"I am little of a physician. I cannot lay my hand on the seat of
disease. But there is One who can." And to Him I know the simple-hearted
old man prays for me.
Often he recurs to the declaration in the creed, "I believe in the
forgiveness of sins." "It is the command of God," he said to me one day,
"that we should believe in the forgiveness of sins; not of David's or
Peter's sins, but of _ours_, our own, the very sins that distress our
consciences." He also quoted a sermon of St. Bernard's on the
annunciation.
"The testimony of the Holy Ghost given in thy heart is this, 'Thy sins
are forgiven thee.'"
Yes, forgiven to all _penitents_! But who can assure me I am a true
penitent?
These words, he told me, comforted Brother Martin, and he wonders they
do not comfort me. I suppose Brother Martin had "the testimony of the
Holy Ghost in his heart;" but who shall give that to me? to me who
resisted the vocation of the Holy Ghost so long; who in my deepest heart
obey it so imperfectly still!
Brother Martin was faithful, honest, thorough, single-hearted,--all that
God accepts; all that I am not!
The affection and compassion of my aged confessor often, however,
comfort me, even when his words have little power. They make me feel a
dim hope now and then that the Lord he serves may have something of the
same pity in his heart.
ERFURT, _April_ 15.
The Vicar-General, Staupitz, has visited our convent. I have confessed
to him. He was very gentle with me, and to my surprise proscribed me
scarcely any penance, although I endeavored to unveil all to him.
Once he murmured, as if to himself, looking at me with a penetrating
compassion, "Yes, there is no drawing back. But I wish I had known this
before." And then he added to me, "Brother, we must not confuse
suffering with sin. It is sin to _turn_ back. It may be anguish to
_look_ back and see what we have renounced, but it is not necessarily
sin, if we resolutely press forward still. And if sin mingles with the
regret, remember we have to do not with a painted, but a real Saviour;
and he died not for painted, but for real sins. Sin is never overcome by
looking at it, but by looking away from it to Him who bore our sins,
yours and mine, on the cross. The heart is never won back to God by
thinking we ought to love him, but by learning what he is, all worthy of
our love. True repentance begins with the love of God. The Holy Spirit
teaches us to know, and, therefore, to love God. Fear not, but read the
Scriptures, and pray. He will employ thee in his service yet, and in his
favour is life, and in his service is freedom."
This confession gave me great comfort for the time. I felt myself
understood, and yet not despaired of. And that evening, after repeating
the Hours, I ventured in my own words to pray to God, and found it
solemn and sweet.
But since then my old fear has recurred. Did I indeed confess completely
even to the Vicar-General? If I had, would not his verdict have been
different? Does not the very mildness of his judgment prove that I have
once more deceived myself--made a false confession, and, therefore,
failed of the absolution! But it is a relief to have his positive
command as my superior to study the Holy Scriptures, instead of the
scholastic theologians, to whose writings my preceptor had lately been
exclusively directing my studies.
_April_ 25.
I have this day, to my surprise, received a command, issuing from the
Vicar-General, to prepare to set off on a mission to Rome.
The monk under whose direction I am to journey I do not yet know.
The thought of the new scenes we shall pass through, and the wonderful
new world we shall enter on,--new and old,--fills me with an almost
childish delight. Since I heard it, my heart and conscience seem to have
become strangely lightened, which proves, I fear, how little real
earnestness there is in me.
Another thing, however, has comforted me greatly. In the course of my
confession I spoke to the Vicar-General about my family, and he has
procured for my father an appointment as superintendent of the Latin
printing press, at the Elector's new University of Wittemberg.
I trust now that the heavy pressure of pecuniary care which has weighed
so long on my mother and Else will be relieved. It would have been
sweeter to me to have earned this relief for them by my own exertions.
But we must not choose the shape or the time in which divine messengers
shall appear.
The Vicar-General has, moreover, presented me with a little volume of
sermons by a pious Dominican friar, named Tauler. These are wonderfully
deep and heart-searching. I find it difficult to reconcile the sublime
and enrapt devotion to God which inspires them, with the minute rules of
our order, the details of scholastic casuistry, and the precise
directions as to the measure of worship and honour, Dulia, Hyperdulia,
and Latria to be paid to the various orders of heavenly beings, which
make prayer often seem as perplexing to me as the ceremonial of the
imperial court would to a peasant of the Thuringian forest.
This Dominican speaks as if we might soar above all these lower things,
and lose ourselves in the One Ineffable Source, Ground, Beginning, and
End of all Being; the One who is all.
