545, _ib._, p. 757.

[1320] _Ib._, p. 768.

[1321] P. 769.

[1322] “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 11, p. 325.

[1323] To Amsdorf, Jan. 19, 1546, “Briefe,” 5, p. 780.

[1324] To Prince George, Administrator of Merseburg, Oct., 1545, _ib._,
p. 759.

[1325] To Count Albert of Mansfeld, Dec. 6, 1545, “Briefe,” 5, p. 771.

[1326] Hausrath, “Leben Luthers,” 2, p. 483.

[1327] See above, vol. v., p. 261.

[1328] “Orthodoxa Tigurinæ ecclesiæ ministrorum confessio … cum
responsione ad vanas et offendiculi plenas D. Martini calumnias,
condemnationes et convicia, etc.,” 1545.

[1329] To Jakob Probst, Jan. 17, 1546, “Briefe,” 4, p. 778. Cp. Ps. 1, 1:
“_Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum et in via peccatorum non
stetit et in cathedra pestilentiæ non sedit_.”

[1330] April 14, 1545, “Briefe,” 5, p. 728.

[1331] Hausrath, _ib._, 2, p. 469.

[1332] See Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 570. He was referring to Luther’s
attitude towards the lawyers. On Melanchthon’s earlier plan of leaving
the town, see above, vol. iii., p. 370 f.

[1333] Cp. No. 16 of the Theses “Wider die Theologisten zu Löven,” Erl.
ed., 65, p. 171, and the passage from Mathesius quoted in the following
note.

[1334] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 341 with Kroker’s remarks; the
latter places this important utterance recorded by Besold (1544) in its
right chronological setting, as against Lœsche and Köstlin. Here Luther
says, in condemnation of processions: “_Alia res est circumferri, alia
elevari_.” The Wittenberg Concord says evasively: “The Body of Christ is
present when the bread is received, and is truly given.” Köstlin-Kawerau,
2, p. 346.

[1335] Hausrath, “Leben Luthers,” 2, p. 475. The latter says of the
charges made by the Zwinglians: “It is not surprising that his opponents
found that his (Luther’s) obstinacy and his hatred of everything
Zwinglian was leading him into palpable self-contradiction.”

[1336] Hausrath, _ib._, p. 465.

[1337] Hausrath, _ib._, p. 477 f.

[1338] “Briefe,” 5, p. 715.

[1339] [The 4th Commandment, with the Lutherans as with the Catholics,
is that known as the 5th by Anglicans and the English sects. Note to the
English edition.]

[1340] Köstlin-Kawerau (above, vol. iv., p. 288).

[1341] Weim. ed., 30, 3, p. 207: Erl. ed., 23, p. 95 f.

[1342] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 469 f.

[1343] See vol. iv., p. 289 f.

[1344] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 292.

[1345] To the Elector Johann Frederick, Jan. 22, 1544, “Briefe,” 5, p.
614.

[1346] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 570. The text is embodied in the German
Table-Talk, Erl. ed., 62, p. 240. See in vol. iii., p. 39 ff. some
further utterances of Luther’s on the marriages in question. The allusion
above to “the paternal consent that follows” is probably to be understood
as referring to the unlawfulness of any subsequent ratification by the
parents. Such in any case was Luther’s view: “In his eyes the secret
betrothals were sinful, even when the consent was obtained afterwards,
nay actually invalid,” Kawerau, 2, p. 570. After Luther’s “victory” in
1545 it was, however, decided that such marriages should be null and
void until the parents gave their consent, or until the Consistories had
determined whether the parents’ refusal was based on valid, important or
sufficient grounds.

[1347] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, pp. 571, 687, n. “_Fax domestica_,” see above,
vol. iii., p. 216.

[1348] To Spalatin, Jan. 30, 1544, “Briefe,” 5, p. 626.

[1349] To Caspar Beier, Jan. 27, 1545, “Briefe,” 5, p. 721: “_Responde
amori te amantis et anxie expectantis, nihil moratus Satanæ et
Satanicorum verba, quorum mundus plenus_.”

[1350] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 340. Cp. “Aufzeichn.,” p. 355 f. and
Erl. ed., 62, pp. 95 and 282.

[1351] Erl. ed., 62, p. 214 ff. and “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 287
_sqq._

[1352] Erl. ed., 62, p. 245.

[1353] To Melanchthon, Feb. 6, 1546, “Briefe,” 5, p. 785.

[1354] Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 3.

[1355] _Ib._, p. 14, and see above, vol. iv., p. 289 f.

[1356] Schlaginhaufen, _ib._, p. 81.

[1357] From the sermon of Feb. 23, 1539, “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 2, p.
295.

[1358] Jan. 9, 1545, “Briefe,” 5, p. 712.

[1359] “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 2, p. 284.

[1360] Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 193.

[1361] Mathesius, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 290.

[1362] To Wenceslaus Link, Sep. 8, 1541, “Briefe,” 5, p. 399.

[1363] To Anton Lauterbach, Nov. 10, 1541, _ib._, p. 407.

[1364] To Duke Maurice of Saxony, 1541 (not dated), _ib._, p. 417.

[1365] To a Town Councillor, Jan. 27, 1543, _ib._, p. 537.

[1366] To Amsdorf, July 21, 1544, _ib._, p. 675.

[1367] To Lauterbach, April 2, 1543, _ib._, p. 552.

[1368] To Justus Menius, May 1, 1542, “Briefe,” 5, p. 467.

[1369] Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 124.

[1370] Nov. 3, 1543, “Briefe,” 5, p. 598.

[1371] Erl. ed., 62, p. 245.

[1372] “Ratzebergers Gesch.,” p. 131.

[1373] Erl. ed., 62, p. 234.

[1374] “Ratzebergers Gesch.,” p. 132.

[1375] Erl. ed., 20², 2, p. 472 ff.

[1376] _Ib._, p. 479 f.

[1377] P. 479.

[1378] P. 475. This is not the only passage in which Luther labels the
concupiscence “which everyone feels” as a “sin.”

[1379] P. 481.

[1380] P. 480.

[1381] P. 482.

[1382] Jan. 8, 1546, “Briefe,” 5, p. 773: “_Spiritus Munsterianus post
rusticos nunc nobiles invasit_,” etc.

[1383] Feb. 10, 1546, _ib._, p. 789.

[1384] To Beier, see above, p. 359, n. 3.

[1385] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 495.

[1386] Erl. ed., 62, p. 287. Cp. the chapter of the Table-Talk dealing
with the “schools and universities” (_ib._, pp. 285-308), and “Colloq.,”
ed. Bindseil, 2, pp. 13-20 where many excellent thoughts are found.

[1387] See above, vol. iv., p. 228 f.

[1388] Erl. ed., 62, p. 291 f.

[1389] Hausrath, 2, p. 487 f.

[1390] _Ib._, p. 488.

[1391] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 87.

[1392] _Ib._, p. 135.

[1393] The fragmentary work, ed. E. Thiele in the “Neudrucken deutscher
Literaturwerke,” No. 76, according to the Cod. Ottobon. 3029 in the
Vat. Library. For an older ed. see “Luthers Werke,” ed. Walch, 14, p.
1365 f.—Cp. Luther’s praise of Æsop and hints on its use, in Mathesius,
“Tischreden,” p. 379.

[1394] End of July, 1545, “Briefe,” 5, p. 753. See above, vol iii., pp.
280 f., 307.

[1395] Feb. 7, 1546, _ib._, p. 787.

[1396] Erl. ed., 32, p. 426. The Latin verses begin: “_Dura lues pestis,
sed mors est durior illa_.” One may well ask whether the broadside, which
bears no date, was not perhaps written in Germany by friends of Luther’s
to afford a pretext for inveighing anew against the Catholics.

[1397] Mathesius, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 323 f., 12, 113.

[1398] Erl. ed., 61, p. 435.

[1399] Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 115.

[1400] To Jonas, Feb. 25, 1542, “Briefe,” 5, p. 439.

[1401] Mathesius, _ib._, p. 113.

[1402] _Ib._, p. 384.

[1403] _Ib._, p. 113.

[1404] Weim. ed., 30, 3, p. 387; Erl. ed., 25², p. 87.

[1405] Erl. ed., 52, p. 36.

[1406] _Ib._, 61, p. 432; 64, p. 289. Cp. _ib._, 3², p. 418 f.; 11², p.
148; Weim. ed., 16, p. 418 f.=Erl. ed., 36, p. 27. “Briefe,” 6, p. 411.

[1407] “Briefe,” 5, p. 780. For the devil’s preference for water see
above, vol. v., p. 285.

[1408] Erl. ed., 20², 2, p. 483 ff.

[1409] Hausrath, 2, p. 493. Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 618.

[1410] To Catherine Bora, Feb. 14, 1546, “Briefe,” 5, p. 792.

[1411] “Briefe,” 5, p. 783 f.

[1412] _Ib._, p. 789 f.

[1413] Erl. ed., 65, 187 ff.

[1414] March 9, 1545, “Briefe,” 5, p. 725.

[1415] “Werke,” Walch’s ed., 21, p. 282.*

[1416] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 619.

[1417] Above, p. 132.

[1418] “Briefe,” 5, p. 791 f.

[1419] _Ib._, p. 792.

[1420] Erl. ed., 61, p. 437.

[1421] Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 614.

[1422] To Amsdorf, Jan. 8, 1546, “Briefe,” 5, p. 773.

[1423] The phrase was a popular one and, though not above a suspicion of
frivolity, was certainly not “blasphemous.” The account here is that of
Jonas.

[1424] “Briefe,” 6, p. 414: “_Scripturas sacras sciat se nemo degustasse
satis, nisi centum annis cum prophetis, ut Elia et Elisæo, Ioanne
Baptista, Christo et Apostolis ecclesias gubernavit. Hanc tu ne Æneida
tenta, sed vestigia pronus adora ~[cf. Statius, _Thebaid._ l. 12, v. 816
_sq._]. We are beggars,~ hoc est verum. 16 Februarii anno 1546._”

[1425] The following narrative is based on the account of witnesses who
were present at the death or called in immediately after, viz. on the
letter of Jonas to the Elector of Saxony dated in the night of Luther’s
death (Kawerau, “Briefwechsel des Jonas,” 2, p. 177 ff.), the letters
of Count Albert of Mansfeld and Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt to the same
and sent on the same day (Förstemann, “Denkmale,” 1846, p. 17 f.),
the letter of Johann Aurifaber to Michael Gutt, also of the same date
(Kolde, “Analecta,” p. 427); then on the panegyric of Michael Cœlius on
Feb. 20 at Eisleben, published together with the panegyric of Jonas at
Wittenberg, 1546, and reprinted together with other matter in “Werke,”
ed. Walch, 21, p. 274* ff. and particularly, the “Historia” of the death
written by Jonas, Cœlius and Aurifaber which appeared at Wittenberg in
the middle of March, 1546. It is also reprinted in Walch, _ib._, p.
280* ff. For the report of the apothecary Johann Landau see below, p.
379. Of no importance for the account of the death is the so-called
“Neues Fragment zu Luthers Tod,” given by G. L. Burr in the “Americ.
Hist. Rev.” (July, 1911, pp. 723-736), as it is merely a repetition
by one of Melanchthon’s pupils of the latter’s funeral address. The
account, first made public at Philadelphia by A. Spaeth, and printed
in the “Lutherkalender” for 1911 (p. 88), likewise contains nothing
substantially new.

[1426] Ratzeberger, “Gesch.,” p. 138. That the idea embodied in the verse
was familiar to Luther is clear from other sayings: cp. above, vol.
v., p. 102 and below, p. 394. Ratzeberger’s narrative cannot, however,
compare in value with the other authorities quoted above, p. 376, n. 2,
and Catholic writers have lent too much credence to it. Luther’s prayer,
for instance, which Ratzeberger quotes as having been overheard by a
servant, Johann Sickell, is given only by him (p. 140).

[1427] With the silence of the witnesses present it is rather difficult
to square the statement contained in an Autograph of Paul, Luther’s son,
which according to Köstlin-Kawerau (2, p. 695) lies in the library at
Rudolstadt; it tells how he, and his brother Martin, while standing by
their father’s bedside had heard him repeat three times the text, John
iii. 16.

[1428] In Cochlæus, “Ex compendio actorum M. Lutheri caput ultimum,
etc.,” Moguntiæ, 1548. In 1565 the account was embodied in the larger
work of Cochlæus: “De actis et scriptis M. Lutheri.” To N. Paulus (below,
p. 381, n. 2) belongs the credit of having examined in detail the report
(p. 67 ff.) and pointed out the author.

[1429] For some further remarks of the apothecary see above, vol. iii.,
p. 304.

[1430] “_Visa enim est tortura oris et dexterum latus totum infuscatum._”

[1431] On the grave see Köstlin, “Theol. Stud. und Krit.,” 1894, p. 630
ff, 1897, pp. 192 ff., 824 ff. and in the “RE. f. prot. Th.,” 11³, p. 752
f. Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 626.

[1432] Paulus, “Luthers Lebensende, eine kritische Untersuchung”
(“Erläuterungen und Erganzungen zu Janssens Gesch. des deutschen Volkes,”
vol. i., Hft. 1), 1898, p. 63.

[1433] Paulus, _ib._, pp. 67-82. It may be added that, in the 2nd decade
of the 17th century the fable had no support at Munich, for Ægidius
Albertinus in his work “Der Teutschen Recreation,” printed there in 1613
(which contains many falsehoods about Luther), says he “died a sudden
death”; it is said that “a stroke, _apoplexia_, or the hand of God, smote
him” (p. 85 f.). That his sudden death as the result of a stroke was
known abroad is also plain from the account of Pedro de Gante, Secretary
to the Duke of Najera. This contemporary of Luther’s writes in his
“Relaciones” (Madrid, 1873), p. 149: Luther went to bed without feeling
ill, but, “early in the morning he was found dead in his bed, wearing
such a dreadful countenance that it was impossible to look at him without
being dismayed.” Cp. “Zeitschr. f. KG.,” 14, 1894, p. 454.

[1434] See above, vol. iv., p. 304.

[1435] Cordatus, “Tagebuch,” p. 236. Paulus (p. 27) notes that, according
to Aurifaber in Luther’s Table-Talk (Eisleben, 1566), p. 586, and
Spangenberg in his “Theander Lutherus,” p. 191´, the Papists had told the
same tale of Luther whilst he was still alive. Thus Luther’s own methods
were applied to himself.

[1436] Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 83. Erl. ed., 60, p. 327.

[1437] “Werke,” _ib._, p. 329.

[1438] See the chapter of the Table-Talk entitled “The end of the enemies
of God’s Word,” _ib._, p. 327 ff.

[1439] _Ib._, p. 328.

[1440] Paulus, p. 5 ff.

[1441] Erl. ed., 31, p. 318. Cp. Kawerau, “Briefwechsel des Jonas,” 1, p.
116. Paulus, _ib._, p. 7.

[1442] “Rechte Ausslegung der geheymen Offenbarung” (no place), 1589, p.
19; Paulus, _ib._, p. 21. Staphylus, as Paulus points out, really died a
very edifying death.

[1443] Paulus, _ib._, p. 61, n. 2.

[1444] _Ib._, p. 61 f.

[1445] _Ib._, p. 60, n. 6.

[1446] “Corp. ref.,” 6, p. 58 _sq._

[1447] “Werke,” Walch’s ed., p. 365* ff.

[1448] _Ib._, p. 329* ff.

[1449] Janssen, “Hist. of the German People” (Engl. Trans., 6, p. 419).
Cp. on the medals M. C. Juncker, “Vita Lutheri nummis illustrata,”
Francof. et Lipsiæ, 1699, e.g. p. 176 (Plate II), and p. 459. Juncker
enlarged this work and published it in German as “Das Guldene und
Silberne Ehrengedächtniss Lutheri,” Franc. and Leipsig, 1706. Cp. on
p. 212 the medal of 1546. On p. 260 he says that at the Wittenberg
Schlosskirche there was “an altar over which was a life-size effigy of
Luther as he stood in the pulpit”; beside him was Melanchthon baptising a
child and Bugenhagen sitting in the confessional. On another picture in
the parish church see F. S. Keil, “Luthers merkwürdige Lebensumstände,”
Leipsig, 1764, p. 280.—Albertinus (above, p. 382, n.) speaks, p. 87, of
a wooden effigy of Luther in the Schlosskirche bearing the inscription:
“_Divus et sanctus doctor Martinus Lutherus, propheta Germaniæ_.”

[1450] We find them in reprints of 1519, 1520 and 1521. One edition with
the Wittenberg imprint contains the picture, but was really printed at
Strasburg. Thomas Murner, writing from Strasburg, refers to the picture
in 1520. See below, section 4.

[1451] “Historien von des ehrwirden in Gott seligen thewren Manns Gottes
Doctoris M. Lutheri Anfang, Lehr, Leben und Sterben,” Nürnberg, 1566, Bl.
200.

[1452] _Ib._, Preface.

[1453] “Studien und Skizzen zur Gesch. der Reformationszeit,” 1874, p.
211.

[1454] See above, vol. iii., p. 228.

[1455] Erl. ed., 57, p. xvi.

[1456] Account of Hieronymus Mencel, dated Nov. 1, 1562, Köstlin-Kawerau,
2, p. 695.

[1457] “Theander Lutherus,” Ursel, pp. 45, 193.

[1458] Flacius, “Clarissimæ quædam notæ veræ ac falsæ religionis,”
Magdeburgi, 1549, end of cap. 15.

[1459] “Luthers Werke,” Jena ed., 1555 ff., vol. i., Preface.

[1460] That the proposition “‘Good works are harmful to salvation’ is a
right, true and Christian one, taught and preached by Saints Paul and
Luther.” 1559.

[1461] “Werke,” Walch’s ed., 24, p. 250.

[1462] _Ib._, 21, p. 380.*

[1463] H. Lietzmann, “Zu Luthers Grabschrift,” in “Zietschr. f. wiss.
Th.,” 1911, p. 171 f., points out that as there can be no doubt that
Luther was born on Nov. 10, 1483, his age as given in the epitaph ANN.
LXIII M(enses) II D(ies) X is “quite wrong,” but that the error can be
explained by the fact that the writer or the workman transposed one of
the strokes from the months to the years; it should read: ANN. LXII M.
III D. X.

[1464] Reprinted in Walch, 24, p. 250 ff. The poem begins: “_Hic prope
Martini rursus victuri Lutheri_.”

[1465] Walch, 24, p. 253 f.

[1466] Walch, 24, p. 258, commencing “_Hœc erat effigies operose facta
Luthero_.”

[1467] Vol. ii., p. 355; vol. v., p. 341.

[1468] Above, p. 29.

[1469] Vol. ii., p. 253; vol. iv., p. 354.

[1470] Vol. ii., p. 335.

[1471] De Rossi, “Inscriptiones christ. Urbis Romæ,” 2, 1, p. 147.

[1472] Weim. ed., 30, 3, p. 279 f.; Erl. ed., 25², p. 8.

[1473] Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 66.

[1474] K. L. Grube, in the “KL.,” 12², Sp. 1720.

[1475] Weim. ed., 15, p. 254; Erl. ed., 24², p. 222.

[1476] Erl. ed., 65, p. 221.

[1477] Cordatus, “Tagebuch,” p. 121.

[1478] Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 119. The Bible passage alluded to (Rom.
vi. 7) says rather that, in the man who is justified, the old man being
crucified with Christ is dead to sin.

[1479] “Werke,” Walch’s ed., 21, p. 383.*

[1480] Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 74.

[1481] Weim. ed., 23, p. 36; Erl. ed., 30, p. 13.

[1482] _Ib._, Erl. ed., 49, p. 359 ff., 1538.

[1483] Weim. ed., 33, p. 626 f; Erl. ed., 48, p. 358 f.

[1484] Schlaginhaufen, “Aufzeichn.,” p. 10.

[1485] To Justus Jonas, Sep. 30, 1543, “Briefe,” 5, p. 591.

[1486] Weim. ed., 23, p. 32; Erl. ed., 30, p. 8.

[1487] _Ib._, p. 27 ff.=2 ff.

[1488] _Ib._, p. 27=3.

[1489] _Ib._, 33, p. 630=48, p. 361.

[1490] _Ib._, p. 634 f.=365.

[1491] Weim. ed. 10, 2, p. 105; Erl. ed. 28, p. 143.

[1492] Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 54.

[1493] See above, vol. iv., p. 44.

[1494] To Lauterbach, Nov. 3, 1543, “Briefe,” 5, p. 598.

[1495] Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 119.

[1496] “Luther, eine Skizze,” pp. 51, 57; “KL.,” col. 339, 343.

[1497] Dec. 22, 1525, to Duke George of Saxony (?), Erl. ed., 53, p. 340
(“Briefwechsel,” 5, p. 281). Cp. Weim. ed., 7, p. 274; Erl. ed., 27, p.
210, where the assertion also occurs that, my doctrine “is not mine but
God’s,” “because it is the very Gospel itself” (1521). The allusion is of
course to Galatians, i. 1 ff.

[1498] Weim. ed., 10, 2, p. 105 f.; Erl. ed., 28, p. 142 f.

[1499] “Luthers Werke,” Erl. ed., 25², p. 159.

[1500] Cp. the 18th-century Protestant historian, G. J. Planck, “Gesch.
der Entstehung des protestant. Lehrbegriffs,” 1², Leipsig, 1791, pp. 2,
3, 41.

[1501] Above, vol. i., p. 45 ff.

[1502] Weim. ed., 8, p. 683; Erl. ed., 22, p. 53.

[1503] _Ib._, p. 684=54.

[1504] On the ecclesiastical and social disorders see above, vol. i. and
ii., _passim_.

[1505] Weim. ed., 10, 1, p. 707 ff.: Erl. ed., 10², p. 464 f.

[1506] _Ib._

[1507] For Luther’s strange idea that the rapid spread of his doctrine
was really a “miracle,” see above, vol. iii., p. 156, etc.

[1508] See, for instance, the passages from Aurifaber and Spangenberg,
below, p. 416.

[1509] See above, vol. v., p. 393.

[1510] “Deutsche Literaturztng.,” 1898, p. 1005.

[1511] M. Spahn, “J. Cochläus,” 1898, p. 90.

[1512] Cp. J. Schlecht, “Hist. Jahrb.,” 19, 1898, p. 938, quoted from
Cochlæus’s “Vorrede zu Hertzog Georgs Entschuldigung,” 1533.

[1513] “De Actis,” etc., Moguntiæ, 1549, Preface.

[1514] Letter to Pirkheimer, Sep. 5, 1525. Quoted by Schlecht, “Jahrb.,”
_ib._

[1515] “De Actis,” etc., p. 318.

[1516] Preface.

[1517] _Ib._

[1518] “De Actis,” p. 317.

[1519] “De Actis,” p. 318.

[1520] Janssen, “Hist. of the German People” Engl. Trans, vii., p. 304.

[1521] See above, vol. iv., p. 475. Characteristic of Amsdorf is his
assurance in the Preface to vol. i. of the Jena ed. of Luther’s works
(1555), that Luther, whose books “could not be paid for with all the
world’s goods and gold,” was especially deserving of praise because
he had eradicated “the worst and most pernicious heresy that had ever
appeared on earth, viz. that good works are necessary for salvation.”

[1522] Kawerau, “RE. f. prot. Th.”³, Art. “Menius.”

[1523] The only one of all the “reformers” who did not regard the Pope as
Antichrist was, according to R. Mumm (“Die Polemik des Martin Chemnitz
gegen das Konzil von Trient,” Part I., p. 41), the Calvinist theologian
Zanchi. The latter, however, protested against such a “calumny,” as he
called it; see Paulus, against Mumm, in the “Theolog. Revue,” 1906, p. 17.

[1524] “Luthers Werke,” Jena ed., vol. i., 1555.

[1525] To Ehrhard Schnepf, Nov. 10, 1553, “Corp. ref.,” 8, p. 171.

[1526] “Corp. ref.,” 8, p. 798.

[1527] Janssen, “Hist. of the German People” (Engl. Trans.), 14, p. 157.

[1528] “Theander Lutherus, Vom werthen Gottes Manne D.M. Luther,” 12.

[1529] A. Kluckhohn, “Briefe Friedrich des Frommen, Kurfürsten von der
Pfalz,” 1, p. 478.

[1530] _Ib._, p. 587. Of Luther’s doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ’s
human nature the Prince says, “it degrades the manhood of Christ and
makes it something so intangible that it exists in all stones, wood,
leaves, grass, apples, pears and in all that lives, also in the stinking
swine and, as someone had admitted to the old Landgrave, in the great
wine-tun at Stuttgart.”

[1531] Janssen, _ib._, 8, 175.

[1532] Janssen, _ib._, p. 176.

[1533] Janssen, _ib._, p. 176 f. Cp. the 1571 inscription under Luther’s
memorial at Jena where the Latin verses on the founder of the University
run as follows:

“_Esset ut hæc sanctæ doctrinæ strenue custos_
_Condidit ad Salæ pulcra fluenta scholam_
_Quæ tumidos docto confunderet ore sophistas,_
_Nec sineret falsis dogmata vera premi,_
_Sed quia mox ætas mundi trahet ægra ruinam,_
_Pullulat errorum nunc numerosa seges_, etc.”

[1534] “Tischreden,” Eisleben, 1566, Preface.

[1535] Spangenberg, “Theander Lutherus,” Preface.

[1536] V. E. Löscher, “Ausführliche Historia motuum zwischen den
Evangelisch-Lutherischen und reformierten,” 3², 1723-1724, p. 158.

[1537] H. Heppe, “Gesch. des deutschen Prot. in den Jahren 1555-1581,” 2,
Marburg, 1852, ff., p. 419 f.

[1538] L. Hutter, “Concordia concors,” Wittenbergæ, 1614, c. 8. R.
Calinich, “Kampf und Untergang des Melanchthonismus,” Leipzig, 1866, p.
128 ff.

[1539] Janssen, “Hist. of the German People” (Engl. Trans.), 8, p. 189 f.