Dearer to me, however, than this, is an old manuscript in our convent
library, containing the confessions of the patron of our order himself,
the great father Augustine.
Straight from his heart it penetrates into mine, as if spoken to me
to-day. Passionate, fervent, struggling, wandering, trembling, adoring
heart, I feel its pulses through every line!
And was this the experience of one who is now a saint on the most
glorious heights of heaven?
Then the mother! Patient, lowly, noble, saintly Monica; mother, and more
than martyr. She rises before me in the likeness of a beloved form I may
remember, without sin, even here, even now. St. Monica speaks to me with
my mother's voice; and in the narrative of her prayers I seem to gain a
deeper insight into what my mother's have been for me.
St. Augustine was happy, to breathe the last words of comfort to herself
as he did, to be with her dwelling in one house to the last. This can
scarcely be given to me. "That sweet habit of living together" is broken
for ever between us; broken by my deliberate act. "For the glory of
God!" may God accept it; if not, may he forgive!
That old manuscript is worn with reading. It has lain in the convent
library for certainly more than a hundred years. Generation after
generation of those who now lie sleeping in the field of God below our
windows have turned over those pages. Heart after heart has doubtless
come, as I came, to consult the oracle of that deep heart of old times,
so nearly shipwrecked, so gloriously saved.
As I read the old thumbed volume, a company of spirits seems to breathe
in fellowship around me, and I think how many, strengthened by these
words, are perhaps, even now, like him who penned them, amongst the
spirits of the just made perfect.
In the convent library, the dead seem to live again around me. In the
cemetery are the relics of the corruptible body. Among these worn
volumes I feel the breath of the living spirits of generations passed
away.
I must say, however, there is more opportunity for solitary communion
with the departed in that library than I could wish. The books are not
so much read, certainly, in these days, as the Vicar-General would
desire, although the Augustinian has the reputation of being among the
more learned orders.
I often question what brought many of these easy comfortable monks here.
But many of the faces give no reply to my search. No history seems
written on them. The wrinkles seem mere ruts of the wheels of Time, not
furrows sown with the seeds of thought,--happy at least if they are not
as fissures rent by the convulsions of inward fires.
I suppose many of the brethren became monks just as other men become
tailors or shoemakers, and with no further spiritual aim, because their
parents planned it so. But I may wrong even the meanest in saying so.
The shallowest human heart has depths somewhere, let them be crusted
over by ice ever so thick, or veiled by flowers ever so fair.
And I--I and this unknown brother are actually about to journey to
Italy, the glorious land of sunshine, and vines, and olives, and ancient
cities--the land of Rome, imperial, saintly Rome, where countless
martyrs sleep, where St. Augustine and Monica sojourned, where St. Paul
and St. Peter preached and suffered,--where the vicar of Christ lives
and reigns?
_May_ 1.
The brother with whom I am to make the pilgrimage to Rome, arrived last
night. To my inexpressible delight it is none other than Brother
Martin--Martin Luther! Professor of Theology in the Elector's new
University of Wittemberg. He is much changed again since I saw him last,
toiling through the streets of Erfurt with the sack on his shoulder. The
hollow, worn look, has disappeared from his face, and the fire has come
back to his eyes. Their expression varies, indeed, often from the
sparkle of merriment to a grave earnestness, when all their light seems
withdrawn inward; but underneath there is that kind of repose I have
noticed in the countenance of my aged confessor.
Brother Martin's face has, indeed, a history written on it, and a
history, I deem, not yet finished.
HEIDELBERG, _May_ 25.
I wondered at the lightness of heart with which I set out on our journey
from Erfurt.
The Vicar-General himself accompanied us hither. We travelled partly on
horseback, and partly in wheeled carriages.
The conversation turned much on the prospects of the new university, and
the importance of finding good professors of the ancient languages for
it. Brother Martin himself proposed to make use of his sojourn at Rome,
to improve himself in Greek and Hebrew, by studying under the learned
Greeks and rabbis there. They counsel me also to do the same.
The business which calls us to Rome is an appeal to the Holy Father,
concerning a dispute between some convents of our Order and the
Vicar-General.
But they say business is slowly conducted at Rome, and will leave us
much time for other occupations besides those which are most on our
hearts, namely, paying homage at the tombs of the holy apostles and
martyrs.
They speak most respectfully and cordially of the Elector Frederick, who
must indeed be a very devout prince. Not many years since, he
accomplished a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and took with him the painter
Lucas Cranach, to make drawings of the various holy places.
About ten years since, he built a church dedicated to St. Ursula, on the
site of the small chapel erected in 1353, over the Holy Thorn from the
Crown of Thorns, presented to a former elector by the king of France.
This church is already, they say, through the Elector Frederick's
diligence, richer in relics than any church in Europe, except that of
Assisi, the birth-place of St. Francis. And the collection is still
continually being increased.
They showed me a book printed at Wittemberg a year or two since,
entitled "A Description of the Venerable Relics," adorned with one
hundred and nineteen woodcuts.
The town itself seems to be still poor and mean compared with Eisenach
and Erfurt; and the students, of whom there are now nearly five hundred,
are at times very turbulent. There is much beer-drinking among them. In
1507, three years since, the Bishop of Brandenburg laid the whole city
under interdict for some insult offered by the students to his suite,
and now they are forbidden to wear guns, swords, or knives.
Brother Martin, however, is full of hope as to the good to be done among
them. He himself received the degree of Biblicus (Bible teacher) on the
9th of March last year; and every day he lectures between twelve and one
o'clock.
Last summer, for the first time, he was persuaded by the Vicar-General
to preach publicly. I heard some conversation between them in reference
to this, which afterwards Brother Martin explained to me.
Dr. Staupitz and Brother Martin were sitting last summer in the convent
garden at Wittemberg together, under the shade of a pear tree, whilst
the Vicar-General endeavoured to prevail on him to preach. He was
exceedingly unwilling to make the attempt. "It is no little matter,"
said he to Dr. Staupitz, "to appear before the people in the place of
God." "I had fifteen arguments," he continued in relating it to me,
"wherewith I purposed to resist my vocation; but they availed nothing."
At the last I said, "Dr. Staupitz, you will be the death of me, for I
cannot live under it three months." "Very well," replied Dr. Staupitz,
"still go on. Our Lord God hath many great things to accomplish, and he
has need of wise men in heaven as well as in earth."
Brother Martin could not further resist, and after making a trial before
the brethren in the refectory, at last, with a trembling heart, he
mounted the pulpit of the little chapel of the Augustinian cloister.
"When a preacher for the first time enters the pulpit," he concluded,
"no one would believe how fearful he is; he sees so many heads before
him. When I go into the pulpit, I do not look on any one. I think them
only to be so many blocks before me, and I speak out the words of my
God."
And yet Dr. Staupitz says his words are like thunder-peals. _Yet!_ do I
say? Is it not _because_? He feels himself nothing; he feels his message
everything; he feels God present. What more could be needed to make a
man of his power a great preacher?
With such discourse the journey seemed accomplished quickly indeed. And
yet, almost the happiest hours to me were those when we were all silent,
and the new scenes passed rapidly before me. It was a great rest to live
for a time on what I saw, and cease from thought, and remembrance, and
inward questionings altogether. For have I not been commanded this
journey by my superiors, so that in accordance with my vow of obedience,
my one duty at present is to travel; and therefore what pleasure it
chances to bring I must not refuse.
We spent some hours in Nueremberg. The quaint rich carvings of many of
the houses were beautiful. There also we saw Albrecht Duerer's paintings,
and heard Hans Sachs, the shoemaker and poet, sing his godly German
hymns. And as we crossed the Bavarian plains, the friendliness of the
simple peasantry made up to us for the sameness of the country.
Near Heidelberg again I fancied myself once more in the Thuringian
forest, especially as we rested in the convent of Erbach in the
Odenwald. Again the familiar forests and green valleys with their
streams were around me. I fear Else and the others will miss the beauty
of the forest-covered hills around Eisenach, when they remove to
Wittemberg, which is situated on a barren, monotonous flat. About this
time they will be moving!
Brother Martin has held many disputations on theological and
philosophical questions in the University of Heidelberg; but I, being
only a novice, have been free to wander whither I would.
This evening it was delightful to stand in the woods of the Elector
Palatine's castle, and from among the oaks and delicate birches rustling
about me, to look down on the hills of the Odenwald folding over each
other. Far up among them I traced the narrow, quiet Neckar, issuing from
the silent depths of the forest; while on the other side, below the
city, it wound on through the plain to the Rhine, gleaming here and
there with the gold of sunset or the cold grey light of the evening.
Beyond, far off, I could see the masts of ships on the Rhine.
I scarcely know why, the river made me think of life, of mine and
Brother Martin's. Already he has left the shadow of the forests. Who can
say what people his life will bless, what sea it will reach, and through
what perils? Of this I feel sure, it will matter much to many what its
course shall be. For me it is otherwise. My life, as far as earth is
concerned, seems closed,--ended; and it can matter little to any,
henceforth, through what regions it passes, if only it reaches the ocean
at last, and ends, as they say, in the bosom of God. If only we could be
sure that God guides the course of our lives as he does that of rivers!