[1540] G. J. Planck, “Gesch. der Entstehung, usw., des prot.
Lehrbegriffs”, vol. v., Part 2, Leipzig, 1781 ff., p. 600 f.

[1541] Janssen, _ib._, p. 190.

[1542] _Ib._, p. 192.

[1543] _Ib._, p. 193.

[1544] Wagenmann, Art. “Peucer,” “Allg. Deutsche Biographie,” 25, p.
555. An attempt has been made of recent years to exonerate Peucer from
the charge of pure Calvinism. This may possibly prove successful, but
his guilt lay in the fact that, “under the semblance of Lutheranism,
he abandoned Luther’s Christology and his doctrine of the Supper and
advocated something so closely resembling Calvinism that it was easily
mistaken for it.” Kawerau, “RE. f. prot. Th.,”³ Art. “Peucer.”

[1545] See above, vol. v., p. 592 f.

[1546] J. A. Dorner, “Gesch. der prot. Th.,” (“Gesch. der Wissenschaften
in Deutschland,” vol. v.), Munich, 1867, p. 370 f.

[1547] Janssen, _ib._ (Engl. Trans.) 8, p. 406.

[1548] Cp. “Beiträge zur evangel. Concordie,” “Festschrift,” etc., by
Chr. G., no place, 1717, p. 42 f. Janssen, _ib._, p. 413.

[1549] The Landgrave demanded, e.g. that it should be pointed out to
him where in Holy Scripture it was stated that the Body of Christ was
not in heaven, that the Virgin Mary did not bring forth like another
woman, or that the human nature of Christ was everywhere; “all these are
new-fangled dogmas, let them smear and daub them with Luther’s excrement
as much as they please”; “the poor old spoonbill goose did not know what
he was writing about.” Report of the envoys, in L. Hutter, “Concordia
concors,” 1614, p. 215 _sq._ Janssen _ib._, p. 420 f.

[1550] “Symbol. Bücher,”¹⁰ ed. Müller-Kolde, p. 702.

[1551] Heppe, “Gesch. des Prot.,” 3, p. 116.

[1552] _Ib._, 4, p. 150. Janssen, _ib._, p. 419.

[1553] Heppe, _ib._, 3, p. 299 ff. Janssen, _ib._, p. 429.

[1554] Janssen, _ib._, p. 414 f.

[1555] _Ib._, p. 415.

[1556] J. C. Johannsen, “Pfalzgraf Johann Kasimir und sein Kampf gegen
die Concordienformel,” in Niedner’s “Zeitschrift f. hist. Th.,” 31, 1861
(pp. 419-476), p. 461 ff. Janssen, _ib._, p. 436.

[1557] Aurifaber, “Tischreden,” Eisleben, 1566, Cap. I. Cp. Erl. ed., 57,
p. 19, and “Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 1, pp. 47, 48.

[1558] Above, p. 419.

[1559] “Hist. of the German People” (Engl. Trans.), 14, p. 160 f.

[1560] H. Grauert, “P. Denifle, ein Wort zum Gedächtnis,” etc., p.
6: “The strength and energy of Luther’s personality it was that for
centuries kept wide circles of his followers true to the belief in the
Redeemer of the world, the God-man, Jesus Christ. With a practical and
highly significant inconsequence, for all his principles of freedom
Luther transmitted to his followers a relatively fixed doctrinal system,
and, with it, a summary of the articles of faith which have preserved
even to the present day a certain spiritual community of faith between
the believing Protestant world and Catholicism.”

[1561] Words of Canisius in the passage quoted below, p. 429.

[1562] A. Ehrhard, “Der Katholizismus und das 20ste. Jahrh.,”¹² 1902, p.
126.

[1563] “Votorum monast. Tutor,” in Cod. lat. Monac., 2886, fol. 35´
Denifle, _ib._, 1², p. 9.

[1564] Lemmens, “Pater Augustin von Alfeld,” 1899, p. 72. Denifle, _ib._

[1565] Grauert, _ib._, p. 37.

[1566] The “Exercises” were approved by Pope Paul III in 1540. Cp. the
“Regulæ ad sentiendum vere, sicut debemus, in ecclesia militante,”
which St. Ignatius appended as early as 1541 to the Exercises, reg. 1
and 13. Without naming the new heresy the author gives in these rules
practical hints as to how to counteract the spirit of the age. He urges
that all the commandments of the Church should be zealously upheld,
that the respect due to the authorities both spiritual and temporal
should not be diminished by seditious public censure, since efforts
after reform were more effectual when carried out quietly; also that the
traditional learning of the Church, Scholasticism and positive studies
should be held in honour (“a right understanding of Holy Scripture and
the saintly Doctors is of great advantage to the modern theologians of
the schools,” etc., Reg. 11); prudence too should be exercised in the
matter of controversy, for instance, in sermons and writings grace should
not be exalted at the expense of free-will, or faith emphasised so as
to depreciate good works; the motive of the pure love of God should
be recommended, but at the same time the fear of punishment admitted,
because a “childlike fear is pious and holy and bound up with the love of
God, whilst servile fear, if a man is unable to rise any higher, at least
helps him to forsake mortal sin and to rise to a childlike fear.” At the
same time he recommends all the usual Catholic devotions, not merely the
frequent reception of the sacraments but also the keeping of the feasts
and fasts, the veneration of relics, office in choir, processions, the
use of lights and the beautifying of the churches. Above all, in harmony
with the spirit of the Exercises, the interior virtues are extolled and
vows, virginity and the inward and outward works of penance recommended.
Thus did the founder of the Order, whose ideal was the extension of the
Kingdom of Christ to the utmost limits, provide for the needs of the
day. That the Jesuit Order was founded in order to oppose Protestantism
can only be maintained by one who has not read the first pages of the
Constitutions of St. Ignatius.

[1567] “Memoriale b. Petri Fabri, primi S. Ignatii alumni,” ed. M. Bouix,
Lut. Paris. 1873, p. 19. Cochlæus too wished to go through the Exercises
under Favre. The latter informs Ignatius in a letter from Spires dated
Jan. 23, 1541, that after he had discussed with Cochlæus the distinction
between “_scientia_” and “_sensus spiritualis_” (enjoyment of the higher
truths) the latter, “_subridens cœlesti lætitia_,” had said; “_gaudeo
quod tandem magistri circa affectus inveniantur_.” Braunsberger, “Canisii
Epistulæ,” 1, p. 77 note 2.

[1568] To Francis Borgia from Dillingen, Sep. 8, 1570. Janssen, 8, p.
241. Canisius also pointed out to his General, Aquaviva, the necessity
of “publicly defending the Catholic truths with the pen and thus meeting
with prudence the demands of our day; such a work was of no less
importance than the conversion of the wild Indians.” F. Sachinus, “De
vita Petri Canisii.” Ingolstadii, 1616, p. 361 _sq._

[1569] To the General of the Order, Lainez, April 22, 1559. Janssen,
_ib._, p. 237. Braunsberger, _ib._, 2, 398.

[1570] Memo. for the General of the Order, Aquaviva, Janssen, _ib._, p.
235 f.

[1571] “Opp.,” ed. Lugd., 3, col. 658: “_Ut insanum sit, omnia probare
quæ scripsit aut scripturus sit Lutherus, ita non placet, odio auctoris
damnare quæ vera sunt, ea depravare quæ recta sunt_.”

[1572] _Ib._, 9, p. 1084, “Hyperaspistes,” 1, 1: “_Quis enim est tam
malus scriptor, ut non aliquid admisceat probandum_.”

[1573] _Ib._, 10, col. 1251.

[1574] To the Emperor’s brother Ferdinand, Nov. 20, 1524, _ib._, 3, col.
826.

[1575] To Auerbach, Dec. 10, 1524, _ib._, col. 833.

[1576] To Duke George of Saxony, Dec. 12, 1524, _ib._, col. 838.

[1577] May 20, 1520, “Hist. Jahrb.,” 15, 1894, p. 378 (ed. J. Fijalyek).
On the last sentence cp. John viii. 21 and Ez. xxxvi. 25.

[1578] “An den grossmechtigsten.… Adel tütscher Nation,” etc., Strasburg,
1520 (anonymously published), Bl. K 1´. Murner attributes the contempt
for the Ban to its abuse (D 4) and says, it would be better were some of
the precepts and some of the numerous Church holidays done away with (H
1´).

[1579] “De actis et scriptis Lutheri,” p. 29. He adds, however, that the
good was often all sham.

[1580] _Ib._, p. 55 _sqq._ German ed., Dillingen, 1611, p. 109 ff. Cp.
“Lutheri Colloq.,” ed. Bindseil, 2, p. 146. “_Nunc omnes artes illustratæ
florescunt._ So too God has now made us a present of the press, _præcipue
ad premendum papam_.” Cp. Janssen, “Hist. of the German People” (Engl.
Trans.), 14, pp. 498-533.

[1581] W. Friedensburg in the art. “Fortschritte in Kenntnis und
Verständnis der Reformationsgesch.” (“Schriften des Vereins f. RG.,” No.
100, 1910, pp. 1-59), p. 40, where it is true, he says of Cochlæus that
“Vanity as a rule played a great part in his character.”

[1582] “Vormeldunge der Unwarheit Lutherscher Clage,”
Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, 1532.

[1583] Cp. for instance Falk, “Pfarramtliche Aufzeichnungen des
Florentius Diel zu St. Christoph in Mainz, 1491-1518” (“Erläuterungen u.
Erg. zu Janssen,” vol. iv., Hft. 3). Falk, _ib._, p. 5: “The family was
at that time responsible for the religious instruction of the young.” In
many of the schools the Catechism was taught, but the schools were not as
yet generally attended.

[1584] Otto, “Joh. Cochläus,” Breslau, 1874, p. 3.

[1585] He only advises a “_consilium plebani_” when the result of the
instructions to the Communicants was doubtful. “Sermones,” Hagenau, 1510,
“De festivitatibus Christi,” xix., “on Maundy Thursday,” “on preparation
for communion.”

[1586] In the “Deudsche Messe,” Weim. ed., 19, p. 76; Erl, ed., 22, p.
232. Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 50.

[1587] O. Braunsberger, “Entstehung und erste Entwicklung der Katechismen
des sel. Petrus Canisius” (“Ergänzungshefte zu den Stimmen aus
Maria-Laach,” No. 57, 1893). Cp. J. Fijalyek, “Über das wahre Jahr der
Erstlingsgabe des Grossen Katechismus des sel. Petrus Canisius” in the
“Hist. Jahrb.,” 17, 1896, p. 804 ff.

[1588] Published in 1556 as shown by N. Paulus, “Zeitsch. f. kath. Th.,”
27, 1903, p. 172.

[1589] K. Kehr, “Gesch. der Methodik des deutschen Volksunterrichts,” 1,
1877 ff., p. 33.

[1590] Sess. 24, “De reform.,” c. 4.

[1591] See Janssen, “Hist. of the German People” (Engl. Trans.), vol.
xiii., _passim_.

[1592] Janssen, _ib._, p. 58 ff.

[1593] Janssen, _ib._, p. 129.

[1594] See the statements of Albert of Mayence, of Pflug and Wicel, in
Janssen, _ib._, p. 58.

[1595] W. Bäumker, in Wetzer and Welte’s “KL.,” 7², p. 606 f.

[1596] Cp. Denifle, 1², p. 287 ff.

[1597] To Cardinal Otto Truchsess (Dec. 7, 1560) (Cod. Vat. 6417):
“_Abundat Roma viris doctis et historiarum peritis. Magni profecto
referret, ex his deligi aliquem ad conscribendas pontificum vitas. Nunc
sectarii quæ volunt effingunt, nobis plane stertentibus. Iudicet Rᵐᵃ D.V.
quomodo succurri possit non modo præsenti sed etiam sequenti ecclesiæ.
Ita de catechismis et postillis quoque dixerim, salvo semper iudicio
sapientium. Sed opus plane videtur, ut ad huius ætatis rationem docendi
modus accommodetur_,” etc. Cp. Braunsberger, “B. Petri Canisii epist.,”
3, p. 30, and Jos. Schmid, “Hist. Jahrb.,” 17, 1896, p. 79.

[1598] And yet it would have been better had even Panvinius and Baronius
shown themselves more critical, particularly in dealing with the Saints,
relics, etc. The Council of Trent itself had been most urgent in
demanding the removal of false relics; nor were preachers to be allowed
to relate untrue stories about the souls in Purgatory for filthy lucre’s
sake (“_incerta vel quæ specie falsi laborant, evulgari ac tractari
non permittant_”; Sess. 25; Denzinger-Bannwart, n. 983). The false
indulgences were among the abuses condemned by the Council of Trent in
the Decree “De indulgentiis” (Sess. 25): “_abusus qui in his irrepserunt
et quorum occasione insigne hoc indulgentiarum nomen ab hæreticis
blasphematur_.”

[1599] “Werke,” Weim. ed., 30, 3, p. 530 ff.; “Opp. lat. var.,” 7, p. 523
_sqq._ Cp. “Briefwechsel,” 9, p. 252 f.

[1600] “Bibliotheca sanctorum Patrum,” Paris, 1575-79, in 9 folio volumes.

[1601] “Lehrb. der DG.,” 3⁴, p. 810.

[1602] To Thomas Blaurer, Dec. 21, 1521, “Briefwechsel der Brüder Ambr.
und Thom. Blaurer,” 1, 1908, p. 42 ff.

[1603] Cp. Horst Stephan, “Luther in den Wandlungen seiner Kirche,”
Giessen, 1907 (“Stud. zur Gesch. des neueren Protestantismus,” Hft. 1).
This book has been largely utilised in what follows. Cp. J. Schmidlin,
“Luther im Luthertum,” in the “Theol. Revue,” 1908, col. 441 ff. The
words we quote in inverted commas without further reference are from H.
Stephan.

[1604] Stephan, _ib._, pp. 17, 34, 67.

[1605] Schmidlin, _ib._, col. 445.

[1606] Stephan, _ib._, p. 126.

[1607] “Martin Luther und seine Bedeutung für die Wissenschaft und
Bildung,” Giessen, 1883. New ed. 1911, p. 4.

[1608] Stephan, _ib._, pp. 15, 18, 22.

[1609] Stephan, _ib._, p. 23 calls the prophecy on Luther (Rev. xiv.
6) “that most frequently used from Styfel’s time down to Löscher’s
‘Unschuldige Nachrichten.’”

[1610] Sermon of Reisner, pastor of Mittweida near Chemnitz, printed
1677. _Ib._, p. 24. Joh. Alb. Fabricius appeals in his “Centifolium
Lutheranum” (Hamburg, 1728), p. 331, to Bugenhagen’s funeral oration on
Luther where the passage is taken to refer to Luther, and remarks quite
seriously that Samuel Benedict Carpzov had seen in the other two angels
mentioned there Flacius Illyricus and Martin Chemnitz.

[1611] In the “Centifolium Lutheranum” just mentioned, p. 339, Fabricius
quotes from Theophrastus Paracelsus, “Descriptio Carinthiæ” (Argentor.
1616, p. 250), the inscription in question, said to be in a church at
Ingingen in Carinthia, to which some statues had been presented by the
Emperor.—The swan is mentioned in Bugenhagen’s funeral address and in
Mathesius, “Historien,” p. 199.

[1612] Stephan, _ib._, p. 25. Cp. Hutter, “Compendium locorum
theologicorum,” 1610, and “Concordia concors,” 1614.

[1613] Stephan, _ib._, p. 21. Claius, “Grammatica Germanicæ linguæ, ex
bibliis Lutheri,” etc., Lipsiæ, 1578, Præf.

[1614] “Centifolium Lutheranum,” p. 330 ff.

[1615] “Gesch. der deutschen Reformation,” 1, Leipzig, 1872, pp. 178,
179, 399.

[1616] “Unparteiische Kirchenhistorie,” Part II, Frankfurt, 1699-1700,
pp. 42, 45, 48. See the epitaph above, p. 393.

[1617] Zierold, rector at Stargard, quoted by Stephan, _ib._, p. 36.

[1618] See above, vol. v., p. 147 f. Cp. Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 16.
Stephan, _ib._, p. 34, here rightly draws on Ritschl, “Gesch. des
Pietismus.”

[1619] Stephan, _ib._, p. 34.

[1620] _Ib._, pp. 35-38, 43.

[1621] See above, vol. iii., p. 293.

[1622] “Werke,” ed. Suphan, 7, p. 258.

[1623] “Werke,” ed. Suphan, 7, p. 500.

[1624] “Rettungen des Lemnius und Cochläus,” 1754, Stephan, _ib._, p. 73.
Cp. below, p. 448.

[1625] Stephan, _ib._, p. 54.

[1626] _Ib._, p. 46.

[1627] In Nicolai, “Allg. deut. Bibliothek,” 1797. G. Frank, “Luther im
Spiegel seiner Kirche” (“Zeitschr. f. wiss. Theol.,” 1905, p. 465 ff.),
p. 475.

[1628] Ritschl, “Gesch. des Pietismus,” 2, p. 575. Stephan, _ib._, p. 58.
Ritschl adds that, according to this view (Büsching’s), “religion was a
matter of the individual and only incidentally of the congregation.”

[1629] Stephan’s words, _ib._, p. 59.

[1630] _Ib._, p. 74; cp. _ib._, p. 72, Lessing’s high opinion of Luther.

[1631] “Pantheon der Deutschen,” 1, Chemnitz, 1794, p. 232.

[1632] Conversation with Eckermann, March 11, 1832.

[1633] “Novalis’ Schriften,” 2, ed. Minor, Jena, 1907, p. 27 f.

[1634] See vol. i., p. xxxv, f.

[1635] Quoted by Franck, “Gesch. d. prot. Theol.,” 4, p. 144.

[1636] “Luthers Leben,” 1, p. xiii.

[1637] Of the legendary traits common in the popular literature on Luther
there is no lack in Köstlin’s “Martin Luther.” G. Kawerau, who, after the
author’s death, finished the latest edition of the book already in the
press, would doubtless have depicted many things differently had he had a
free hand.

In the long discussion of Luther’s monastic days his later utterances
are accepted implicitly without being submitted to criticism. Thus his
account of his penitential martyrdom, by which he even “endangered
his life,” is taken at its face value, and so is his testimony to
his own saintliness. “Of any more evangelical conception of the road
to salvation,” Luther heard nothing at Erfurt, indeed there was “no
Christian preaching at all,” etc., etc. “In the convent he was left
practically to himself.” “The lax standard by which his scholastic
teachers judged of sin [the motions of concupiscence] did not alleviate
what he had to endure,” viz. “the standard of the law.” In the
theological lectures he heard nothing of “how, in the Man Christ, the
Godhead descends to us”; on the contrary they led him to turn away in
terror from the Master and Judge. It was a cause of deep grief to him
that forgiveness was made “to depend on the worthiness and the works of
the sinner himself,” etc., etc. The Church gave him no “insight into the
meaning of the Mediatorship of Christ.” Even at Erfurt the Bible “had
led him to see many errors in the Papal Church,” but the most important
thing was that, by means of this same Bible he attained “by the gracious
dispensation of God” to the “overthrow of all proud self-righteousness.”
His flying for refuge simply to the merciful Love of God became the
salvation of the quiet, laborious, struggling monk, whose destiny was to
mould the world’s history (pp. 55, 60-66, 72, 75, 77 f.).

According to Köstlin Luther began “this attack on ecclesiastical abuses
straightforwardly, conscientiously, with moderation and prudence” (1,
142). “At last he came forward from the ‘corner’ where he would gladly
have remained and entered upon the struggle” (2, 626). During the
struggle itself he was calm and peaceful, etc., “what would ensue he did
not know, but committed it to Him Who sits on High” (1, 354). This grand
tranquillity was permanent with him. “Of good courage, inwardly peaceful
and confident, we see Luther (after his marriage) living his new life”
(738). Köstlin indeed repeatedly mentions his inward struggles, but,
according to him, Luther conquers the burden of his temptations with “a
bold faith” (2, 178). “He warns his followers against the belief that
the Papacy was to be overthrown by the use of force” (1, 583). He also
demands that no constraint should be used in the “purely interior domain
of faith”; the heretics were to “be resisted only by the Word,” so long
at least as they did not “outwardly manifest” their errors (1, 584),
which, however, they nearly always did.

Luther’s sovereign “merely looked on while the Word and the Spirit did
the work” (1, 603). Luther never “imposed on him either the duty or the
right to protect him and his work against Emperor and Empire.” “Never
did he lend a hand to measures that might have been of advantage to the
furtherance of the evangelical cause, but which would have militated
against his principles” (2, 522).

No trace of false enthusiasm dominates Luther, but rather a
“conscientious sobriety”; the passion that urges him on is merely “fiery
enthusiasm for the faith and his absolute confidence” (cp. 2, 517).

“It is from the religious foundations on which his life is based that
proceeds the freedom to which he has attained with regard to temporal
things, his joyousness in using them and the calmness with which he
renounces them and awaits what is better” (2, 512). “The faith with
which he embraces God, holds intercourse with Him and seeks strength and
victory through Him alone bears a character of childlike simplicity” (2,
513). It is a “bold faith,” a courageous faith, that animates him. “In
heartfelt prayer lies for Luther all his strength” (2, 514).

His “modesty as to his theological achievements” (2, 512) ought not to be
overlooked. He had no fears as to the permanency of his Evangel. “That it
was the Evangel of God for which he was working and that He would not let
His Evangel fall to the ground, of this he was quite sure” etc. (2, 522).

At the time of his death “true religious interests were once more
paramount and Rome’s domination, till then all-powerful, was for ever
shaken to its foundation” (2, 626).

[1638] “Stud. und Skizzen zur Gesch. der Ref.,” Leipzig, 1874, Introd.
and pp. 208, 212 f., 237. Cp. above, vol. i, p. xxix.

[1639] (Anonymous) Schaffhausen, 1857, pp. 104, 111, 113.

[1640] This was the opinion of H. Boehmer, “Luther im Lichte der neueren
Forschung,”¹ p. 115.

[1641] See above, vol. v., p. 432 ff.

[1642] Cp. C. Stange, “Die ältesten ethischen Disputationen Luthers,”
1900, p. vi. ff.

[1643] 4th edition, 1906, Preface, p. vii. f.

[1644] Troeltsch, “Protestantisches Christentum und Kirche in der
Neuzeit,” in “Kultur der Gegenwart,” 1, vol. iv.,²; Stephan, _ib._, p.
128 f.

[1645] J. Schmidlin, “Das Luthertum als historische Erscheinung”
(“Wissenschaftl. Beilage der Germania,” 1909, No. 15), pp. 117, 119.

[1646] “Leitfaden der Dogmengesch.,”³ p. 535.

[1647] Stephan, _ib._, p. 69.

[1648] _Ib._, p. 110 ff.

[1649] Boehmer, _ib._, p. 120.

[1650] _Ib._, 2nd ed., p. 140.

[1651] _Ib._, 2nd ed., p. 153.

[1652] Boehmer, _ib._, p. 153.

[1653] Stephan, _ib._, p. 93.

[1654] In the lecture quoted above, p. 441, n. 4.

[1655] “Fröhliche Wissenschaft,” Pocket edition, 6, p. 202. Stephan,
_ib._, p. 120.

[1656] “Katholizismus und Reformation,” 1905, p. 52 f.

[1657] W. Köhler, “Theol. Literaturztng.,” 1907, p. 303.

[1658] Cp. also H. Boehmer, _ib._,¹ p. 136.

[1659] _Ib._, p. 100; 2nd. ed., p. 139 f.

[1660] _Ib._, p. 10.

[1661] In the lecture mentioned above, p. 441, n. 4.

[1662] “With this knowledge the Holy Ghost inspired me in this cloaca on
the tower.”

INDEX

In this Index “L.” stands for “Luther.”

Abailard, i. 401

Abbots, Prince-, ii. 120, iii. 262 f.

Abel, i. 43

Abortions.
_See_ Misbirths

Abraham, iv. 109, 111, 156, v. 124, 413, vi. 74;
“I am A.,” iii. 273;
his “lie,” iv. 109, 113, v. 501, vi. 514;
his idolatry, iii. 192, v. 124

Absolution.
_See_ Confession

Abstinence.
_See_ Fasts

Abuses in the Church, i. 26, 45 ff., 53, 70, 84, 123 f., 130 ff.,
226 ff., 272, 325, 350 f., ii. 3, 123 ff., 127, 190 ff., 222,
312 f., 338, v. 120 f., vi. 404

Abusive language, i. 69, 72, 83, 209 f., 284, ii. 152 ff., 396,
iii. 172, iv. 188 f., 192, 300, 306-326, 365, 370, v. 88, 116,
342, 383 f., 395, 398 f., 411 f., vi. 109, 214 f.;
shocks Bullinger, v. 409;
Melanchthon, iii. 364 f.;
Zwingli, iii. 380.
_See_ Unseemliness

Acceptation, i. 155.
_See_ Imputation

Accolti, P., ii. 46

Acta Augustana, i. 359

Activity.
_See_ Work

Actual sin.
_See_ Sin

Actus matrimonialis, iv. 137, 151 f., v. 48

Adam, ii. 271, 282 f.

⸺ Melchior, v. 271 f.

Adiaphora, v. 263, vi. 410 ff.

Adrian.
_See_ Hadrian

Adulteration of wine, iii. 297, 313

Adultery, ii. 33, iii. 245, 247, 254 ff., iv. 158 f., 165, 208, v. 25

Ægidius Romanus, i. 13, 129

⸺ Viterbiensis, vi. 497, 503

Æpinus, J., vi. 82, 408

Æsop’s Fables, iv. 246, vi. 16 ff., 368 f.;
“A New F.,” iv. 177

Agnus Dei, iv. 123

Agonies.
_See_ Temptations

Agony in the Garden, v. 363

Agricola, George, ii. 242, iii. 304

⸺ Johann, as L.’s helper, v. 181, 563, n.;
against L., ii. 370, iii. 301 f., iv. 100, 309, vi. 280 f.;
L. on A., iii. 219, 278, 400, 407, 475, v. 15, 25, 238, 276, vi. 281,
289, 343, 354, 398;
and Bugenhagen, v. 275;
and Bora, iii. 216, v. 21;
and Jonas, iii. 414;
and Melanchthon, iii. 444, v. 22.
_See_ Antinomians

⸺ Stephen, iv. 514

⸺ Wolfgang, iii. 284 ff.

Ailly, Cardinal P. d’, i. 13, 132, 141, 155, 157, 161 f., 243

Ailments:
apoplexy, vi. 107, 376 ff., 379 f.;
calculus, ii. 161, iii. 434 f., v. 348, vi. 109, 341, 345;
catarrh, iii. 297, vi. 109;
constipation, ii. 81 f., 95, 164, n., vi. 109, 177;
ear-trouble, ii. 161, v. 236, vi. 104, 106 ff.;
epilepsy?, i. 17, vi. 101;
eye-trouble, iv. 261;
fainting-fits, i. 16 f., ii. 170, vi. 103 ff., 373;
giddiness, i. 278, ii. 161, vi. 106;
gout?, ii. 162, n., vi. 176 f.;
headache, etc., ii. 161, iii. 124, 299, 317 f., v. 346, vi. 130, 170,
341, 371;
heart-trouble, vi. 100 f., 103, 178, 341, 376 f.;
hemorrhoids, vi. 109, 177;
influenza, vi. 110;
insanity? iii. 136, iv. 183, 353, n., vi. 170-186;
nerve-trouble, ii. 390, iii. 299, 317, v. 226, vi. 105 ff., 111;
running wound, vi. 109, 132 f.;
sleeplessness, ii. 163, iii. 305 f., 310;
sweat (English), vi. 109;
syphilis?, i. 37, ii. 161 ff.;
tears as a relief, vi. 104, 108, 132, 169;
vomiting, iii. 300 f.
_See_ Pessimism, Temptations

Alber, Erasmus, iii. 402, 409, iv. 74, 357, vi. 493

Albert of Brandenburg, v. 220

⸺ Mansfeld, ii. 137, 289 f., vi. 350 f., 372, 379 f.

⸺ Mayence; concern in the Indulgence, i. 328, 348 ff.;
L. invites him to wed, ii. 141, 205;
attacks him, ii. 6, 70, 214 f., iv. 98, 292, 319 f., v. 307 f.,
vi. 188, 350;
his “relics,” iv. 292, v. 307 f.;
A. and Erasmus, ii. 248;
and Lemnius, vi. 287;
and Melanchthon, iii. 370;
and Schönitz, iv. 319 f., v. 106;
and Erfurt, ii. 354 f., 359 f.;
residence, vi. 485;
on the schools, vi. 436

⸺ Prussia, ii. 223, iii. 423, iv. 196, vi. 253, 408

Albertinus, Æ., v. 271, vi. 382, n.

Albertus, L., iv. 226

⸺ Magnus, i. 162

Albrecht, B., v. 295

Alderspach, vi. 29 f.

Aleander, ii. 6, 61, 71, 78 f., 256, iii. 303, iv. 355, 357

Alemann, A., ii. 139, 141

Alexander III, iv. 109 f., v. 424, vi. 494

⸺ VI, i. 55, iv. 90 (cp. correction, vi. 516)

⸺ of Hales, i. 162, vi. 503

Alfeld.
_See_ Alveld

Allstedt, ii. 364, iv. 172

Alms.
_See_ Poor-Relief

Altenburg, ii. 314 ff., vi. 49, 52, 240

Alveld, i. 366, ii. 11, iii. 145, iv. 288, v. 124, 307, 520, vi. 426

Ambiguity.
_See_ Dishonesty

Ambrose, St., iii. 250, iv. 335, v. 586;
pseudo-, iv. 174 f., 177

Amen, L.’s use of the word, vi. 511.
_See_ Pope-Ass

Amerbach, B. and V., iv. 183, 364, vi. 170

America, vi. 515

Amsdorf, N., as L.’s henchman, i. 39, 91, 278, 304, 311, ii. 169,
iii. 405;
against good works, iv. 475, vi. 392;
matrimonial agent, ii. 137, 139;
dealings with spirits, v. 282, 315 f.;
“consecration,” v. 191 ff.;
edits L.’s works, ii. 55;
coarseness, iii. 336;
quarrels, vi. 409 ff.;
and Agricola, v. 20;
and Erasmus, iv. 181 f.;
and Melanchthon, iii. 366, v. 257;
ejected from his bishopric, vi. 408

Anabaptists:
their rise, iii. 418 f.;
effect on L., ii, 93, vi. 75 f., 86, 312;
Melanchthon denies their existence, iii. 374, iv. 113;
L. attacks them, ii. 363 ff., iii. 419;
appeals to tradition, iv. 488;
condemns them to death, ii. 365 f., v. 349, vi. 249, 275;
their strictures on L., ii. 130, 367 f., 377, iii. 275.
_See_ Fanatics, Münzer

Andreæ, J., iv. 200, vi. 275, 419, 421, 424

Angels, v. 381, 395, vi. 127 f., 131;
A. guardian, i. 19, v. 279 f., 297, 309, 327, vi. 374;
visions of A.
_See_ Ghosts

Anger.
_See_ Passion

Anhalt, Adolf of, i. 22

⸺ Johann, vi, 226.
_See_ Wolfgang, etc.

Anne, devotion to St., i. 4, iv. 140, vi. 223

Anointing, Last, iii. 7, vi. 410

Antichrist, i. 359, 385, ii. 13, 56 f., 80, 260, iii. 142-148, 355,
431, 436, 439, iv. 81 f., v. 243 f., 420, vi. 154 f.
_See_ Pope

Antinomians, ii. 289, iv. 245, 475, v. 15 ff., 158 f., vi. 279 f.
_See_ Agricola

Antwerp, ii. 167, v. 172, vi. 43

Apel, J., ii. 174, 183

Apocalypse, v. 521 f.

Apocalyptics, ii. 103, iii. 84, 92 f., 140-152, iv. 296, 313 f.

Apocrypha, v. 497, 521 f.
_See_ Bible (Canon)

Apostasy, i. 62 ff., 120 f., 258 f., 385 ff.;
concealment of, i. 146 ff., ii. 15 ff.;
later description of, vi. 187-205

Apostate monks and priests, ii. 115 ff., 123 ff., 138, 317 ff., 342

Apostles described, iii. 191 f., v. 124;
L.’s belief about them, vi. 515

Apothecaries, i. 245, v. 235.
_See_ Landau

Apparitions.
_See_ Ghosts

Appeal to Pope, i. 258;
to Council, i. 356, 359, iii. 432 f., 443, v. 376 f.

Appearance of L., i. 279, ii. 157 ff., iii. 428 f., iv. 230.
_See_ Dress, Eyes, Portrait

Apriolus.
_See_ Eberlin

Aquila, C., iii. 366, vi. 410

Aquinas, i. 85, 131, 137, 141 f., 150, 162 f., 243 f., 270, 370,
iii. 143, vi. 236

Arcimboldi, i. 344, 352

Argula, ii. 173

Aristotle, i. 22, 77, 85 f., 127, 136 f., 149 ff., 159, 211 f., 244,
305, 313, 339, 370, ii. 269, iii. 143, iv. 102, 336, 346, v. 50,
113, 390, 518, vi. 20 f., 235

Arndt, E. M., vi. 456 f.

Arnold, G., iii. 138, iv. 205, vi. 443 ff.

Arnoldi, B.
_See_ Usingen

⸺ F., ii. 392, 396, iv. 101, 191, 306, 355, iv. 267

Arnstadt, iv. 15, vi. 139

Art, works of, ii. 351 f., iv. 198 f., v. 203-224

Asceticism, v. 87.
_See_ Mortification

Astrology, ii. 168, iii. 118, 166, 356, iv. 267.
_See_ Superstition

Athanasius, i. 10, ii. 398 f., vi. 206, 438

Attrition, i. 292 ff.
_See_ Contrition.

Augsburg, Diets of, i. 340 f., ii. 284 f., 383 ff., iii. 65, 123,
328-343, 420 f.;
trial of L., i. 66, 340, 355-359, 384 f., ii. 39, 367, iv. 388,
vi. 190, 299;
Confession, ii. 384, iii. 329 ff., vi. 281

August of Saxony, iv. 209, vi. 413, 415-419

Augustine, St., i. 12, 23 f., 76 f., 90 f., 92, 204, 210 f., 250,
305 f., 400 f., ii. 225 f., 233 f., iv. 108 ff., 331, 335, 439 f.;
pseudo-A., i. 311 f., vi. 501, 515;
L. and Melanchthon disagree with A., iii. 333, vi. 336;
on works, iv. 457-464

Augustinians, i. 4 f., 9 f., 28 f., 68, 81 f., 147, 262 ff., 297 ff.,
315 f., ii. 89, 334, 337; vi. 473 f., 498-504;
Rule of, vi. 202 f.;
and Dominicans, i. 105

Aurifaber, J., i. 184, ii. 289, iii. 218, 224, 230, 239, iv. 269, v. 30,
vi. 372, 387, 391, 410 f., 416, 423

Aurogallus, M., v. 496 f., 499

Authority, ecclesiastical, ii. 31, 73, 74 f., vi. 163 f.;
secular A., ii. 294-312;
“A.” instead of State, v. 584;
L.’s changes of view about, ii. 196-211, 346;
contradictions, v. 601;
has nothing to do with the Church, v. 55;
yet must uphold Lutheranism, v. 56.
_See_ Freedom

Babel, ii. 34, v. 171, vi. 315

Babylon, Roman, ii. 13, 19 f., 56

Babylonian captivity, ii. 20, 27, 37, iii. 146, 407, iv. 510, vi. 302

Bachmann, P., iii. 63, iv. 100, 352 f., v. 123

Bachofen, Fr., vi. 493

Backsliding, i. 289

Balaam, iv. 337

Balduin, F., v. 295

Bamberger, P., ii. 345

Banishment.
_See_ Intolerance

Baptism, infant, ii. 97, 372 f., iii. 277, 391, 395, 421, iv. 487 ff.,
v. 292, 462, vi. 166;
of Jews, v. 412 f.;
is a sacrament, ii. 27;
mark of the Church, vi. 294;
B. and original sin, v. 451;
optional?, iii. 11, iv. 488 ff.;
works through faith, i. 364, iv. 486 f., vi. 310;
lost by L., vi. 197

Barnes, R., iii. 260, 428, iv. 3 f., 8, 11 ff., vi. 488, 492

Barnim XI, Duke, vi. 61

Baronius, C., vi. 437

Basle, ii. 422, vi. 38, 272

Baumgärtner, H., ii. 138 f., iii. 327, 337, iv. 222

Bawdy houses.
_See_ Brothels

Beer, ii. 22, iii. 208 f., 219, 294 ff., 304, 306 f., 313 ff., 317,
v. 354, 364, vi. 373

Beger, L., iv. 71

Beggars, v. 562, vi. 42 ff., 55.
_See_ Mendicancy

Beier.
_See_ Beyer

Belief.
_See_ Faith

Bellarmin, i. 91, vi. 294, 323, 384 f.

Beltzius, iv. 219 ff.

Benevolence.
_See_ Generosity, Poor-relief, Students

Bennet, iv. 7

Benno, St., v. 123 ff., vi. 243 f.

Bergen, Book of, vi. 419

Berlepsch (Berlips), ii. 95, vi. 124 f.

Bernard, St., i. 18, 84, 88, 181, 243, iii. 176, v. 91;
his “perdite vixi,” iv. 88 f.

⸺ the Jew, iii. 301

Berndt, A., iii. 216

Bernhardi, B., i. 65, 310 ff.

Berthold of Chiemsee, iv. 356

⸺ Ratisbon, v. 77

Besler, iv. 221

Besold, H., iii. 218, 221, vi. 360

Beyer, C., iv. 282, vi. 358 f.

⸺ L., i. 66, 316 ff., 334, iv. 222, v. 353, vi. 263

⸺ M., iv. 43

Beza, T., 278

Bible, olden editions and translations, i. 14, 28, v. 542 ff.;
looked down upon by Nominalists, i. 134 f.;
a “heretics’ book,” iv. 396;
“Bible, Bubble,” ii. 365, 370 f.;
Canon, iv. 400 ff., 505, v. 436 f., 521 ff.;
inspiration, iv. 398 ff., v. 437 f.;
interpretation, ii. 235 ff., iv. 387-431;
_see_ Anabaptists, Sacramentarians, etc.;
L.’s translations, iv. 242 f., v. 494-546;
Revised B., v. 523 ff.;
“B. alone,” iv. 387-405;
Lutherans’ use of the B., vi. 431 f.;
the “paper idol,” vi. 271.
_See_ Word

Bibliander, v. 421

Bibra, L. von, i. 334

Bidembach (brothers), iv. 221

Biel, G., i. 13, 91, 125, 132, 135, 140 ff., 151, 224, 243, 311,
345, iv. 119, 440, 508, 516 f., vi. 433, 514 f.

Bigamy, ii. 33.
_See_ Henry VIII, Philip II, Leprosy

Billicanus, i. 316, iii. 447

Bing, S., iv. 15

Bishops, Catholic, i. 46 ff., 224 f., 281, ii. 28, 101, 103, 114,
193, 210 f., 301, 387 f., iii. 440, v. 101, vi. 324, 404, 493;
Lutheran, iii. 428, iv. 126, v. 191, n., 602, vi. 315, 356;
L.’s offer to the B., iii. 330, 337 f., 343, 439 f., v. 190-198,
329, 386, 601, vi. 239;
only B. are forbidden to have several wives, iv. 28

Blasphemy, utterances savouring of, iv. 292, 344, v. 198, 233, 310,
n., 407;
B. to be punished by death, iii. 71, 358, iv. 266, vi. 259.
_See_ Idolatry, Temptations

Blaurer (brothers), i. xvii, ii. 153, 155, 157, iii. 304, 433, iv. 6,
116, 196 f., 323, vi. 278

Bock, H., vi. 265, 313

Bohemian Brethren, ii. 25, iii. 152, vi. 316

Bolsec, J., vi. 385

Bomhauer, i. 244

Bonaventure, St., i. 84, 181 f., 346, iii. 176, 261

Boniface VIII, i. 339, v. 584

Bonn, H., v. 166

Books, on forbidden, ii. 58 f.

Bora, Cath. von, flight from nunnery and marriage, ii. 135, 138, 141,
173-188;
brews the beer, iii. 313;
“too rude,” ii. 379, iii. 229, v. 83;
“go back to the convent,” iii. 268;
gifts from sovereigns, ii. 139, iv. 8, 26;
after L.’s death, vi. 346;
and Agricola, iii. 216, v. 21;
and Cruciger, vi. 359;
in Letters, iv. 281 f., v. 199, 308 f., vi. 369, 372 f.;
Legends, iii. 281 f., v. 372;
and Melanchthon’s wife, iii. 365.
_See_ Will, L.’s last

Borner, C., ii. 258

Bose, M. A. J., v. 271

Bossuet, iv. 71

Bozius, T., vi. 381

Brandenburg, iv. 195, v. 408

Brant, S., iii. 152, v. 540

Braun, J., i. 15, 127, vi. 206

Brenz, J., i. 316, iii. 50, 405, iv. 5 f., 167, 459 f., vi. 257, 408, 482

Brethren of the Common Life, i. 5, 46, vi. 35

Breviary, i. 127, 225, 269, 275-279, ii. 126, iii. 114, v. 316,
vi. 200 f.

Briesmann, J., iv. 155, v. 152

Brothels, ii. 359, iii. 122, 227 f., iv. 176, 229.
_See_ Prostitutes

Brück, C., vi. 40 f.

⸺ G., iii. 87, 123, 216, iv. 36, 40, 44, v. 197, 201, 385, 590,
vi. 372, 385 f.

Brulefer, S., iv. 120

Brunswick, ii. 215, iii. 408, v. 167, 217, 394 f., vi. 35, 276 f.

Bucer, M., joins L., i. 316;
disagrees with L., iv. 99 f., v. 237, vi. 354;
denies sacramental presence, iii. 354, iv. 498, v. 268;
shocked at L.’s language, ii. 155, iii. 417, iv. 326;
intolerance, vi. 271, 277 f.;
in favour of a Protestant Council, v. 176;
serves Landgrave Philip as adviser in the bigamy, iv. 15-62;
suggests a lie, iv. 114;
at Cologne, v. 166;
at Strasburg, vi. 46;
agrees with Calvin, v. 399 f.;
against Schnepf, iv. 198;
allows 12% interest, vi. 98;
a mediator, iii. 383, 417, 420 ff., 446 f., v. 172

Buchholzer, G., v. 313

Buchner, A., vi. 392

Bugenhagen, J., friendship with L., iii. 404-413, 432, v. 22, 173,
175, 262, 328, 335, n., vi. 326, 347, 364;
at L.’s wedding, ii. 174;
untruthfulness, iii. 74;
coarseness, iii. 178, 229 f., v. 304;
“cardinal,” iii. 427;
“ordains” pastors, vi. 265, 313 f.;
disagreement with L., iv. 239, vi. 353;
parish-priest of Wittenberg, ii. 174, iv. 231, 273, v. 136;
L.’s confessor, iii. 437, iv. 249, v. 333, vi. 103;
panegyric on L., vi. 387 f., 443;
intolerance, vi. 273;
is called a Papist, vi. 410;
literary work, ii. 118, 399, v. 489, 499; vi. 438, 476;
missionary work, ii. 323, v. 167, 217;
poor-relief, vi. 57 f.

Bullinger, H., his intolerance, vi. 271, 278;
indignant with L., iii. 277, 417, iv. 325, v. 115, 409;
on L. as translator, v. 520, 523;
on the bigamy, iv. 10, n., 43, 68

Burer, A., ii. 157, iv. 269

Burgos, P. of, i. 243, 401, v. 411

Burkhard, iv. 11

Burning of the Bull, ii. 51, 54, vi. 381

Büttner, W., v. 295

Butz, P., vi. 271

Cahera, G., ii. 112

Cajetan, Cardinal, 340 f., 344, 357, 384, iv. 86, 302, vi. 487;
on polygamy, iii. 261

Calculus.
_See_ Ailments

Calixt, G., iv. 310

Calixtines, ii. 112

Call.
_See_ Mission

Calovius, A., iii. 138

Calumnies:
on olden Church, i. 79, 271, 283, 394, iv. 80-98, 102 f., 117-134,
v. 485, vi. 199;
on the Popes, iv. 90 f. [amend according to vi. 516];
on Erasmus, ii. 251, 294, iii. 135;
on others, iv. 86, v. 106 f.

Calvin, relations with L., v. 399-402;
as an organiser, iv. 280, n.;
“agonies,” v. 75;
predestinarianism, ii. 268, 271, iii. 189, 350;
vocation, iii. 140, n.;
intolerance, iii. 258;
on the Supper, iii. 354, 446 ff., v. 264;
end justifies the means, iv. 111, n.;
at Geneva, vi. 488, 490, 492;
Calvinism, vi. 414

Camerarius, J., relations with L., ii. 256, iv. 220 f., vi. 348;
with Melanchthon, ii. 145 ff., iii. 357, 364, iv. 61 f., 209,
vi. 6, 37;
as editor, ii. 176 ff., 180

Campanus, J., ii. 376, 378, 398, iii. 403, vi. 251, 284

Campeggio, L., ii. 380, 392, iii. 334 ff.

Candles, ii. 321, v. 147, 282, vi. 410

Canisius, P., ii. 253, iii. 238, 376, iv. 385 f., v. 264, 296 f.,
vi. 323, 384, 427 ff., 434, 437

Canon.
_See_ Bible, Mass

Canon Law, i. 227, v. 183, 601, vi. 21, 188 f.
_See_ Lawyers

Canonisation, v. 122 f.

Canus, M., vi. 323

Capella, Galeatius, vi. 491

Capito, W., relations with L., ii. 6 f.;
against L., ii. 242, iv. 99, vi. 280;
on bigamy, iv. 6, 10, n.;
intolerance, vi. 277 f.;
despair, iv. 220;
dishonesty, iv. 115;
relief of poor, vi. 46

Caraccioli, M., ii. 6

Caraffa, vi. 488

Cardinals, iii. 427 f., 443, n., v. 108 f.

Caricatures, in the German Bible, v. 528;
in “Popery Pictured,” in “Das Bapstum mit seinen Gliedern,” in
the “Passional Christi et Antichristi,” v. 421-426

Carlowitz, iv. 69, v. 252

Carlstadt, A. B. von, friendship with L., i. 40, 304, 362 f.;
takes side of the Zwickau Prophets, ii. 97-100;
against L., iii. 183, iv. 336;
against images, v. 208;
Real Presence, iv. 493;
sacraments, iv. 486;
saint-worship, ii. 345;
vows, ii. 83 f.;
on Epistle of James, v. 523;
L. against him, i. 14, 91, 97, 101, ii. 154, 166, 374, iii. 4, 121,
154, 177, 385-400, 409, 424, iv. 87, 308, v. 104, 399, vi. 280,
289. Cp. vi. p. 478

Carpi, A. P., ii. 256

Carpzov, B., v. 264, 295, vi. 443, n.

Carthusians, ii. 335.
_See_ Lening

Casel, G., v. 127

Casimir of Brandenburg, v. 317

Cassian, iv. 110

Catechism, ii. 119, iv. 233 ff., v. 483-494, vi. 263, 433 ff.

Catharinus, A., ii. 57, iii. 142, 276, 279, 303, vi. 323

Catherine of Alexandria, St., iv. 246

⸺ Aragon, iv. 3

⸺ Bologna (and Genoa, SS.), i. 173

Catholic, L.’s Church C., ii. 108, iii. 368

Catholics, act against their conscience, iii. 90, vi. 284;
cannot pray, v. 88;
have a beam in their eye, vi. 332;
know L. to be in the right, ii. 70.
_See_ Calumnies, Church, Intolerance

Cato, vi. 16, 18

Catullus, vi. 18

Celibacy, clergy’s disregard for the law, i. 50;
assailed by L., i. 120, 276, ii. 83-87, 115-129, iii. 246-251,
262, iv. 87, 147-150, v. 112.
_See_ Marriage, Preachers, Vows

Celichius, A., iv. 223

Celtes, C., vi. 45

Centuriators, Magdeburg, vi. 313.
_See_ Flacius

Certainty, need of, i. 308, ii. 368, iii. 9, 47 f., 112, 140-141,
notes, 146, 159, iv. 440 ff., v. 25-43, 323, vi. 283 ff., 302;
our lack of C., i. 95, 97, 207 ff.

Chalice, ii. 99, 110, 321, iii. 10, 371, v. 216

Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, vi. 459 f.

Chancery, German, iv. 244

Changelings, v. 292, vi. 140;
L. a C.?, iv. 358

Charity.
_See_ Love of God and Poor-relief

Charles V, L. to, or on, C., ii. 20, 69, iii. 105, n., iv. 270;
at Worms, ii. 61 ff.;
against L., i. 340, ii. 79;
and Erasmus, ii. 256;
Hermann von Wied, v. 166;
Josel of Rosheim, v. 409;
Landgrave Philip, iv. 21 f., 68, v. 396;
the Schmalkalden League, iii. 430;
the Council, iii. 424 f., v. 380;
the Turks, iii. 88 f.
_See also_ Appendix I _passim_

Chastity, Catholic teaching and practice, ii. 120 f., 128 f., iv. 133,
135, 138;
in L.’s view, i. 259, 362, iii. 243 f., iv. 147 f., 473 f., vi. 404;
L.’s C., i. 7, 19;
Melanchthon on C., iii. 325;
temptations against, i. 287, ii. 86, 161, n., vi. 118 f.
_See_ Celibacy

Chemnitz, M., vi. 313, 415, 419, 443, n.

Children, L.’s, iii. 215 f., 232, 280 f., 428, iv. 265, v. 108, 226,
230, vi. 31, 373, 378 f.
_See_ Luther (Hans, etc.)

Chrism, iv. 519, v. 101, 195

Christ, Divinity of, iv. 238 ff., v. 412;
almost forgotten, ii. 245;
darkened by Aristotle, i. 137;
formerly unknown, i. 135, 282, 320, ii. 92;
known only as the Judge, i. 391, ii. 281, iv. 103;
who did not die for our sins, vi. 245, 260;
the “weak” C., ii. 385, iii. 191, v. 227;
His Body omnipresent, iii. 396, iv. 495 f., vi. 253 f., 414 f.;
sole content of Scripture, v. 541;
His preaching in Hell, v. 48;
His “lie,” vi. 514;
“C. our hen,” i. 80, vi. 372, 501 f.
_See_ Faith

Christian III of Denmark, ii. 139, iii. 413, iv. 75

Christians, L.’s title for his followers, ii. 108, 345, v. 172, 518;
what C. must do, iii. 52, 60, 69, 79, 81, v. 44 f., vi. 80, n.;
need no divine worship, vi. 147 f.;
nor government, v. 572 f.;
they are few, iii. 24 f., vi. 292 f.
_See_ Church-Apart, Evangelicals, Temptations, Worship

Christina, Landgravine, iv. 14, 18 f., 24, 69

Chronology of the world, iii. 147, vi. 349

Chrysostom, St. J., i. 243, iv. 335

Church, iii. 22-38, vi. 290-340;
to be esteemed, i. 223 ff., 337, iv. 406, 410, 488;
L.’s view connected with Wiclif’s and Hus’s?, i. 106, vi. 299;
visibility, ii. 304, iii. 28;
criticised by moderns, v. 465 ff.;
_my_ Churches, v. 173, vi. 314, 356;
marks of the C., vi. 293-297, 327;
Church-Apart of the true Believers, ii. 104, 111, 304, ii. 25 f.,
v. 133-140;
Church property, ii. 318, 327, iii. 33-38, 68, 234, 440, v. 203 ff.,
vi. 51, 61.
_See_ Infallibility

Chytræus, iv. 461, vi. 419

Cicero, i. 8, vi. 17, 376

Circumcision, iii. 256

Cistercians.
_See_ Mayer

Civilisation, L. founder of modern, vi. 457 ff.