And yet, do they not say that some rivers lose themselves in sandwastes,
and others trickle meanly to the sea through lands they have desolated
into untenantable marshes?
BLACK FOREST, _May_ 14, 1510.
Brother Martin and I are now fairly on our pilgrimage alone, walking all
day, begging our provisions and our lodgings, which he sometimes repays
by performing a mass in the parish church, or by a promise of reciting
certain prayers or celebrating masses on the behalf of our benefactors,
at Rome.
These are, indeed, precious days. My whole frame seems braced and
revived by the early rising, the constant movement in the pure air, the
pressing forward to a definite point.
But more, infinitely more than this, my heart seems reviving. I begin to
have a hope and see a light which, until now, I scarcely deemed
possible.
To encourage me in my perplexities and conflicts, Brother Martin
unfolded to me what his own had been. To the storm of doubt, and fear,
and anguish in that great heart of his my troubles seem like a passing
spring shower. Yet to me they were tempests which laid my heart waste.
And God, Brother Martin believes, does not measure his pity by what our
sorrows are in themselves, but what they are to us. Are we not all
children, little children, in his sight?
"I did not learn my divinity at once," he said, "but was constrained by
my temptations to search deeper and deeper; for no man without trials
and temptations can attain a true understanding of the Holy Scriptures.
St. Paul had a devil that beat him with fists, and with temptations
drove him diligently to study the Holy Scriptures. Temptations hunted me
into the Bible, wherein I sedulously read; and thereby, God be praised,
at length attained a true understanding of it."
He then related to me what some of these temptations were;--the bitter
disappointment it was to him to find that the cowl, and even the vows
and the priestly consecration, made no change in his heart; that Satan
was as near him in the cloister as outside, and he no stronger to cope
with him. He told me of his endeavours to keep every minute rule of the
order, and how the slightest deviation weighed on his conscience. It
seems to have been like trying to restrain a fire by a fence of willows,
or to guide a mountain torrent in artificial windings through a
flower-garden, to bind his fervent nature by these vexatious rules.
He was continually becoming absorbed in some thought or study, and
forgetting all the rules, and then painfully he would turn back and
retrace his steps; sometimes spending weeks in absorbing study, and then
remembering he had neglected his canonical hours, and depriving himself
of sleep for nights to make up the missing prayers.
He fasted, disciplined himself, humbled himself to perform the meanest
offices for the meanest brother; forcibly kept sleep from his eyes
wearied with study, and his mind worn out with conflict, until every now
and then Nature avenged herself by laying him unconscious on the floor
of his cell, or disabling him by a fit of illness.
But all in vain; his temptations seemed to grow stronger, his strength
less. Love to God he could not feel at all; but in his secret soul the
bitterest questioning of God, who seemed to torment him at once by the
law and the gospel. He thought of Christ as the severest judge, because
the most righteous; and the very phrase, "the righteousness of God," was
torture to him.
Not that this state of distress was continual with him. At times he
gloried in his obedience, and felt that he earned rewards from God by
performing the sacrifice of the mass, not only for himself, but for
others. At times, also, in his circuits, after his consecration, to say
mass in the villages around Erfurt, he would feel his spirits lightened
by the variety of the scenes he witnessed, and would be greatly amused
at the ridiculous mistakes of the village choirs; for instance, their
chanting the "Kyrie" to the music of the "Gloria."
Then, at other times, his limbs would totter with terror when he offered
the holy sacrifice, at the thought that he, the sacrificing priest, yet
the poor, sinful Brother Martin, actually stood before God "without a
Mediator."
At his first mass he had difficulty in restraining himself from flying
from the altar--so great was his awe and the sense of his unworthiness.
Had he done so, he would have been excommunicated.
Again, there were days when he performed the services with some
satisfaction, and would conclude with saying, "O Lord Jesus, I come to
thee and entreat thee to be pleased with whatsoever I do and suffer in
my order; and I pray thee that these burdens and this straitness of my
rule and religion may be a full satisfaction for all my sins."
Yet then again, the dread would come that perhaps he had inadvertently
omitted some word in the service, such as "enim" or "aeternum," or
neglected some prescribed genuflexion, or even a signing of the cross;
and that thus, instead of offering to God an acceptable sacrifice in the
mass, he had committed a grievous sin.