Claius, J., v. 505, vi. 443

Clandestinity.
_See_ Marriage

Classics, vi. 16 f.

Clavasio, A. de, ii. 51

Clémanges, N. of, i. 50

Clement IV, iv. 89, v. 424

⸺ VI, i. 134

⸺ VII, ii. 392, iii. 424 f., iv. 6

Clergy, i. 46-53, 57, 283 f., iv. 127 ff., 169 f., v. 485

Cleve, W. von, v. 396

Clichtoveus, J., iv. 152, n., 353, n., vi. 437

Cloaca, i. 393, vi. 504-510

Clothes.
_See_ Dress

Coarseness.
_See_ Unseemliness

Coburg, ii. 95, 384 ff., 389 ff., iii. 87 f., 123, 175, 299, iv. 313,
v. 98, 117, 346, 497, vi. 106, 512

Cochlæus, with Luther at Worms, ii. 65, vi. 135, 143 f.;
on L., i. 17, 24, 30, iii. 303, iv. 92, 354, 358, vi. 431;
L. on C., v. 182, 303;
C. on Melanchthon, v. 267;
literary work, ii. 196, 212, iii. 63, 86, 276, n., iv. 380 ff., 522,
v. 591, vi. 405 ff.;
language, ii. 150;
and the Jesuits, vi. 428, n.;
death, vi. 384

Cœlestinus, J. F., vi. 415

Cœlius, M., vi. 132, 374, 377 ff., 387 f.

Coler, M., vi. 255

Cologne, i. 42, v. 166, 233;
L. at C., iv. 171, n.;
Book of Reform, iii. 354, 447

Combats, spiritual.
_See_ Temptations

Commandments, Ten, “unknown to Catholics,” vi. 200;
in L.’s Catechism, v. 485;
a bad law, i. 313;
not to be dwelt on, iii. 175, 226, 394, v. 454;
sermons on the, i. 361;
C. do not justify, i. 43;
need not be kept, ii. 28 f., iv. 454;
indeed cannot, i. 100, 144, 189, 207, 339;
hurtful to salvation, i. 317;
their object, i. 287 f., ii. 271 f.;
C. of the Church, v. 46, 246, vi. 316;
L.’s unwillingness to impose C. and precepts, v. 85 f., 139, 142,
147, 179, 484.
_See_ Counsels

Commerce.
_See_ Merchants

Communicatio idiomatum, iv. 240, v. 456, vi. 420

Communion, under both kinds, ii. 99, 321, iii. 10, 330, 335, iv. 525,
vi. 279, n.;
of the sick, v. 464.
_See_ Eucharist, Mass, Supper

Compostella, iv. 105, vi. 405

Concords (various Protestant), iii. 330 f., 421 f., 434, 436, 441, 447,
v. 176, 259, vi. 412, 419-423

Concubinage, among the German clergy, i. 50 f.;
recommended by L. to the members of the Teutonic Order, iii. 262 f.;
the Landgrave’s “concubine,” iv. 28, 40, 52

Concupiscence, i. 141, 207 ff.;
all-powerful, i. 73 f., 110-117;
destroys freedom, ii. 278 f.;
is a sin, i. 99, 203, 210, ii. 150, vi. 365;
identical with original sin, i. 98

Concurrence, Divine, i. 144, 153 f., ii. 233

Conduct, L.’s safe, i. 334, ii. 62, 66 ff., 69, 367, iv. 85, vi. 188

Confession, i. 10, 99, 208 ff., 290-296, 250, 380, n., 384 f., ii.
59 f., 99, iii. 10, 210, 324, 410, 421, 437, iv. 21, 30-39,
248-256, v. 74, 315, 320, vi. 340, 374, 496 f.
_See_ Penance

Confirmation, vi. 410

Congregational Churches, ii. 98-114, iii. 22-43

Conjugal due, rendering the, a sin, iv. 152.
_See_ Marriage

Conradin, iv. 89, v. 424

Consanguinity, iv. 156 f.

Conscience, iv. 56 f.;
the only true C. is that which agrees with L.’s, v. 66-78;
all the Lutheran’s troubles of C. must be from the devil, v. 328 ff.,
339, 355 f.;
struggles of C., _see_ Temptations;
freedom of C., _see_ Intolerance;
_see also_ Synteresis

Consecration.
_See_ Ordination

Consistories, iii. 29, v. 179-185, 601 f., vi. 314, 356

Constance, Council of, i. 364, ii. 232, iii. 426, iv. 287

Constantine, ii. 309, iii. 71, v. 229, 594;
Donation of C., iii. 145, vi. 489

Constipation.
_See_ Ailments

Consubstantiation, i. 162, ii. 320, iii. 380, iv. 495 f., v. 463,
vi. 415

Contarini, C., ii. 78, iii. 429, iv. 69, 359, vi. 488

Contelori, F., i. 354

Contingent things, i. 193.
_See_ Necessity

Contradictions: the Schoolmen admitted grace, and didn’t, i. 150;
the monks were, and were not, zealous, i. 271;
death was a reason why L. should, and should not, marry, ii. 181;
the Bible errs, and does not, iv. 418;
God is, and is not, author of evil, ii. 281 f.;
hell can, and can’t, be escaped by those predestined, i. 192;
works are, and are not, called for, i. 255, iv. 447, v. 454 f.;
Scripture is, and is not, sole rule of faith, iv. 415 ff.;
God alone does all, i. 255;
yet man must prepare for Grace, i. 213;
freedom of judgment and yet binding creeds, iii. 3;
continence possible, and impossible, iii. 243 f.;
repentance out of fear, good, and yet evil, i. 293;
armed resistance lawful, and not lawful, v. 55 f., 58 f.;
Church has, and has not, any power of her own, ii. 295 ff., v. 597
ff., vi. 329;
for money lent money may, and may not, be taken, vi. 91 f.;
on the Eucharist, v. 464.
_See_ Councils, Opposition

Contrition, not necessary for justification, iv. 433 f. (but cp. iv.
438 f. and v. 15);
nor for confession, iii. 210;
what C. is, i. 290-296, v. 12, 310, n.

Controversy.
_See_ Polemics

Conventuals, vi. 498.
_See_ Observantines

Conviction.
_See_ Certainty

Copernicus, iii. 100, vi. 25

Copes.
_See_ Vestments

Cordatus, C., i. xvii., 395, iii. 178 f., 218, 225, 228, 231, n., 294,
369, 371, 377, 414, 434, iv. 269, 461, vi. 391, 505 ff.

Cordus, E., ii. 125, 220, 256, 342, iv. 176, vi. 28

Corpulence, ii. 157, iii. 296, 309

Corvinus, A., iii. 218, iv. 14, 25, 28, 74, 184, vi. 487 f.

Coster, F., vi. 385

Cotta, K. and U., i. 5, iii. 288 f.

Councils, Œcumenical, L. appeals to one, i. 359;
cannot err, i. 339;
can err, i. 364, v. 378, vi. 299;
a “Christian” C., ii. 50;
Rome’s efforts to assemble a Council, iii. 424-429;
a free German C., v. 379;
the projected Protestant Council, iii. 432 f., 441, v. 170, 175-179,
vi. 424.
_See_ Constance, Trent, etc.

Counsels, Evangelical, vi. 89;
are really commands, ii. 166, 299, v. 46 ff., 56-60, vi. 80, n., 89;
with the exception of chastity, ii. 166.
_See_ Law

Courage, ii. 27, 76 f., 367, v. 131

Craco, C., vi. 415, 417

Cranach, Lucas (the Elder and Younger), ii. 158 f., 174, iii. 300, v.
224, 422 f., 425, 429, 495 f., 498, 519, 528

Cranmer, iv. 10, n.

Creed, iv. 415, 483, v. 360, 473, 485 f., 554

Cricius, A., iii. 370

Critical acumen, i. 90 f., 181, 282 f., 311 f., iv. 174 f., 177, 246,
v. 153, 474, 522, vi. 335.
_See_ Apocrypha

Cromwell, iv. 12

Cronberg, H. von, ii. 325 f.

Cross, sign of the, iii. 83, 435;
mystic particles of the C., i. 88.
_See_ Crucifix, Theology of the C.

Crotus Rubeanus, i. 4 f., 7, 403, ii. 3 f., 62, 256, iii. 403, vi. 28, 31

Crucifix, iii. 84, 132, v. 212, vi. 197, 225, 335;
taken to bed by nuns, iv. 106

Cruciger, C., iii. 171, 371, 377, 433 f., iv. 194, 299, v. 22, 237, 262,
270 f., 499, vi. 5, 346, 359, 364, 417

Crusades, iii. 81, 83

Cryptocalvinism, vi. 414-423

Culsamer, J., ii. 344

Curæus, J., vi. 417

Curia, iii. 128.
_See_ Rome

Curses, i. 209, ii. 13, iv. 295-305.
_See_ Maledictory prayer

Cusa, N. of, i. 50

Cyprian, i. 243, iii. 250, vi. 339

Daniel, ii. 57, iii. 84, 141 f., 148, iv. 134, 315

Dantiscus, iv. 274, n., 357

Dantzig, v. 216

David, v. 300, 579 f., vi. 253

Day, The.
_See_ Last Day

Deacons, Lutheran, vi. 57, 265

Death, vi. 376-386;
Italian pamphlet on L.’s death, vi. 371;
L.’s wish to die, vi. 107, 341;
best d. for Pope and his cardinals, v. 383 f.
_See_ Opponents

Decalogue.
_See_ Commandments

Deceit.
_See_ Dishonesty

Decretals, i. 367, ii. 51, iv. 303, vi. 338

Defiance, ii. 52, iii. 21, 394, iv. 317, 416, 511, v. 369, vi. 168 f.,
318, 396-403

Degree, academical, i. 21, 58, 127 ff., 285, ii. 130, 362, vi. 466.
_See_ Doctorate

Demonology, ii. 389 f., v. 275-305, 427, vi. 111

Denmark, ii. 323, iii. 412 f., vi. 247, 273

Depression.
_See_ Pessimism

Desertion, ground for divorce, iii. 252 ff., 257

Despair, L.’s reason for becoming a monk, i. 4, vi. 224;
necessary, i. 191.
_See_ Fear, Temptations

Dessau, League of, ii. 213

Determinism, i. 116, 183, n., ii. 227, 241, 266, 284, 288

Dettigkofer, D., iv. 75

Deuterocanonical Books.
_See_ Apocrypha

Devils, v. 275-305, vi. 122-140;
white d., ii. 348;
attend L.’s funeral, vi. 385;
“as many devils as tiles on the roofs,” ii. 62, 367;
Devil holds the Jews captive, v. 406 f.;
is a poisoner, v. 235;
a good dialectician, ii. 379;
kidnaps people, vi. 383;
lives in the water, vi. 372;
L.’s vocation, from the d.? i. 16, ii. 86;
cause of L.’s ailments, iii. 317 f., vi. 111;
sorely wounded by L., iii. 122;
the d. as L.’s father, iv. 358;
the d.’s embassy, v. 98, n.
_See_ Exorcism, Ghosts, Possession, Satan

Didymus Faventinus, vi. 26

Diet, L’.s, iii. 211, 305, 309 f., 317 f.

Dietenberger, J., ii. 222, iv. 101, 355, 383, v. 520

Dietrich, V. (Theodoricus Vitus), iii. 58, 216, 218, 317, iv. 12, 180,
vi. 130, 250, 391, 505 ff.

Diller, M., vi. 275

Dionysius “the Areopagite,” i. 181

Diplomacy, i. 365, ii. 15, 21 f., 55, 58 f., 100, 109 f., 295 f.,
302 f., 321, 365 f., iii. 331, n., iv. 6, 39, 97, n., vi. 325-340

Discipline, Church, i. 57, v. 388.
_See_ Clergy and Preachers

Diseases.
_See_ Ailments

Dishonesty, i. 335 f., ii. 15-25, 49, 385 ff., 392, iv. 41, v. 111,
537 f.
_See_ Gospel-proviso, Lies

Dispensations, Papal, i. 271, iv. 3, 5, 18, 20, 156, 319, vi. 497;
Luther’s, i. 9, 358, iv. 30, 38, n., vi. 500, 504

Disputations, i. 310-320, 362-365, vi. 21;
early disputatiousness, i. 58 ff.

Distractions, need of, iii. 179, v. 353 f.

Divorce, ii. 33, 149, iii. 252-258, iv. 3-13, 156 ff.
_See_ Pauline privilege

Doctor, Doctorate, i. 33, 38, 78, 281, ii. 375, iii. 157 f., 297,
315 f., 320, 369 n., 391, iv. 227, 344, 346, v. 103 f., 304,
384, 510 n., vi. 375;
“A great Doctor,” i. 20, iii. 177, iv. 330.
_See_ Degree

Doliatoris, J., ii. 339

Domestic life, iii. 215 ff., iv. 280 ff.
_See_ Family

Dominicans, i. 39, 105, 163, 179, 337, 339, 370 f., ii. 12, iv. 383.
_See_ Cajetan, Tetzel, etc.

Doubts, ii. 79 f., iii. 112, iv. 218-227.
_See_ Temptations

Down-heartedness.
_See_ Pessimism

Draco, J., ii. 124

Draconites, J., ii. 256

Dreams, v. 352, vi. 149, 444

Dress, L.’s, i. 9, 276 f., 285 f., ii. 78, iii. 428, iv. 74

Dressel, M., i. 266 f.

Dringenberg, L., vi. 34

Drink, ii. 87, 94, 131, iii. 294-318.
_See_ Beer, Wine

Dungersheim, i. 24, 26, 168, ii. 145 f., 186, iii. 275, iv. 335, vi. 101

Dürer, A., ii. 40-44, 127, 158, 244, n., iii. 137

Ear-discharge.
_See_ Ailments

Eber, P., vi. 275, 410, 412

Eberbach, P.
_See_ Petreius

Eberlin, J., ii. 124, 129, 162 ff., 189, 354 f., v. 215, vi. 62

Ebner, H., ii. 334

Ecclesiastes by the Grace of God, ii. 102, 345, iv. 329, vi. 400

Eck, J., relations with L., i. 262 ff., 313, iv. 388;
attacks L., i. 336, ii. 147, iv. 86, 101, 377 ff.;
literary work, iv. 457, 502, 513, v. 456, 520, vi. 87, 323;
L. on E., i. 179, 336, ii. 49, 51, 70, iii. 114, iv. 86, 182, 287,
301 f., 319, v. 110, 282, 473;
E. in Rome, ii. 45 f.;
E. and Emser, ii. 222;
and Pirkheimer, ii., 39;
and Melanchthon, iii. 446, v. 267;
his death, vi. 383

Eckhard, iii. 163

Eckhart, Master, i. 172

Economics.
_See_ Usury

Edemberger, L., ii. 170

Education, L.’s, defects of, i. 126 ff.;
of children, i. 362, v. 280.
_See_ Schools

Egranus, iii. 384 f., 402 f., iv. 360, v. 42, vi. 289

Ehem, C., vi. 271

Ehrhardt, J., vi. 78

Eilenburg, ii. 319

Eisenach, i. 5, ii. 68, iii. 288, 421, vi. 125, 276;
Conference, iv. 50-55

Eisleben, i. 5, 262, iii. 159, iv. 361, 497, v. 30 ff., vi. 5, 372 ff.

Election.
_See_ Predestination, Vicar

Eleutherius, i. 314

Elevation of the Elements, iii. 393 f., iv. 195, n., 239 f., v. 153,
397, vi. 353

Elias, the New, ii. 129, 163 f., 189, iii. 141, 165, 322, iv. 348 f.,
v. 426, vi. 347, 391, 442

Elisabeth, Palsgravine, iv. 70

⸺ of Rochlitz, iv. 16, 24, 27, 201

Eliseus, his trick, iv. 113

Eloquence, iii. 103.
_See_ Rhetoric

Emotion, value of, iii. 179

Emperor.
_See_ Kaiser

Emser, H., relations with L., i. 8, 27, 371 ff.;
against L., i. 79, 346, 366, ii. 14, 220 ff., iii. 127, iv. 324,
354, 376;
L. against E., ii. 13, 51, iv. 182, 288, v. 307, 541, vi. 383, 512;
literary work, v. 123, 517, 519, 531;
E. and Melanchthon, vi. 26

End, justifies the means, ii. 156, iv. 110, n., vi. 92, 399;
of World.
_See_ Last Day

Epicure, Epicureans, v. 116, 173

Epicureans.
_See_ Erasmus, Papists, Rome

Epilepsy.
_See_ Ailments

Episcopate.
_See_ Bishops

Epistolæ obscurorum virorum, i. 6 f., 42, 91 f., ii. 3 f.

Epitaph, L.’s, ii. 159, vi. 377, 393

Equivocation, iv. 28 f., 51.
_See_ Dishonesty

Erasmus, secularised, i. 36;
edition of New Testament, i. 242 f., v. 510, vi. 454, 467;
“Colloquia,” iii. 443 f., vi. 16, 38;
for L., i. xxx., ii. 3, 9;
alleged saying, vi. 390;
against L., ii. 126, 154, 242-294, iii. 173, iv. 179-186, 325, 353,
v. 115 f., vi. 32, 36, 170, 429 f.;
on L.’s marriage, ii. 186;
blames L. for the Peasant War, ii. 212;
L. on E., i. 43, 92, ii. 219, 223, 267, iii. 135, 208, 403, iv. 91,
100 f., 287, 329, v. 456, vi. 397, 429 f.;
E. and Charles V, ii. 256;
and Dürer, ii. 41;
and Ferdinand I, ii. 249, vi. 429 f.;
and Duke George, ii. 246, 261;
and Melanchthon, iii. 320, 346, 366, 369, 376, 443 f., v. 268;
and Stadion, v. 273;
and Vives, vi. 44

Erbe, F., vi. 255

Erfurt, i. 3, 6, 21, 58 f., 263, 312, 363, ii, 62 f., 336-362, v.
213 ff., vi. 27 f., 326 f.

Ericeus, iii. 436, n.

Eschatology.
_See_ Apocalyptics, Last Day

Eschwege, iv. 38

Esdras, ii. 235

Esther, iii. 253;
Book of E., v. 521

Ethics, iii. 200 f., v. 3-164, vi. 453;
in Occamism, i. 157.
_See_ Works

Eucharist, iii. 380-384, 393 ff., 444 f., iv. 250 f., 492-499,
v. 74, 149, 462-465;
is a sacrament, ii. 27;
to be adored, iv. 239 f., vi. 353;
not to be reserved, ii. 320 f., v. 222.
_See_ Communion, Consubstantiation, Elevation, Mass, Supper, Zwinglians

Eusebius, v. 411

Eustochium, ii. 121, iii. 243

Eutychianism, v. 81

Evangel.
_See_ Gospel

Evangelical Church Evangelicals, ii. 108, iii. 96, 301, iv. 21,
210, 311, v. 230.
_See_ Christians

Exaggeration, i. 57, 124, 244, 283, iv. 343 f., vi. 22, 200, 216 f.

Excommunication, Church’s use of, against L., ii. 19 f., 45-52, 90;
L. against E., i. 24 f., 51 f., 54, 66, 337, 371, ii. 231 f., iii.
120, 146, iv. 85 f., 320, v. 122;
L.’s own use of E., ii. 335, iii. 324, iv. 209 f., 216 f., 245, v.
19, 139 f., 143, 148, 186 ff., 603, vi. 263, 293, 316

Exegesis.
_See_ Bible interpretation

Exemption, i. 283.
_See_ Dispensations

Exorcism, iii. 411, vi. 137-140

Expectants, iv. 339

Experience, inward, i. 159, 170, 241 f., 323, 377, 380, ii. 233, n.,
277, iv. 391 ff., v. 7, 81, 161 f., vi. 127, 192, 234

Exsurge Domine, ii. 47

Extra ecclesiam.
_See_ Salvation

Extreme Unction, iii. 7, vi. 410

Eyb, A. von, iv. 136

Eyes, L.’s., i. 86, 279, ii. 158 f., iv. 357 f.

Ezechiel, iii. 84, 88

Faber (J.) Stapulensis, i. 63, 92, 243, vi. 437

⸺ J., vi. 494

⸺ J., vi. 498

⸺ (or Fabri), J., of Vienna, ii. 135, iii. 194, 335, 416, iv. 302,
383, 514, v. 266, 529, vi. 323, 384, 516

⸺ P.
_See_ Favre

Fabricius, J., iii. 292, vi. 443

⸺ T., vi. 494

Facienti quod est in se, etc., i. 144, 205, n.

Fainting-fits.
_See_ Ailments

Faith, L. begins to make more of F. than of works, i. 72 f., 121,
133, 221;
what F. means to L., ii. 34, iii. 352 f., v. 38 ff., 444-449;
true F. is humility, i. 219, 252 f.;
it comprises the “fides historica,” i. 76, 377, iii. 14 f., 415,
iv. 413 ff., 432 f.;
and all the elements of Christianity, ii. 72, iii. 13 f.;
such F. is either complete or non-existent, i. 253, iii. 384,
424, v. 398;
F. as a mere assent, iii. 18; iv. 432 f.;
articles of F., iv. 414 f.;
justification, due to Fiducial F., i. 377-400, iv. 431-449;
which is the one thing necessary, iii. 180-186;
and is produced by God alone, ii. 290, n.;
this F. is weak even in L. himself, iii. 201 ff., 415, iv. 275,
441 f., v. 74 f., 130, 357-368;
this F. is Saving F., i. 261, 385;
it includes the love of God, v. 41 f., 477 (but, cp. i. 308, also
excludes it),
yet is no “fides formata caritate” which is a “thing accursed,”
i. 209, iii. 329, v. 12;
“by F. alone,” v. 515;
criticised by Schwenckfeld, v. 160 f.;
Rule of F., iv. 482 ff.;
“vera fides,” i. 170.
_See_ Reason

False charges.
_See_ Legends

Family, L.’s, iii, 42, iv. 232 f., v. 558 f., 561.
_See_ Domestic life

Fanatics, origin, ii. 97 ff.;
they force L. to reconsider his theory of the worthlessness of works,
iv. 474;
and to insist on the rights of the authorities, v. 569 f.;
why don’t they perform miracles? vi. 151 f.;
L.’s attack on them, ii. 167, 363-379.
_See_ Anabaptists, Carlstadt, etc.

Farel, Guil., v. 167

Fasting, i. 227, 339, iii. 226 f., 309, 428, v. 87 ff., 355, vi. 321.
_See_ Mortification, Penance

Fatalism, ii. 263.
_See_ Pessimism

Fathers of the Church, iv. 410;
Erasmus’s work, ii. 243, 253;
L. demands a return to them, i. 138, 320 (_See_ Augustine);
yet he dislikes their praise of chastity, ii. 120 f.;
their belief in free will, ii. 287;
and their ignorance of faith alone, iv. 335;
nevertheless they may be appealed to, iii. 380 f., iv. 409 f., 415,
vi. 336.
_See_ Tradition

Faust, Dr., v. 241

Favre, P., iv. 385 f., vi. 427 f.

Fear of God’s judgments, i. 125, 251, 294 f., 318, iv. 433, 455, 462,
v. 22 f.

Feasts.
_See_ Holidays

Feige, J., iv. 41, 54, 69, 113

Ferber, G., iii. 286 f.

Ferdinand I (Archduke, King and Kaiser), ii. 132, 215, 380, iii. 89,
276, 303, 437, iv. 162, 285, v. 404, vi. 480, 485, 487, 489

Ferinarius, J., v. 193

Ferreri, L., iii. 173 f., vi. 430

Festivals.
_See_ Holidays

Finance, Papal, i. 51 f., 54, 347 ff.

Findling, J., iii. 171 f.

Fischart, v. 295

Fischer, C., vi. 61

⸺ J., vi. 265, 314

Fisher, Bp. of Rochester, iii. 70, 428, iv. 9, v. 110, vi. 246

Flacius Illyricus, ii. 361, iii. 446, iv. 514, v. 219, 263, 426,
vi. 40, 207, 391 f., 407 ff., 412 f., 443, n.

Flasch, S., iv. 160

Fliesbach, C., vi. 61

Florence, hospitals, iv. 481;
tale, v. 318

Florentina, the runaway nun, iii. 159 f.

Fomes peccati.
_See_ Concupiscence

Fontaine, S., vi. 385

Forchheim, ii. 345

Forgiveness of sins, i. 10;
a covering over, i. 99 f., v. 6 f.;
not an actual removal, i. 208, 210 f., iii. 182, v. 37;
St. Augustine’s view, iv. 462;
comes through faith in Christ, i. 115, iii. 183, 192 f.;
believer sins not in doing evil, i. 208, iii. 180 f.;
article of F. is fundamental, vi. 166, n.;
chief article of the creed, v. 95.
_See_ Confession, Contrition, Faith, Sin

Formal principle.
_See_ Bible alone

Forstemius, v. 500

Forster, vi. 271

Fortenagel, L., ii. 158

Fox, Bp. of Hereford, iv. 10

Franciscans, ii. 128, 254, iii. 166, 172, vi. 247

François I., ii, 168, iii. 424, iv. 69, 76, vi. 472, 480, 488, 490, 492

Frank, S., v. 83, 190, vi. 271, 289

Frankenhausen, ii. 365

Frankfurt on Main, iii. 71, v. 377, 400, vi, 35, 61

⸺ ⸺ Oder, vi. 29, 41

Franz, W., iv. 469

Frederick Barbarossa, v. 424, vi. 443, 494

⸺ II of Prussia, vi. 447 f.

⸺ the Wise of Saxony, his character, iv. 205 f.;
praised by L., ii. 7 f., 91, 101, iii. 167 f.;
his familiarity, v. 311;
passion for relics, i. 284 f., 327;
receives the Golden Rose, i. 365, n.;
L.’s strictures on F., i. 81;
F. protects L., i. 334, 340 f., 355, ii. 67;
restrains him, v. 587;
hinders his marriage?, ii. 183;
F. and Carlstadt, ii. 97 f.;
and Erasmus, ii. 246;
and Spalatin, ii. 23

⸺ III of the Palatinate, vi. 414, 420

Freedom of the Gospel, i. 229, 251, ii. 27 ff., 34, 84-87, 241, iii. 9,
v. 476 f., vi. 447.
_See_ Intolerance

⸺ ⸺ Will, i. 100, 204 ff., 207, 318 f., ii. 223-294, iii. 349 f.;
in Augustine, iv. 458 f.;
according to Calvin, v. 400 f.;
Melanchthon, iii. 346 ff., iv. 436, v. 258, vi. 152 f.;
Schwenckfeld, v. 159.
_See_ Determinism

Free-thought, L. the herald of?, iii. 109

Friars.
_See_ Monks

Friedrich, A., vi. 133

Fröschel, S., v. 188, 280, vi. 137

Fugger family, i. 328, 348 ff., 352, vi. 83

Funk, J., vi. 408

Furtenbach, B., vi. 82

Galatians, commentary on, i. 64, 66, 306-310, 386, v. 292

Gallicanism, i. 164

Gallows grief, i. 292.
_See_ Fear of God’s judgments

Gallus, iv., vi. 410

Gangra, Council, vi. 489

Gantner, J., vi. 271

Gebhard of Mansfeld, iii. 64

Geiler of Kaysersberg, ii. 151, iv. 135, v. 290, vi. 46

Generosity, iv. 270 ff.

Genesis, commentary on, i. 395, iv. 14

Geneva, iii. 448.
_See_ Calvin

George, “Junker,” ii. 81, 159

⸺ of Anhalt, iii. 215, v. 167, 192, vi. 347, 366

⸺ of Brandenburg, ii. 384, iii. 50, 62, 314, vi. 263

⸺ Saxony, iv. 187-193;
L.’s mystical advice to G., i. 228, 242;
preaches before him, i. 334, 369 f.;
at the Leipzig Disputation, i. 362 ff.;
L.’s rage with him, ii. 396 f., iii. 121, iv. 287, 302 f., vi. 243;
G. against L., ii. 395 f., iii. 275, iv. 101 f., 159, 192 f., 322,
v. 171, vi. 400 f.;
G.’s severity to peccant clergy, iv. 158;
G. and Arnoldi, ii. 392;
and Erasmus, ii. 246, 261;
and the “Leipzig poets,” iv. 173 ff.;
and Wicel, iv. 362;
G.’s sons, iv. 163;
his death, iv. 27, 194, 302

Gerbel, N., ii. 83

Gerhard, J., iii. 138

Gerhoch of Reichersberg, v. 553

German, Council, v. 379, 382;
G. language a barbarous one, v. 497;
L.’s influence on G., iii. 103, v. 504-510, vi. 15, 416, 443;
makes unseemliness popular, iii. 239;
G. nationalism, i. 403, ii. 10, 26, iii. 93-108, v. 129, vi. 390 f.,
446, 448, 457, 460 f.;
G. theology, i. 66, 87, 177, 180 f., 230, 237, 345, ii. 145, 225

Germans, L.’s unflattering descriptions, v. 534, vi. 4, 72.
_See_ Italians, Prophet of the G., etc.

Gerson, J., i. 13, 84, 134, 142, 159, 173, 179 f., 233, 243, iii. 179,
v. 91, vi. 202

Getelen, A. von, iv. 383

Ghinucci, G., i. 338

Ghost, egg and feathers of the Holy, iv. 292.
_See_ Spirit

Ghosts, etc., i. 19, 176, ii. 81 f., 95 f., 167, 389 f., iii. 118, 160,
356 f., iv. 315, v. 283 f., 346, vi. 122-140;
L.’s ghost, iv. 300.
_See_ Devils

Giddiness.
_See_ Ailments

Giengarius, ii. 164

Gifts to L., i. 285 f., iii. 304, 314 f., iv. 8, 10, 26, 271.
_See_ Talents

Glareanus, H., vi. 31

Glatz, C., ii. 139, 174, n.

Gleichen, E. von, iv. 20

Glosses, i. 62 f., iii. 398

Gluttony, ii. 87, 94.
_See_ Diet

Gnesiolutherans, iii. 375, vi. 415

God: the Hidden G., i. 161, ii. 239, 268 ff., 284, iii. 190;
G. “in se” and “quoad nos,” v. 441 f.;
Occam’s view that His existence is not demonstrable, i. 158, 161;
shared by Melanchthon, v. 269;
“falsehood” of the Catholic opinion of G., i. 190, 301, ii. 269 f.,
284;
L.’s gloomy conception of G., i. 113, 116, 187-197, 381;
fear of G.’s judgments, i. 10, 189, n., 294 f., 393, v. 473;
G. is not bound by justice, i. 196 f., ii. 292 f., n.;
commands impossibilities, i. 144, 188 f.;
works evil in the wicked, ii. 233, 270, 282, iii. 190.
_See_ Will

Gödelmann, J. G., v. 295

Goethe, vi. 448

Golhart, J., vi. 265

Good intention, works, etc.
_See_ Intention, Works

Gospel, rediscovered by L., i. 393 f.;
“my G.,” iv. 334;
content of the G., iii. 186;
G. existed before Christ, v. 8;
rule of G. quite distinct from worldly rule, v. 564 f.;
Gospel-proviso, ii. 384 f., iii. 330, 338, 343, iv. 96.
_See_ Law

Gotha, i. 69 f., 262, vi. 326, 409

Gout.
_See_ Ailments

Government.
_See_ Authority

Grace, semi-Pelagian stamp of Occam’s teaching, i. 132, 141 ff.,
311, vi. 426;
exaggerated by L., i. 151 ff.;
need of G., 72 ff., 83;
means of G., v. 461 f.;
actual grace, v. 36;
G. and predestination, i. 204 ff., ii. 229;
preparation for G., i. 75, 144 f., ii. 226, iii. 210;
Catholics never know whether they are in G., vi. 193.
_See_ Justification

Granvell, iv. 369

Gräter, J., v. 295

Gratian, i. 91, 311, ii. 51

Gravamina nationis Germanicæ, i. 52 f., ii. 66, 77, iii. 98

Great man, a, iv. 260, 330, vi. 211 f., 448, 457;
a G. theologian, vi. 349;
_see_ Doctor, Megalomania;

Greatness, vi. 398-407

Grebel, C., ii. 370 f.

Greek, i. 28, 128, ii. 235, v. 494, 509 f., 606, vi. 12, 19, 36, 38,
431, 504;
G. orthodox, ii. 13, v. 175

Grefenstein, J., i. 25

Gregorian chant, ii. 171.
_See_ Hymns

Gregory I, iv. 335, 464, 525, v. 252, vi. 515

⸺ VII, iv. 110, n., v. 424, n.

⸺ of Rimini, i. 143 f., 159

Greiffenklau, R. von, ii. 65, vi. 383

Greser, D., vi. 61

Groote, G., i. 88, 173

Gropper, J., vi. 492

Gross, C., iii. 218, n.

⸺ E., iv. 128 f., 136

Grynæus, S., iv. 10, n.

Gualther, R., iv. 10, n., 68

Guidiccione, G., iii. 425

Günther, i. 65, 312, vi. 216

Güttel, C., v. 19

Gymnasia, vi. 20

Haarlem, whale of, iii. 148

Habit, supernatural, i. 155 f.
_See_ Virtue

Hadrian IV, v. 424, n., vi. 494

⸺ VI, i. 55, ii. 39, 165, iv. 371

Hagenau conference, v. 400

Hagiolatry.
_See_ Saint-worship

Halberstadt, v. 220

Halle, v. 165, 219, vi. 272, 381, 384 f., 407

Hallucinations, ii. 81, vi. 129 ff., 172-186

Halo.
_See_ Portraits

Hamburg, iii. 408, v. 218

Hamelmann, H., iv. 223

Hammelburg treaty, ii. 360

Hamster, Hans, vi. 255

Haner, J., iv. 470 f.

Hardenberg, A. R., iv. 497

Harnack, A., on L., i. 398, ii. 72, iv. 483 f., v. 432-469, vi.
63, 441

Hasenberg, J., iv. 173 ff., v. 519

Hass, J., i. 344

Hatred, of God, i. 389;
resignation to God’s H., i. 238;
L.’s H. for his foes, iii. 172, 412, 434, iv. 508, v. 98-116, 429

Haubitz, A. von, v. 591

Hausen, vi. 288

Hausmann, N., ii. 135, 205, 387, iv. 219, v. 140, 590

Health.
_See_ Ailments

Heathen, salvation of ancient, v. 48;
their virtues, vices, i. 101, v. 50.
_See_ Missions

Hebrew, i. 28, 35, 128, iv. 46, v. 410, 413, 428, 494 f., 510 ff.,
533, vi. 19, 36, 431.
_See_ Jews

Hebrews, commentary on Epistle to the, i. 64, 251, 260 ff., 306, 378;
Pauline authorship denied, v. 521

Hecker, G., i. 355

Hedio, C., ii. 193 f., vi. 46, 58, 278

Hegemon, P., vi. 494

Hegius, A., vi. 34

Heidelberg Chapter, i. 298, 334, v. 13;
Disputation, i. 115, 315 ff., 334, 379, ii. 230;
University, iii. 291, vi. 29, 40, 414

Heintz, P., iii. 411

Hel, C., vi. 271

Held, G., iii. 215

⸺ M., vi. 490

Helding, M., iv. 223, 384, v. 21

Helfenstein, U. von, ii. 131

Hell, predestination to, i. 102, 307, 312 f., 317, ii. 227, 239, 268,
iii. 329, v. 5, 438, 441;
according to Calvin, v. 400;
Mosellanus, ii. 242;
Melanchthon, iii. 347;
Schwenckfeld, v. 159;
resignation to H., i. 174, 190, 192, 237 ff., 376, vi. 220

Heller, S., iii. 314

Hemorrhoids.
_See_ Ailments.

Hen.
_See_ Christ

Hendriks-Hoen, C., iv. 493

Henry VIII, L. and the divorce, iii. 255, 260, iv. 3-13, vi. 488;
approval of H.’s cruelty, iii. 70, 428, v. 110;
L.’s rudeness to H., ii. 152 f., 211, iv. 302, 391;
H. and Erasmus, ii. 259;
and Melanchthon, iii. 357, 373 f.;
and the Schmalkalden League, iii. 65

⸺ of Brunswick, iii. 124, 270 f., iv. 63-71, 97 ff., 288, 293 f.,
v. 167, 236, 394 f., vi. 349, 407

⸺ Saxony, iv. 27, 194, v. 124 f., vi. 243, 255

Herborn, N., ii. 254

Herder, G., vi. 446

Heretics, in L.’s fold, ii. 74, 379, iii. 398, iv. 245, v. 169 ff.,
238 f., 349, vi. 288 f., 343, 351 ff., 364 f., 398, 415 f.;
on H., i. 225, n.;
H. all begin by doubting one article, i. 253, iii. 384, 424, v. 398;
the ways of H., vi. 280-289;
their vanity, i. 225, 324, vi. 164;
obstinacy, i. 253, v. 349;
H. are the devil’s dwelling-place, v. 284;
not to be punished, ii. 301;
and yet to be punished severely.
_See_ Intolerance, Zwinglians.

Herolt, J., iv. 120, 128

Hersfeld, ii. 68

Hervagius, iv. 183

Hesse, iv. 210 f., v. 141 f., 188, 408

Hesshusen, T., iv. 323, vi. 413, 415

Hessus, Eobanus, joins L., ii. 3, 43, 62, 256;
fanaticism, ii. 355;
at Nuremberg, vi. 6;
on runaway monks, ii. 124 f.;
on the decay of learning, vi. 27 f., 37, 79;
and of morals, ii. 342, 349 f.

Heyden, J. von der, ii. 188, iv. 173 ff., v. 592

Heydenreich, C., i. 393, iii. 221

Hierarchy.
_See_ Bishops

Hilary of Poitiers, iii. 381, iv. 110

Hildesheim, v. 218 f.

Hilten, J., iii. 166

Hindrances.
_See_ Impediments

History, study of, vi. 4, 19, 36, 437

Hoff, H. von, ii. 351, 353 f.

Hoffmann, C., iv. 355

Hoffmeister, J., iv. 114 f., 352, vi. 384-498

Hofmann, M., v. 151

Hohenzollerns.
_See_ Albert, Joachim, of Brandenburg

Holbein, ii. 158

Holidays, i. 227, ii. 253, vi. 430, n.

Holiness, as a mark of the Church, vi. 296, 330, 332 f.

Holkot, R., iv. 137

Hollen, G., vi. 68

Holler, J. L., v. 521

Holy monk, L. a, vi. 194 f.

Holzhausen, H. von, ii. 184

Homberg, synod, v. 141

Home.
_See_ Domestic life, Postils

Homoousios, iv. 240

Hondorf, A., v. 295

Honesty (in Bible-translation), v. 513 ff.
_See_ Truthfulness

Honstein, W. von, i. 228

Hoogstraaten, ii. 14, iv. 302, 383, vi. 383

Hope.
_See_ Faith (Fiducial)

Horn, A., ii. 361, n.

Horns, L.’s, v. 109, vi. 398

Hosius, S., i. 105, n., vi. 385

Hospitals, iv. 480 f.

Hoyer of Mansfeld, ii. 79, 131 f., iii. 276, 303, 312

Hubmaier, B., ii. 365

Huguenots, vi. 422

Humanism, i. 6 ff., 40-44, 91 f., ii. 3-9, vi. 30 f.
_See_ Erasmus, etc.

Humility, source of justification, i. 214-219, 258;
L.’s H., ii. 16 f., 21, 366, iv. 273 f., 277, 327 ff., 347, v. 114,
vi. 209-212

Humour, i. 277, ii. 140-145, 183 f., iii. 281, 306, iv. 104, 257, 279,
303, v. 306-318, vi. 350, 373 f.

Hundelshausen, H. von, iv. 25

Hungary, iii. 89, vi. 480, 483

Hus, J., i. 25 f., 106 ff., 356, 364, iii. 143 f., 155, 165, iv. 188,
317, 330, 417, n., v. 243, 389, 425, vi. 443

Hutten, U. von, i. 403, ii. 4-10, 54, 66 f., 248, vi. 467, 470

Hutter, L., vi. 443

Huttner, A., v. 215

Hymns, i. 278, n., v. 223, 342 f., 546-556, vi. 436

Hyperius, A., iv. 468 f., vi. 58

Hypocrisy.
_See_ Dishonesty

Ickelsamer, V., ii. 126 f., 130, 377, iii. 170, 302, iv. 337, v. 115

Iconoclasm.
_See_ Image-worship

Idol, L. made into an, iv. 70, vi. 422

Idolatry, to stand by one’s statutes, i. 72;
to look on God as the Judge, i. 390 f.;
to honour Mary, iv. 502 f.;
to say Mass, iv. 507, n.;
to pray, i. 309;
L.’s gainsayers are all idolaters, ii. 316, 329, 364, v. 113.
_See_ Intolerance, Saint-worship

Ignatius of Antioch, iii. 381

⸺ Loyola, vi. 384, 427 f., 435

Illnesses.
_See_ Ailments

Illuminism.
_See_ Rationalism

Image-worship, iconoclastic riots, etc., ii. 97 ff., 244 f., iii. 391
ff., iv. 411, v. 202 ff., 207-224

Immaculate conception, iv. 238

Immoral, L.? i. 26 f., 111, iii. 273-294

Impanation.
_See_ Consubstantiation

Impediments, matrimonial, ii. 33, 150, 187, iii. 257 ff., iv. 10, 156 ff.

Impotence, ground for Divorce, iii. 255.
_See_ Marriage

Impropriety.
_See_ Unseemliness

Imputation, i. 94 f., 155 ff.;
a nominalist view, i. 75, 122, 133, 161;
L.’s peculiar conception of it, i. 74, 94, 117, 191, 212, 214 f.,
219, 290.
_See_ Justification

Incense, v. 147

Inconsistencies.
_See_ Contradictions

Incubi, iv. 358 f., v. 286.
_See_ Possessed

Indulgences, L.’s earlier views on, i. 35, 75, 324;
the quarrel with Tetzel, i. 325-356, vi. 510;
other attacks on I., i. 70 f., 149, 227, 260, 284, 296 f., ii. 16,
iv. 372 f., v. 472

Infallibility of the Church, acknowledged, i. 162, 323, ii. 50, vi. 253;
denied, ii. 301;
L.’s own, ii. 375 f., vi. 256 f.
_See_ Pope

Infant.
_See_ Baptism

Infidelity.
_See_ Unbelief

Informers, L.’s, about Roman matters, i. 348 f., ii. 27, v. 382

Ingolstadt, vi. 431

Inkpot legend, ii. 96

Innocent III, i. 162, ii. 522

⸺ VIII, v. 296

Inquisition, the Saxon, ii. 332, iv. 409, v. 592 f., vi. 241 f., 264 ff.

Insanity.
_See_ Ailments

Inspiration, L.’s, ii. 93 f., iii. 137 f.
_See_ Bible, Spirit

Intemperance.
_See_ Drink

Intention (“intentio bona”), i. 177, 190, 202, 205, 277 f., ii. 241

Interest, vi. 79-98

Interim, iii. 375 f.
_See_ Leipzig, Ratisbon

Intermarriage of nobles, vi. 71

Intolerance, L.’s, ii. 72, 318, 331 f., 335, iii. 357 ff., 393, 409,
439, 447, iv. 512, v. 567, 577, 592, vi. 237-280, 408 f.
_See_ Blasphemy, Carlstadt, etc., Jews, etc.

Irrationalism, iii. 8

Isaac’s untruth, vi. 513

Italians, i. 54, 356, 339, ii. 5, iii. 94, 96 f., 130, iv. 320, v. 391

Iwanek, G., v. 373

Jacob’s lie to Isaac, vi. 515

⸺ the Jew, i. 35 f., vi. 497

Jaius, C., iii. 376, vi. 427

James, Epistle of, ii. 32, iv. 277, 389, 474, v. 522 f., vi. 446

Jena, iii. 385 f., v. 236, vi. 40, 412, 415

Jeremias, L. a new, vi. 161 f., 442

Jerome, St., i. 92, ii. 121 ff., iii. 243 f., iv. 164, 331, 335, v. 284,
vi. 413, 530

Jests.
_See_ Humour

Jews, iii. 235, n., 281, 289 f., iv. 265 f., 284-288, 296, v. 30 f., 115,
283, 298, 402-417, vi. 78, 262, 373 f.

Joachim of Anhalt, v. 313

⸺ I of Brandenburg, i. 349, ii. 214, iv. 302, v. 282

⸺ II, iii. 71 ff., iv. 195, v. 20, 313, vi. 61, 76

Joachimstal, iii. 402, vi. 389

Job, iv. 266, v. 497

Johann the Constant, of Saxony, relations with L., ii. 240, 345, iii.
35, iv. 206 f., 316, v. 496;
furthers L.’s cause, ii. 214, 331, v. 144, 576, 579, 587;
on resistance to the Kaiser, ii. 382, iii. 49, 51, 54, 325 f.;
and Erfurt, ii. 359;
one of the “Protesters,” ii. 384;
moral character, iv. 206;
not strong, iii. 37 f.;
temperate, iii. 307;
intolerance, vi. 241, 255 ff., 274 f.

⸺ Casimir, iv. 70, vi. 422

⸺ Frederick, L. dedicates to him his Magnificat, v. 480;
opinion of Henry VIII, iv. 11;
and the Turkish War, iii. 87, 90;
and resistance to the Kaiser, iii. 70;
rude behaviour to the Legate, iii. 441;
interference at Naumburg, v. 165 f.;
invites L. to draft his Schmalkalden Articles, iii. 431 f.;
intolerance, v. 403, vi. 274 f.;
and the Landgrave’s bigamy, iv. 22 f., 27;
relations with L., vi. 341, 347, 394;
sometimes has a drop too much, iii. 307, n.;
a sodomite, iv. 60, 202 ff.;
his moral character, iii. 268, iv. 202 ff., 207;
is deposed, vi. 407

John the Baptist, L. a new, vi. 442

Jokes.
_See_ Humour

Jonas, J., close relationship with L., ii. 174, 387, iii. 44, 52, 55,
57, 70, 300 f., 348, 367, 413-416, 432, v. 138, 175, 197, 231, 333,
vi. 222, 326, 372 ff.;
translates L.’s works into Latin, ii. 264, iv. 521 f., v. 382, 403 f.;
help in the German Bible, v. 499 f.;
missionary work, iv. 194, v. 124 f., 165, vi. 273 f.;
assists at ordinations, vi. 314, 347;
promotes the Consistories, iii. 31, v. 181, 183 f.;
acts as judge, iii. 171, 401 f., v. 20, vi. 281;
fanaticism, iii. 131, iv. 299, 510 f.;
a misunderstanding with L., v. 107;
his writing paper, ii. 144;
his melancholy, iv. 219;
and the bigamy, iv. 26, 36, 43;
and Wicel, v. 43;
present at L.’s death, his panegyric, iv. 244, 348, vi. 373, 380 f.,
387 f., 396

⸺ Prophet, v. 532

Jordan of Saxony, vi. 236

Jörger, D., vi. 92

Josel of Rosheim, v. 403, 408 f.

Jovian, iii. 41, vi. 355

Jubilee Year, vi. 86

Judae, L., iii. 227, 302, 417

Judas, ii. 282, iii. 190, v. 352

Jude, epistle of, v. 522

Judex, M., vi. 410

Judge.
_See_ Christ

Judgment.
_See_ God, Last Day

Julius II, i. 55, 228, 339, 351, vi. 516

⸺ III, vi. 436

Juncker, C., iii. 292, vi. 289, n.

Justice, of God, i. 391, 388-402, iv. 93 f., vi. 190;
human J., i. 150;
the twofold and threefold “justice,” i. 387;
natural and supernatural, v. 49-52;
“justice” becomes “piety,” v. 514;
commutative, v. 58, 117 ff.;
reaching of J., i. 71 ff., vi. 195;
“formalis justitia,” iv. 460.
_See_ Justification

Justification, according to L., iv. 432-449, v. 453-461;
consists in a being declared just, i. 213 ff.;
the fear of its absence is the sign of its presence, i. 218, 302;
is ever doubtful, i. 97;
preparation for, i. 213 f.;
its preaching makes the congregation snore, iv. 232.
_See_ Certainty, Faith, Grace, Humility, Imputation

Justinian, ii. 269, vi. 91

Justitiarii, i. 148, 199 ff., iv. 170

Juvenal, vi. 18

Kaiser, iii. 48-54.
_See_ Charles V, etc., Resistance

Kalteisen, H., i. 346

Karg, G., iii. 171, vi. 275

Kaufmann, F., iii. 217, vi. 358

⸺ M., iii. 216 f., v. 344

Kauxdorf, A., ii. 319

Kern, J., iv. 172 f.

Kessler, J., ii, 157 ff., iv. 268, 357 f.

Khummer, C., i. 396, vi. 505 ff.

Kingdom of God _v._ Kingdom of the World, ii. 297;
consists in forgiveness of sins, iv. 448

Kirchner, T., vi. 415

Kleindienst, B., iv. 95, 101

Kliefoth, v. 150

Kling, C., ii. 355, v. 341, vi. 326

⸺ M., iv. 289, vi. 356

Klingenbeyl, S., vi. 157, n.

Kneusel, B., v. 203

Knights, ii. 26, 56, 66 f., 197, vi. 402;
Teutonic, ii. 120, 223, iii. 16, 262, iv. 196

Koch, V., vi. 4

Kohlhase, Hans, v. 117-119

Kokeritz, C. von, iii. 72

Kolb, F., iv. 493

Kollin, C., ii. 154, iv. 383

Königsberg, v. 216, vi. 41, 408

Koppe, L., ii. 136

Koran, v. 419, 421

Körner, W., vi. 419

Koss, J., iv. 303 f.

Kötteritz, S. von, vi. 49

Krafft, U., iii. 238

Kraft, A., ii. 256, iv. 25

Kramer, M., iv. 158, 208, n.

Krapp, C., iii. 365

Kraus, J., v. 373

Krautwald, V., v. 79

Krug, N., v. 295

Kultur.
_See_ Civilisation

Lagarde, P. de, v. 512, vi. 449

Lainez, vi. 90, 435

Laing, J., vi. 385

Laity, i. 281, ii. 103, v. 178.
_See_ Clergy

Lamb of God, iv. 123, 517

Lambert, Fr., of Avignon, ii. 137, v. 141 f., vi. 8, 475, 479

Landau, J., iii. 304, vi. 376, n., 379 f.

Lang, J., at Erfurt, i. 40;
relations with the Humanists, i. 28, ii. 256;
love for mysticism, i. 41, 84, 169, 264 f., 280;
L.’s right hand man, i. 7, 265 f., ii. 342, vi. 114, 116, 118;
translates Matthew, v. 546;
succeeds L. as Augustinian Vicar, i. 315, 334;
promotes the apostasy of Erfurt, ii. 337, 340;
causes scandal, ii. 123, 355;
intolerance, ii. 354;
difficulties with his flock, vi. 326 ff.

⸺ P., i. 353

Langen, R. von, vi. 34

Language, L.’s, advantages, iii. 103, iv. 242 ff.;
defects, ii. 153 f., 198, iii. 172.
_See_ Abusive L., German L., Unseemliness

Languages, vi. 3, 12, 15, 25 f., 83, 436 f.

Lasco, vi. 58

Lasius, C., vi. 412

Last Day, v. 241-252;
will come in less than a century (v. 393) now that L. has shown up
the Roman Antichrist, ii. 56, 103, iii. 147;
signs of its nearness, ii. 168, 200 f.;
among them the prevalence of syphilis, ii. 162;
and of melancholy, iv. 224;
also the bad morals of the New Believers, iii. 165, iv. 218, v. 180;
the dissensions rampant among them, v. 170 f.;
the inroads of the Turks, iii. 82, 84, 88, 92, v. 418;
its expectation a ground for L.’s marriage, ii. 181;
as an explanation of his lack of missionary zeal, vi. 515;
does not prove L. a man of strong faith, v. 361;
its pathological character, vi. 154

Lateran Councils, i. 162, vi. 34, 503

Latin, iii. 396, 428, v. 146, 508

Latomus, iv. 329, vi. 384, 473.
_See_ Louvain

Lauterbach, A., i. xx., 394, iii. 163, 218 ff., 223, 230, v. 169, 188,
iv. 342, 391, 505 ff.