From such terrors of conscience he fled for refuge to some of his
twenty-one patron saints, or oftener to Mary, seeking to touch her
womanly heart, that she might appease her Son. He hoped that by invoking
three saints daily, and by letting his body waste away with fastings and
watchings, he should satisfy the law, and shield his conscience against
the goad of the driver. But it all availed him nothing. The further he
went on in this way, the more he was terrified.
And then he related to me how the light broke upon his heart; slowly,
intermittently, indeed; yet it has dawned on him. His day may often be
dark and tempestuous; but it is day, and not night.
Dr. Staupitz was the first who brought him any comfort. The
Vicar-General received his confession not long after he entered the
cloister, and from that time won his confidence, and took the warmest
interest in him. Brother Martin frequently wrote to him; and once he
used the words, in reference to some neglect of the rules which troubled
his conscience, "Oh, my sins, my sins!" Dr. Staupitz replied, "You would
be without sin, and yet you have no proper sins. Christ forgives true
sins, such as parricide, blasphemy, contempt of God, adultery, and sins
like these. These are sins indeed. You must have a register in which
stand veritable sins, if Christ is to help you. You would be a painted
sinner, and have a painted Christ as a Saviour. You must make up your
mind that Christ is a real Saviour, and you a real sinner."
These words brought some light to Brother Martin, but the darkness came
back again and again; and tenderly did Dr. Staupitz sympathize with him
and rouse him--Dr. Staupitz, and that dear aged confessor, who
ministered also so lovingly to me. Brother Martin's great terror was the
thought of the righteousness of God, by which he had been taught to
understand his inflexible severity in executing judgment on sinners.
Dr. Staupitz and the confessor explained to him that the righteousness
of God is not _against_ the sinner who believes in the Lord Jesus
Christ, but _for_ him--not against us to condemn, but for us to justify.
He began to study the Bible with a new zest. He had had the greatest
longing to understand rightly the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, but
was always stopped by the word "righteousness" in the first chapter and
seventeenth verse, where Paul says the righteousness of God is revealed
by the gospel. "I felt very angry," he said, "at the term,
'righteousness of God;' for, after the manner of all the teachers, I was
taught to understand it in a philosophic sense, of that righteousness by
which God is just and punisheth the guilty. Though I had lived without
reproach, I felt myself to be a great sinner before God, and was of a
very quick conscience, and had not confidence in a reconciliation with
God to be produced by any work or satisfaction or merit of my own. For
this cause I had in me no love of a righteous and angry God, but
secretly hated him, and thought within myself, Is it not enough that God
has condemned us to everlasting death by Adam's sin, and that we must
suffer so much trouble and misery in this life? Over and above the
terror and threatening of the law, must he needs increase by the gospel
our misery and anguish, and, by the preaching of the same, thunder
against us his justice and fierce wrath? My confused conscience ofttimes
did cast me into fits of anger, and I sought day and night to make out
the meaning of Paul; and at last I came to apprehend it thus: Through
the gospel is revealed the righteousness which availeth with God--a
righteousness by which God, in his mercy and compassion, justifieth us;
as is it written, '_The just shall live by faith._' Straightway I felt
as if I were born anew; it was as if I had found the door of Paradise
thrown wide open. Now I saw the Scriptures altogether in a new
light--ran through their whole contents as far as my memory would serve,
and compared them--and found that this righteousness was the more surely
that by which he makes us righteous, because everything agreed thereunto
so well. The expression, 'the righteousness of God,' which I so much
hated before, became now dear and precious--my darling and most
comforting word. That passage of Paul was to me the true door of
Paradise."
Brother Martin also told me of the peace the words, "I believe in the
forgiveness of sins," brought to him, as the aged confessor had
previously narrated to me; for, he said, the devil often plucked him
back, and, taking the very form of Christ, sought to terrify him again
with his sins.
As I listened to him, the conviction came on me that he had indeed drunk
of the well-spring of everlasting life, and it seemed almost within my
own reach; but I said--
"Brother Martin, your sins were mere transgressions of human rules, but
mine are different." And I told him how I had resisted my vocation. He
replied--
"The devil gives heaven to people before they sin; but after they sin,
brings their consciences into despair. Christ deals quite in the
contrary way, for he gives heaven after sins committed, and makes
troubled consciences joyful."
Then we fell into a long silence, and from time to time, as I looked at
the calm which reigned on his rugged and massive brow, and felt the deep
light in his dark eyes, the conviction gathered strength--
"This solid rock on which that tempest-tossed spirit rests is Truth!"
His lips moved now and then, as if in prayer, and his eyes were lifted
up from time to time to heaven, as if his thoughts found a home there.