Lauterbecken, G., vi. 98

Lauze, W., iv. 202

Law and Gospel, iv. 459, v. 7-14, 24, 323, 451;
hard to distinguish, ii. 375, iv. 227, vi. 204 f.;
mosaic L., iii. 387, 394 f.
_See_ Antinomians, Commandments, Natural L., Schwenckfeld

Lawyers, attacked by L., i. 202, iii. 39 ff., 56 f., 233, 411, iv.
228 ff., v. 207, 293 ff., vi. 355-361

Learning.
_See_ Schools

Legends, L.’s, about his early life, vi. 187-236;
about the olden Church, iv. 116-178;
Legends about L., i. 111, n., ii. 69-74, 94 ff., iii. 278-294,
v. 367-374, vi. 381-386;
Legends of the Saints.
_See_ Critical acumen

Leib, K., ii. 39, 253, iv. 354

Leiffer, G., i. 88, 274

Leipzig Disputation, i. 362 ff.;
Interim, iii. 375, v. 263, vi. 410, 412;
University, vi. 29;
L.’s last visit, vi. 348

Leisentritt, J., vi. 436

Leisnig, v. 136 ff., 142, vi. 49 ff.

Lemnius, S., ii. 188, iii. 233 f., 274, 297, 302, iv. 292, vi. 287 ff.

Lening, J., iv. 24 f., 65 ff., 201

Leo X, and Albert of Mayence, i. 348-354;
takes steps against Luther, i. 333, 341, ii. 45;
his Bulls, ii. 39, 52 f.;
Luther’s letter, i. 335, 340, ii. 17 ff., 30, vi. 218

Leprosy, ground for bigamy or divorce, iii. 255, iv. 20

Lessing, vi. 446, 448

Leyser, P., iv. 469

Libraries, v. 215, vi. 19

Lichtenberg, ii. 317

Lichtenberger, J., iii. 167, iv. 330

Liége, vi. 35

Lies, iv. 28 f., 51, 55, 80-178, vi. 191, 513 ff.
_See_ Abraham, etc., Dishonesty

Lights.
_See_ Candles

Liguori, v. 469, n.

Lindanus, W., vi. 385

Link, W., Luther’s intimate, i. 40, 264, 359, ii. 184, iii. 54, 60, 121,
n., 143 f., 424, iv. 96, v. 516;
resigns his office as General Vicar and goes to Altenburg, i. 315 f.,
vi. 49, 52, 242;
at Nuremberg, ii. 335 f., v. 172 f., 186;
his temptations, v. 338 f.

Litany, iii. 412, vi. 482

Liturgy.
_See_ Worship

Lochau, v. 251

Locher, J., iii. 152

Lombard, Peter, i. 12, 22, 86, 91, 98, 150, 243, 305, 311, 410, vi. 21

Löscher, T., vi. 316

Lotichius, N., v. 295

Lotther (or Lother), the printer, ii. 367, v. 498

Louis of Bavaria, ii. 380, iii. 430

⸺ the Palatinate, vi. 420

Louvain, the town, vi. 35, 38, 43;
the theologians, ii. 46, vi. 328, 348 f.
_See_ Latomus

Love of God, perfect, i. 158, 172, 191, 194, 236, 238 f., 308, v. 33 f.;
imperfect is mere egotism, i. 251;
required together with faith for justification, i. 207, ii. 240.
_See_ Faith.

Love of one’s neighbour, _see_ Poor-relief

Lübeck, iii. 64 f., 408, 410

Ludel, T., iii. 285

Ludicke, J., iii. 72

Luft (Lufft), Hans, the printer, v. 498, 502

Lüneburg, ii. 384, vi. 276

Lupinus, P., i. 304, iii. 389

Luscinius, O., iv. 471, vi. 31

Lute-playing, i. 7, ii. 131, 157, iii. 288

Luther, spelling of the name, i. 6, 264;
Hans, the father, i. 5, 15 f., 19, 25, ii. 86, 182, 216, iii. 308,
iv. 265, v. 230, vi. 182 f., 224;
Hans, the son, iii. 216, iv. 181, vi. 346, 368, 371, 509;
Catherine L., _see_ Bora;
James L., v. 108;
Paul L., i. 33, vi. 378 f., 496.
_See_ Children

Lutherans, ii. 108, vi. 476.
_See_ Christians

Lutz, R., v. 296

Lycosthenes, C., iii. 152

Lyra, N., of, i. 92, 243, 401, ii. 237, v. 413, 535

Macarius, St., ii. 379

⸺ Magnes, iii. 381

Macchiavelli, vi. 57

Machabees, 2nd Book, iv. 505 f.

Madness, is from the devil, v. 280.
_See_ Ailments (Insanity)

Magdeburg, i. 5, iii. 64, 442, v. 219 f., 236, vi. 5, 35, 408, 413

Magdeburgius, J., iv. 225

Magenbuch, J., ii. 162 f., iv. 349

Magi, their lie to Herod, vi. 514.
_See_ Three Kings

Magic, v. 240 f., 277, 284 f.
_See_ Superstition, Witches.
M. in the sacraments, i. 248

Magnus of Mecklenburg, iii. 371

Major, G., v. 262, 265, vi. 272, 364, 408 ff., 412, 494

Maladies.
_See_ Ailments

Maledictory prayer, iii. 172, 208, 437 f., v. 94.
_See_ Curses

Malipiero, iii. 152

Malsburg, H. von der, iv. 25

Maltitz, J. von, vi. 516

Malvasian wine, ii. 131, iii. 297

Man.
_See_ Great M.

Mania.
_See_ Madness

Manichæans, ii. 376, iii. 259, vi. 413, 415

Mansfeld, i. 5, ii. 131, iv. 165, vi. 132, 350 f.

Mantel, J., iv. 210

Mantua, Council, iii. 425, 428 f., vi. 488

Marbach, J., vi. 275, 493

Marburg, archives, iii. 51;
Conference, ii. 334, 390, iii. 328, 342, 381, 382 f., 416, v. 340,
531 f.;
University, vi. 40

Marcion, i. 300

Marcolfus, iii. 268, iv. 45 f.

Margaritha, A., v. 411

Marguérin de la Bigne, vi. 438

Marienwerder, v. 216

Marquard, iv. 120

Marriage, iii. 241-273, 324 f., iv. 129-178;
L.’s charges against the Papists, v. 112, vi. 232;
did he better it? ii. 148 ff., v. 283;
M. secularised, iii. 38-42;
a remedy against fornication, ii. 116 ff., 142, vi. 166;
impediments, iii. 290 f.;
is commanded, ii. 166;
clandestine M., ii. 120, 149, n., iii. 39 ff., iv. 289 f.,
vi. 355-359;
with brother of impotent man, ii. 33 f.;
exchange of wives, iv. 160.
_See_ Actus matrimonialis, Bigamy, Divorce, Impediments,
Intermarriage, Leprosy, Sacraments, Women
L.’s M., _see_ Wedding

Marschalk, i. 263

Marsupino, v. 382

Martial, vi. 18

Mary, Virgin, L. on honour paid to the, iv. 235-238, 500-503, v. 146,
476;
conceived without sin, iv. 238, n.;
her virginity, v. 446;
on the Hail M., iv. 502, v. 478, 480, 517.
_See_ Saint-worship

Mascov, G., i. 83, 267 f.

Mass, iv. 506-527;
L.’s first M., i. 15, 125 f., iv. 170, vi. 100, 226;
how quickly Masses are said in Rome, i. 35;
last M., ii. 88;
early distaste for, i. 275 f., iv. 124 f., vi. 196 f.;
insults, i. 27 f., ii. 166, iii. 130, 227, 305;
Masses for dead bring in money, iii. 439, iv. 513 f.;
M. suppressed, ii. 311, 320 f., 327 f.;
against the Canon, ii. 330, v. 154;
the “winklemass,” ii. 88, iv. 518-523;
not a sacrifice, ii. 89 f., 320, 385, iv. 506-518, v. 150, 439;
yet L. calls it the “sacrificium eucharisticum,” v. 149, 464;
M. is quietly changed into Communion-service, ii. 98 f., v.
145 ff., 150;
“Formula missæ,” v. 135, 145, 546;
German M., v. 139, 146, vi. 445.
_See_ Eucharist

Material principle.
_See_ Faith, Justification

Mathesius, J., relations with L., iii. 312, iv. 269;
enthusiasm, v. 364, 488, vi. 389 f.;
“Historien,” i. xx., vi. 389 f., 443;
on his Catholic days, v. 490, n.;
on Tetzel, iv. 84;
on Egranus, iii. 402 f.;
Frau Cotta, iii. 288;
on the beginning of the Gospel-business, i. 303 f., 393;
on the ghosts, etc., vi. 123;
on L.’s prophecies, iii. 164;
on L.’s habit of taking a sip at night, iii. 305 f., 310;
on the German Bible, v. 499 f.;
on the Table-Talk, iii. 218 f., 222, 228, 232, 239, iv. 43 f., v. 170;
and the song for driving out Antichrist, v. 555 f.;
his melancholy, iv. 222, v. 363 f., vi. 150 f.

Maupis, F., vi. 346

Maurice of Saxony, iv. 315, v. 125, 167, 200 ff., 252, vi. 347, 407, 410

Maximilian I of Bavaria, ii. 43

⸺ I, Kaiser, i. 340

Mayence, ii. 6, 214 f., v. 221, vi. 431

Mayer, W., vi. 29, 426

Mayron, F., i. 346

Mechanical system of grace, i. 156, 308, ii. 274, n., 284

Mechler, Æ., ii. 345, 354

Meckbach, J., iv. 69

Medals, vi. 389

Medicines, spoilt by the devil, v. 283.
_See_ Physicians

Meder, v. 295

Mediævalism, L.’s, vi. 440-444, 453 ff.

Medici, Guilio dei, ii. 46

Mediocrity standardised, i. 71 f., iii. 211 f., 311 f., v. 124

Medler, N., v. 165, 194, vi. 346, 488

Medmann, P., v. 166

Megalomania, iv. 327-350, v. 110 f., 389 ff., 530-533, vi. 161 ff.,
284 f., 361, 398-406.
_See_ Doctor, Great man

Meinhardi, A. von, i. 40, n., iv. 141

Meirisch, M., i. 144, iv. 160

Meissen, iv. 86, v. 123, 200 ff., vi. 243

Melancholy, iii. 402, 416, iv. 210, 218-227, v. 305, vi. 176, 221, 227

Melanchthon, Ph., character and work, iii. 319-378, 438-449, v. 252-275;
acts as intermediary between the Knights and L., ii. 5;
pictured with L., vi. 389, n.;
and alone, ii. 158;
enthusiasm for L., i. 303, iii. 165, iv. 269, 357;
his “Passional,” v. 425;
“Pope-Ass,” iii. 150 ff.;
his Commonplace-Book, ii. 239, 282, n., 287 f., iv. 498, v. 4;
Instructions for the Visitors, v. 591;
panegyric on L., v. 262, vi. 387;
Vita Lutheri, i. 17 f., 303;
helps in the German Bible, v. 495 ff.;
favours the fanatics, ii. 99;
comparative moderation, iii. 134;
criticises L.’s teaching, v. 460 f.;
drops predestinarianism, ii. 239, 268, 287, n., iv. 435 f.,
vi. 152 f.;
on the Law, v. 17;
penance, v. 452 f.;
need of good works, iv. 476;
Eucharist, iii. 424, v. 465;
finds fault with L.’s language, ii. 144 f., 155, 176 ff.,
iii. 240, 276 f.;
M.’s melancholy, ii. 167, iii. 201, iv. 219;
belief in astrology, ii. 168, iii. 306;
superstition, ii. 390, v. 240;
dances occasionally, iii. 303;
on the Virgin Mary, iv. 502;
strictures on the Universities, vi. 26;
and Agricola, v. 15, 20;
and Amerbach, iv. 364;
and Amsdorf, v. 193;
and Bucer, iii. 421;
and Calvin, v. 401;
and Cordatus, iv. 461;
and Erasmus, ii. 248 f., 262, iv. 183;
and Henry VIII, iv. 10 f.;
his daughter, vi. 418;
and Lemnius, vi. 287;
as an educationalist, iii. 391, vi. 5 f., 9, 13, n., 16 f., 18,
21, 26, 38, 435;
his students’ lack of discipline, v. 157, 247;
his hopes of a Protestant Council, v. 170, 175 f.;
his leading place in Lutheranism, v. 173, 183;
ordains ministers, vi. 265, 314;
intolerance, ii. 203, iv. 9, v. 20, 22 f., 82, vi. 251 f., 269 f.;
truthfulness, ii. 386 f., iv. 112 f.;
misrepresents Augustine, i. 305 f., iv. 459;
thwarts L.’s Schmalkalden Articles, iii. 432;
armed resistance, iii. 59;
the Landgrave’s bigamy (iv. 13-79) is the cause of an indisposition,
iii. 268, iv. 144;
miraculously cured by L., iii. 162, iv. 48;
is sometimes suspected by L., v. 237, vi. 345;
plans to leave Wittenberg, vi. 347, 352 f.;
at Mansfeld, vi. 350 f.
_See_ Cryptocalvinism, Pecca fortiter, Synergism

Melander, D., iv. 24 f., 157, 201, 251

Memmingen, iii. 64, 421

Mendicancy, i. 71, 270, ii. 337, vi. 473, 500.
_See_ Beggars

Menius, J., ii. 256, iii. 68, 421, iv. 66 f., 74, 203, v. 282, vi. 276,
391, 409 f., 482 f.

Mensing, J., i. 79, iii. 195, iv. 121, 160, 303, 385, vi. 330, n., 432

Merchants, v. 157, vi. 6, 79-86

Merit, i. 75, 102, 119, 143, 157, 179, iv. 449, v. 8 f., 459 f.;
of Christ, i. 71 f.

Merseburg, v. 167, 219, vi. 347

Metz, v. 167, 396

Metzsch, Hans, ii. 169, iii. 426, iv. 216, 245, v. 118, 187 f., 312,
vi. 22

⸺ Jos. L., vi. 262

Meyer, P., ii. 327

Michol’s lie, iv. 109

Micyllus, vi. 36

Middle Ages, L.’s misrepresentations of the, iv. 116-178.
_See_ Mediævalism

Military service, iv. 247

Milsungen, iv. 18

Miltitz, C. von, i. 341 f., 348, 365, ii. 18, 86, vi. 190, 307

Mind, L.’s, vi. 156-186

Ministers, Ministry, ii. 107-111, 113 f., iv. 126, vi. 311;
their choice, ii. 112, 192, 358, vi. 599;
their support, iii. 34.
_See_ Ordinations, Preachers, Priests

Minkwitz, J. von, v. 220

Miracles, ii. 63, iii. 117, 153-162, v. 288, 313, vi. 164 f., 191,
285 f., 443.
_See_ Fanatics, Melanchthon, Monk-Calf

Misbirths, iii. 152;
consolation for women suffering M., iv. 248

Misrepresentations.
_See_ Calumnies, Legends

Mission, L.’s, i. 37, 74, 91 ff., iii. 109-168, iv. 313-318, 391,
v. 321 ff., vi. 161-166, 283 f., 285 f.
_See_ Certainty, Revelation, Vocation

Missions, foreign, iii. 213 ff., v. 249, vi. 427, 515

Misson, M., iii. 292

Mochau, M., von, vi. 509

Modern spirit, L. and the, ii. 72, iii. 19, vi. 454 f.

Modesty.
_See_ Humility

Mohacz, iii. 89

Mohammed, iv. 6, v. 479.
_See_ Koran, Turks

Mohr, G., iv. 219, vi. 346, 349

Möhra, i. 5, 16

Moibanus, A., vi. 491

Moller, H., vi. 417

Monastery, L. in the, i. 3-34, iii. 114;
his legend, vi. 187-236.
_See_ Wittenberg

Money, vi. 84, 87 f.

Monk-Calf, ii. 57, iii. 149 f., 355 f., v. 244, 310, vi. 155

Monkeys, v. 286

Monks, what their name comes from, iv. 161;
L. on M. and friars, i. 270 f., ii. 138, iii. 228, v. 113 f., vi. 514.
_See_ Apostate M., Spectre M., Vows

Mönsterberg, U. von, vi. 482

Morality.
_See_ Ethics.
L.’s morals, vi. 512

Moravia, v. 403 f.

Morbid trains of thought, vi. 141-182, 224 ff.

More, Sir Th., ii. 244, n., iii. 70, 237, iv. 9, 284, v. 110, vi. 246

Mörlin, J., vi. 408, 492

Morone, J., iv. 28, vi. 492

Mortal sins, all breaches of the Rules, i. 15, iv. 105, n.
_See_ Scapular, Sin

Mortification, i. 191, 235, iii. 211, v. 31, 86, 92, 481, vi. 235.
_See_ Penance

Mosaism.
_See_ Law, Mosaic

Mosellanus, P., ii. 242, iv. 269, vi. 16

Moses, i. 179, ii. 221, v. 236;
to be slain, v. 324;
a German M., vi. 442;
a second M., vi. 442;
“relics” of, iv. 292

Moth, Ph., vi. 488

Motives, v. 34

Mountjoy, ii. 251

Mühlberg, vi. 407

Mühlhausen, ii. 167, 364 f., iii. 422

Müller, C., ii. 208, iii. 296, 315 f., iv. 361

Münch, J., vi. 385

Munich, ii. 172

Münster, ii. 365, iii. 419, v. 166, 173, vi. 35

⸺ S., v. 411, 413, 532, 535

Münzer, Th., ii. 200-207, 363-378;
at Allstedt, iv. 172;
at Zwickau, iii. 402;
L.’s rival, iii. 4;
won’t work miracles, iii. 154, vi. 285;
his “presumption,” iii. 389 f., vi. 152;
his “sins,” iii. 177;
preaches against the two popes, of Rome and Wittenberg, iv. 309,
337, vi. 281;
his defence, ii. 130, iii. 275, 302, iv. 100;
is doomed, iii. 384

Murmellius, J., vi. 34

Murner, Th., ii. 154, iv. 376, 384, vi. 430, 513

Musa, A., ii. 345, iv. 222, v. 174, 363

Musæus, S., iv. 220

Musculus, A., vi. 61, 419

⸺ W., iii. 300, vi. 277

Music, i. 8, ii. 170 ff., iii. 66 f., iv. 256 f., v. 223, 302, 547
f., 551 f., 554, vi. 19

Mutian, R., i. 7, 28, 41, ii. 3, 243, iii. 287, vi. 31, 350, 387

Myconius, F., iii. 62, 162, 166, 421, iv. 84, 200, vi. 123, 265, 326,
341, 491

⸺ O., iv. 198

Mylius, G., i. 33

Mysticism, i. 160, 165-183, 268;
German M., i. 84, 87 f., ii. 275, n.;
mystic pangs of hell, i. 231-240, vi. 102, 115 ff.;
was L. a mystic? i. 89, n., v. 476;
some mystic effusions, i. 82-90, 230-240, 280 ff., 318, v. 32 f.,
198, 476

Namur, vi. 43

Nannius, J., vi. 488

Nathin, J., i. 4, 13, 17, 22, 58, 128, ii. 337, 361, n., iv. 354, vi.
101, n.

Nationalism.
_See_ German N.

Natural virtues, _see_ Virtue;
N. order, v. 49-52;
N. law, i. 141, 143 f.;
thunderstorms, etc., not N., v. 286;
Nature and Grace, i. 204

Naumburg, iii. 375, v. 165 f., 192 ff., vi. 328, 408

Nausea, F., iv. 383

Necessity, all takes place of, ii. 227, 290, v. 53;
N. knows no law, iii. 90

Neobulus, H.
_See_ Lening

Neoplatonism, i. 76, 174

Nerve trouble.
_See_ Ailments

Neustadt Admonition, vi. 422

Nicene Council, iii. 157, iv. 240, vi. 314

Nider, J., i. 48

Nietzsche, vi. 459

Nigrinus, iv. 324

Nimbschen.
_See_ Nuns

Nimbus.
_See_ Portraits

Nobility, ii. 3 ff., 26 ff., 199, 216, vi. 71 f., 402

Noe, L. a new N., vi. 388, 442

Nominalism, i. 130 ff., ii. 275, n.;
Nominalists on lies, vi. 514 f.;
Semi-Pelagianism of the, vi. 426.
_See_ Occam, etc.

Noppus, J., vi. 493

Nordhausen, v. 236, vi. 276

Nossenus, M., ii. 342

Novalis, vi. 449

Nuns, apostate, of Nimbschen, etc., ii. 135-148, 177 f., 282;
their fate, iv. 172 ff., 175 f.;
persecution of the faithful ones, vi. 276 f., 278 f.;
two newly “cursed” N., vi. 343

Nuremberg, ii. 334 ff., v. 172 f., 186, 223, 255;
Town-Council, ii. 335, iii. 59 ff.;
Diets of N., ii. 189, 334, 380, iii. 76;
Poor-relief, vi. 46;
Schools, vi. 5 f., 35 ff.;
tolerance, vi. 270 f.

Oaths, lawful to take, v. 570

Obedience, ii. 15 ff., 308 ff., iii. 172, vi. 498 f.

Observantines and Conventuals, i. 28-38, 67-78, 81 f., 147, 198 ff.,
255, 262 f., 267, 298, vi. 497-503

Obstinacy.
_See_ Defiance

Occam, Occamism, i. 13, 84 ff., 120, 130-165, 171, 191, 204 f., 212,
216, 243, iv. 417, n., v. 51.
_See_ Nominalism

Œcolampadius, J., takes Zwingli’s side, iii. 409, n., v. 79;
wants to establish synods, v. 176;
opposes the bigamy, iv. 6, 10, n.;
Œ. on L., iv. 99;
L. on Œ., ii. 254, iii. 389, 403, 424, iv. 87, 308, v. 105, 447,
vi. 278, 281, 284, 289

Office.
_See_ Breviary, Calling, Ministry

Oils.
_See_ Anointing, Chrism

Oldecop, J., 24, 29, 35 f., 304, 332, 361, iv. 229, 429, v. 218,
vi. 222, 385, 497

Olevian, C., vi. 414

Olmütz, W. von., iii. 152

Omnipresence.
_See_ Christ

Opponents, awful death of L.’s, iv. 302, 304, vi. 161, 191, 383 f.;
_See_ Catholics, Heretics

Opposition, a sign that one is in the right, i. 253

Orders, Holy, all “jugglery,” vi. 404;
“donkey-smearing,” v. 101

Ordinations, Lutheran, ii. 112, iii. 428, v. 101, 190-197, vi. 264 f.,
313 f., 347, 374

Ordo matrimonialis, iv. 129 f.

Organs, ii. 227, v. 148

Origen, iv. 110, 331

Original sin, i. 74 f., 92, 99, 140 f., 203 f., 210, ii. 250, v. 6, 37,
438,450, 487, vi. 412 f., 420.
_See_ Concupiscence, Grace

Orlamünde, iii. 256, 385

Orthodox side, L.’s, ii. 399, iv. 239 ff., 526 f.;
O. Lutheranism, vi. 440-444

Ortiz, iv. 386

Ortwin de Graes, i. 42

Osiander, A., ii. 334, iii. 434, 444, iv. 9, 29, 223, v. 170, 257, 410,
531, vi. 408 f.

Osnabrück, v. 166

Ossitz, vi. 137

Ostermayer, W., i. 127

Ostia, v. 109, 384

Otto I, Kaiser, v. 220

⸺ A., vi. 410

Our Father, the, i. 65, 361, ii, 240, v. 94, 124, 473, 476, 478, 485

Outlawry, L.’s, ii. 45

Overwork, i. 267.
_See_ Work

Pack, O. von, iii. 48 f., 326, v. 343

Pagans.
_See_ Heathen

Pagninus, S., v. 535

Palladius, P., iii. 413, n., vi. 273, 489

Pallavicini, S., iv. 259

Palpitations.
_See_ Ailments

Paltz, J., i. 13, 105, 224, 243, 272 f. 327, n., 345

Palude, P. de, i. 346, iii. 261

Pantheism, i. 166, 172, 178, ii. 284, vi. 456

Panvinius, O., vi. 437

Papacy.
_See_ Pope, Popedom

Papists are murderers, iii. 130 ff., 414;
Cains and devils, iii. 43;
fattening pigs, iv. 288;
as bad as Turks, iii. 91 f., vi. 155;
abnormal nature of L.’s views of the P., vi. 156 ff.

Pappus, H., iv. 100

Parents, L.’s, i. 5, v. 294, vi. 223.
_See_ Luther, Hans

Paris, University of, i. 363, v. 279, vi. 37, 349, 472

Parrots, v. 286

Pastors.
_See_ Ministers

Pathology.
_See_ Ailments

Patmos (the Wartburg), ii. 91

Patriarchs, iii. 259, iv. 4, vi. 74, 85.
_See_ Prince

Patriotism.
_See_ German nationalism

Paul, St., as L.’s mainstay, i. 94, 140, 179;
Paul rather than Jesus, iii. 169, vi. 453 f.;
his failings, ii. 289, v. 360, 362 f., 393;
L. a new P., iii. 165, v. 517 f.;
like P., iii. 119, iv. 273

⸺ III, Pope, ii. 250, iii. 420, 425, 427, 443, iv. 90, v. 168, 234 f.,
380, 382, vi. 427, n.

Pauli, B., v. 22

⸺ J., vi. 513

⸺ S., iv. 225 f.

Pauline privilege, ii. 33, iii, 254

Pázmány, P., vi. 385

Peasants, ii. 180, 189-219, 350, 353, 356 f., iii. 323 f., v. 181, 588,
vi. 70-74, 76, 84, 406

Pecca fortiter, iii. 195-199, vi. 166

Pelagianism, i. 91 ff., 190, 199, 205 f., 287, ii. 225, 232, 293, n.
_See_ Grace

Pelargus, A., iv. 383

Pelayo, A., i. 55

Pellicanus, C., iii. 383 f.

Penance, i. 65 f., 90 f., 119, 290, 292-296, 311 f., iii. 176, 184 ff.,
212, 323, iv. 460, 491, v. 23 f., 452 f;
the sacrament, ii. 27, iii. 338, iv. 249, 491 f., v. 462.
_See_ Confession, Contrition, Satisfaction

Perfection, reputed to be found only in the cloistral “state of P.,”
i. 85, n., iv. 130 f., 133;
L.’s idea of P., i. 166, v. 43, 84 ff., 439;
his own efforts, iii. 187-193.
_See_ Counsels

Perrenoti, N., v. 382

Perusco, M. de, i. 338

Pessimism, i. 126, 289, iii. 24, 84, 98 f., 123, 190 f., v. 130,
225-234, 241

Pessler, ii. 334

Pestel, P., vi. 255, 267

Pestilence.
_See_ Plague

Peter, thou art, v. 518, vi. 338 ff.;
L. like P., v. 340;
P.’s denial, iii. 182;
second epistle of, v. 522;
the legend of P., iv. 264

Petreius, i. 28

Peucer, C., vi. 415, 418

Peutinger, C., ii. 76, vi. 45, 271

Pezel, C., vi. 417

Pfeffinger, J., vi. 76, 347, 410, 412

Pfeifer, H., ii, 364, 373

Pflug, J. von, iv. 69, v. 21, 165, 191, 197, vi. 39, n., 408, 436, 492

Pharisees, i. 82, iv. 45

Philip II, Landgrave of Hesse, a patron of the new religion, ii. 216,
388, iii. 64, 72, 340, v. 201 f., 576;
inclines to the Church-apart, v. 141 ff.;
to Zwinglianism, ii, 333 f., iii. 327, 337, 383, 445, v. 172;
refuses help against the Turks, iii. 87;
stands for resistance against the Kaiser, iii. 50;
and carries L. with him, iii. 54 ff.;
raid on Würtemberg, iii. 67 f.;
and Brunswick, v. 394 ff.;
makes a secret covenant with the Kaiser, v. 396;
vanquished by the latter, vi. 407;
favours a Protestant Council, v. 175;
his bigamy, iv. 13-79, 209;
sends L. a barrel of wine, iii. 314;
and Melanchthon, iii. 373;
his morality, iv. 201, 71 f.;
intolerance, vi. 256, 258, 272

Philippists, iii. 375, vi. 415

Philosophy, i. 22, 136, 158 f., 244 f., 281, 320, v. 440 ff., 445,
vi. 18, 20 f., 445.
_See_ Aristotle

Phocas, iii. 93, iv. 297

Phormion, vi. 82

Physicians, iii. 211, v. 203, 281, 283, vi. 7, 21, 378 ff.
_See_ Ratzeberger, Rychardus

Picards, i. 34, 106 f., ii. 186

Pictures.
_See_ Images, Portraits

Pietism, v. 173, vi. 63, 440, 444 f.

Pighius, A., v. 75, vi. 384

Pilgrimages, i. 46, 124, v. 212, 288, vi. 68

Pirata, A., iv. 383

Pirkheimer, C., ii. 334 f.

⸺ W., ii. 39 f., 43, 67, 127, 256, iv. 353, 453, 471, v. 431, vi. 37

Pirna, vi. 415

Pirstinger, B., i. 48, 344 f.

Pistorius, F., ii. 131, vi. 275, 290, n., 492

Plague, i. 265, iv. 248, 272 f., v. 337, vi. 509;
“the Pope’s Plague,” iii. 435, v. 102, vi. 370, 377, 389, 394 f., 407

Planck, J., i. xi. f., iii. 174, vi. 449

Planitz, Hans von der, v. 591

Plantsch, M., v. 290

Plassen, C., van der, iv. 368

Plato, L.’s guest, iii. 218, 232

Plautus, vi. 16, 18

Plenaries, iv. 135

Poison, iii. 116, v. 235 f.

Pole, Cardinal, vi. 488

Polemics, iv. 283-350, v. 375-431.
_See_ Calumnies, Lies, Unseemliness

Polenz, G. von. iv. 96 f., 155

Poliander, vi. 37

Politician, L. a P.? vi. 459 ff.

Pollich, M., i. 39, 86, iv. 258 f., 357

Polner, Hans, iii. 217, 307

Poltergeists.
_See_ Ghosts

Polygamy, iii. 259 ff., 268, iv. 3 ff., 146, v. 72, vi. 86.
_See_ Philip II, his bigamy

Polygranus, F., i. 345

Pomeranus.
_See_ Bugenhagen

Pommersfelden, L. von, ii. 215

Ponikau, iii. 435

Pontanus.
_See_ Brück, G.

Poor-Relief, vi. 42-65;
in olden times, iv. 477-481;
L.’s merits, v. 26, 117, 562;
bad effects, v. 205

Pope of Rome, Popedom, iii. 128 ff., iv. 295-305, v. 381-389;
acknowledged by L., i. 34 f., 324;
“papa, papa!” ii. 347;
not infallible, ii. 50;
P. flings about indulgences, i. 70;
early blame for Julius II, i. 228;
and Leo X, i. 348;
what the P. teaches, vi. 337 f.;
P. oppresses the Germans, iii. 96 ff., 105 f.;
presumes to decide on matters of faith, iii. 130;
not head of Christendom, v. 383;
instituted by the devil, vi. 190;
attacked in his very marrow, ii. 260;
is adored as God, iii. 130;
Popes are seducers, i. 227;
the Pope-Ass, iii. 150 ff., 355;
worse than the Turk, i. 359, iii. 72, 79, 82, 86, n., 91 f., 126,
iv. 164, v. 416;
“Popery pictured,” v. 421-431.
_See_ Antichrist, Infallibility, Peter, Plague, Rome, Werewolf

⸺ of Wittenberg, L. a new P., iii. 277 (Judae);
has set up a new Papal chair, ii. 130, 377 (Ickelsamer);
has taken the P.’s place (iv. 337);
is a new P. (vi. 281) who bestows church-property on the princes,
ii. 377 (Münzer);
“pseudo-papa,” ii. 163, n.,;
“I am your P.,” v. 231;
P. of Germany, vi. 77;
“called by God to be an anti-pope,” ii. 54, iii. 110;
“ego sum papa,” v. 191, n., vi. 315;
“the German P.,” iii. 427, vi. 77;
a Cæsarean popedom, vi. 452

Porchetus de Salvaticis, v. 411

Portents, iii. 148-152, v. 239.
_See_ Astrology

Portraits, L.’s vi. 389, 393 f., 430, 443;
depicted with a halo, ii. 66.
_See_ Appearance

Possessed, L. P.? ii. 68, 392, 396, iii. 127, 429, iv. 352-360, vi. 112;
Agricola P., v. 22;
Carlstadt, iii. 390 f.;
Schwenckfeld, v. 83;
other cases, ii. 289, 376, iii. 148;
calm of the P. at L.’s funeral, vi. 385;
in the P. the devil takes the soul’s place, v. 281, n., 292

Postils, Church-P., ii. 119, iii. 151, v. 158, 473 f., 480;
Home-P., iv. 217, 232, v. 470

Powers, natural, made too much of by the Nominalists, i. 132;
and too little of by L., i. 65, 74 f., 100 f., 117, 133, 140, 160,
310 ff., iv. 229.
_See_ Determinism

Prætorius, Alexius, vi. 409

⸺ Anton, vi. 61

Prague, ii. 112

Prateolus, vi. 385, 409

Prayer, true P. L.’s “discovery,” iii. 345;
P. arises from Faith, v. 27;
his opponents don’t pray, iii. 399;
how monks pray in choir, i. 277;
P. is necessary, i. 35, 153, 235, 279, ii. 349;
how to pray, v. 478 ff.;
P. decried, i. 68, iii. 205;
all P. petition, v. 87;
L.’s P., ii. 87, iii. 206 ff., 365, 410, 435, iv. 275-278, v. 94, 199,
vi. 232 f., 235, 511 f.;
power of L.’s P., iii. 113, 162, 209, n., iv. 267, v. 313, vi. 161
f., 391, 395 f.;
Catholics’ P., i. 390, iii. 131 f.;
“Pray Maurice to death,” iv. 315.
_See_ Breviary, Maledictory P.

Preachers, even “millers’ maids” (iv. 389) can expound Scripture, yet
true P. are only those “in office,” iv. 126, vi. 250, n., 315;
best unmarried, iii. 248;
L.’s complaints about the P., ii. 123, 127;
preach faith and decry good works, iv. 466 ff.;
on the faults of others, ii. 344, iii. 323 f., iv. 323 f.;
preach violence, ii. 323 f., 340 f., 354 f., iv. 514;
responsible for breaches of wedlock, iv. 158, 160, 165 ff., 172 f.,
201, 208;
seek only an income and a wife, ii. 126, vi. 32;
scorned by the people, iii. 34, iv. 209, 211, 218, 478, n., v. 182,
249, vi. 77, 326, 343.
_See_ Ministers, Priesthood

Precepts.
_See_ Commandments

Predestination, i. 74, n., 183, 187-198, 208, 238, 313, 369, ii. 268-294,
iii. 189, 347, iv. 434, 447, v. 159, 438;
doubts concerning P., i. 19, 124 f., 161, 190 f., 376, vi. 219, 221.
_See_ Determinism, Hell

Predictions.
_See_ Prophecies

Presents.
_See_ Gifts

Prices, high, vi. 77, 84 f.

Pride, i. 123, 279, 287, ii. 54, 130, 221, 368, iii. 200, 389, iv. 332,
n., v. 110 f.;
according to L. source of all heretical pravity, i. 287, 324, ii. 376

Prierias, S., i. 66, 163, 338 ff., 366, ii. 12 f., iii. 145, iv. 373 ff.

Priesthood, the olden P. a wall between man and God, iv. 123, 126, 516;
the new P. universal, all being priests though not preachers, ii. 31,
35, 89, 106, 113 f., 193, 211, 304, iii. 12, 15, iv. 455, 516, v.
160, vi. 250, n., 303 f., 306, 311, 403.
_See_ Apostates, Preachers

Primacy, Roman, dates only from Phocas, iii. 93.
_See_ Peter

Prince, as patriarch, v. 579-584;
as bishop, vi. 322;
as chief member of the Church, v. 144;
as supreme head, v. 590;
his duties, v. 568 ff.;
P. and Christian two different things, iii. 60, 69, 81, v. 55 f.;
L.’s treatment of the princes, ii. 305 ff., iii. 24, iv. 290-294.
_See_ Authority, secular

Printers, printing-press, ii. 52 f., iv. 365, 381, v. 558, 560, vi. 431.
_See_ Lotther, Lufft

Private judgment.
_See_ Bible interpretation

Probst, J., ii. 346, iii. 300, iv. 160, v. 195, vi. 349

Processions, whether right, iv. 239, v. 313, 464, vi. 353, n.

Professor, L. as University P., iv. 228 ff.

Proles, A., i. 29, 46, 107, 297, iv. 119, vi. 68

Prophecies, L.’s, iii. 155, 163-168, iv. 13, v. 169-174, vi. 416,
443 f.;
P. fulfilled in L., iii. 165 ff., 396 f., iv. 330

Prophet, L. a, vi. 306, 391;
P. of the Germans, iii. 96, iv. 329, vi. 389 f., 442.
_See_ Fanatics

Prostitutes, iii. 243, iv. 148, 215 f., 227, v. 109, 231.
_See_ Brothels

Protest of Spires, ii. 381

Protestants.
_See_ Christians

Proverbs, iii. 104, iv. 246

Proviso.
_See_ Gospel-P.

Prussia, iv. 196, v. 216, 286

Psalms, commentaries and lectures on the, i. 63, 67-77, 119, 285,
361, 386

Psychology of L.’s abuse, iv. 306-326;
of his development, vi. 112-123;
of his humour, v. 319 ff.

Purgatory, i. 75, 179, 324, 343, iii. 329, iv. 504 ff., v. 283, 299,
438, vi. 484

Qualitas, “Christ my Q.,” iv. 460;
concupiscence a Q.? i. 141

Quare.
_See_ Reason

Quarrelsomeness, i. 79

Quietism, i. 83, 167, 221 f., 231 f., ii. 225, iii. 210, v. 45, 86 f.
_See_ Mysticism

Rabbis, v. 407, 414, 533.
_See_ Jews

Rabe, A.
_See_ Corvinus

⸺ L., v. 106

Rapagelanus, S., vi. 494

Ratichius, W., vi. 9

Rationalism, v. 269, vi. 440, 446 ff.
_See_ Zwinglianism

Ratisbon, vi. 47, 412;
conferences and Interim, iii. 446, v. 274, 379 f.;
Diet, vi. 495

Ratzeberger, M., ii. 82, 170, iii. 74, 288, 309, vi. 103, 123, 132,
344, 347, 364, 377

Rauchhaupt, v. 239

Reaction, iii. 3-21.
_See_ Antinomians, Fanatics, Peasants

Reason, L.’s antipathy for, i. 132, 158, 216, iii. 8, 21, 203, 210,
321, v. 4, 440, vi. 25, 364;
leads him to deny freedom, ii. 279 f.;
to require faith of infants brought for baptism, ii. 373;
“quare” comes from the devil, ii. 378;
R. a devil’s whore, vi. 364 f.
_See_ Philosophy

Reform, need of R., ii. 222;
desired by all, vi. 402;
Roman proposals for R., iii. 443.
_See_ Humanism

Reformation, v. 119-132;
its birth-hour, i. 23;
“from the monk’s melancholy sprang the R.,” vi. 176;
usual idea of it “mythological,” vi. 448;
the “peasant-rising of the spirit,” iii. 19;
a “remedy for the future,” ii. 249, 257

Reformer, L. a R.? iii. 236 f., 273, vi. 401 ff.

Regeneration, iii. 271.
_See_ Justification

Reginald, W., vi. 385

Rehlinger, J., vi. 271

Reichenbach, ii. 138

Reinholdt, v. 218

Reisner, vi. 443

Reissenbusch, ii. 116 ff., 319 f.

Relaxation, weekly, iii. 307

Relics, i. 235, 284 f., ii. 245, 327;
L.’s list of R., iv. 292;
L.’s R., vi. 443

Religious teacher? L. a, vi. 455 f.
_See_ Blasphemy, Quietism;
R. War, _see_ Resistance

Rellach, J., v. 543

Remission.
_See_ Forgiveness

Resignation.
_See_ Hell

Resistance, armed R. against the Kaiser, ii. 309 f., iii. 43-76,
95, 431 ff.

Responsibility, ii. 79 f., 125, 272, iii. 438, v. 373 ff., vi. 162,
171, 228, 406 f.

Retractations, v. 23 f., vi. 260, 308

Reuchlin, J., i. 42, iii. 320

Reutlingen, ii. 384, iii. 64, 421, v. 80

Reval, vi. 265, 313

Revelation, L.’s, i. 377 f., 393, 397 ff., ii. 91, 114, 153, iii. 110
ff., 119, vi. 141-171, 387 f.
_See_ Faith, Mission

Reward.
_See_ Merit

Rhaide, B., iv. 25, vi. 486

Rhau, G., ii. 170

Rhegius, U., iv. 165, 467 f., vi. 58, 276, 487, 492

Rhetoric, iv. 342-350, vi. 200

Richardus, v. 419

Riesenburg, v. 216

Riga, vi. 475

Righteousness.
_See_ Justice

Rings, L.’s, iii. 302, 428

Ritschl, A., v. 28, vi. 456

Ritual, iv. 223, 296, v. 313.
_See_ Worship

Rivander, Z., iv. 222

Rivius, J., iv. 165, 470

Rochlitz, E. von, iv. 16, 24, 27, 201

Romans, Commentary on, i. 93-102, 184-260, iv. 422, 426

Romanticists, vi. 449

Rome, a heathen place, i. 286;
where nothing is believed, iv. 102, 296;
though seat of the martyrs, vi. 307;
abode of Antichrist, i. 359;
where Erasmus learnt unbelief, iii. 135;
a good thing if attacked by Turks, iii. 92;
L’s visit to R., i. 29 ff., vi. 188, 496 f.;
union with R. not necessary, ii. 9.
_See_ Babylon, Pope, Pope-Ass

Rorarius, T., vi. 61

Rörer, G., iii. 218, iv. 498, v. 191, 499 ff., vi. 281, 391, 505 ff.

Rosary, i. 119, v. 248

Rose, golden, i. 365, n.

Rosheim.
_See_ Josel

Rosina, iii. 217, 281, v. 107 f., 235, vi. 369

Rostock, iii. 371, vi. 29, 61

Rotenburg, iv. 25

Roth, S., iv. 99, v. 158

Rothenburg, ii. 167, iii. 387

Roting, M., vi. 6

Rubeanus.
_See_ Crotus

Rudolstadt, vi. 265, 314

Rühel, ii. 142, 204, 206

Ruler.
_See_ Prince

Rungius, P., vi. 275

Ruysbroek, J., i. 173

Rychardus, W., ii. 162 ff., iv. 349

Sabbatarians, v. 403 f.

Sabbath-Sunday, iii. 394 f.;
Sabbath of the soul, v. 86 f.
_See_ Quietism

Sabellicus, iv. 89

Sabinus, G., ii. 390, iii. 362

Sachs, Hans, v. 223

Sachse, M., iv. 222

Sacrament, _see_ Supper;
Sacramentarians, _see_ Zwinglians

Sacraments, i. 27, 37, ii. 59, 389, iii. 262 f., iv. 146, 486-500,
v. 438 f., 461 f.;
may be received or not, iii. 10;
preparation for, iii. 209 f.;
depend on faith of the receiver, i. 357, vi. 310;
are marks of the true Church, vi. 295, 309;
L.’s doctrine of the S. criticised, v. 461-465;
marriage is a S., iv. 146, 149;
is not, iii. 262 ff.;
not even with the Papists, iv. 134;
a merdiferous S., iv. 163.
_See_ Baptism, etc.

Sacrifice.
_See_ Mass

Sadoleto, J., iii. 335, 443, v. 401, vi. 488

Sailer, G., iv. 15, 65

Sainctes, C. de, vi. 386

St. Gall, iii. 422

Saint, use of the word by L., i. 82, ii. 217, n., iii. 187 f.;
L. a S., ii. 396, iii. 154, 169, vi. 389, 392, 445.
_See_ Sanctus;
“S. L.,” vi. 391, _see_ Portraits

Saints, what the S. did a dog or pig could do, iii. 227;
frailty of the S., iii. 191 f.;
the “little S.,” _see_ Observantines;
legends of the S., i. 124, 282, iv. 246, v. 153 f., 474, vi. 335,
437, n.;
worship of the S., abuses in, i. 46, 361;
assailed by Erasmus, ii. 245;
L.’s attitude, iv. 499-503;
Mary made into a goddess, iv. 237;
and adored, 502 f.;
on canonisation, v. 122 f.;
suppression of feast-days, v. 146;
reintroduction mooted, vi. 410

Sala, B. von, i. 370

Salat, Hans, iv. 324

Sale, A. and M. von der, iv. 14, 16, 24 ff., 69 f.

Salvation, “outside of the Church no S.,” vi. 297, 425.
_See_ Certainty, Faith, Grace, Hell, Humility, Justification

Salzburg, iii. 430

Sam, C., iii. 277

Samson, v. 382;
a “second S.,” iv. 338, vi. 442

Sanctity.
_See_ Holiness

Sanctus Domini, ii. 51, n., vi. 389, n.

Sapidus, J., vi. 271

Sarcerius, E., iv. 71, 165, 222, vi. 61

Satan, L. reads his thoughts, vi. 154;
buffets, etc. of S., vi. 160 f., 111;
the prince of this world, ii. 273, iii. 190 f.
_See_ Devil

Satire.
_See_ Humour

Satisfaction, i. 75, 288, 296.
_See_ Penance

Saur, A., v. 295

Savonarola, vi. 475

Saxo, J., iii. 412

Saxon, “I am a hard S.,” iv. 44, vi. 398

Saxony, v. 219, vi. 8;
Duchy of, iii. 416, iv. 194 ff., v. 124 ff.;
Electorate of, ii. 327-334, iii. 33 ff., iv. 202-210, v. 181, 296,
vi. 241 f., 254 f., 414;
chief playground of the demons, v. 286

Scala Santa, i. 33, vi. 496

Scapular, mortal sin to leave cell without one’s, iv. 94, vi. 200

Scepticism, utterances savouring of, iii. 415, v. 360 f., 501;
L.’s promotion of S., ii. 32, 253, iii. 18.
_See_ Rationalism

Schade.
_See_ Mosellanus

Schaffhausen, iii. 422

Schalbe, C., i. 7

Schärtlin von Burtenbach, v. 219

Schatzgeyer, C., ii. 128, iii. 237, iv. 131, 353, n., 384

Schauenberg, S. von, ii. 5, 9, 27, iv. 83

Schelhorn, vi. 288

Schem Hamphoras.
_See_ Jews

Schenk, J., iii. 371, 401 f., 414, iv. 309, v. 16, 237 f., vi. 273,
280, 285, 488

⸺ zu Schweinsberg, R., iv. 25, 38

Scheurl, C., i. 40, n., 304 f., 313, 361, ii. 149, iv. 141, 429, vi.
31, 212 f., 510 f.

Schlaginhaufen, J., i. xxiii., 393, iii. 177, 218 f., 225, 231, 287,
383, iv. 180, 226 f., v. 323, vi. 504-510;
his fainting-fit, v. 326 ff.

Schlahinhauffen, iii. 286 f.

Schleupner, D., ii. 334

Schlick, S. von, ii. 70

Schmalkalden, Conventions, iii. 58 f., 123, 430-441, v. 82, 175, 376,
vi. 272;
League iii. 62, 64-68, 71, iv. 8 f., 11, v. 185, 394 f.;
War, v. 219, 252, vi. 274, 375, 407

Schmaltz, iii. 83

Schmedenstede, H., vi. 493

Schnabel, T., v. 142, vi. 51, 489

Schnauss, C., iii. 416

Schnepf, E., i. 316, iv. 29, 197, 461

Schöffer, J., v. 543

Scholasticism, L.’s relations with, i. 22 f., 84 ff., 130-164, 208, 243,
320, 357, iv. 92, v. 50, 59.
_See_ Aquinas, Louvain, Nominalists

Schönfeld, A. von, ii. 139, 141

Schönitz, Hans von, v. 106 f.

Schools, vi. 3-41;
school-punishments, i. 5;
L’s concern for the S., iv. 247, 264 f., v. 386, 562;
decline of the S., iv. 208, vi. 367, 435 f.
_See_ Æsop, Greek, etc.

Schott, F., v. 117

Schud, G., iv. 10

Schultheiss, W., vi. 271

Schurf, A., vi. 509

⸺ H., i. 304, ii. 99, 176, iii. 407, iv. 289, v. 591, vi. 356 ff.

Schütz, C., vi. 415, 417

Schwabach Articles, v. 340, vi. 309

Schwäbisch-Hall, vi. 275

Schwarzburg, ii. 318

Schweiniz, iii. 300

Schwenckfeld, C., v. 78-84, 155-164;
L’s interview with S., v. 138 f.;
L. on S., ii. 376, 379, iii. 409, n., v. 276, 397, vi. 272, 289;
“Stinkfield,” iii. 424

Scotus, Duns, i. 22, 86, 91, 130, 142, 146, 243, 311, iv. 120

⸺ J. M., vi. 493

Scribonius, G. A., v. 295

Scripture.
_See_ Bible

Scruples, i. 11, 15, 110, 124 f., iii. 180, n., vi. 203, 219

Scultetus, H., i. 228, 332, 336, ii. 16 ff., iv. 82

Seckendorf, i. xxiii.

Sects, Sectarians.
_See_ Heretics

Secular, calling, iv. 127-131, v. 55-60, 561, vi. 65-98.
_See_ Authority, Clergy

Secularisation.
_See_ Church-property, Marriage

Sedulius, H., iv. 178, vi. 382

Self-denial.
_See_ Mortification

Self-righteousness.
_See_ Works, holiness by

Selnecker, N., iii. 445, iv. 220, 225, vi. 62, 391, 417, 419, 421

Senfl, L., ii. 171 f., iii. 66

Sepulchre, the Holy, ii. 91, iii. 167 f.

Serarius, N., vi. 136, n.

Serfdom, ii. 217, vi. 74

Sermons, in Catholic times, i. 78 ff., iv. 136, v. 153 f., vi. 432;
_see_ Geiler, etc.;
L.’s S., iv. 230 ff.;
notes of his S., ii. 149, n.;
place of the Sermon in Lutheran service, v. 152 f.
_See_ Preachers

Servetus, iii. 358, vi. 266, 269, 272, 275

Service.
_See_ Worship

Sic volo sic iubeo, iv. 346, v. 517, vi. 156, 166

Sickell, J., vi. 377, n.

Sickingen, F. von, ii. 4, 9, 67, 69, 93, 326, v. 240, vi. 467

Sickness.
_See_ Ailments

Sidonie of Saxony, iv. 22

Sieberger, W., vi. 487

Silvius, P., iii. 429, iv. 178, 356, 358 f.

Simony, i. 328, 350 f.

Sin, the burden of past sins, i. 10 ff., 18;
need of finding a gracious God, i. 108 f.;
L.’s teaching on S., i. 209 ff., iii. 180-188;
all done without grace is S., ii. 229;
wicked man sins in doing good, i. 318 f.;
all man’s deeds are mortal sins, i. 101, 203;
no distinction between mortal and venial S., i. 102, iv. 459, vi. 514;
murder, adultery, etc., are small sins, v. 305;
the marriage-rite a S., iv. 152;
does God will S.? i. 188 f.;
man’s will all turned to S., ii. 287;
actual S., i. 99, 224, v. 438;
we should gladly be sinners, i. 73, 88 f., 186, iii. 177;
and cast our sins on Christ, v. 12;
it is good to commit a S., ii. 339, iii. 175 ff.;
“doing good we sin,” i. 101;
L. rebukes S., v. 31 ff.;
biggest S. (saying Mass), iii. 410;
“daily” S., iii 309.
_See_ Concupiscence, Contrition, Forgiveness, Justification, Original
S., Pecca fortiter, Scapular

Siricius, M., iv. 70

Sittardus, M., iii. 195, 238, iv. 383

Slander, i. 69.
_See_ Calumnies

Sleeplessness.
_See_ Ailments;
Sleep-walkers, v. 283

Sleidanus, J., ii. 196, iii. 239, vi. 451

Social work, L.’s, v. 561-564

Sodom, _see_ Wittenberg;
Sodomite.
_See_ Johann of Saxony

Sola fides, _see_ Faith;
interpolation of “sola,” iv. 345 f., v. 513 f.

Soli Deo (to the Sun-God), vi. 350

Solida Declaratio, vi. 420

Solitude, to be avoided, v. 93, 302

Solomon’s, Temple, v. 501;
wives, iv. 161 f.

Somnambulists, v. 283

Sophists, i. 23.
_See_ Scholastics

Sorbonne.
_See_ Paris

Sorcery.
_See_ Devil, Superstition, Witches

Sovereign.
_See_ Prince

Spalatin, G., L.’s intimate, i. 7, 42, ii. 58, iii. 38, n., 113 f.,
144 f., 269, v. 110, vi. 510;
his friend at Court, i. 263 f., 358, 368, ii. 19, 23, iii. 78, 301,
vi. 241;
helps in the German Bible, v. 495;
marriage matters, ii. 137, 140, 173;
intolerance, ii. 331, v. 145, 593, vi. 240, 274;
missionary work, ii. 316, v. 124 f.;
becomes a victim to melancholy, iii. 197, iv. 219 f., v. 362;
consoled by L., v. 330;
the tale about his parents, iii. 284-287

Spangenberg, C., iii. 209, n., iv. 269, v. 174, 300, 426, vi. 62,
134 f., 276, 391, 413

⸺ J. von, ii. 361, n., vi. 391

Spectre-monks of Spires, ii. 389 f., vi. 209

Spee, F. von, v. 295

Spener, vi. 444

Spengler, L., ii. 334, 385, iii. 50, 58 ff., vi. 7, 36, 250, 483

Spenlein, G., i. 88 ff., 177, 263

Speratus, v. 190

Spires, i. 214, v. 221;
Diets, ii. 380 ff., iii. 49, 86, 88, 327, v. 168, 396

Spirit, iii. 382, 397 f., iv. 309, 314, 387-419, v. 73.
_See_ Synteresis.
Bible S., _see_ Word

Stadion, v. 273

Stangwald, vi. 391

Staphylus, F., iv. 167, vi. 137, 312 f., 384

Stapleton, T., vi. 323

Stapulensis.
_See_ Faber

Staremberg, B. von, vi. 477

State, L. and the S., v. 559 ff., 568-579, 582, 585;
S. Church, iii. 29-33.
_See_ Consistories, Intolerance, Prince

Statues.
_See_ Images

Staupitz, J., theological deficiencies, i. 129;
his aims in the Order, i. 29;
L. “falls away” to S., i. 38;
esteem for and rapid promotion of L., i. 11 f., 14, 19 ff., 127,
160, 262, 295-299, 340, v. 63, vi. 212 f., 228;
advice to L., i. 16;
on Hus, i. 107 f., iii. 144;
at Heidelberg, i. 315 f.;
“your works are read in houses of ill-fame,” ii. 151, iii. 122;
proposed for a bishopric, i. 57;
dispenses L., i. 358, vi. 500, 504;
his sister, ii. 137;
the prophecy, iii. 165;
an enemy of the popedom? i. 326, vi. 189;
visit to Rome, vi. 497;
on the soul and her bridegroom, vi. 513

Stein, W., v. 194, vi. 86

Steinbach, W., i. 345

Steindorf, J., vi. 255

Steinhart, G., vi. 505 f.

Stiefel, M., ii. 376, iii. 389, v. 250 f., vi. 285

Stolberg, L. von, v. 211

Stolpen, v. 125

Stoltz, J., iii. 218

Storch, N., vi. 152

Stössel, J., vi. 415, 417

Stoutness.
_See_ Corpulence

Stralsund, v. 216

Strasburg, ii. 382, iii. 386 f., 421, v. 409, vi. 46, 278, 412, 422

Strauss, J., iii. 409, n.

Strigel, V., iv. 222, vi. 412

Strobel, C. G., v. 271

Stübner, M., vi. 285

Students, L.’s care for, iii. 296 f., iv. 228 ff., vi. 367;
lack of discipline, ii. 51 f., v. 157, 247, vi. 30, 37, 41.
_See_ Melanchthon

Stuhlweissenburg, v. 227

Sturm, Jakob, iv. 75

⸺ Joh., vi. 255

Sturz, G., ii. 350, v. 495

Stuttgart, vi. 38, 275

Stützel, ii. 334

Suarez, v. 375, n.

Subjectivism, i. 223 ff., 367, ii. 31 ff., 73, iii. 18 f., 81, 128,
vi. 334, 458

Sublitz, vi. 122

Suevus, S., iv. 224, n.

Suicide, a work of the devil, v. 281 f.;
increase in Lutheranism, iv. 222 f., v. 240;
L.’s temptations to commit S., v. 352 f.;
and the baseless tale that he did, vi. 379, 381 f.

Suleiman II, iii. 76, 81, 88, 92, vi. 485;
inquires after L., iii. 83

Sunday.
_See_ Sabbath-S.

Superintendents, iii. 30, 324, v. 190, 595, vi. 10

Supernatural, order, v. 49-52;
L.’s view of the S., i. 132, 157.
_See_ Justification

Superstition, ii. 103, 167 f., 389, iii. 118, 148-152, 229 f., 355 ff.,
410 f., v. 239 ff., 276 f., 428.
_See_ Astrology, Changelings, Demonology, Last Day, Witches

Supper, Lord’s, the new rite, ii. 109 f.;
S. versus Sermon, v. 152 f.;
abuse of the, iii. 304, v. 163;
examination of those who partake, v. 134 f.;
no S. without communicants, v. 152;
L.’s last attendance at the S., vi. 374.
_See_ Cryptocalvinism, Eucharist

Surgant, J., v. 491

Surplice.
_See_ Vestments

Suso, H., i. 173

Sutel, J., iii. 163

Sweden, vi. 474, 480

Sylvius.
_See_ Silvius

Synergism, ii. 287 ff., iii. 349 f., v. 53 f., 263, 454, vi. 412 ff.

Synteresis, i. 75, 114, 233 f., ii. 227 f.
_See_ Conscience

Syphilis, i. 37.
_See_ Ailments

Table-Talk, iii. 217-241, iv. 262-268, vi. 504-510;
L.’s words softened in the German T.-T., iii. 179, n.;
reasons for its publication, vi. 390 f.;
on the “good drink,” iii. 305 ff.;
the bigamy, iv. 43-49;
the Mass, iv. 523 f.;
end of the world, v. 247 ff.;
Antichrist, vi. 155.
_See_ Aurifaber, Cordatus, etc.

Tagler, U., iv. 172

Talents, i. 24, iii. 217, iv. 257 ff., 327 ff., v. 475 f., 482 f.,
vi. 111

Talmud, iv. 285.
_See_ Jews

Tauler, J., i. 84, 87, 122, 166-174, 178-183, 232 ff., 237, 243, 273 f.,
299, 381, ii. 145, 372, vi. 115 ff., 215

Taxes, iv. 291.
_See_ Tithes

Temptations, of the flesh, i. 18 f., 275, 287 f., ii. 82 f., 94 f.,
vi. 118, 120 f., 511;
to blasphemy, i. 194, ii. 122;
T. against faith, i. 25 f., 124, v. 362 f.;
to despair, i. 19, 376, ii. 276, v. 361;
“struggles and T.,” etc., v. 319-375, vi. 98-122, 150-154;
due to remembrance of past sins, v. 303;
to uncertainty whether his teaching be true, iii. 178, 202;
such T. are exalted ones, ii. 121;
make good Bible-interpreters, iii. 119, v. 390, 532, vi. 149;
make one humble, iii. 389;
are God’s own seal on L.’s work, iii. 119;
a mark of the true Christian, vi. 294 f.;
drink, a good remedy, iii. 306

Terence, iv. 47, 61, 186, 217, vi. 16, 18 f., 235

Tetrapolitana, Confessio, iii. 444, iv. 199

Tetzel, J., i. 105, 163, 314, 320, 325-330, 341-347, 352, iv. 84, 372,
390, vi. 188 f.

Teutleben, C., von ii. 21

Teutonic Knights.
_See_ Knights

Thann, E. von der, iv. 25, 40 f.

Theocracy, v. 580-584, vi. 57

Theology, speculative T., v. 440 ff.;
T. of the Cross, i. 174, 191, 234 f., 270, 319, 332, ii. 146, 234,
vi. 116.
_See_ Scholasticism;
“deeper” T., _see_ Mysticism

Thesaurus ecclesiæ, i. 70, 75, 357.
_See_ Indulgence, Mass, Purgatory

Thomae, M., vi. 151

Thomas of Aquin, _see_ Aquinas;
Thomists, i. 162 f., 243, 271, 339, 370.
_See_ Aristotle

Three Kings, i. 174, iv. 171.
_See_ Magi

Thuringia, v. 21

Timothy, v. 328

Tithes, ii. 193, 221, vi. 85 f., 94 f.

Titillationes, ii. 94

Titles.
_See_ Doctor, Ecclesiastes, Pope (of Wittenberg), Prophet, etc.

Titus, 64, 306, 386

Tobogganing, vi. 373

Tolerance, L. the herald of T.? iii. 109, v. 558, vi. 266 f., 448.
_See_ Intolerance

Tomb, L.’s, vi. 387 ff., 392 ff.

Tonsure, i. 120, 276, v. 113, 515

Torgau, ii. 215, iii. 55 ff., v. 183, 340, vi. 108;
T. Articles, vi. 417;
Book of T., vi. 419

Tower-incident, i. 388-400

Tradition, not the same as the personal views of the Fathers, vi. 336;
is the common usage of the Churches, vi. 253, 309;
scorned, iv. 420 f.;
thrown over, v. 437 f.;
and yet appealed to, iii. 395 f., iv. 409 f., 494;
v. 399, 462.
_See_ Fathers

Training.
_See_ Education

Translations, iii. 413 f., 416.
_See_ Bible, etc.

Transubstantiation, i. 161 f., iii. 329, 382, n., 445 f.
_See_ Consubstantiation

Transylvania, v. 167

Treasure.
_See_ Thesaurus

Trent, Council of, indirectly brought about by L., vi. 426;
steps towards its assembling, iii. 424 ff., vi. 492, 494;
its doings, v. 387 ff.;
on relics, etc., vi. 437;
the Catechism, vi. 435;
not fair to judge L. everywhere by its standard, i. 224;
L. on the Council, iv. 339 f., v. 376-394, 429, vi. 344, 364, 375;
its reaction on the Protestants, vi. 419 f., 423 f.

Treptow, iii. 407

Treves, v. 221

Trinity, ii. 397 ff., iv. 240 f., 488 f.

Trithemius, J., i. 48, 91

Trump of doom, iv. 329, v. 239, vi. 344

Trutfetter, J., i. 6, 137, 311, 320, 343, iv. 356

Truthfulness, v. 111.
_See_ Calumnies, Lies

Tübingen, iii. 430, vi. 38

Turks, iii. 76-93, iv. 247, v. 417-421;
a sign of the Last Day, v. 227;
L.’s fear, v. 167;
L. does little to help the defence, ii. 383, iii. 70 f., 94 f.,
214, v. 129, 231;
T. and Pope, etc., ii. 324, v. 234;
T. and Evangelicals, iv. 20, v. 197, 234, 417-421, 479;
Embassy to the T., v. 234, vi. 344 f.
_See_ Appendix I, passim

Tyrants, world cannot get on without, iii. 147;
assassination of T., ii. 199, iii. 357, iv. 12, vi. 269

Ubiquity.
_See_ Christ

Ulenberg, C., i. xxiv., ii. 131, iv. 243, 262, n., vi. 268

Ulm, ii. 382, iii. 64, 421, vi. 272, 278

Ulrich of Augsburg, S., iii. 250, iv. 89 f.

⸺ Würtemberg, iii. 58, 67 f., iv. 196 ff.

Ulscenius, vi. 52, n.

Unbelief, L.’s occasional U., v. 373;
the worst of sins, iii. 177;
“Catholic U.,” i. 326, 390, 395;
lack of fiducial faith constitutes U., vi. 193 f.
_See_ Faith, Rome

Undermark, M., iv. 383

Universities, appealed to, ii. 21, iv. 6;
unmarried Fellows at the, iv. 154;
derided, ii. 80, 347, iii. 143, iv. 336, vi. 24 f., 33;
decline of the U. due to L., ii. 340 f., 358 f., vi. 27 f.;
the new U., vi. 38.
_See_ Paris, etc.

Unseemliness of L.’s language, specimens of the, i. 245, ii. 117 f.,
121, 144 ff., iii. 226, 229-241, 251, 264-273, 399, 403, 426, iv.
45, 64, 106, 143, 148, 153 f., 161-164, 177, 285 ff., 295 f., 305,
318-322, v. 115, 196, 229, 238, 397, 406 f., 421-431, vi. 72, 254,
336, 338, 349, 363 f., 513.
_See_ Abusive language

Urban, vi. 383

Ursinus, Z., vi. 414, 422

Usingen, B. A. von, L.’s professor, i. 6, 14;
suspicious of Aristotle, i. 136 f.;
the “best Paraclete,” i. 10, vi. 206;
traces in the Comm. on Romans, i. 243;
U. on the two “factions,” i. 147;
opposes L., i. 311, ii. 342 ff., 350;
L.’s treatment of U., ii. 337, 347, 361, n.

Usury and interest, iii. 104, iv. 216, 266, v. 479, 562, vi. 78, n.,
81-98

Utilitarianism, vi. 23

Utraquists of Prague, ii. 9, 112

Vadian, J., iv. 100

Valla, L., ii. 286, iii. 145

Vasa, G., vi. 480

Vehe, M., iii. 238, iv. 383, vi. 436

Venatorius, T., ii. 43, vi. 483

Venial sin.
_See_ Sin

Venice, i. 228, iii. 430, v. 167

Vergerio, P. P., iii. 70, 425-430, iv. 358 f., 485, v. 391

Vestments, ii. 323, iii. 393, 413, iv. 511, v. 147, 220, 222, 313,
vi. 410

Vicar, District, L. elected, i. 69;
doings as D. V., i. 88 ff., 124, 262-268, 297 f., 315 f., 333 f.

Viccius, J., ii. 27

Vienna, iii. 81, 88, 383

Vio, T. de, ii. 46

Violence, of language, ii. 11, 13 f., iii. 365 f., 444, iv. 306 f.,
vi. 108 f., 112;
V. advocated, ii. 55, iii. 127.

Violent measures, _see_ Intolerance

Virgil, vi. 17 f., 376

Virgin, Blessed, _see_ Mary;
Virgin-Birth, iv. 241, vi. 420, n.;
L. a V., ii. 143

Virginity, iii. 244, iv. 147 f.
_See_ Chastity

Virtue, no infused V., v. 35;
no efforts to be made after V., i. 83, iii. 187 ff.;
the conception of V. altered, iv. 459;
natural V. is no V. but rather vice, i. 101, 160;
V. is not a real “habit” nor a “quality,” i. 149 f., 209-213, 216;
L.’s new view of V., iii. 200-217;
its defects, v. 84 ff.
_See_ Qualitas

Vischer, S., vi. 61

Visions.
_See_ Ghost

Visitations, ii. 113, 223, 299, n., 332, iii. 34, 323, iv. 207 ff.,
v. 588-597, vi. 241 f.

Vitalis, F., iii. 152

Vives, J. L., vi. 44, 58

Vocation, L.’s V. to the monastic state, i. 18 f., 25, 167, 297 f.
_See_ Mission, Secular calling

Volta, G. della, i. 333

Vows, according to Erasmus, ii. 245;
Melanchthon, iii. 325, 330, 360, 439;
according to L., i. 269 f.;
L.’s attack on V., i. 120, ii. 83-87, 115 ff.;
encourages others to break their, ii. 116 ff., 139 f., 142, 169;
L.’s own V., i. 12, ii. 86, vi. 205 ff., 222 f.
_See_ Chastity

Vulgarity.
_See_ Unseemliness

Wages, high, vi. 84 (iii. 291)

Walch, J. G., iii. 138, 164, 222, vi. 447

Waldensians, iv. 417, n.

Waldschmidt, B., v. 295

Walther, J., ii. 334, iv. 256, v. 547

⸺ R., vi. 40

Wanckel, M., v. 421

War, legitimacy of, iv. 299;
evil of, v. 282.
_See_ Julius II, Peasants, Resistance, Turks

Warsager, J., iv. 64, n.

Wartburg, stay at the, ii. 79-96, 368;
temptations, ii. 88, iii. 196, vi. 511;
apparitions, etc., vi. 123 f., 134;
beginning of the German Bible, v. 494, 544;
effect on L. of his stay, iii. 5 f., 120 f.

Water, Holy, iii. 266

Wealth, on whom bestowed, iv. 265

Wedding, L.’s, ii. 173-189;
his thoughts before it, ii. 86 f., 118 f., 139 ff., 147 f., 169 f.,
218 f., vi. 208;
a “Joseph’s marriage,” ii. 142;
after-allusions to his W., iii. 269;
“good days,” iii. 178, v. 328, vi. 208;
a means of escaping temptations, vi. 209;
God’s own work, vi. 162;
not recognised by the lawyers, iii. 42, vi. 341, 355.
_See_ Bora, Marriage

Wegscheider, J., vi. 447

Weida, M., of, iii. 238, iv. 128, 136

Weier, M., ii. 323

Weimar, iii. 70, iv. 23, 44 f., 48, vi. 9

Weinsberg, ii. 198, vi. 477

Weislinger, N., ii. 131

Weller, A., iv. 206

⸺ Hier., iii. 175 ff., 196, 218, 221, 306, iv. 219, 244, 269, v. 329,
vi. 488

Werdenberg, Hans von, iii. 292

Werewolf, the Papal, iv. 298, v. 384, vi. 244 f., 491

Werner, Hans, iv. 197

⸺ Z., vi. 449

Wesenberg, vi. 61

Wessel, J., vi. 474

Westphal, J., vi. 408, 410, 415

Whale.
_See_ Haarlem

Whore, use of the word, iii. 270 f.

Wicel, G., i. 16, iii. 403, 416, iv. 160, 165 f., 181 f., 361 ff., 471,
v. 43, 379, 436

Wiclif, i. 106, 108, n., ii. 232, 286, n., iv. 417, n., v. 243, vi. 26

Widebram, F., vi. 417

Widerstett, ii. 137

Wied, H. von, v. 166, vi. 492 f.

Wieland, vi. 448

Wife, terrible to die without a W., iii. 242 f.
_See_ Bishop, Bora, Marriage, Women

Wigand, J., vi. 409 f., 413, 415

Wild, J., iii. 238, iv. 366

Wilde, S., iv. 99

Will of God, reason why things are good and evil, i. 157, 212, _see_
God (the hidden);
Will (human), _see_ Freedom;
L.’s strong Will, iii. 112, iv. 259, vi. 396.
_See_ Defiance

Will, Last W. and Testament, iii. 42 f., 435 f., iv. 207, 281, 329

William of Bavaria, ii. 171 f., 380, iii. 66, 430, iv. 367

⸺ II, of Hesse, iv. 45, 61

⸺ IV, iv. 70, vi. 420

Wimpfeling, J., i. 24, 48, 52, iii. 238, iv. 169, vi. 18, 34, 214

Wimpina, C., i. 344, iv. 303, 384

Winand, i. 12

Wine, iii. 293, 301, 304, 307, 310, 314, iv. 26, 171, vi. 446

Winistede, J., vi. 61

Winther, J., iv. 25

Witches, L. and the, iii. 230, 356 f., v. 187, 241 f., 276 f.,
289-297, 304

Wittenberg, L. goes to W., i. 21;
dislike for, iv. 215 f., vi. 345 ff.;
“compelled by God” to go thither, iii. 114;
the escaped nuns at W., ii. 136 ff.;
conversion of the town, ii. 327 ff., vi. 240 f.;
Bugenhagen made parish-priest, iii. 407;
suppression of the Mass, ii. 90 f., iv. 510 f.;
“Church of W.,” “School of W.,” v. 384, vi. 314 f.;
morals, iv. 209 f., 215-218, v. 247, vi. 77;
the students vi. 367;
hasty marriages, vi. 358;
the Black Monastery, i. 297, n., iii. 218, 282 f., v. 203 f., 207,
346, vi. 509;
Elster Gate, ii. 51, 54, vi. 381;
Parish church, ii. 98, iv. 286;
University, i. 38 f.
_See_ Melanchthon, Pope (of Wittenberg), Zwingli

Wolferinus, vi. 354

Wolfframsdorff, J. F. von, iii. 292

Wolfgang of Anhalt, ii. 384, iii. 64, vi. 380 f.

Wollin, iii. 407

Women, status of, iii. 233, 267, iv. 132-178;
advice of L.’s director, vi. 206, n.;
degraded by L., iii. 253;
“plenty of wives and children few,” iii. 291;
“who loves not woman, wine and song,” iii. 293 f.;
“a woman’s love,” iii. 289.
_See_ Marriage

Word, the inner W. (i.e. spirit), i. 229, 299, iv. 397 f.;
replaced by the outward W. (i.e. letter), iii. 397 f., iv. 408-411,
v. 161, 164, vi. 149;
the divine W. in the Sermon and the Eucharist, v. 153;
the W. of truth, i. 83.
_See_ Bible, Revelations, Temptations

Work, L.’s power for work, i. 267, 274 f., ii. 52 f., 87 f., 97 f., 134,
160, 223, iii. 117, 298 f., iv. 260 f., v. 497 ff., vi. 342, 348

Works, good, iv. 449-481, v. 38-43;
L.’s dislike for, i. 43, 62, 118 ff., 167, 208, ii. 348 f., v. 45;
reason for his apostasy, i. 117 ff., vi. 189;
natural G. W. non-existent, i. 92;
probably all of them mortal sins, i. 317;
G. W. are mere Mosaism, i. 251;
the Catholic “Holiness-by-works,” i. 67, 71, 108, 182;
the only goodness in W. is imputed goodness, i. 212;
truly G. W. are found only in those justified by faith, i. 215;
in these all works are G. W., ii. 36, n.;
whereas in others all are sins, v. 47 f.;
the best of G. W. is fiducial faith, v. 85;
L.’s teaching on G. W. helps on his cause, vi. 403 f.
_See_ Commandments, Concurrence, Counsels, Ethics, Law, Merit,
Synergism

World, L. against the W. and the W. against L., vi. 271;
W. and Christianity, v. 55 f.;
end of W.
_See_ Last Day;
_see also_ Secular Calling

Worms, L. at the Diet of, ii. 57 f., 61-79, 132, 324, 367, iii. 209,
n., iv. 85, 355, vi. 105;
Edict of W., ii. 380 f.

Worship, L.’s charges against Catholic W., i. 283, ii. 354 f., iii. 46,
v. 46, 439, vi. 242-245;
true W. consists of faith, praise and thanks, v. 44;
public W., v. 145-154, 466;
not meant for “Christians,” v. 466, vi. 445, n.;
must be free, i. 252;
the new form of W., ii. 97 f., 320 f.;
to be in Latin, iii. 396;
v. 146; or in Greek, or Hebrew, iv. 280;
to be settled by the Government, vi. 263.
_See_ Ritual

Würtemberg, iii. 67 f., iv. 46, 53, 196-201

Würzburg, v. 220, vi. 47

Wurzen, v. 200, 202

Ypres, vi. 43 f.

Zachariae, J., i. 107

Zanchi, vi. 410, n.

Zasius, U., ii. 39, 211 f., 244, n., 256, 261, iv. 336, 360, vi. 31,
438 f.

Zeitz, v. 193, iv. 346

Zell, M., ii. 153, vi. 278

Zerbst, v. 189, 218, vi. 266

Ziegler, B., v. 500, vi. 410

⸺ J., ii. 133, iii. 303, vi. 271

Zinzendorf, vi. 445

Ziska, iii. 96

Zoch, L., iv. 349

Zulsdorf, vi. 346

Zürich, iii. 422 ff., 447

Zwickau, ii. 97, 99, 205, iii. 234, 402, vi. 34 f., 255, 263, 266

Zwilling, G., i. 297, n., ii. 98, 314 ff., 336, iii. 121, vi. 504

Zwingli, U., an Erasmian, ii. 248;
yet a predestinarian, iii. 189;
an iconoclast, v. 208, 222;
rationalist, i. 175;
intolerance, vi. 278;
stands up for the Epistle of James, v. 523;
against the bigamy, iv. 10, n.;
relations with L., iii. 379-385;
L.’s jealousy, ii. 376, iii. 65, 177, 389, iv. 87, 308 ff., 410 f.,
493 f., v. 104, 231, 531 f., vi. 108, 280, 289, 352;
Wittenberg Concord, iii. 417-424;
Z. on L., iii. 277.
_See_ Marburg Conference, Philip II

Zwinglians, Sacramentarians, etc., ii. 223, iii. 67, 327 f., 379-385,
409, 424, v. 76, 79 f., 104 f., 169, 231, 397 ff., 465, vi. 289,
316, 351 f., 396.
_See_ Supper

Zwolle, vi. 35

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